Wednesday 30 November 2011

Green Lantern (Martin Campbell, 2011)

Bucking the prevailing trend for Marvel/DC superhero adaptations, Green Lantern went resoundingly arse-over-tit not just with the critics as is commonplace but even at the box office. This is gratifying, as by any criterion it's a feeble effort. The comic book source is an inexplicably enduring one considering the lameness of the concept, i.e. that there's a corps of guardians of the universe who have magic rings that they can use to make all manner of gadgets materialise from their imaginations, provided they're all green. Oh, and they can fly at the speed of light and anything yellow is evil.
This might have produced a bearable film adaptation if it were purely played for The Mask-style hijinks, but it still seems to want to say something Star Trekky about overcoming your fears and just how neat the plucky humans are with their maverick individualism even if they might not be as old or smart as all those older civilisations. Yes, once again it's how Americans like to see themselves and I suppose hence having Ryan Reynolds as the titular hero fits in nicely with this, leading the charge as a blandly beefy and earnest lunkhead of a quarterback. It's incredibly boring, probably even for 10-year-olds.

3/10

Tuesday 29 November 2011

Solomon Kane (Michael J. Bassett, 2009)

James Purefoy dons the stubble and tortured mean mofo attitude of his lookalike Hugh Jackman, as Wolverine/Van Helsing, as a 17th century mercenary who roams the land having renounced violence in exchange for a temporary reprieve from eternal damnation. Naturally, like his homonymous namesake Caine in Kung Fu, the forces of evil won't leave the man of peace alone and the slaughter of a pious family by unsavoury hordes soon has him back to limb-chopping like he'd never stopped.
It's complete action twaddle by numbers, of course, but given enough of a gloss by a decent stab at historical design and some rather lovely snowbound landscape photography that it'll do to while away the hours.

5/10

White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)

The title refers to the residue left behind by departing colonials, in terms of both infrastructure and cultural baggage. Here it's in an unspecified African country, and the director's choice of leaving it open is a double-edged sword: it may make statements about the repercussions of the fall of the colonial system more universal, but at the same time divorced of real context.
Isabelle Huppert and Christophe Lambert play plantation owners under pressure to leave the country and their possessions with the impending approach of rebel forces. Lambert's moderated character is a surprising inclusion considering his OTT portfolio, but he's strictly second fiddle to Huppert's in any case, as she grows increasingly unstable in her frenzy to cling on to what she considers her birthright.
It's a deconstructed narrative, presumably for the purpose of creating disorientation. Huppert, as usual, fills the centre of the film with a performance of quiet but feverish intensity. However, the problem is that that's all you expect of a Huppert character, and her character's illogical intransigence does not surprise as a result, particularly as she already played the same character in the same set-up, even if in Cambodia, in Rithy Panh's more affecting The Sea Wall, just the year before. Meanwhile, the Liberia-set Johnny Mad Dog was more effective at conveying the horror at what had come to pass.
It's hence a very mixed bag, with the child rebels also feeling like little more than ciphers, with the focus as usual on the Europeans, despite what the Africa-raised director's intentions might have been. What probably got the critics raving and what, after all's said, deserves credit is Denis's uniquely poetic eye, full of telling details, and the absolute refusal to give in to simplification of the issues.

6/10

Monday 28 November 2011

The Mechanic (Simon West, 2011)

A Jason Statham film that's perfunctory and generic even by the standards of his body of work, the remake of the forgotten Charles Bronson-led The Mechanic has The Stat as an elite hitman who finds himself emotionally compromised by his latest job and ending up training a young hothead to fill his shoes. The presence of Donald Sutherland alongside at the start may raise hopes of something more interesting occurring, but these days he only crops up to get himself out of the house for a bit and it's no different here.
Statham's character is of course endowed with a sense of ethics about his choice of targets, gets it on with a woman in the first ten women just so we know it's not kinky when he starts getting his shirt off at any old excuse, and demonstrates depth with the stock device of first choice, i.e. listening to classical music after each hit. The only things that elevate it above a Steven Seagal vehicle are superior production values and the star's honestly workmanlike approach to the pointlessness of it all.

4/10

Saturday 19 November 2011

Somers Town (Shane Meadows, 2008)

Meadows's featurette is the first one he didn't have a hand in writing, the first set outside his Midlands home turf, and furthermore, disconcertingly for a director synonymous with independent and community-centred British film, financed wholly by Eurostar.
There was no need to worry about any of this. His backers have wisely given him free rein to make the kind of low-key drama he's always made, with little apparent requirement to big up their product or tart up the grimy area around their rail terminal, the combination of Paul Fraser's script and improv by the two teenage leads works a treat and Meadows proves to be as at ease at finding little nuggets of pathos from London estates as from Nottingham ones. The two boys who become friends, Thomas Turgoose (from Meadows's This Is England) as a cheeky urchin who's run away to London, and Piotr Jagiello as the shy Polish boy who gives him a place to stay, put in unaffected performances and some lovely moments of unforced humour crop up through their harmless shenanigans.
All the same, it is a very slight creation, and not only because of its 71-minute running time, ending with a vague fizzle before anything of consequence has actually transpired. If Meadows had realised from the off that he had all the parts required for an urban drama of substance at his disposal instead of just setting out to slap together an organic short, who knows how good it could have been?

6/10

Thursday 17 November 2011

True Grit (the Coen brothers, 2010)

Is this the way it's going to be with the Coens from now on, alternating original work with the scripts of others to keep up their a feature a year output? True Grit is a class apart from their hammed-up The Ladykillers remake, and indeed element-by-element superior in almost every way to the John Wayne original, not least Jeff Bridges having just a tad more control over his delivery than The Duke did, but it's still a shame to get something which is only a technical refinement and not wholly new.
That said, the virtuoso regular Coen photographer Roger Deakins gets to show how he's effectively claimed ownership of the sombre beige-wash palette for the revisionist Western since The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, with some images of quite remarkable tonality. The shift of emphasis away from the gruff drunkard marshal to the determined teenage girl who hires him to find her father's killer allows other characters to breathe too, including Matt Damon's sniffily precious Texas Ranger who wants in on the manhunt, and the outlaws they chase. As entertaining as the 1969 original was, it was far too much in thrall to the Wayne mythology to accommodate the complexity or elegiac darkness of this retelling.
This being a Coen film, the spot-on casting is no surprise, not least the self-assured Hailee Steinfeld as the young avenger, and the dialogue is as quickfire and ornate as usual while also fitting the Bible-encumbered culture of the 1870s frontier. It's just hard, despite all the craft, to blank out how often we've been here before, at the death of the old west.

7/10

Made in Dagenham (Nigel Cole, 2010)

The subject of the women machinists' 1968 strike at Ford's Dagenham plant would seem tailor-made for Ken Loach, having been a defining moment in the history of gender equality, with the women's stand against wage discrimination leading shortly after to a permanent change in legislation. If Loach did choose to sidestep it, it's understandable: even activists have to take a breather sometimes. So we get Cole as the helm instead, who brings pretty much the same bag of ingredients to this as he did with Calendar Girls, with a cast of mutually supportive women from all parts of the age and class spectrums united in a common cause.
It's all very chest-swellingly feelgood and full of comic-tinged turns designed to gratify, from Miranda Richardson's ballsy Barbara Castle to Bob Hoskins as a token male old Trot thrilled at the women's politicisation. On the other hand, as the leader of the protesters and focal point, Sally Hawkins is required to carry the scenes of human interest drama too, and unfortunately has to get by on a lot of squeaking bravely when the script lets her down. Still, you'd have to have a heart of stone to remain unstirred by the message.

6/10

Wednesday 16 November 2011

The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh, 2009)

Based on the story of corporate whistleblower and embezzler Mark Whitacre, The Informant! is in essence a continuation of Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven streak, right down to the casting of Matt Damon as the titular double-dealer. It opts to turn Whitacre's delusional tale, which involves him playing the FBI and his employers off against each other to make himself appear a crusader against big-business corruption while pocketing millions, into a comedy crime caper, complete with a whimsical retro Marvin Hamlisch soundtrack, intentionally redolent of what he did for The Sting. Matt Damon does do a good weasel, a kind of an amiable nerd version of his sociopathic Tom Ripley, but it's not half as endearing or funny as it thinks it is while attempting to wring satire out of its protagonist's rather sad compulsive lying.

5/10

Friday 11 November 2011

Chloe (Atom Egoyan, 2009)

When Julianne Moore, queen of the highly-strung relationship drama, is cast as a wife who suspects her husband of infidelity, you know things will get nebulous and pear-shaped sooner or later. Accordingly it's clear that when she pays a high-class call girl to test his limits, the complications due are to be self-inflicted.
Egoyan has always been fixated with kinkiness, but at least this time round it's hardly a strong suit, soft-focus, soft core and rather cringeworthy altogether. Where the film scores far higher is on fine detail in the characterisation, conveyed by a solid cast, even if Amanda Seyfried as the call girl looks too much like an adolescent frog to convince as a sexually irresistible force. The twists that come as the film slides into thriller territory are also quite nifty, provided you're prepared to forgive the cheat technique of withholding vital information from the viewer.

5/10

Thursday 10 November 2011

Kak ya provel etim letom (Aleksey Popogrebskiy, 2010)

How I Ended This Summer reeks of Tarkovsky with its dragged-out takes and metaphysical saturation. This cannot possibly be a bad thing in itself, although it needs to have a driving purpose behind the tableaux.
On one level, the barren and forbidding landscape of the Russian Arctic is the subject, but also how it impacts on the human psyche, here that of two researchers stuck on a remote island through a summer of never-ending day. The protracted silence and longueurs serve to highlight the slightest word or gesture from the protagonists, creating a brittle tension that lends plausibility to their overreactions when the junior partner gets some news from the mainland that he's afraid to pass on.
Along the way, the film does fall foul of plot logic in other ways that the characters' mental instability can't quite explain. Nevertheless, the two actors put in powerfully modulated performances and the soundtrack of mostly ambient sound and ethereal photography combine to a hypnotic effect.

7/10

Wednesday 9 November 2011

Skeletons (Nick Whitfield, 2010)

A quirky low-budget British comedy that's got a whole lot more going for it than that categorisation might threaten, Skeletons is an unassuming charmer of a film, with two exorcists of sorts trudging from house to house in the northern countryside like bickering insurance salesmen to purge clients' lives of psychic knots. Then they come up against a real hurdle with a family odder than their metier is.
It could be truly irksome if it played up the life-lesson sentiment any more or broadened the humour, and you can bet your bottom dollar a US remake would fail on both counts, but its very Britishness keeps both in check and it ends up rather sweet instead, even if it raises no more than the occasional smile or eyebrow.

6/10

Romper Stomper (Geoffrey Wright, 1992)

The film that gave Russell Crowe his first big break, Romper Stomper is a raw kitchen-sink precursor of American History X centring on a pack of Neo-Nazi skinheads in Melbourne, who pick the wrong target for their aimless rage when their local haunt falls into Vietnamese hands. Unlike in the American retread, there's little promise of redemption here: the pathetic lowlifes are too unanalytical to learn anything from their own suffering, let alone from that which they inflict on others. This is both virtuous by dint of being truthful and thoroughly depressing to the point of risking alienating a cinematic audience. The refusal to slap on gloss is admirable, but leaves little room for interpersonal drama when all the characters are so utterly devoid of saving graces. Still, some consolation is to be had in knowing it'll all end in tears.

5/10

Sunday 6 November 2011

Revanche (Götz Spielmann, 2008)

Modern Austrian cinema does not reflect well on the nation as a carefree place: there is a pervasive tendency for an existential malaise that outdoes even the excesses of Swedish directors, too often not tempered with hope or warmth. Revanche begins very much in this milieu, with a pimp's lackey dreaming of an escape to Spain with his Ukrainian prostitute girlfriend, and when the bank robbery that he ineptly attempts to give them the means to start a new life goes badly wrong it seems we're in it for the long haul, with no glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Suddenly though, and wholly unexpectedly given the tortured and ascetic character of the lead and the pared-down and hard-boiled nature of the plot and dialogue, a layer of emotional complexity is added and there is a glimmer after all. It feels oddly spiritual for coming so unforeseen.

6/10

Direktøren for det hele (Lars Von Trier, 2006)

With The Boss of it All, Von Trier tries his hand at making a comedy and almost spoils the fun by being so antsily self-conscious about it that he has to butt in several times to tell us not to take it seriously. There was just no need: the admittedly overused notion of a klutz of an actor hired by a cowardly IT company boss to play the part of the CEO in takeover talks with a hilariously truculent Icelander is still jolly enough to sustain interest, even with Von Trier doing his best to sabotage the flow with frenetic jump-cutting throughout, so clearly lacking confidence in how to judge comic timing. Contentwise, it only has the potential to be a slight addition to the idiosyncratic director's oeuvre, but would be a welcome diversion from his usual portentous melancholy and misanthropy nonetheless, if only its maker had any faith in letting it breathe.

5/10

Mr. Nobody (Jaco Van Dormael, 2009)

In a 2092 where the human race has conquered ageing, the last living mortal man recounts his life story to a reporter. He's an unreliable narrator, giving three alternative courses of events with different wives, branching out from butterfly wing-effects at critical junctures.
The deus ex machina is represented beguilingly as a falling leaf and the film is packed with similarly telling images. It rewards attentiveness on the part of the viewer and is exquisite to look at. It also plunders ideas and scenes, in no particular order, from 2001: A Space Odyssey,  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Truman Show, Sliding Doors, Rashomon, Little Big ManThe Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Fountain, Dark CityRequiem for a Dream and Slaughterhouse-Five, and this list is by no means exhaustive. It seems to admit defeat under the weight of filmic history by resorting to a salvage-by-collage technique and frequently falls prey to whimsy, and its protagonist, Nemo, is an emo even by name.
And yet it captivates too. Jared Leto may not be the most charismatic casting as Nemo - the more intense Jake Gyllenhaal would probably have been first choice - but he's no hammy Jim Carrey either. And Van Dormael can just about be forgiven in the final analysis for his looting, since all the splicing is executed so adeptly that some moments of real beauty are engendered. It has a poetic impact Michel Gondry has never achieved and Darren Aronofsky only managed with his first outings. Bizarrely, it has received almost no international distribution since its release.

7/10

Wednesday 2 November 2011

In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007)

In Crash, Paul Haggis had a go at tackling the pickle of racism and was awarded a Best Picture Oscar for it. With In the Valley of Elah he turns to the Iraq war, a topic less palatable for the Academy voters' consumption, and accordingly misses out on the prize. This is a shame, as Haggis should garner recognition for his consistency: the film is every bit as lunk-headedly earnest as Crash, pushing kneejerk buttons over misplaced patriotism and the dehumanisation of the combatants, but rarely saying anything illuminating about either aspect.
It doesn't help that it uses the plot framework of an investigative thriller as a crutch, with Tommy Lee Jones as the father of a missing soldier trying to establish what happened to his son, or that Charlize Theron has to be wedged in there as the one cop who'll help him. Another director might have thrown caution to the wind to hit the target head on and for once presented America's grubby wars as wrong in themselves rather than just because American boys come back mentally scarred, but Haggis is not that brave.
Jones is very good here, conveying denial, wounded pride and pain with some subtlety. It's a performance frustratingly wasted amidst the stodge.

5/10