American Hustle (2013) 79/100

Posted on January 31, 2014 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 79/100 138 Min

A film which could deservedly take home a clean sweep at this year’s Oscars ceremony, with fully merited nominations in the best film, director, actor, actress, supporting actor and supporting actress categories.

It’s from writer/director David O. Russell (Eric Warren Singer wrote the original version of the screenplay, which was more focused on the real events that inspired it) hot on the heels of his success with 2012’s ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ and once again featuring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper – this time in supporting roles, with Christian Bale and Amy Adams taking the lead as two con artists forced to work for the FBI in order to try and catch bigger fish, specifically the mayor of Camden, New Jersey – played by Jeremy Renner. The only problem is, the mayor and his associates are willing to break the law in order to speed the wheels of a deal which would reap great benefits for the local community, cue certain moral dilemmas.

At its heart though, this is a story about the central characters and their relationships with one another, told against the backdrop of high crime and egotistical one-upmanship. The same strong vein of comedy that existed throughout Silver Linings is once again in fine form here, possibly to the extent that if you liked that movie you almost certainly will enjoy this too, and naturally the converse of that is likely just as true.

It’s difficult to think of that many films where all of the cast do such a universally impressive job, together with O. Russell, and it is nice to see it getting the attention it deserves, with Bale in particular giving one his finest performances in an already illustrious career, here once again replete with a physical transformation – gaining a very noticeable amount of excess baggage for the role.

Set around 1978, the film very cleverly opens with the line ‘Some of this stuff actually happened’, partly because the story is very loosely based on the Abscam sting operation, but it’s also perhaps a jibe aimed in the direction of ‘Argo’, which beat Silver Linings to win the best picture Oscar but which also came under heavy fire (including from The Red Dragon) for saying ‘Based on a true story’, and yet it fabricated almost everything…

Anchorman 2 : The Legend Continues (2013) 61/100

Posted on December 25, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 61/100 119 Min

Equal parts slightly entertaining and just plain cringe worthy, this sequel to one of Will Ferrell’s best comedy films does not live up to expectations. All the cast have returned, as news anchorman Ron Burgundy and his team are put on the night shift of the new innovative 24hrs news channel, and to liven things up they effectively invent reality television. The very heavy advertising unleashed for the movie to give it a chance against the likes of The Hobbit, has ruined a lot of the comedy as cinema goers will be familiar with many of the jokes by now, and some of the others could have been good but the delivery is just not quite right. Keeping some laughs and losing others to just plain silliness, the film is redeemed somewhat by having a pretty good scene toward the end with a smorgasbord of famous faces joining in. Starring Ferrell, Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, David Koechner, Christina Applegate, Meagan Good, Kristen Wiig and James Marsden.

Appointment in London / Raiders in the Sky (1953) 65/100

Posted on November 5, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 65/100 96 Min

Predominantly set in a British RAF base of operations during World War II that sees the main characters continually fly sorties over German soil, and leaves us wondering who will make it back and also, due to the number of unlikely things going wrong together with certain lighting effects, who may be masquerading as someone they’re not. I decided to watch this when I realised the lead is played by Dirk Bogard and it occurred to me that I was not entirely certain I could immediately put his name to a face (he is pictured above, along with Dinah Sheridan – who actually just passed away only last year). The comedic ‘Doctor’ series immediately sprung to mind once it started of course (of which he starred in four of the seven films, with Leslie Phillips eventually replacing him) and he carries a definite kind of instant onscreen sympathy and likeability, certainly for his character here who has just achieved his 87th sortie – but will he make it to his final 90th?

The film is successful in putting us inside events on the ground, but less so when it introduces the female character, appropriately called Mrs Canyons, that two of the males will fight over, namely Bogarde’s Tim Mason and William Sylvester’s cocksure ‘Mac’ Baker (he comes across very much like an American 1950’s Clive Owen), and some of the tension in the aerial missions feels somewhat neutered with the way it’s been filmed. The title comes from a future appointment in the capital that some of the pilots hope to be alive to make it to – they do actually explain what the meeting is for, but sometimes I find when everyone is speaking with classic celluloid RAF accents they end up sounding a little like competing chipmunks, and The Red Dragon couldn’t quite make out the details… It doesn’t matter anyway as they all die.

That previous statement is inaccurate. A decent war drama that unfortunately had a few drawbacks preventing it from ever really entering into the hallowed halls of classic British war films, but definitely worth a look in for fans of the genre. Raiders in the Sky is the U.S. version of the title, and interestingly the character of Mason seems to have been based on the ‘Dambusters’ leader Guy Gibson whom co-screenwriter John Wooldridge had served under in the No. 106 Squadron RAF. Wooldridge himself not only successfully completed over ninety sorties, but also set a new record time for crossing the Atlantic, from Labrador to London, of circa 5hrs 46 mins in 1944. He also conducted and scored the music for this film as part of a successful career as a film composer, before tragically being killed in a car accident in 1958 when he was only thirty nine.

About Time (2013) 10/100

Posted on September 17, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 10/100 123 Min

Garbage. Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) discovers he can travel back in time to any point that he has previously experienced thanks to the time travelling gene he has inherited from his father (Bill Nighy), and so he decides to spend the majority of the film, and indeed his life, using it to get laid with Mary (Rachel McAdams – continuing her sexual perversion for time travelling lovers, after 2009’s ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’). Actually Mary turns out to be quite easy, so it isn’t especially difficult for him and most of the film is padded out with very obvious time travelling gags as it meanders along with writer/director Richard Curtis’ upper middle class spoiled London centric characters who scarcely have any real problems to deal with, other than worrying about how to fall in love in the politest way possible and which swanky restaurant to go to. According to Curtis, the law profession that Tim chooses is entirely dominated by men – which century is he living in? And of course Tim never seems to think about using his powers to help out the people he defends in court, or indeed for doing anything especially interesting whatsoever.

Meanwhile Mary, being gainfully employed as an editor reading books for a living, which she loves, for some reason hates theatre, which makes absolutely no sense, but she is passionate about her idol Kate Moss. Kate Moss? What exactly has she ever done except stand around in her underwear posing and snorting mountains of cocaine, unless it’s dating a ‘rockstar’ so repugnant that even the press eventually got bored of him? Of course she’s in the script because Curtis has admitted his own salivary predilection for Moss. Then he gives McAdams an audience silencer of a line – whilst she’s stripping off her clothes to get information from Tim about the wedding and, upon reaching the threshold of her knickers, she asks where the honeymoon is to be, to which he suggests Scotland, her response is “I’m not taking my pants off for Scotland!”. No problem – come up north and we’ll take them off for you lass. I can only assume this references some kind of Jungian archetypal fear of the sexual prowess of the Scots. In response I think it should henceforth be every red blooded Scotsman’s duty to try and get into Rachel McAdams’ pants, although really we’d prefer Curtis had put the line in Notting Hill and we could chase Julia Roberts. Still, not sure I’d kick Rachel McAdams out of bed. Give her a good kick her up the arse, maybe…

Toward the end of the film we find motifs of death and loss and whiffs of emotional essence begin to drift into the story, and here it is more successful, but it is beyond redemption by this point. Tim’s airhead but easy to love sister (played by Lydia Wilson) is at one point taken back in time to demonstrate the man she had entered into a destructive relationship with was in fact no good, as thus now not meeting her at a party he instead simply hits on a different girl. What?! So he’s a ‘bad guy’ because he hits on girls at parties when he’s single? As if members of both sexes don’t attend parties all over the world precisely because they hope they will meet someone there, plus the girl he talks to doesn’t exactly seem upset at the attention he gives her. Is the assumption that this man is some sort of unstoppable demonic sexual force that all girls have no choice about submitting to?

This also completely ignores the enormity of the double standards that are applied throughout the story – Tim changes something which means he misses what would have been his first meeting with Mary, who instead shacks up with someone she meets AT A PARTY – someone she doesn’t know before hand and is quite clearly shown to be a creepy idiot. Tim, realising his mistake, then finds out exactly the right thing to say to Mary to impress her by repeating history again and again and again. This is somehow not intensely wrong on every level. Eventually, his lies should be unravelled and the fact their relationship is based on nothing at all unearthed, but of course it never is as he can alter everything, spending many lifetimes over perfecting his space time continuum rape of Mary, purely because he finds her hot, not really based on her personality in any meaningful way. Given the speed Mary also jumps into the sack with him, I guess she wasn’t really that fussy anyway.

Then there’s the babies – Tim cannot travel once he has created a child without altering the precise sperm and egg that met (if he goes back beyond conception that is), thus creating a different child. Somehow he corrects this error the first time he makes it and gets his young daughter back (she briefly becomes a young boy), also a little absent minded of his father not to mention this drawback, but later on when his third child is about to be born he decides to go back once again because clearly annihilating that unborn but fully formed child is fine so long as he hasn’t actually seen its face – who’ll know the difference, right?

Disgusting.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (2013) 59/100

Posted on September 16, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 59/100 96 Min

A film that has its moments, but overall feels largely pointless, not to mention derivative of the work of Terrence Malick. Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara play Bob and Ruth respectively – young lovers involved in a gang of thieves that we don’t really learn too much about, as very early on the police put an end to their career of choice by sending Bob to jail and leaving a now pregnant Ruth in the care of their adopted father Skerritt (Keith Carradine). Years further on, one of the local sheriffs, played by Ben Foster (who normally plays a total creep, and here looks completely out of his element, and frankly unbelievable, trying to be the ‘nice guy’), decides he rather fancies his chances of looking after Ruth and her young girl, which just so happens to coincide with the jail break of a certain ardent and desperate young father …

Overall the entire film feels like it’s trying too hard to be ‘arty’ and heavy with ‘depth’, and it reminds The Red Dragon a lot of ‘To The Wonder’ – there we seen Olga Kurylenko frolic in the fields with the sun low in the sky behind her, here we see Rooney Mara frolic in the fields with the sun low in the sky behind her. The music and the way it’s used feels similar, and although there is a lot more dialogue here, it still retains attempts at wanky poetry – especially issuing forth from Bob, and Affleck rarely convinces in any scene here. Indeed, one in particular is downright annoying as he delivers some vain rambling monologue in front of the mirror whilst chewing on something, slurring his words and talking in an unnatural affected way, ironically perhaps an attempt at ‘realism’. Given Casey’s brother, Ben Affleck, also starred in ‘To The Wonder’, these things do not seem like coincidence at all. Mara and Carradine are good, but with the pretentious title heralding a particularly hollow drama, it was wishful thinking indeed for director David Lowery if he thought this would touch base with such outlaw classics as ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (67) and ‘Badlands’ (73) – the latter of which was also directed by Malick. Coincidence?

Any Day Now (2012) 69/100

Posted on September 12, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 69/100 97 Min

Touted as Alan Cumming’s best performance to date, a statement I would not disagree with, this tells the true story of an American homosexual couple’s fight in the 1970s to win custody over a child with Down syndrome from his drug addicted, and neglectful to the point of criminality, mother. Cumming (who, incidentally, grow up around Carnoustie in Scotland – the same home town as Ian McDiarmid, a.k.a. the emperor in the Star Wars franchise {episodes I, II, III & VI}, a character that in light of the new films currently lined up may or may not have survived the events of ‘The Return of the Jedi’ 84) plays Rudy Donatello, the more flamboyant and outspoken of the two, whose occupation at the opening of the film is as a miming drag queen in a gay nightclub, whilst his partner Paul Fliger, played by Garret Dillahunt, is a district attorney.

It’s a tough, and yet important story, highlighting human prejudice and the failings of the legal system in America designed to safeguard vulnerable minors. Despite its worthiness, however, I would be lying if I said I found it easy to become especially emotionally involved with the film. It is perhaps due to the story spending too much time focusing on the adults and the ramifications of their sexual orientation, rather than the experiences of the child, Marco (played here by Isaac Leyva), which is where the connection with the audience should be centred. It’s still a good film though, and Cumming gets the opportunity to show us he can sing as well as act (the title comes from a line in the song ‘I Shall be Released’ by Bob Dylan).

Interestingly, Cumming and fellow actor Brian Cox (who is from Dundee, just west of Carnoustie) were two of the speakers at the launch of the ‘Yes campaign’ for Scottish independence, a launch that took place at Cineworld in Edinburgh and seen politics nod very heavily to the powerful influence of cinema. Indeed, analysts are predicting the ‘Braveheart generation’ to play a key role in deciding the vote in 2014 – that is, the people who were growing up when the film was released in 1995. Ah humans, bless them. I remember the olden days of independence and the comings and goings of the English, the French, the Vikings, the Scots, the Picts, the Romans, the Celts, the Africans … everyone who came to Scotland eventually fell in love with the land and were welcomed by the natives. Or we killed them. One of the two.

Alan Partridge : Alpha Papa (2013) 60/100

Posted on August 15, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 60/100 90 Min

Steve Coogan’s most iconic comedy persona gets his first big screen outing, twenty two years and multiple TV/radio shows after he was first aired to British audiences in 1991, with BBC Radio 4’s parody show ‘On The Hour’. After the heyday of his graduation from radio to television, Alan’s life has returned to a more leisurely pace working once more for the local radio station in Norwich. The peace is about to be ruined, however, when corporate downsizers arrive and it looks like either Alan, or his closest friend at the station Pat (at least, in the eyes of Pat he is his closest friend), are the two most likely candidates for the chop. Chaotic skullduggery ensues, resulting in a hostage situation at North Norfolk Digital, and a chance for Alan Partridge to once again appear in front of the cameras …

The Red Dragon has never been a big fan of the main character, in fact I’ve often wondered if he wouldn’t operate much better as a supporting one with the right surrounding enterprise, much like earlier in his career, and it’s a style of comedy that I find a little drab, a little obvious, and a little flat. That said, I would definitely call this is a solid adaptation of the TV series, but, despite laughing a few times, the thought of someone sitting me down to watch ‘Knowing me, knowing you … with Alan Partridge’ still makes me want to gag. One lady in the audience was practically wetting herself with laughter on more than one occasion (though she may have been laughing at the simple fact she was laughing) so this is most probably worth seeing if you are a fan of Coogan and his alter ego, but at the same time I think it’s unlikely to galvanise many people into new followers.

After Earth (2013) 20/100

Posted on June 8, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 20/100 100 Min

A ridiculous story matched by ridiculous acting. Planned as a trilogy that will now most certainly not be happening, this film never really gets past the main problem of knowing that Will Smith has cast his real life fourteen year old son to play the son of his central character onscreen and, although I do feel a degree of pity for Jaden Smith’s situation here, his son’s acting ability simply isn’t where it needs to be for a huge blockbuster like this. This issue is compounded by Will Smith himself actually having come up with the story (though not the screenplay), and it’s hopelessly contrived to allow the character his son plays to conquer his fears and in effect become a man. His heart was likely in the right place, and it has the feel of Mr Smith senior trying to pass the acting gauntlet onto Mr Smith junior, but it absolutely needed a better script.

Set in the future after we’ve destroyed our planet by abusing its resources, although this is actually nonsense as the two central characters end up on a crash landed ship (wherein the entirety of the ship’s crew have conveniently otherwise perished) that warps back to Earth (this is not a spoiler by the way), and it is displayed as abundantly full of vegetation and megafauna. There’s a volcano, if that is supposed to denote global warming, but we do actually have volcanoes at the moment Mr Smith (admittedly, it is set one thousand years after we left for pastures new, but hardly enough time for every species on Earth to more than double in size, especially in their supposedly resources limited environment).

Anyway, Will’s legs are also conveniently broken, or as his character puts it ‘Both my legs are broken. One of them really badly.’, hmm yes, which thus forces his young mini me to go on a trip through the perilous forest to find the tail of the crashed vessel with the emergency distress beacon. And therein an enormous problem with the story rears its ugly head – since there are only two of them it is abundantly obvious that young Mr Smith is in fact not going to be annihilated by the several things that he encounters which will, of course, try to annihilate him. Though he does pretty much ask for it by smacking a baboon in the face with a rock for no apparent reason. Fortunately, he is so super fit, despite Earth’s gravity being stronger than on his home planet, he is able to outrun an entire pack of angry baboons in their native forest. Did. Not. See. That. Coming. Sarcasm.

O there’s an alien bad guy that may or may not have survived the crash too, see the above line, all that being said, some of the visuals and cinematography are quite good. Indeed, the production design on the spaceship is interesting, with an aesthetic that appears to be a hybrid of an old sailing ship and a beehive/organic structure on the interior, and a more Star Trek esque hull on the outside. With the start of the final credits and the revelation that the director is M. Night Shyamalan (his name was removed from trailers after they performed badly) there was a moment of, ‘O, of course, it all makes sense now’, as there was one part when our young hero looked as if he were going to try to outrun the weather as well as the baboons, and one couldn’t help but think of Shyamalan’s ‘The Happening’ (08) when Mark Wahlberg and co did actually try to outrun the wind and the airborne evil that came with it, and here we find similar veins of trashy nonsense throughout the story. There are a lot of good films out at the moment, don’t waste your time and money on this.

All Stars (2013) 75/100

Posted on May 4, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 75/100 106 Min

Great wee film for kids, essentially with exactly the same premise from the ‘Step Up’ and ‘Streetdance’ films lifted and placed into a British high school. The most important thing about the film is that it successfully encourages kids to dance, so much so that most of the younger audience in the cinema were in fact doing just that whilst it was playing. The focus is on choreographed street dance, or break dancing if you prefer, with brief excerpts from ballroom and tap too.

The group consist of a number of stereotypes, the posh kids, the tough as nails female, the chubby male, but ones which work pretty well together, with everyone learning the value of being in a group working towards something, as they come together to compete in a local championship that may perhaps just save their youth centre from demolition in the process, and the chubby kid learns to swap his burgers for salad too, although since he’s suddenly upped his calorie needs this may be wishful thinking on his part.

All of the young budding actors could easily see themselves in film again with some pretty talented dancing in there, and Fleur Houdijk in particular demonstrates a precocious onscreen presence. One of the main story arcs deserves to be criticised though, with the parents of one of the kids demanding he give up dancing so he can study – surely it ought to be quite possible to do both?

All Things to All Men (2013) 63/100

Posted on April 6, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating: 63/100 84 Min

A crime thriller set in London that is in many ways comprised of very basic ingredients, but all those ingredients are executed with enough panache to make it work . Features gangsters, thieves, corrupt police officers, drugs and diamonds all to the backdrop of a good scene-setting soundtrack, and a lot of nice scenic shots of the city. It’s one of those films where you don’t need to pay a great deal of attention to get the gist of what’s going on, but when you do stop to think about it some of the trusts put in certain characters may seem a little far fetched, though on the whole it is believable enough. There’s a distinct lack of the sort of endless gratuitous swearing which is normally ever present in British gangster films, courtesy of criminals with a bit more class led by Gabriel Byrne – looking a little like Christoph Waltz here for some reason. Also with, bizarrely, Julian Sands (‘A Room with a View’ 85), Toby Stephens, and a noteworthy turn from Rufus Sewell.

The drama, of course, surrounds a fairly extreme scenario, an insider heist worth millions of pounds, but it tries to briefly touch on real issues, suggesting some officers can only make arrests by themselves committing perjury, for example, though there is no discussion as to whether that is due to the system or individuals (there is a heavy suggestion of course given the nature of the film). Unfortunately, the important work the police in Britain do is all too often undermined by stories of corruption in the media, even on a large and endemic scale such as the recent Hillsborough probe that revealed endless false testimonies from officers and the botched Jimmy Savile investigations, where scores of witnesses were never taken seriously at the time.

They are not currently being helped, however, by the present Tory government who have decided to privatise parts of the force (as well as severely cutting it) together with welfare, two elements of society that should absolutely never ever be privatised. Despite being exposed in the media as being hopelessly unfit for purpose, the agencies used in the welfare scandal, many of which have already been kicked out of other countries such as Australia, are being paid public money to effectively force the poor to work as slaves in order to receive state benefits, the equivalent of two pounds something an hour, under threat of starvation and homelessness if they refuse, using companies that should be paying them at least minimum wage to do the same job. Interestingly, a few police officers in London are also facing corruption charges over lying about what a certain Tory minister may or may not have said to them after they told him to get off his bike and walk (click here for more details), though I think their hearts were in the right place in that instance….

These socio-political things find their way into cinema, often in understated terms. Even the recent release of ‘Identity Thief’ has Jason Bateman make the comment that the police in America don’t appear to be able to do anything unless they catch someone actually in the act of committing a crime due to the bureaucracy involved (interestingly, in that film they plan to secretly record conversations to use as evidence, a stalwart of crime films. There, the police are complicit, but in most law systems, including Scotland’s, evidence gained this way is unusable in court, and generally frowned upon unless obtained with a police warrant). For a few films based on true stories of corruption see ‘Midnight Express’, Sidney Lumet’s ‘Serpico’, and the recent Polish film ‘The Closed Circuit’ for a bit of a geographical spread.

‘All Things to All Men’, takes its title from the famous phrase in the New Testament of the Bible (First Corinthians – 9:22), and is written and directed by George Isaac – a double debut for him after previous roles as producer on Noel Clarke’s gritty ‘Kidulthood’ (06) and its sequel ‘Adulthood’ (08), and overall, here he has done a pretty decent job.

As an aside, the following is a very illustrative, and important, interview between the former head of A4E (one of the private welfare agencies), Emma Harrison, and Krishnan Guru-Murthy for Channel 4 News, some of the elements they touch upon are, I believe, simply the tip of the iceberg. Also, see the equally important clip afterward from the Guardian, who were approached by a DWP whistleblower…

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