Friday 30 December 2011

The King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson, 1972)

The second of Rafelson's collaborations with Jack Nicholson suffered from the expectations raised by the previous year's seminal Five Easy Pieces. To be sure, it doesn't deliver as much resonance or depth as its predecessor's melange of emotional stiflement and laconic humour, but radiates a skewed froideur of its own nevertheless, with the weathered boardwalks and derelict music halls of a wintry Atlantic City as much the star as Nicholson's melancholic talk radio host and Bruce Dern as his pipe-dreaming speculator brother. The dialogue retains a perceptive crispness that some of its more flaked-out surreal interludes have rather lost with the passage of time.

6/10

Vatel (Roland Joffé, 2000)

The ludicrous excesses of the court of Louis XIV, the sun King, continue to exercise a powerful hold on the popular imagination more than four centuries on, not least in cinema. It's not hard to see why: the mind-bogglingly lavish feasts and entertainments make for sumptuous eye candy on screen, and then there's the social comment angle ready-made too, with a claustrophobic circle of decadent toadies and back-stabbers, preening and conducting intrigues behind locked doors while the hoi polloi starve. Given all the ingredients for a complete package, all that a filmmaker has to do with them is avoid being seduced by the artifice themselves and fall prey to cliche.
The figure of François Vatel, the maître d’of the most prominent Bourbon prince, is a captivating one too. A perfectionist to a nigh-crippling degree, he was to commit suicide upon the failure of his ultimate royal banquet. Being the focal point of Joffé's English-language film, he gets to be played by an actual Frenchman amongst a host of English costume drama regulars, this rather predictably being Gérard Depardieu (Daniel Auteuil being the other default option). He does this as dependably as ever, despite being hindered with having the only non-RP accent in the house, portraying a commoner walking a tightrope between servile deference and barbed indignation. Depardieu is not the problem, and neither is the pageantry, which is spectacular. The rub lies in the other figures, from Tim Roth's carbon copy of his villain from Rob Roy, Uma Thurman uncertainly halfway between her character and Glenn Close's from Dangerous Liaisons, and a horde of tedious fops twittering sub-Ridicule bons mots. This is Vatel in a nutshell: it would be perfectly charming in large parts, were it not for the irritation caused by its constant derivativeness.

5/10

Thursday 29 December 2011

Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010)

Regardless of whether a reimagining of the legend was called for, an increasingly imaginatively bankrupt Ridley Scott gives us one anyway. To begin with, the transposition of the figure as Robin Longstride, a commoner returning from the Crusades to deliver a fallen knight's sword to his father in Nottingham, the father then pragmatically handing his estate to Robin's keep so that it may stay in his daughter-in-law Marion's hands, at least shows signs of trying to come at the worn-out tale from a fresh angle, even if scene after scene never rises above the pedestrian.
Then it gets worse, much worse, as director and scriptwriter alike lose all sight of all the trademark elements of the myth, and eventually we're headed for a climactic battle against French invaders in wooden versions of WWII landing craft, which is equal parts Henry V without the stirring rhetoric and Hastings with the English winning the day instead. If this came from a historically pick'n'mix American action director it would still not be forgivable, but at least understandable. Coming from Scott, it beggars belief. It's not even as if the blockbuster treatment requires the wedging in of a mass melee. The merry men are consequently hopelessly lost in the fray amongst the extras, as are all the other distinguishing characteristics in the irredeemable mess of a plot. All that remains in the last five minutes is the delivery of the upsetting message that this was just an origin story after all, and that means the impending threat of a sequel.

4/10

Dreamcatcher (Lawrence Kasdan, 2003)

The litany of Stephen King screen adaptations has been as lucrative as prone to resulting in indigestible dross, and it would be foolish to expect anything artful when the King source isn't one of his all too rare excursions outside the sci-fi/horror field. For every landmark The Shining he turns out a dozen disposable variations on The Children of the Corn, and Dreamcatcher is very much in the latter category, even crapping on the kudos he acquired with Stand by Me by taking the template of four stock childhood mates (the ginger one, the speccy one etc.), giving them a secret to keep and revisiting them twenty years later. To chuck aliens that come out of your arse at them. Actual dreamcatchers don't come into it at all: the film's too busy trying to force graveyard laughs out of unimaginative CGI Grand Guignol assaults by the extraterrestrial turdworms on a succession of actors who should have known better, Damian Lewis in particular a sinner just by having so much more to squander than the likes of, say, Timothy Olyphant.
Far more baffling and disheartening, though, is the estimable William Goldman's involvement as screenplay writer. If the bills need to be paid this badly, wouldn't you do it incognito out of sheer shame?

3/10

Wednesday 28 December 2011

The Whistleblower (Larysa Kondracki, 2010)

This is an earnest account of real-life events in '90s Bosnia, where a female employee of an American private security contractor given a policing mandate over the war-torn land discovers that her colleagues are complicit in  trafficking young women for prostitution. She subsequently finds her attempts to expose them are slighted and blocked by local gangsters, the police and her employers alike.
It's inevitable that a relatively non-histrionic tract for such a worthy cause will earn some critical dispensation, and there's a reasonable verisimilitude to the events, even if Rachel Weisz, while an able enough actress, is somewhat too Famous Fivey to convince fully in the role of the determined crusader. On the downside, it's too flat to sustain interest though tension or stand-out dialogue, and while the Balkans are without a doubt rife with institutionalised corruption and scummy gangsters, neither aspect rises above the complexity of the Eastern European villain stereotype at any point.
So it might as well have been a documentary, though that would have meant even fewer members of the public discovering that the real company, DynCorp, on whose thorough rottenness the story is based, is in fact still doing very nicely for itself in other troublespots around the world.

5/10

Tuesday 27 December 2011

Tron: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010)

Disney revisits another groundbreaking moment in its past with a wholly unnecessary sequel to 1982's conceptually throwaway but stylistically seminal computer-graphic trial run, Tron. There is a plot of sorts, with the son of Jeff Bridges going on a rescue mission into the virtual world where his father got trapped at some point since the first film, but really it's just a conveyor belt for the transmission of vast amounts of Disney's money into FX which may be far more polished than those of its predecessor, yet singularly fail to stand out of today's crowd simply because of adding nothing in terms of ideas.
Beyond this shortcoming, Tron: Legacy also seems to entertain notions of having a message, mistaking the technical innovation of the first film for thematic prescience, and consequently ends up losing sight of the fact that it only ever worked on a sinister kiddie quest level, and certainly not as full-blooded kicks. The sum total is as efficiently soporific as Daft Punk's incessant muted soundtrack.

3/10

Sunday 25 December 2011

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Oliver Stone, 2010)

Oliver Stone unwisely returns to the scene of the crime twenty years later with the iconically unscrupulous trader Gordon Gekko seemingly a new man upon his release from prison, albeit still spouting aphorisms on the nature of greed. Shia LaBeouf takes the Charlie Sheen role this time round as a junior stock broker with delusions of ethics taken in by the meretricious patter of his prospective father-in-law.
It's difficult to say what Stone thinks he's doing with this reconstituted piece, bar coming back to cash in one more time on the instant of his success as Gekko ends up doing when he inevitably shows his true colours. There's an attempt to justify the continuation by having a half-baked go at the subprime market crisis, but it's severely undermined first and foremost by Stone's worship of power in all its guises. It's just a bit of a handicap when you're meant to be attacking the ruthlessness of speculative capitalism to devote so much time to making the splurging and cock-waving lifestyles of its proponents look desirable. Not that it helps when the forces of 'good' are represented by the couple of a badly miscast and simpering Carey Mulligan as Gekko's vaguely activist daughter and the charisma vacuum that is LaBeouf, a walking piece of hissy bumfluff who could probably ruin any film single-handed even without the help of a script scribbled on bog roll and pitifully posturing dialogue alternating with David Byrne's whining coffee-table soundtrack.

3/10

Thursday 22 December 2011

The American (Anton Corbijn, 2010)

If you've seen Jim Jarmusch's somnambulent The Limits of Control from the previous year, you'll know half the formula, with a displaced and superficially dispassionate hitman moving from place to place exchanging as few words as possible with those around him to avoid emotional involvement as much as visibility. The other half of the formula is the cold-blooded professional wanting to hang up his boots at last, upon finding the solitude and detachment too much to bear after all.
Thankfully, The American is more than the sum of those parts. This owes less to former star photographer-turned-director Corbijn's visual sense, not that having every shot so elegantly framed and lit is unwelcome by any means, than to mature sense in throttling back the pace from the frenetic norm for the hunted hunter genre, which is mirrored closely by George Clooney's performance. He's always been more than just an OTT Cary Grant impersonation and understands that less is more when working with such off-the-shelf ingredients. To be sure, without much novelty, the end result can be no timeless classic, but it's handsomely executed all the same.

6/10

The Reader (Stephen Daldry, 2008)

In a self-fulfilling prophecy after her ostensibly satirical remark in the TV series Extras, regarding needing that Holocaust film under her belt to bag an Oscar, Kate Winslet did indeed walk away with one from this. If the alarmingly mechanical correlation between the genre role and the award has to be explained in some way, it probably boils down to an overvaluation of pretty actresses doing ugly characters. Her former concentration camp guard living in denial of personal culpability and illiteracy to boot is too teflon-coated to like, and further encumbered with some truly cringeworthy verbal tics, but Winslet at least does a decent job in conveying enough conflict within her denial to allow for some understanding to grow.
It's just that the rest of it has so little to say, about either guilt or responsibility. Ralph Fiennes, as a lawyer in the near-present, hasn't much to do besides mulling over his teenage affair with the reclusive older woman years after she has been exposed and sentenced to life imprisonment for her crimes. A Fiennes left running on empty churns out not much more than clipped hand-wringing. And in turn David Kross, as his teenage self, only gets the staples of any adolescent infatuation drama to work with, and so it's hard to say if there's any more range under his hood. Ultimately, though being preciously assembled, The Reader runs aground on the same shoals of aimlessness as its cast.

5/10

Monday 19 December 2011

Brüno (Larry Charles, 2009)

In probably his last throw of the dice at punking the dimmer end of the American public, Sacha Baron Cohen ups the stakes from his Ali G and Borat outings by presenting a character who's bound to rub his targets up the wrong way from the off. Brüno, his 19-year-old preening and screeching Austrian queen has none of the matey bonhomie of the former or wide-eyed enthusiasm of the latter, being outright abrasive enough at one point to bait a black TV audience with his purchase of a black baby in Africa and then show off his collection of worryingly paedophilia-tinted family album snaps to them. Besides, the conservatives he zeroes in on may have been taught to hold their tongue as regards their racism, but having aggressive homosexuality thrust in their faces pushes them too far. Baron Cohen exploits this to full effect, of course.
There remains a doubt over much of it whether he's being braver than ever, exposing what needs to be exposed, or just shooting fish in a barrel for the sake of extending his comic life, with a lot more obviously staged scenes than before. While the disappointing fact that the basic plot and many of the scenes are just rehashes from Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan does point towards the latter interpretation, neither can the other readings be denied.
It's funny to note here, though, that despite setting its stall out so blatantly as a vehicle for homophobe-baiting, not only does Brüno get a lot of mileage out of ridiculing the screaming end of the gay spectrum, but also scores more points when laying bare wholly other glaring hypocrisies and excesses. If Baron Cohen does go back to the medium for a fourth crack, he might want to consider taking these moments on board and go for something more focused and understated.

6/10

Sunday 18 December 2011

Punishment Park (Peter Watkins, 1971)

A faux-documentary that freezes a moment in history like a fly suspended in amber, Punishment Park could only be a product of Vietnam-and-civil-rights-protest era America. It posits the creation of correctional facilities in the desert where political offenders of assorted ilks are sent on a brutal hike towards the hope of a pardon. This is all purportedly filmed by European documentary crews, and intercuts the sham trials of the accused with their hopeless trek and the growing blood thirst of the law enforcement officers on their trail.
For all the accusations it predictably met with of being a political assault by European hippies on the American right, it actually presents a surprisingly plausible set of characters on both sides of the divide, the prisoners as frequently reduced to frothing away and sloganeering as their accusers. Furthermore, despite being unmistakably a child of its time, it's not anachronistic at all: it's chilling to realise how little has actually changed for the better. It remains relevant.

7/10

The Way Back (Peter Weir, 2010)

Covering pretty much the same ground as the German As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me, thematically and geographically, Weir's fuller-budget story of POWs sent to a Siberian labour camp making their escape on foot across thousands of hostile miles has the obligatory big names but thankfully avoids the additional histrionics that usually come with the Hollywood version. In fact, the German film, while more credibly based on a real figure, suffered a lot from disbelieving the strength of its own premise and ended up daubing on an archvillain, improbable coincidences and a spurious love interest to boot.
By having a whole band of escapees rely on each other, this one bolsters itself in feasibility and thereby gives itself the room to develop more human interest through their interrelationships, which thankfully remain as unsentimentalised as the vast landscapes, stunning though they are. It's still not on an emotive or visceral par with Weir's best work, such as his last, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, but respectable enough, and ironically so when you consider that a piece of pure fiction has on this occasion trumped one of historical fact.

6/10

Anuvahood (Adam Deacon, 2011)

Ho hum, it's a low-budget British Ali-G derivative spoof of gritty street culture films, most obviously Kidulthood or Bullet Boy. This already does not bode well, and then you see that Paul Kaye and Richard Blackwood have cameos, which is a twin kiss of death. The only thing that might stop you using the DVD for target practice at once is bumbling director Deacon making a better fist it as an actor, investing his utter tool of a wannabe gangsta with at least a smidgeon of likability. It's not much to cling on to, though.

3/10

Snarveien (Severin Eskeland, 2009)

A couple driving along the backroads across the Norwegian-Swedish border in order to avoid excessive scrutiny of their boozy cargo are forced to divert onto an even smaller road, where, as we know from time-honoured convention, only bad things will happen. More specifically, attack by murderous hick nutjobs, since the leads are (a) a happy couple and (b) to be punished for sneaking away the means to chemical debauchery, and Scandinavian morality in horror films follows closely along American lines in these aspects. Not that Scandinavian horror has a wholly bad track record, even when recycling U.S. products this shamelessly, sometimes managing to add refreshing local flavours to the formula.
Detour, however, does not, adhering to the blueprint so depressingly closely that it even induces no winces, since you can always plot every start and development ten minutes ahead.

3/10

Sunday 11 December 2011

Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston, 2011)

The latest Marvel adaptation sees the Star Wars FX supremo Joe Johnston take on the task of making the stable's most politically suspect and superannuated hero a viable product to be milked for screen and merchandising bucks, whilst having to juggle with the need to lay down the groundwork for next year's superhero combo behemoth The Avengers. This may sound too painful to behold, but Johnston has at least realised the utter ludicrousness of the character and so we get no loftier ambitions than that of a humour-laced rollercoaster, with an earnest simpleton in a laughable costume at first used just as a wartime propaganda poster boy until proving his gumption by saving the world from cartoon Nazis, first and foremost Hugo Weaving determined to outham his own estimable previous hammings. It's strictly for kids despite the satirical winks, but thankfully unlikely to make them walk out of the cinema advocating U.S. intervention in foreign countries, probably by virtue of being so inoffensively forgettable.

4/10

Saturday 3 December 2011

X-Men: First Class (Matthew Vaughn, 2011)

The fifth instalment in the X-Men franchise rewinds the action back to 1962 and the environment of the Cuban missile crisis. This brings benefits and drawbacks: it's fun to piece together the seeds of later character developments and how their actions fit in with officially recorded history, and it does not require an anorak's knowledge of the comic series to manage either aspect. On the other hand, with most of the heroes now teens, there's always the risk of going all Glee with the banter and homilies.
In respect to the latter, Vaughn was a reassuring choice of director, with his previous in handling juvenile action leads without the customary cutesiness, i.e. Kick-Ass, and duly the cheese is mostly kept to a minimum. The adult casting is also as strong as you might expect from the series, with Michael Fassbender's Magneto a more complex character than it's reasonable to expect of a popcorn product. Naturally, subservience to the franchise is still inescapable, and the continuity dots with the other parts have to be joined up as best managed, but it breezes along surprisingly lightly for all that burden.

5/10