Nick Cassavetes (‘The Notebook’ 04) directs Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann and Kate Upton in what is supposed to be a story of female friendship triumphing over all, in this case the man who had been cheating primarily on his wife, played by Mann, but also on his girlfriends played by the other two, ultimately though, it looks more like the director just pointed the camera at his actors and said ‘Ok, just make something up’. It’s completely terrible, without any moral fibre, decent laughs, believable characters or indeed stunts such as there are. At one point we see Diaz running barefoot along the beach trying to catch up with Upton, in order to rugby tackle her, but we can clearly see the sand is strewn with shells – lo and behold she stumbles and falls, but I would be very surprised if what we’re watching isn’t simply the performer cutting her feet open and they’ve used the take anyway. That’s the kind of level of thought and preparation applied throughout. Nicki Minaj makes a brief appearance in her first live action film role (it was only a matter of time really). Watch ‘The First Wives Club’ (96) instead, which essentially has the same premise but is also a really good film.
The title encapsulates the only striking or interesting thing about this film, in fact the whole thing plays out like a long winded joke with no punch line, told by a friend that you only listen to until the end out of politeness. It’s a comedy crime caper that sees a separated couple, played by Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson, forced to join forces again to try and recapture their financial loses after Brosnan’s company is bought over and then immediately liquidated, annihilating the family savings. This leads them on a jaunt to Paris and a life of crime as they opt to try and steal the money back any way they can, helped out by their mutual friends, played by Timothy Spall and Celia Imrie. Will the ex-lovers also manage to recapture their passions of yester-year?
Teenage fiction that is very obviously hoping to ape the success of ‘The Hunger Games’ (12), which is no bad thing, and it largely does a good job with only the cheesier elements of the writing letting it down. The film is based on Veronica Roth’s debut novel of the same name, part one of a trilogy, whilst Neil Burger (‘The Illusionist’ 06, ‘Limitless’ 11) directs. The immediate difference between this and The Hunger Games is that whilst both have a preposterous central storyline the other franchise makes it work on film in a very believable way, whereas here it takes a while to settle and doesn’t work to the same degree.
The world of Divergent is a dystopian future where mankind has struggled to survive after global war ruined everything. We are specifically taken to Chicago which is surrounded by enormous defences (beyond which no one is quite sure what exists anymore) and where the people are divided into factions when they are young, denominations they will belong to for the rest of their lives. These factions are : Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), Erudite (the intelligent), Abnegation (the selfless), and Candor (the honest), with each supposed to represent your nature and where you’ll be happy and productive and essentially ‘belong’. If you exhibit personality that fits in to more than one then you are a freak, divergent, and are to be killed instantly before you mess everything up. Getting this notion across to the audience in a way that doesn’t sound ludicrous is the first major challenge of the film and it remains one of its biggest pitfalls.
It does, however, immediately remind The Red Dragon of playing countless role playing games and trying to get ranks in as many different classes or disciplines as possible, one just never seemed enough. Guess I’m divergent, or schizophrenic, or GREEDY mwahaha! Our protagonist ‘Tris’ (Shailene Woodley) finds herself in a similar spot when her time to choose her faction arrives. Inevitably, her split personality disorder and strength of character will see her life put in danger, but also allow her to resist and fight against the sinister plot at work within faction management and inevitably attract the amorous attention of the male lead ‘Four’, Theo James. Kate Winslet appears as one of the faction chiefs but even though she was used heavily in the marketing it’s little more than a cameo role for her.
The style has been chosen to make it look as realistic as possible, and they’ve made it quite a lengthy piece, again much like The Hunger Games, and this all works in its favour, but it’s really the strength and charisma of the two leads that sell it overall. Decent, and good enough to merit a sequel.
Four uninteresting and largely fake characters engage in relationships with one another and we are unfortunate enough to be taken along for the ride, with as many potential hooks for the filmmaker’s target demographic as possible and almost no real relevance featured at any point. We see, for example, one of the females enraged at her male partner for staying out all night drinking with his friends as she is now left by herself to prepare lunch for people coming over, except she could’ve woken him up at any point, and then during lunch she casually lights up a joint in the kitchen whilst still bitching about her man. The four poor actors who at least refuse to throw in the towel throughout are Kevin Hart, Michael Ealy, Regina Hall and Joy Bryant, and I think they may have managed at least one laugh in there at some point, but the sort of laugh that never really makes it to the surface you’re so completely bored by the rest of it. Based on the 1974 play ‘Sexual Perversity in Chicago’ by David Mamet, and previously directed on film by Edward Zwick back in 1986.
Why, why, why oh why did Kate Winslet agree to do this film? This is beyond abysmal. It begins by suggesting it might be going down into ‘Straw Dogs’ (71 & 2011) territory, but then it quickly does a U-turn into the realm of Nicholas Sparks (although Joyce Maynard actually wrote the book this is based on). This essentially tells the story of an escaped prisoner (Josh Brolin) who abducts Winslet and her young son in order to hide out at their house for the evening, where he ‘has’ to tie her up, even though he’s a nice guy you understand, so that it looks like he gave them no choice should someone come in. Within a few days she has been banged so many times by him that she is quite willing to give up everything and take her son out of school, take all their money out of the bank, and flee with him across the border to Canada.
It’s ridiculous, I’m surprised he didn’t try to have it off with the boy at the same time and manage to sell it to the pair of them as normal. To make the clichéd point that perhaps someone who has been sent to jail may still be a nice person, and someone walking around free may not be, we see a mentally handicapped child left over at the house by his mother to be looked after by Winselt and co for the day. Not fearing the mentally handicapped child’s ability to recognise him as a CONVICTED FELON ON THE LAM Brolin teaches the kid baseball and gives him, presumably, the best day of his live with a ‘real man’ father figure, much as he presents to Winslet’s son. On the return of the mother, the child achieves the impossible and recognises who Brolin is and dutifully tries to inform his loving mother, who, in order to shut him up whilst she is talking, turns around and SOCKS HIM IN THE FACE, before cheerfully saying goodbye and carting the dazed and befuddled child out of the door.
This child abuse doesn’t end with the loving parents of the town though, a local police officer (played by none other than Dawson, James Van Der Beek) after seeing Winslet’s child casually walking down the street actually threatens to arrest him unless he gets in the car so that he can give him ‘a ride home’. Hmm. After Brolin begins his attempted rape/seduction of Winslet by tying her up slowly in front of her kid, he follows this up with the old one-two of baking absurdly rich and perfect peach pie, an age old seduction technique guaranteed to charm the pants off any sex starved middle aged house wife, especially if they can’t cook themselves. In the years to come we see Tobey Maguire appear as Winslet’s boy in the future and guess what he does for a living? He bakes THE SAME FUCKING PIE on an industrial scale. GET. TO. FUCK.
The latest film from Terry Gilliam is entirely autorepresentative even if one was initially unaware he was at the helm, set as it is in a dystopian Blade Runner-esque future on Earth and replete with the sort of cynical corporate outlook and the many imaginative, varied and urban physical props that consistently appear in his work, ‘Brazil’ (85) and ’12 Monkeys’ (95) in particular, and also his sense of humour (we see posters reading ‘The church of Batman the Redeemer needs You!’). Here, the story focuses on a social outsider, Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz), who lives alone in an abandoned church in the heart of town, and the film opens with him begging the management at his work (some kind of mass processing plant of intellectual/virtual goods) to allow him to work from home which, he argues, would be much more productive for the company as there would be no time lost in transit etc. and he would prefer it as he wouldn’t have to be surrounded by people he doesn’t want anything to do with. At least, that is the assumption as we see him suffer great difficulty under normal social conditions and continually use ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ in conversation. The head of the company (Matt Damon, who last worked with Gilliam on ‘The Brothers Grimm’ 05) comes to the conclusion that he is borderline insane and so consents to his wish, so long as he works on ‘The Zero Theorem’, a project which is notorious for driving people bonkers and so he figures Qohen has nothing to lose anyway.
The opening third of the film is a little too ungrounded to work properly – we see Qohen at a party, for example, where the socialites there are dressed in what passes for fashionable garb, each holding modern tablets while they dance as if they’re sending out some social signal trending in the future, whether it be simply an alternative statement or some kind of status symbol, relationship or otherwise, we don’t know, and that’s the problem – it’s too loose, an attempted commentary on the dominance of technology and perhaps social media in our lives at the expense of human interaction, but it’s too vague to have any real meaning.
Eventually though, the film settles and finds more resonance with modernity and physics, in particular the ‘big crunch’ theory which would see the universe eventually contract and end with the opposite of a big bang (the universe is currently expanding, but different, conflicting ideas about its future abound). Qohen, we learn, has been waiting all his life for the one call that will explain the meaning of his life to him, but is ironically forced to work obsessively on the imposed Zero Theorem, which attempts to prove that the sum total of everything, all knowledge, matter and experience, amounts to absolutely and figuratively nothing, and thus everything is pointless.
As we watch him work at his computer we see him trying to fit endless arrays of boxes with formulae written on them into structures comprised of many such boxes – when he puts the right one into the right place he ‘solves’ that part, bringing order to chaos, but when he makes a mistake entropy ensues and that structure collapses, causing much mental anguish to the would be mathematician, compounded by his exponentially increasing workload, all of which threatens his already dubious mental stability.
Interestingly, this could be read in a number of ways. It will certainly seem familiar to the many programmers out there who work under such infuriating circumstance all the time, but there is also a connection to the modern rise of ultra cynical computer games, usually found online or available as apps, that are designed with the sole purpose of tying people into them, forcing them to invest more and more of, not just their time, but also their money into the game and for no real gain in terms of enjoyment or any satisfaction to be gleamed from the gameplay, simply to keep consumers using their product as much as possible. The ‘grind’ as gamers will often refer to some instances of this phenomenon. All of these games are a complete waste of time, and the creator’s main job is to dress it up as something rewarding so that you don’t realise just how bad it is until you’ve already been playing for a while, and they quite often target a younger market that are easier to hook. At the same time, it also has echoes of the drive in modern physics to search for a ‘unified theory’ of everything, as currently two of our major understandings of the universe, namely relativity and quantum theory, do not match up with one another, meaning something is wrong with at least one of them somewhere.
Thus, the film becomes more relevant and more interesting as it progresses. Matt Damon hires a digital prostitute Bainsley (Mélanie Thierry) to keep Qohen interested in the project, presumably also to relieve some of his pent up rage, but the two develop real feelings for one another, throwing the unstable variables of love and desire into the equation. Here too the science fiction aspect really works, as Bainsley explains she doesn’t actually engage in any physical intercourse because it isn’t safe but focuses instead on the cerebral, and eventually we see the pair of them connect themselves to the internet where they can experience the real thing in virtual reality – something which could become available in the not too distant future with current technology able to ‘read thoughts’ (electrical impulses, see below) and deliver an element of tactile sensation, and with experiments to link this to cybersex and the adult entertainment industry being conducted by various interested parties.
A delightfully dark and yet hopeful film in some ways, as we at least see Qohen’s passion for something compel him to strive ever forward, all counterbalanced by the warmth Bainsley provides, and so long as you can live with its flirtation with whimsy, there are a lot of nice touches to appreciate too. Well acted throughout, also with David Thewlis, Tilda Swinton and Lucas Hedges in support.
The constant linking motif throughout this film is the slender, beautiful and delicate figure of Maggie Cheung, accentuated by a menagerie of elegant dresses that relentlessly hug her frame, constraints of time and place, perpetuating an almost haunting, nostalgic image of perfection with the way the film has been shot, and its poetic reflection of love. On several occasions, once very near the beginning, director Kar Wai Wong uses to great effect brief images of simply Cheong’s hand and arm on a doorframe and then later a banister to powerfully convey sensuality and sexuality respectively. Throughout the film the same score of moody string laden music plays, mixed with the sonorous baritone of Nat King Cole singing in Spanish which, together with the elegance of the leads and their costumes, creates the atmosphere of a tango being danced throughout the narrative, with all its dark heady promise verging on catastrophic despair.
Cheong plays the wife of a husband who is having an affair with the married woman next door in 1960’s Hong Kong. Circumstances bring her closer to that woman’s husband, played by Tony Leung, and the two find solace in each other’s company as they ask each other how their partner’s infidelity could have come to pass. A crutch for one another, they are in many ways isolated in their own company, unable to share their turmoil with anyone else and yet unable to admit they are falling for each other, hoping to resolve their marital difficulties eventually but also unwilling to consider themselves in the same category as their other halves, that perhaps the simple act of their partners spending time together whilst they were at work was enough for their existing love to shatter.
The film has an almost voyeuristic feel to it – the camera is often at a distance from where the actors are talking, and at times it is allowed to remain stationary whilst the characters move past it to continue conversing somewhere out of shot. It kind of fits with the increased secrecy of their meetings, but the time frame is also very cleverly, and subtly, used to great effect here, both in a localised and a general way, and with the inclusion of the iconic and ancient setting of Angkor Wat and the film ending, as it begins, with a line of poetry that uses the imagery of looking through glass, the style of the piece is finally, and triumphantly, consummated.
It’s achingly beautiful in many ways and wonderfully acted, and it will involve you in the onscreen romance, but it just might break your heart a little in the process too.
Another journey into the mindscape of Jim Jarmusch travelling along the familiar pathways of his love for music and physics, but this time delivered via the unexpectedly ethereal, and at times amusing, blackened world of vampires. Tom Hiddleston (Adam) and Tilda Swinton (Eve) are the lead vamps and have been lovers for countless decades, with John Hurt and Mia Wasikowska in support, aided by Anton Yelchin and Jeffrey Wright as two of the few mortals in the film. The performances are great, especially from the leads, but the use of music throughout the film is very well balanced creating not only a sombre tone for the shadowlands of their lives, but also a unique ambience for long reflective moments, as we spend most of the film in Adam’s home musing along with his lugubrious melancholy at the state of the world.
His home is in a rundown area of Detroit, where he lives as a mysterious and reclusive musician lamenting on the fact that his distancing himself from commercial interests only seems to make his music even more popular, which is the perfect setting, subtly adding to the not so cheery vein running through the film after Detroit last year was forced to declare itself bankrupt, the largest scale event of its kind in US history, with her population considerably under half of what it was in the 1950s. The vampirism is part anchor and delivery mechanism for the philosophy, but it could also easily be read as a thinly veiled metaphor for drug use and dependence, especially when they speak of contamination of the blood supply, in today’s HIV conscious world.
Continuing the protagonists commentary on the general malaise of mankind, comparing his centuries of scientific learning and cultural experiences to the modern world, we find mention of the work and theories of nineteenth century electronics pioneer Nikola Tesla, just as in Jarmusch’s ‘Coffee and Cigarettes’ (David Bowie gives a nice turn playing him in ‘The Prestige’ (06) as well, incidentally), and when Adam points to the mess of cables and wires around the place that pass for a supply of power and waves it off as woefully rudimentary and wasteful, he is absolutely right. In today’s world, the technology and know how exist to completely transform the way we live, making it a hundred times more economically viable as well as environmentally friendly – for those with a Facebook account take a look at this clip from Physicist TV to see what I mean, or watch the excellent documentary ‘Who Killed the Electric Car’ (06) to see how big business stamps its regressive boot down on technology that threatens its profits.
For fans of Jarmusch this is a must see, and for everyone else it’s worth delving into for the shades of legitimate grey contrasted with the unhurried, yet enduring and passionate romance of the two main characters.
This is a very, very familiar story of the local mechanic’s boy who falls for the hot blonde soon to be studying medicine shy girl next door, only daddy doesn’t like it, in small town rural America. Bizarrely, it’s kind of likeable for what it is. The leads are appealing enough and never really grate, the dialogue isn’t off-puttingly cheesy, and the story doesn’t bore to death, all of which is a bit of a surprise. Alex Pettyfer and Gabriella Wilde (Carrie) play the two leads with Bruce Greenwood as the latter’s father and Joely Richardson as his wife, and the story focuses as much on their relationship as it does the two young lovebirds. It’s loosely based on the novel of the same name by Scott Spencer, previously filmed by Franco Zeffirelli in 1981, which may explain why there’s a little more going on than in the usual teen romance drama, and although it fulfils its purview reasonably well, the romance is not exactly going to set the world on fire either.
So derivative, it’s a wonder they bothered at all. Starring leading man Nick Frost – the whole concept for the film allegedly originates from a drunken email he sent to his producer, although it operates as essentially his own version of his pal Simon Pegg’s ‘Run Fatboy Run’ (07). He plays Bruce Garrett, a shy and introverted office worker who has a passion for salsa that he’s buried deep inside after some kids gave him a beating for dancing when he was a kid. The fact that this incident was a one off, doesn’t really speak highly of the main character, but that also forms the core of the story as he falls for burgeoning salsa enthusiast Julia (Rashida Jones) and must regain his self confidence and win her away from the affections of office rival and massive sleaze Drew (Chris O’Dowd).
The main problem, asides from the dire lack of any originality, is that’s it’s just so overwhelmingly drab, set in some uninteresting corner of England with very intermittent dance scenes all shot with such poor editing and direction that it’s not easy at all to say whether or not Frost is physically any good in the role, all asides from one scene where he has a dance-off in the car park at work with O’Dowd, which was quite well worked. The only other scene of any real note is when his quasi-mystical dance instructor (Ian McShane) has Bruce play board games with him and needles him when he refuses to properly engage with it, eventually producing a pretty impressive Scarface impression from him, making board games more fun for the pair and curing his self esteem issues in the process.
If you’re a big fan of Frost then you’ll probably still enjoy this to some extent, but if you’re simply a fan of salsa or otherwise then this isn’t really worth the time.
