Frances Ha (2012) 66/100

Posted on July 27, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 66/100 86 Min

Starring and co-written by Greta Gerwig (‘Greenberg’ 2010, ‘To Rome with Love‘ 2012) this is a sweet little black and white film following twenty seven year old Frances, as she suddenly realises her career and relationships are perhaps not really heading in the directions she had thought they were. Set in New York City, it’s a drama acted out via situational comedy, primarily revolving and depending upon the lovability and appreciation of the slightly ditsy, but fun loving, Frances, and her deep but soon to be strained connection with her soul mate and best friend Sophie (played by Sting’s daughter, Mickey Sumner). It is largely successful in its premise, but it is a little pretentious in places, with lots of stylised images of ‘artists’ smoking, which is not only a cliché but an outdated one, with smoking’s social acceptability on the steady decline (something which some of the dialogue seems self conscious of). It feels like the characters are living in the cinema of the sixties rather than now, a feeling deepened by a random trip to Paris at one point for Frances – although this also mirrors modern successful films, with the likes of ‘2 days in Paris’ (07), sequel ‘2 days in New York’ (12), ‘Paris, je t’aime’ (06) / ‘New York, I Love You’ (09) and Woody Allen’s migration from his love affair with The Big Apple to European cultural hotspots, most recently with his much lauded ‘Midnight in Paris’ (11) and the aforementioned ‘To Rome with Love’.

It’s directed by Noah Baumbach (‘Margot at the Wedding’ 2007, ‘Greenberg’) who teamed up with Gerwig for the script. Overall it meanders a little too much, and is a little vain, but nevertheless it successfully crafts a delicate and artful expression of friendship.

Easy Money / Snabba Cash (2010) 12/100

Posted on July 20, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 12/100 124 Min

A Swedish fictional thriller telling an all too familiar tale of rival criminal organisations, this time those of the Stockholm underground. The story focuses on the character of JW, a talented young student who is drawn deeper and deeper into one of the group’s employ, played well here by Joel Kinnaman. The problem is that it’s interminably dull, and there is absolutely nothing about any of the characters that is likely to be of interest to the audience, with the only exception those that are shown to have innocent family members that they care about, that being the case it feels like an entirely false inclusion and is far from an original hook in a film that otherwise substitutes violence for plot, and has little to no humanity. It’s filmed in an ultra modern style, showcasing how it’s possible to use many of the habits trending the world right now to bad effect – the insistence on using orange, blue and green lighting/colouring, the fast and out of sequence editing for no real reason, the unsteady camera, and indeed music that is badly misused and at one point noticeably seems to be stealing ideas from ‘The Dark Knight’ (08).

There are more than a couple of similarities with Tarantino’s work here too, with the kind of irrelevant stories the characters tell and the way we are inserted into them as a voyeur, and, one of the worst parts of the film, a plot device toward the end which is effectively straight from the pages of ‘Pulp Fiction’ (94). It’s from director Daniel Espinosa (‘Safe House’ 2012) and is based on the novel by Jens Lapidus, which became the first part of his ‘Stockholm Noir’ trilogy, and indeed the sequel to this will already be familiar to Swedish audiences, with part three due out later this year. Zac Effron is slated to appear in Hollywood’s upcoming remake. I’m sure it will be great.

Monsters University (2013) 79/100

Posted on July 13, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 79/100 104 Min

Pixar show once again that they, together with their Disney partners/owners, are in a league of their own when it comes to animation that will appeal to all audiences, regardless of age. This is a prequel to their successful 4th film Monsters Inc (2001) and tells the tale of how the two central characters Mike (Billy Crystal) and Sullivan (John Goodman) originally came to meet at the titular Monsters University (M.U.), and their challenge to prove themselves worthy enough to compete with the scariest monsters around.

The rendering work looks superb, and overall the story is engaging and inspiring, with the raft of interesting secondary characters that we’ve come to expect. Voice support comes from the likes of Steve Buscemi and Helen Mirren and as always a cameo from the company’s good luck totem, John Ratzenberger. There is a brief after credits scene, though you do have to wait a pretty long time to get to it ….

Chasing Mavericks (2012) 73/100

Posted on July 6, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 73/100 116 Min

Gerard Butler stars in this ‘Karate Kid’ esque (both also star Elisabeth Shue, coincidentally) true story about how one man’s lifelong love of surfing helps inspire a similar desire in his young neighbour, Jay Moriarity, whom he reluctantly takes on as his protege in order to train him to tackle the giant, dangerous waves at the North California location of Mavericks, waves that have claimed the lives of some of the biggest names in surfing and are formed by an unusual rock formation under the water (the name comes from that of the dog who accompanied the location’s founding surfers). The film does stray dangerously close to Nicholas Sparks level melodrama, with the small town, the small town bully, the small town cute girl the protagonist wants to get with, and the ever present danger of the waves, but it eventually sidesteps this dead end territory and fleshes out as a pretty decent drama.

Newcomer Jonny Weston does a good job as the wave hungry Jay, and the film’s visuals of the surfing, and the fact that it’s a true story, are its biggest strengths, with the waves at the end looking sufficiently catastrophic – projecting surfing as at once deadly (Butler himself almost drowned and was hospitalised whilst filming after a succession of waves pulled him under for forty seconds), and a lot of fun. Co-helmed by respected directors Michael Apted (‘Gorillas in the Mist’ 88) and Curtis Hanson (‘L.A. Confidential’ 97), the shoot was difficult and dangerous, going on for a lot longer than expected thanks to bad luck with the weather – all the surfers featured, bar the two leads, are professionals.

Have a peek at the interview below with Butler and Weston, with one of them constantly interrupting the other …

The Bling Ring (2013) 57/100

Posted on July 6, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 57/100 90 Min

A bunch of idiots rob another bunch of idiots, in an idiotic fashion, in Sofia Coppola’s latest indie satire on modern celebrity culture. But do we care? Well, it is difficult to. Based on the real story of a group of teenagers that went on a robbery spree in Beverly Hills, targeting their celebrity idols and using the press to find out when they would be out of town. We watch them repeat the same thing over and over again throughout the film, with them leaving a profiler’s dream worth of fingerprints each time and being caught on CCTV on several occasions, with the only male of the group repeatedly saying ‘C’mon guys, we should really get out of here, now!’ and being completely ignored each time resulting in him casually continuing with what they were doing. Too little effort has been made with characterisation, with an emphasis placed on drink, drugs, and music. Having said that though, a large part of this is necessary to illustrate the world they are a product of, indeed to show the only things that are deemed important to them, with fashion and celebrity taking a high precedence, but we know right from the beginning that they do end up in court, even though we only get the briefest glimpse of the aftermath of the criminal proceedings for one of the characters, giving the piece a decidedly flimsy feel to it.

The group of young larcenists represent one side of the symbiotic see-saw that bobs up and down with the vagaries of fame and celebrity. They most notably, and frequently, target the house of Paris Hilton, who allowed the film crew to use her actual house in the movie, effectively letting her use ‘The Bling Ring’ as another publicity vehicle, and no doubt making a nice profit from the shoot in the process. It’s a clever move for her, so long as it doesn’t result in copycat robberies, or a sort of rite of passage for young bratlings to break into her house. A great deal of irony in the film itself then, but overall it simply becomes very tedious watching the group do the same thing over and over again for the duration of the film, something which wasn’t overly interesting in the first place.

Before Midnight (2013) 72/100

Posted on June 22, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 72/100 109 Min

The continuation of a story focusing on a relationship under the microscope, in this case all before midnight on a certain day, and previously ‘Before Sunrise’ in 95 and ‘Before Sunset’ in 2004. The couple are Jesse and Celine, played respectively by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, both of whom helped write the screenplay along with the director Richard Linklater. The vast majority of the film is a dialogue between the two characters, whilst they holiday in Greece with their two twin daughters, with the only real notable exception being a dinner table scene with friends, but even if you haven’t seen the previous two films and are unfamiliar with the characters, as I was, this is still easily accessible. Both central performances are engaging, and though there are shades of whiny melodrama, the story touches on just enough common relationship issues and overarching themes of transience and mortal companionship to keep us interested. It’s not Bergman (Ingmar), but it is charming and involving, with a decidedly bittersweet aftertaste.

Stuck in Love (2012) 37/100

Posted on June 15, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 37/100 97 Min

This film actually managed to make The Red Dragon pretty irate (not in itself altogether unusual), both for its blatant double standards on serious issues like drug use, and for its grating, and inevitable, conceit of ‘everything will be alright in the end because this is a film designed to showcase upcoming talent featuring a score sounding very much like every other romantic drama released over the last half decade or so, not a film featuring any real characters’. The film focuses on one family, whose parents, played by Greg Kinnear and Jennifer Connelly, have divorced (we never find out why) and it looks at the effect on their children, played by Lily Collins and Nat Wolff, as well as the current state of each family member’s love life. Three of them are writers, and the idea of a shared favourite book resulting in cosmic romance is played out in a particularly dreary and nasty manner, transforming the daughter from a wanton and desperate slut into the hopeless romantic that the film preaches we all secretly are.

In the same way, the story bizarrely shows the parents to not really care their young son is heavily into smoking weed, until a certain point when it does randomly begin to worry one of them, and then we see cocaine appearing and cue the evil music. One is obviously medically more severe than the other, but the grotesque pretension of the narrative seems to miss the fact that endorsing one can also potentially lead to the other – we are to assume the young girl onscreen has been introduced to the drug by her aggressive boyfriend and his friends, but it is unlikely they began with the hard stuff. It’s simply not responsible enough to have a blasé approach to soft core drugs in order to try and look ‘hip’ to a younger demographic, something which has been creeping into Hollywood output (though this is an independent film) for a while, often in throwaway scenes. Lilly Collins smiles approvingly when her brother says he has a stash of weed to smoke, so she endorses it as she sits with him outside and watches him smoke, but is very careful not to have any herself, as at this point in her fledgling career (her biggest role to date is as Snow White in last year’s ‘Mirror Mirror’) it wouldn’t be wise, effectively highlighting the issue. A film can easily be pro or against soft drugs but there has to be a context, a point even, to the very conscious decision to introduce it. Later in the film there is an uproar for, shock horror, giving a sixteen year old a glass of champagne, which somehow leads her to automatically go off and try to get laid with another guy (she is dating Wolff’s character) and go back to abusing coke.

Some of the songs used alongside the score are pretty good, but with the casting of attractive actors (who all do a good job) and the promise that pining after the object of your affection, even if they are with someone else, will yield positive results, not to mention that promiscuity and soft drug culture carry no significant threats whatsoever, ‘Stuck in Love’ has chosen an extremely ill conceived way to try and appeal to its audience.

Behind the Candelabra (2013) 80/100

Posted on June 8, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 80/100 118 Min

Michael Douglas gives what may very well be the crowning performance of his illustrious career, as the secretly, but very obviously, homosexual pianist and entertainer Liberace. Matt Damon plays his young love toy, and he appears on the scene looking like a groomed and buff Prince Adam as both he and Douglas prove committed to the full, giving emotional and engaging performances replete with physical alterations to match their character’s changes over time (Rob Lowe is also good in support). The film focuses on the evolution of the relationship between the pair, with the emphasis naturally leaning toward Liberace, though the story is based on the memoir of Scott Thorsen, Damon’s character, and I think I’d put down Michael Douglas as the heaviest contender so far this year for Oscar nomination in the winter (he has one previous best actor win for portraying Gordon ‘greed is good’ Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 ‘Wall Street’).

At time of writing this is set to be the last feature film from director Steven Soderbergh as he takes a break of undetermined length (not ‘Side Effects‘, as was originally reported, although they were likely filmed around the same time) and it would be a ‘fabulous’ way to bow out of cinema, featuring as it does many refinements to his craft, especially the use of music in the narrative, with here the sound never imposing a viewpoint and yet still driving the story forward – with that of the ensuing scene repeatedly preempting the transition by appearing in the current one, and also the subtle thread of devilish comedy (see his excellent ‘The Informant’ (09) for more along that vein, again with Matt Damon). Filmed not long after Michael Douglas’ was given the all clear regarding his throat cancer, you can be sure this will be work he will never forget, as you can tell by his heartfelt press release below. (Incidentally, his cancer was caused by the sexually transmitted HPV virus, of which there are many strains, so much so that many cannot currently be detected and those that can be are often not tested for at health clinics, in many senses it’s assumed that if you’re sexually active, you are probably carrying some version of it. Worth reading here for more, albeit succinct, info).

(As a further aside, in a fantastic strategic move, a couple of years ago researchers looking to solve a genetic problem in the search for an AIDS cure, sent the real life puzzle out to gamers on Second Life, and one of the many thousands of players actually did solve it. Creatively using the computer game trained minds of gamers to help solve humanity’s problems was a great idea, and indeed it remains so for the future)

The Iceman (2012) 72/100

Posted on June 8, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 72/100 105 Min

Michael Shannon stars as real life New Jersey hitman Richard Kuklinski, who reputedly snuffed out over one hundred people in his long running career, in this violent tale of one man’s rage fuelled impulses and his conjoined determination to protect his family, together with his need to keep his underworld business with the Mafia a secret from them as a necessary part of that protection. Shannon is fantastic in the role, and Ray Liotta is just as good as the gangster that ‘funds’ his murderous enterprise, although this is hardly surprising since Liotta is pretty much the professional gangster of the big screen, someone should really make ‘Shoot Them One More Time Just to Make Sure’, the Disney musical biography of Ray Liotta’s onscreen career.

Winona Ryder plays Kuklinski’s somewhat faithfully naïve wife, whilst Chris Evans, Captain America himself, turns up as a rival assassin, and David Schwimmer convinces us he’s not Ross from ‘Friends’ this time round. Bizarrely, there is a court room scene at one point that seems to have mostly CGI members of the public sitting in the gallery. It’s a little odd, but otherwise this is a noteworthy gangster film sold primarily on the back of Shannon’s ability to embody the relentless killer that Kuklinski is, whilst also gaining our sympathy for him and his family.

The age certificate screen that appears before the film proper describes it as rated 15 for strong violence, sex and bad language, but I fail to see how graphic images of people having their throats sliced open doesn’t qualify it to be an 18 – neither is the sex especially strong (which is a shame since Winona Ryder is in it). It reminds me of when the computer game ‘Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’, which was rated 18, was pulled from shelves not because you could run around chainsawing old grannies in the street and then rob and kick their corpses, but because a mod version was found to exist whereby once you’d shacked up with whichever one of your lady friends you’d impressed by doing all manner of pointless things, and the screen switched to an outside view of the house whilst you went in for some ‘hot coffee’, you were now able to view the actual act of, ahem, procreation, and could perform different sexual manipulations with the control pad. The game was made in Edinburgh, by Rockstar North, I’m proud to say, but the absurdity of the ban highlighted a bigger problem with censorship in general. Likewise, this should have been an 18, but the lack of genital shots rather than brutal executions are what prevent it from being so. Naturally.

Populaire (2012) 66/100

Posted on June 4, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 66/100 111 Min

A fairly decent French language film set in the late 1950’s that very much apes the feel of Audrey Hepburn’s ‘Funny Face’ (57) but which isn’t quite as enjoyable as that classic musical number, in fact it’s almost too light and fluffy for its own good, but with a warm heart that ultimately just wins out over predictability and comedy that never really does more than tickle lightly. It stars Romain Duris as insurance salesman Louis Échard looking for a new secretary – enter Déborah François as the young and very beautiful small town ingenue Rose Pamphyle who will fill the position after demonstrating excessively rapid typing skills, to the extent that Louis feels compelled to enter her into regional speed typing tournaments, and to train her to realise her full typewriting championship potential.

It’s immediately obvious that a romance can hardly fail to develop, and Duris’ character fills the boots of the ‘douche bag guy who will inevitably come good in the end’, but whilst Duris’ performance nor his character are particularly convincing, Déborah François is what really sells the picture, giving a strong and very affable portrayal of the clumsy and yet determined Rose, and surprisingly the fairly dull sounding competition of speed typing becomes reasonably interesting – they even manage to fit in a ‘Rocky’ style training montage at one point.

Bérénice Bejo plays a supporting character that aids in no small way the budding romance, but also teaches Rose to play piano – ostensibly to aid her digital adroitness, but also nodding to the most famous roles of both lead actors to date; ‘The Page Turner’ (06) for François, and ‘The Beat that my Heart Skipped’ (05) for Duris, in which he also played an angry twat who somehow gets the girl by shouting at her in a fit of rage at one point, if memory serves. Indeed, in one scene here Rose gives him a good slap, and he’s just as quick to give her a good one right back – it’s very French, but also perhaps another nod to a moment in ‘Funny Face’ with a Parisian couple sitting outside a nightclub, the female member of which is angrily shouting at her male partner, who, naturally, slaps her across the face, and she promptly responds by hugging and kissing him passionately. ‘Populaire’ takes its name from the brand of typewriter Rose uses, and marks the feature film debut of Régis Roinsard.

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