Thursday 31 October 2013

The Place Beyond the Pines (Derek Cianfrance, 2013)

This is a triptych of sorts, with the sins of the fathers spilling over into later chapters. It begins with Ryan Gosling as a stunt motorbike rider, naturally preternaturally gifted like his getaway driver from Drive, who discovers he has an infant son in one of his touring-stop towns and then goes off the rails in a bid to provide for him. The story then moves on to Bradley Cooper as a cop who brings him down in questionable circumstances. The whole is a blend of understated dialogue and touting the proposition that there is a universal lesson to be learnt from the repercussions of isolated mistakes that echo for generations. If this sounds dismissive, it's for overambitious aspirations towards soothsaying. Nevertheless, it is emotionally complex in a way that few films with Hollywood A-list actors even attempt and does manage to tug on a few heartstrings in the process.

6/10

Wednesday 30 October 2013

Berlin 36 (Kaspar Heidelbach, 2009)

In the run-up to the 1936 Olympics, the Nazis were in a quandary: they had to demonstrate their society to be at least superficially tolerant to avoid an American boycott of the games, and yet of course were loath to have any Jewish representation. In this context, the story of Gretel Bergmann, the Jew who was Germany's best high-jumper at the time, should provide a fresh angle on the worn-out subject of the persecution of the time. The true story even includes a man raised as a woman as one of her competitors: there is material in abundance here for the taking.
Sadly, most of it goes to waste. Karoline Herfurth, as Bergmann, projects one-key sullenness just as the performance of her rival with the terrible secret (rather undermined by having such a blatantly male actor in the role) is little more than scared eye-flitting all the way through. The atmosphere at the training camp, where most of the film takes place, is also irritatingly reminiscent of a bad American high school film, complete with a duo of girl bullies. The criticisms that the film received for taking liberties with the facts are then fairly irrelevant in the light of its failure to do anything dramatically useful with the changes.

4/10

Irvine Welsh's Ecstasy (Rob Heydon, 2011)

Shamelessly riding on the coattails of the iconic Trainspotting, even to the point of ripping off trademarks such as slapping character names freeze-framed on the screen as they appear and having a man scrabble around in a toilet bowl for egested drugs, this is also has to manage with lesser casting and flatter photography than its predecessor's. That said, the script does its best to stretch out one of Welsh's more generic short stories, that of an ageing club drug dealer trying to get out of the game, and leaven it with humour and romantic elements. It is by no means the abysmal failure that some critics would have you believe when considered on its own merits, all-importantly capturing the rave mindstate almost as effectively as Human Traffic did, even if it is then rather over-reliant on filling screentime with this. But the shadow cast by its towering forebear is basically impossible to escape from.

5/10

Friday 25 October 2013

Intouchables (Olivier Nakache & Eric Toledano, 2011)

A film on an odd-couple template that sets its stall out as being based on a true story, Untouchable nevertheless relies heavily on suspension of disbelief as a millionaire quadriplegic indulgently takes a black inner-city hoodie as his personal carer, regardless of his total lack of training or credentials. But I suppose otherwise we wouldn't get the rest of the formula, with the unlikely pair naturally warming to each other as they learn what's on the other side of the social divide. Disbelief duly suspended, it's a perfectly charming piece nevertheless, with the duo going through various escapades in which they challenge each other's preconceptions and giggle together at orthodoxy, which is something that any viewer can probably imagine identifying with, and thereby the foundation for the film's somewhat phenomenal success.

6/10

World War Z (Marc Forster, 2013)

Presumably the writers decided that the world created by 28 Days Later, with its sprinting, instantly turning zombies was 'worth exploring', so World War Z is basically a whistlestop tour around the globe with pauses for CGI mass carnage. The hero, Brad Pitt with his doleful Jesus face on, is reluctantly pressed into it, of course, having his cute kids to worry about, and even after decades of celluloid devoted to the pressing problem of armies of the undead, little progress seems to have been made in adding plausibility to the premise, albeit it that is now only called a super-virus and they don't go around hankering after brains. Apparently you can also fly in a day from South Korea to Israel in an antiquated cargo plane without stopping, and this sums up the overall level of pointlessness quite neatly.

4/10

Saturday 19 October 2013

Przypadek (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1981)

Blind Chance was banned by the Polish authorities in the last days of state communism, probably as much for its mild sexual content as for its anti-totalitarian views. When considering the peaks of Kieslowski's output, the ban is not actually much of a blow: we've been in the world of the butterfly effect since to better effect, even in the outright rip-off Sliding Doors, which steals this film's conceit that the main character either succeeding or failing to catch a train would change the whole of their subsequent life, and is at once more mediocre in intellectual content and yet better in coherence. The problem here is that while Blind Chance is bursting with philosophical ideas about religion, predestiny and freedom, their collation is such a muddle that characters merge into each other and any finesse in why its three parallel universes diverge so drastically from each other is quite lost. It's not the great director's most lucid hour.

5/10

The Last Stand (Kim Jee-Woon, 2013)

Arnie creaks out of his armchair for one last action outing, as the title probably disingenuously promises, and in time-honoured fashion the rest of the cast sportingly ignore the mismatch between his accent which actually seems to have got thicker as if he no longer had the energy to half-try and his character's name as a small-town sheriff who takes it on himself to stop a speeding fugitive crossing over to Mexico, plus his army of goons. Diverging from the High Noon set-up, the filmmaker seems to have decided that these days the big guy needs help for 'plausibility' so he gets a posse of forgettable deputies too, and then unfortunately makes all the dialogue utterly forgettable as well. The action is workmanlike as these things go, but it's hardly a great swansong for the Wrinklynator.

4/10

Tower Block (James Nunn & Ronnie Thompson, 2012)

The notion of the high-rise block as a dystopian environment has become something of a meme of late, not just within science fiction, and Tower Block gamely tries to convince that its scenario is altogether feasible in the English suburban wasteland as an anonymous sniper starts picking off the residents of one block for an unknown reason. The characters are the usual mix of archetypes, with no particular priority given to any of them, which at least makes guessing who'll go next halfway unpredictable, and that may be the best you can expect of a model of low-budget thriller which scores low on concept originality, though reasonably well on suspense execution.

4/10

Sunday 13 October 2013

About Time (Richard Curtis, 2013)

Richard Curtis directs his third film with an identikit style to his trademark screenplays: the characters are all again well-to-do and terribly English, shuttling between nice Notting Hill restaurants and lovely country houses with nothing in between and nary an actual concern for anything as grubby as having to work, since there are relationships to be worked out and social embarrassment quandaries to be hurdled.
But having a pop at Curtis for lacking social realism is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, and about as pointful. The true test of his films is whether they raise a laugh and if there's emotional content that gets through the sugar-coating. In both respects, About Time is a fair success. The story, with a young man finding he has the ability to visit any stage of his past life, may be lifted pretty directly from The Time Traveller's Wife, and the inclusion of Rachel McAdams as the love interest once more is hopefully an admission of the theft, but it does tweak the formula in a fairly interesting way and manages to inject moments of pathos into the overall comic tone without trampling on either aspect. The dependable presence of everyone's favourite uncle Bill Nighy as the traveller's father provides insurance for this juggling act.
Of course, the causality mechanics are riddled with inconsistencies, and it goes on too long just to deliver a soppy homily, but there is nevertheless a good deal of jollity along the way too.

6/10

Thursday 10 October 2013

Monsieur Lazhar (Philippe Falardeau, 2011)

An Algerian asylum seeker in Montreal, following the death of his wife, takes up as job as a schoolteacher for a class whose teacher has recently hanged herself. These are not the stock ingredients of uplifting cinema, but the story meanders slowly and sensitively as Lazhar and the children alike try to get used to each other and come to terms with their respective losses. Also importantly, the children are not sentimentalised, but allowed fully rounded personalities, backed by mature performances from the principal ones.
This was Canada's entry for the 2012 Foreign Language Oscar: one can't help feeling an extra layer of schmaltz would have got it past the finishing post first.

7/10

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (Tommy Wirkola, 2013)

The impressively stupid title promises nothing of value and one of the film's only virtues is coming good on that promise. Hansel and Gretel are kung-fu fighting witch slayers in a medieval Europe of indeterminate geography, realised with a TV-movie level of attention to period detail. They dress in bad-ass black leather and have giant arrow machine guns a la Hugh Jackman in the equally shoddy teen market-aimed Van Helsing. Jeremy Renner still looks like a potato, no matter how many women directors will throw at him, and Gemma Arteton is as wooden as ever. And there's not even anything novel to the realisation of the screeching witches.

3/10

Sunday 6 October 2013

The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd, 2011)

It was inevitable that casting Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher would infuse the erstwhile Prime Minister with too much of the milk of human kindness, as would seeing her in early dementia, having conversations with her dead husband. But then this director is not ideologically driven to dance on Thatcher's grave, obviously wanting to present a portrait of ageing instead, and the combination of Streep's subtle performance and a series of evocative flashbacks to phases of her personal and political life works well in this regard, albeit that the nitty-gritty detail of her political beliefs is somewhat glossed over in the process. A male director might well have focused more on the big events of her tenure to cover this, but then also missed out on the basic truth of the character, namely that being a steam-rollering ideologue is not inconsistent with being a visionary of sorts too, nor that it is possible to care deeply for a few and simultaneously be empathically quite out of touch with a multitude.

6/10

Las Acacias (Pablo Giorgelli, 2011)

A grouchy truck driver reluctantly takes a mother and baby with him as he drives from Paraguay to Buenos Aires, and this plot summary can hardly be expanded further, with little happening and the two protagonists hardly even talking to each other for the first half of the journey. It's a breath of fresh air in a world obsessed by the the need to generate fake drama when real life contains quite enough just as long as you know where to look. Of course they end up bonding, as that is the one dramatic element that requires resolution, but it's quite unforced and beautifully underplayed.

7/10

The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)

Anderson has vigorously denied that this is the story of the founder of Scientology, probably because no-one wants Tom Cruise taking a contract out on them, and it's true that there are enough divergences from L.Ron Hubbard's life to cover the director's back. Nevertheless it's hard to avoid the parallels, particularly when Philip Seymour Hoffman introduces himself as a master of a host of disciplines, ranging from writer to nuclear physicist.
An explicit biopic would in fact have made for a more interesting film: what we get instead is two superlative actors, Joaquin Phoenix's alcoholic simpleton in the pocket of Hoffman's guru, bouncing off each other over the years of their acquaintance. Phoenix throws all his method tricks into the mix, all tics, mumbling and unpredictable explosions of violence while Hoffman smirks and bullies those who disbelieve in his demented creed. But there is no discernible reason for the preacher to take the troubled disciple under his wing, having no money, talent or wit to exploit, and the only purpose the character seems to serve is to show what a control freak the leader is. This, then is a seductively handsome farrago that constantly hints at substance without actually delivering any. Exactly like the master, in fact.

5/10

Byzantium (Neil Jordan, 2012)

Neil Jordan goes back to vampires almost 20 years after Interview with the Vampire. The pair of undead this time are a mother and daughter on the English seaside, not allowed to do anything as distasteful as the carnage committed by their male counterparts and having no powers to speak of beyond an uncanny ability to mope. It's basically a fusion of Twilight and Let the Right One In, and adds nothing to an already saturated genre. The characters are neither interesting or scary, and surely at least one of the two was required.

4/10