Ginger & Rosa – Review

Rosa & Ginger

In perhaps the most excessive metaphor in cinema this year, the threat of nuclear holocaust has been used to represent the disintegration of a lifelong friendship between two teenage girls. While losing a close friend can seem like the end of the world at such a difficult age, it may be deemed over the top to stress it quite so much as Ginger & Rosa does.

Around the same time as the bombing of Hiroshima, the mothers of the titular teens bond as they go into simultaneous labours in a London hospital. Their girls naturally grow up the best of friends. Ginger (Elle Fanning, red-haired and just about English) is intelligent but angsty; Rosa (newcomer Alice Englert) is self-serving and over-confident. Together they blow off school to meet boys, attend anti-bomb protests and discuss religion and their place in the world. As Rosa develops faster as a young woman, Ginger develops more intellectually, encouraged by her lefty academic dad – the girls soon find themselves drifting far apart.

Sally Potter, the visually talented director of Orlando, has written a simple drama that struggles to fill its 90-minute running time. The first half of the film is pleasantly padded with Ginger and Rosa’s expeditions; kissing boys at bus stops, hitching lifts with dangerous strangers, trying out new fashions of the ’60s. But once the girls, particularly Ginger, become involved in the anti-nuclear movement the film slows down dramatically, and becomes a repetitive slog on its journey towards the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ginger’s panic and terror at the potential apocalypse, and fear of facing it without her increasingly distant friend, are not enough to hang half a film on. The subplot of the end of her parents’ marriage also resolves itself more-or-less halfway through – there’s a terrific short film in here somewhere, but it’s hardly feature material.

So while it’s finely made, Ginger & Rosa is anything but a satisfying film. A little into the second half a betrayal occurs so enormous that it is simply preposterous that these two “friends” would ever speak to one another again. No amount of brave faces put on by the characters can change how awkward and implausible the story becomes. Ginger’s increasing despondency at all aspects of her life and the world she lives in become almost too much to take; you don’t know if you want to hold her or give her a good shaking!

Peace be with you, but less so with her

Fanning gives an affecting performance, and is interestingly playing a character two or three years her senior, and believably so. Her natural sweetness makes the pain she suffers hard to bear, and she evokes the idealism of the era with wide-eyed wonder and tear-stained cheeks. Englert meanwhile captures the contradiction of a teenager who is simultaneously woman and child, wielding a newfound sexuality that is as confusing to everyone around her as it is to herself. As Ginger’s father, Alessandro Nivola (another American actor) does his best to humanise a decidedly despicable role, but it’s too much for him – he remains a self-righteous womaniser who only takes pride in his daughter when she says things he believes in. As distracting as her physics-defying cleavage is Christina Hendricks’s godawful attempt at an English accent. The Mad Men star is more than able to hold her own as Ginger’s beleaguered mother, but her strained attempts at capturing English vowel sounds take away from an otherwise fine performance. Elsewhere, Tim Spall and Oliver Platt are adorable as Ginger’s gay godfathers. Annette Bening also shows up.

Potter and her cinematographer Robbie Ryan (who shot last year’s Wuthering Heights) have captured a natural-looking recreation of early-’60s London, and a penchant for close-ups helps sell the performances of the actors even as the drama dwindles. The production design team deserve special praise for selling the era so well.

But despite all the craft that has gone into this film, there is no escaping the fact that there is not enough story to keep it buoyant, and what story there is is little new. Very little is resolved at the end, and a poem read by Fanning in voiceover is not enough to bring you out of the movie feeling you experienced anything more than a pretty, meandering dream of a fascinating time, slightly dumbed down.

2/5

(originally published at http://www.filmireland.net)

Frankenweenie – no dogs go to heaven

A boy and his undead dog

A few weeks back the classics of Universal horror were given a high-profile high-definition release, and the timing was curiously coincidental. The last time Universal brought out a massive repackaging of their classic horror collection, then on DVD, it was to coincide with the theatrical release of their ridiculous horror/adventure movie hodgepodge Van Helsing back in 2004. If one were to seek a current correlation, the Universal Monsters Blu-ray collection may have been timed to coincide with the improbable release of three children’s movies drawing on classic horror elements in barely a month; ParaNorman, Frankenweenie and Hotel Transylvania.

Of these three, ParaNorman is the only released by Universal, and is also the least directly influenced by the classics of the 1930s – it pays far greater homage to American and Italian zombie movies of the ’70s. Because of this, the timing of this release of the Universal classics does not appear to have any link to this triumvirate of pre-teen horror, but it is nice that children leaving the cinema after these films asking their parents about the monster movies of the past can have their questions readily answered. And of the three none has more references to be addressed than Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie.

A feature-length animated remake of a half-hour short film Burton made at Disney in the mid-’80s, Frankenweenie sees the director return to his secure footing in suburban gothic, and it is easily his strongest film since 2003’s Big Fish.

The film tells the tale of young Victor Frankenstein, a regular all-American kid with a knack for invention, who turns to super-science when his beloved pet dog Sparky is struck by a car. Using his homemade lab to channel his town’s freak lightning storms, he manages to revive the dead pooch, after a little stitching of course. Frankenstein’s cuddly monster quickly becomes the envy Victor’s classmates, who seek to produce some supernatural experiments of their own.

Shot in atmosphere-defining black and white, with pale, gaunt stop-motion figures, Frankenweenie is visually the perfect homage to those classic horror movies, despite its suburban school setting. The town the film is set in, New Holland, seems named solely for the purpose of excusing the windmill perched upon its tallest hill, which serves as a location for the film’s denouement just as it did in James Whale’s Frankenstein. The references become increasingly obscure and clever. Victor’s hunchbacked classmate Edgar is the obvious Igor stand-in, but his classmates all resemble characters and actors from classic horrors, while his science teacher, modelled on horror master Vincent Price, is voiced by Martin Landau, who in Burton’s magnum opus Ed Wood played the original Dracula, Bela Lugosi. Finer still, goth-girl-next-door Elsa Van Helsing (voiced by one-time Burton go-to girl Winona Ryder) refers both to the hero of Dracula as well as to Elsa Lanchester, who played the Bride in Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein – when Elsa’s female poodle receives a jolt from the electrified Sparky, she is left with the Bride’s trademark streaks in her poufy mane.

Martin Landau as Vincent Price as science teacher Mr. Rzykruski

Sweet and sometimes very funny, Frankenweenie is oddly at its weakest when focusing on Victor’s relationship with Sparky. Only so many limbs can fall off before the re-animated dog joke runs thin, while Victor’s creepy classmates and straight-laced parents steal the limelight. The film’s finest and funniest scene features a PTA meeting in which the eccentric, ghoulish science teacher is asked to account for his students’ increasingly odd behaviour, and he attempts to calm the parents by assuring them he only wants to fill their heads with knowledge – cracking their heads open and getting at their brains. The metaphor goes down poorly.

The stop motion, similar but less overtly gothic than that used in Burton’s troubled Corpse Bride, is largely pleasing to behold, and there are a handful of clever scene transitions that elevate this above standard children’s fare. Danny Elfman’s score however is less than memorable, and at one stage seems to awkwardly and unknowingly plagiarise his own Batman score.

Descending into too much mayhem in its final act, and hardly vigorous in pursuing conclusions to its subplots, Frankenweenie still hits all the right notes for a family-friendly comedy adventure. Due to its subject, its audience will be small, but many who see it will be inspired to learn more about Hollywood’s classics of horror, and there is a sense here that that is all Burton wanted. It’s a welcome return to his roots for Burton, a filmmaker who had for so long become lost in his own meandering fantasy. Just don’t expect it to last.

3/5

Ruby Sparks – Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl

Makes the central romance in the Twilight books look “healthy”

Your enjoyment of Ruby Sparks will come down entirely to whether you are someone who can switch their brain off, or someone who tends to over-think complicated ideas. Certainly no one involved in this bright romantic fantasy had their brains turned on, as if they had they might have realised the morally rotten core at the heart of an apparently charming little movie. The subtext of this film is frightening, but what’s truly terrifying is that it seems like no one who worked on the film is aware of it in the slightest.

Paul Dano plays Calvin, a young writer suffering a creative block, who a decade earlier had his only hit while still a teenager, with one of those books that “speaks” to people. Burdened with all of the emotional issues (a dead father, a remarried mother, a slowly becoming successful ex), Calvin can’t get started on his new book. He’s the kooky kind you find in movies – he uses a typewriter like an obnoxious hipster, lives off his one successful book and has a dog with gender identity problems. The dog is named Scotty, after F. Scott Fitzgerald; at one point in the film it shreds a copy of Catcher in the Rye. You get the idea.

Unable to meet a girl, Calvin’s psychiatrist recommends he try writing about his dream girl. He invents a girl with the sort of idiosyncrasies he finds attractive, imagines her being pretty but not overwhelmingly so, and then gives her the name of a bad drag queen act. Soon, thanks to his magic typewriter (probably?), Ruby Sparks (Zoe Kazan) is made flesh. While Calvin assumes he has gone insane, Ruby believes they’ve been in a relationship for some time and acts as if she’s always existed, unaware she is his creation. Soon Calvin and Ruby are happy together – she’s the sort of girl who likes zombie movies and jumps into pools unexpectedly; who could resist? But it’s not long before her underwritten life (she has no job or friends) and Calvin’s jealousy and fear of abandonment kick in, and he’s back at his typewriter literally changing her.

Oh for the days of Little Miss Sunshine when he’d keep his damn mouth shut

On the surface, Kazan, who also wrote the film, has scripted a somewhat clever takedown of the “manic pixie dream girl” phenomenon, highlighting the implausibility of male expectations in a similar manner to how Weird Science looked at the fantasy of the buxom bombshell back in the ’80s. But scratch away that surface and a far nastier film is revealed. After running out of ideas halfway through her script, Kazan has opted for a conclusion that is unsuitably creepy. And I don’t mean ‘threatening text message from your ex’ creepy, I mean ‘walking in on your mother in bed with a stranger and it turns out it’s you from the future’ creepy.

At first Calvin’s rewrites do little more than lobotomise Ruby, leaving her a quivering, weeping mess or a braindead giggling simpleton, but later things turn even more disturbing for the writer and his intolerable mind puppet. He becomes so possessive that his writing of Ruby begins to physically abuse her, before ultimately forcing her to perform (mild) sexual acts against her will. Worse still, the film rewards him for “learning” from his spate of domestic abuse with a happy ending. It is tonally completely unsuitable, and it reeks of desperation in storytelling and/or the writer being too clueless to understand her own work. Kazan’s only writing project prior to this was her dire, drab play We Live Here, an under-edited vanity project also about rich people’s problems that ran off-Broadway last year, so perhaps it was premature to expect her to write a feature film that didn’t raise this many eyebrows. But the very fact that Kazan’s real-life boyfriend Dano plays her inventor/tormentor adds an additional layer of ick to the proceedings, upgrading Hurricane Ruby from unsettling shit-storm to grotesque rape fantasy.

Kazan, while not much the writer, proves herself once again a strong screen presence, and captures Ruby’s various mood shifts well enough. Dano on the other hand weasels his way through the despicable role as best he can, but it’s not enough to rescue the character – where’s Daniel Plainview with a bowling pin when you need him? Annette Bening grates as Calvin’s hippie mum, while Antonio Banderas almost charms as her eccentric artist husband. Elliott Gould and Steve Coogan pop up briefly in roles they could do in their sleep, while Chris Messina steals what little of the film he can as Calvin’s jock-with-a-heart brother Harry, who also gets the best of Kazan’s few good lines.

Zoe Kazan act, but Zoe Kazan’t write

Returning to filmmaking for their first time since their 2006 Oscar-winning breakthrough Little Miss Sunshine, director duo Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris make their talents known here – Ruby Sparks is finely, brightly shot throughout and tidily cut with passable montages. People run excitedly to stirring music. It would all be quite lovely if it weren’t for that damn script.

And it all comes down to the script in the end. Telling us repeatedly that Calvin is a genius of a writer when all evidence points to the contrary (just as his faults are written into Ruby, Kazan’s are written into him), Kazan has unintentionally drawn a metaphor for her own script – just because she is famous does not make her a storyteller. Attempting to address similar issues to (500) Days of Summer, she has written a similarly faulted protagonist, but with none of the same charm (and indeed Paul Dano is no Joseph Gordon-Levitt). While those who can mentally gloss over its sordid subtext may enjoy a romcom with a twist, Ruby Sparks will remain a difficult film about an unlikeable, self-absorbed cur who gets to imagine his cake and eat it too.

2/5

(originally published at http://www.filmireland.net)

 

Taken 2 much time and energy

“You will look for me, you will find me, and you will kill me… no, wait, scratch that last one!”

The only thing that hits harder than Bryan Mills, Liam Neeson’s ex-CIA operative turned bodyguard and over-protective father, is the sheer disappointment that a film so similar to Taken could be its antithesis in terms of fun.

The 2008 film became a roaring success as Neeson tore through Paris desperately seeking his daughter, kidnapped by sex slave traders. Once it got going, Taken was a to-the-point slice of gritty action fun that kept the excitement going to its rather abrupt conclusion. It’s amazing to think that that film could be succeeded by such a humourless, dragging ordeal.

Taken 2 is, for the most part, a miserable experience – retracing the events of the first film (this time in Istanbul) with a plodding pace and incoherent action. The less-than-casual racism that fuelled the first film, but suited its topic and its time, is here flamboyant, reeking of Islamophobia. As Mills takes out every male with darker skin than him in sight, his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) jumps in fright at veiled women, and every time the camera sails over one of Istanbul’s magnificent mosques a threatening “BOOMPH” sound echoes on the soundtrack. It’s worse than any of the excesses of Bush-era anti-terrorism romp 24.

Of course, 24’s influence is all over this film. The relationship between Mills and Kim is borrowed almost word-for-word from Jack Bauer’s relationship with his daughter, also Kim. The fact that the main events of Taken 2 take place over the course of one afternoon owes hugely to that TV show’s real-time structure. But even 24 never let its basic character drama slow down the growing threat. Taken 2, by comparison, drags for a considerable fraction of the length of a whole episode of 24 before the “taking” of the title occurs. That first 30 minutes or so is spent redefining the bond between father and daughter and between Mills and ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) with dialogue that would make a Michael Bay movie blush. Mills teaches Kim to drive (just in time, she’ll need to be able to later). He flirts with his ex. He growls at Kim’s new boyfriend. For such basic soap opera drama, it’s simply horrifying that it drags on so long.

“Oh FFS, dad, not again!”

This time its Mills himself, with his ex-wife, who are taken, but not for very long. Using a phone that looks like it came in a Christmas cracker, he guides his terrified daughter to his rescue, before charging off to save her mother. There’s a bit of hand-to-hand combat, some gunplay and an almost thrilling car chase along the way, but it’s all for very little. Most hysterical is Mills ordering his daughter to detonate grenades so he can hear how far away from him she is. She throws one under a parked car in a secluded area, but camera angles don’t reveal how much medicine for sick people, or actual babies, are on the back seat. It’s preposterous, stupefying and very much the wrong kind of funny.

Neeson, who as a human being has proved himself over the years to be one of the most likeable of people, pleasantly surprised when he first took the role of Bryan Mills; as a middle-aged avenger he wielded handguns, blocked punches and wore a sweeping leather coat like a pro. Here, only four years later, it’s all gone terribly wrong. Perhaps due to age, or due to the manic film style of Luc Besson protégé Olivier Megaton (he of last year’s even ore stupid Colombiana), Mills’s heroics utterly fail to convince here. The action sequences are shot so shakily that it is often difficult to see where anyone is located within the scene, or make out what moves are being performed. The frantic cutting makes The Bourne Ultimatum look like Rope. In one of his final confrontations, Mills is nearly finished off by a sweaty, overweight Albanian in tracksuit pants. It’s hard to cheer for a hero who can take such a beating from a P.E. teacher.

“Stop editing so fast, I can’t see where I’m running!”

The film’s climax almost feels like something new, but by then it’s hard to care, and you’re more likely to be wondering what the next tune from the Drive soundtrack the film is going to lazily sample.

Taken 2 will of course make oceans of cash, if only off the energy of its forebear. But there’s nowhere more for this series to go, and one only hopes it will, like Bryan Mills, retire, to protect any remaining integrity of those involved in making it. In the long run, Taken 2 may even damage the brand so much that Taken itself will be forgotten – it’s not like Bryan Mills is a very memorable character, and he has perhaps the least iconic action hero name of any film to ever gross more than $100,000,000 at the box office.

Censored infuriatingly to garner a PG-13 rating, there’s no way to even contemplate recommending this film before a DVD/Blu-ray release reveals an uncut version. At the very least the action might appear believable in an extended cut, and, let’s be honest, what else are you watching Taken 2 for?

1/5

Liberal Arts – Review

I wish I could go back to college: Elizabeth Olsen and Josh Radnor

Kids, did I ever tell you about the time I realised John Radnor was more than just a TV actor?

The star of long-running sitcom How I Met Your Mother has rarely been seen in other productions in more than bit parts, and it was easy to assume his career could never go the distance of those of his co-stars, who have appeared in such crowd-pleasers as American Pie, The Avengers, The Muppets and the life of Neil Patrick Harris.

But the man who is almost inseparable in public perception from the ambitious and romantic Ted Mosby of HIMYM, has shown a similarly ambitious and romantic streak since he began moonlighting as a filmmaker. His writer/director debut happythankyoumoreplease opened in 2010 to little fanfare, but Radnor’s attempt to expand from TV acting, while not extending his range as an actor beyond the shadow of Ted Mosby, was admirable. With his second feature, Liberal Arts, Radnor has made a more personal and borderline-adult film, and comparisons to a young Woody Allen, while somewhat premature, are not entirely unfounded.

Radnor (who also wrote, directed and co-produced) stars as Jesse, a 35-year-old admissions officer at a New York college, facing a crisis of faith in where his life is headed. Recently dumped and finding himself no more grown-up than he was when he graduated 13 years earlier, Jesse is in need of change that will not come. When his favourite college professor (a delightfully grumpy Richard Jenkins), who has few friends of his own, summons Jesse to his retirement do, Jesse is only too happy to get out of the city and revisit his small town alma mater.

Jesse feels both a prodigal son and strangely old and alien, and matters get confused when he finds himself drawn to plucky student Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen), who is 16 years his junior. Their attraction to one another is evident from the get-go, but Jesse is more frightened of the emerging relationship than Zibby. Separated by distance, the pair continue a would-be courtship via snail mail (thankfully the film’s only decent into hipster nonsense), while both realising they have a lot of growing up to do.

Jesse dumbs down with some teen vampire lit

Hardly groundbreaking, Radnor’s film still contains a gentle honesty and surprising amount of wit that elevates it above more standard indie fare. One sequence after Zibby sends Jesse a mix-tape of classical music sees Radnor walking the streets of New York to a personal soundtrack of Mozart and Vivaldi – it’s little new, but the juxtaposition creates a pleasing sensation. Radnor is short on new ideas, but he does lack inspiration, and is a champion recycler.

Jesse may be a close relative of Ted Mosby, but Radnor proves his trademark character can carry a feature-length film. Elizabeth Olsen, this year’s breakthrough actress, plays the innocent optimist exquisitely – she’s neither infantile nor manic pixie. It is evident both why Jesse would be drawn to her and why she is of little interest to boys her own age, a testament to her acting chops and Radnor’s writing. Richard Jenkins plays Richard Jenkins, which is never a bad thing, while Allison Janney has plenty of fun as a fierce, man-eating, queen-bitch English professor. The film is briefly and improbably stolen by Zac Efron, in an extended cameo as a spaced-out student of life, who takes on the role of a badly hatted spirit guide to Jesse. His appearances feature some of the film’s finest dialogue, and help energise some more sombre scenes.

While ostensibly a belated-coming-of-age drama, there’s no denying Liberal Arts is very funny. Awkwardly hanging out with college students nearly half his age, Jesse is asked when he graduated, and dismisses the question with a shrugged “The ’90s”. With deflating enthusiasm, the young women respond “We were born in the ’90s!” One of the film’s finest scenes sees Jesse calculate the repercussions of his and Zibby’s age difference. As well as exposing some curious truths about age (and gender) gaps, the fact Jesse requires a calculator to perform basic mathematics highlights the day-to-day impracticality of his liberal arts education.

It may take the best bits of Manhattan and Annie Hall and produce a lesser beast, but Liberal Arts is a finely made and often touching film about nostalgia for more hopeful days. It looks like there may be a great career ahead of Radnor, even after he finally meets the mother of those children.

3/5

(originally published at http://www.filmireland.net)

Looper – Past and Future Intense

Joseph Gordon-Love-It

We are long overdue a great time travel adventure. Sure, we’ve had dramas such as Midnight in Paris and mind-bending thrillers such as Primer, but there hasn’t been a proper edge-of-your-seat time travel movie since 12 Monkeys, nor a fun one since the Back to the Future trilogy.

Thank goodness for Looper. Clever without being baffling, fun without being silly, Rian Johnson’s film balances its own mythology with a pulp thriller story that feels simultaneously classical and entirely new. Johnson, the writer/director of cult high school noir Brick and the seen-by-few (and liked by fewer) The Brothers Bloom, is a film fan’s filmmaker, a man who has imbibed the Hollywood genre greats, and who now pours those ideas through the blender of his brain and creates some fascinating, if hitherto not entirely successful chimaeras. Looper’s influences are evident and many, and surprisingly none of them are films about time travel.

Starting off 30 years from now in Kansas City, Looper is set in an America wracked with colossal rates of unemployment and homelessness, but where the well-to-do dress like guest stars on Mad Men. A comment on the trajectory of modern America, sure, but that’s where the social commentary ends. Another 30 years down the road, in 2072, time travel technology has been developed, but only for use by the wealthiest and most duplicitous of people. Rather than risk a Back to the Future-style paradox, the global mob of 2072 uses time travel for the sole purpose of disposing of corpses – easily tracked in the future, easily gotten rid of in the past.

In 2042, mob goons called loopers are assigned the task of gunning down newly materialised mob targets the moment they appear from 2072. It’s good work if you can get it, but it comes at a high price. Looper Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is happy with his lot; splashing his cash on cars, drugs and a prostitute with a heart of gold. But things get thrown for a loop for him (sorry) when his latest target is revealed to be himself, 30-years-older, and now looking like Bruce Willis. Willis knocks his young self out and goes on the run, set on a mission to alter the future, while Gordon-Levitt must track down his older, wilier self while evading his own bosses at looper HQ, who can instantly take out the elusive Willis by killing Gordon-Levitt, thereby erasing Willis from the timeline.

Stop the clock

Ostensibly a chase movie through a neo noir future, Looper keeps its story energised by keeping the time travel repercussions as simple as possible. As long as Willis is still there, he knows Gordon-Levitt will grow up to be him. As Gordon-Levitt acquires fresh cuts and injuries, Willis develops brand new, decades-old scars.

Looper is as smart in its dialogue as it is in its ideas. Gordon-Levitt and Willis spar over their shared memories in the film’s most cleverly crafted scene. Looper boss Abe (a delightfully sneering Jeff Daniels) chastises his young employees for dressing in suits and ties, an out-dated fashion now brought back by the Mod-like gangsters – fashion has a cyclical nature, underscoring the film’s central theme. Language, too, has come full circle; the word “blunderbuss” has been uprooted from the history books to refer to the loopers’ heavy-duty shotguns.

Johnson’s team have crafted a terrific thriller here, with crisp, bright imagery and coherent editing. The score hums and clicks with electronic, industrial sounds overlaying traditional instruments. Gordon-Levitt, belatedly (by a decade) the in-demand actor of the hour, is tough yet endearing in the lead role, and the fine makeup that makes him a believable antecedent to Bruce Willis (most notably wearing Willis’s curling nose) never distracts from his performance. Willis plays the weary, broken-hearted avenger he’s based the last decade of his career on with expected fluency. Only Johnson regular Noah Segan disappoints, in the underdeveloped role of token villain Kid Blue.

The film’s seemingly boundless energy comes to a crashing halt in the third act as Willis heads off on his mission and Gordon-Levitt hides out at the rural home of Emily Blunt’s suspicious Sara. The rhythm of the film goes all to hell for nearly 20 minutes, and the temptation to, like the characters in the movie, repeatedly glimpse at your watch is hard to resist. But this is all forgiven in a shocking, brilliantly conceived final quarter hour, that is as exciting as it is philosophical.

Face-Off: Willis and Gordon-Levitt feel the Heat

Aside from that late lull, the film’s most troubling aspect is its narration, lazily used to explain its mythology and technology, and it’s left unclear from where or when (or on what timeline) Gordon-Levitt is narrating. But Looper succeeds in making its world easily accessible, and more impressively manages to make its two anti-heroes – one a junkie out to kill his future self, the other so hell-bent on vengeance he will stop at nothing to do what he insists is right – likeable and worthy of our attention.

With echoes to films as eclectic as Witness and Akira and with a finale drawing on the magnificent climax of the supposedly inimitable Russian classic Come and See, Looper is a minor triumph of genre-bending entertainment.

4/5

(originally published at http://www.filmireland.net)

Barbara – The Lives of Someone or Other

Barbara bushed

Sold as a spiritual successor to The Lives of Others, that masterful 2006 dissection of East Germany under the tyranny of the Stasi which assumedly everyone has seen by now, Christian Petzold’s Barbara takes a similarly personal look at this dark period in recent German history, but with none of the scale that has made Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film a modern classic.

Nina Hoss, looking intense and wearied, plays Barbara, a top East Berlin doctor banished to a provincial hospital for offending the powers-that-be with her desires to defect to the West. Adapting poorly to country life, Barbara finds herself under the command of chief paediatrician André (Ronald Zehrfeld), a handsome, bearlike and good-natured man who despite this is charged with keeping the Stasi informed as to Barbara’s comings and goings.

An excellent doctor with a strong bedside manner unexpected of someone so closed-off and bitter, Barbara finds herself torn between her duty to her patients and her desire to escape East Germany to freedom and her West German lover. But her relationship with André and the ever-watchful Stasi complicate matters.

Shot in tidy, steady frames, in natural colours that evoke the beautifully bland countryside of 1980s Germany, Barbara is a finely constructed film that rarely wows with its imagery. The historical details, from costumes and cars to the actions of the intrusive Stasi, add to the film’s honesty and its feeling of oppression, but they are not exactly eye candy. “You can’t be happy here,” she tells her lover when he offers to stay in East Germany with her, but her statement has all the punch as if she had emphasised the universal “you”, meaning everyone, anyone. It’s easy to see why.

The script is well-written for the most part, with little superfluous dialogue and two broadly developed lead characters, but the story is stupefyingly predictable. If you haven’t worked out exactly where it’s going 30 minutes from the conclusion, it’s possible you have never seen a film before. There are other difficulties too; like so many dramas in recent years the film relies on the use of previously established works of art to underscore its own story. Huckleberry Finn emphasises the dream of escape. Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp reveals both how good a doctor André is, but also his emotional depth. In the end, a short story by Ivan Turgenev serves as the catalyst for the film’s final moments. It’s all a little too easy.

But Barbara is never less than watchable, and Hoss manages to make a difficult character deeply relatable. Zehrfeld and she have great on-screen chemistry, and it is the film’s greatest draw. The supporting cast are similarly strong. Jasna Fritzi Bauer manages to not over-do it as a temperamental young patient determined to stay in hospital and not return to her labour camp. Rainer Bock shifts believably from glaring, evil Stasi officer to weak, almost pitiable man.

A finely told drama, Barbara never manages to be more than that, and as a commentary on life in the former East Germany it drowns in the shadow of The Lives of Others. If it is to be remembered, it will likely be for the utterly unsuitable choice of closing credits song, a soulful ballad by ’70s American R&B group Chic. Whether you enjoy the film or not, you will leave the cinema scratching your head at who let the filmmakers pick that number.

3/5

(originally published at http://www.filmireland.net)

Anna Karenina – Review

All the world’s a stage

Not another costume drama; I hear you say. And you couldn’t be criticised for saying so. It’s not that there have been an excessive number of period films in the past few years, or that they have not been of a high quality, but that the surge in well-produced TV drama has seen an explosion on our screens of ball gowns, steam engines and lives ruined by affairs. The costume drama has come down with a terrible case of the Downtons.

But Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina is something special. Not since Tom Jones has a costume drama been as ambitious, indeed audacious, stylistically as this film is. Leo Tolstoy’s tale of ball gowns, steam engines and lives ruined by affairs has been injected with a burst of visual flair by the Atonement auteur, staging much of the action within a 19^th Century Russian theatre, where characters move from scene to scene as if in an epic, shifting play.

Within this theatrical world, the stage itself plays host to bedchambers and offices, while the house is home to work floors, train stations and ballrooms. The poorer denizens of Moscow are briefly found living in the rafters amongst squalor and sandbags. But like Larry Olivier’s Henry V the doors are soon flung open to the outside world and Wright’s camera becomes free to roam in the icy wilds of Russia.

Keira Knightley as Anna Karenina

It’s a remarkable production of a book that has been filmed many times before, and while the text gives no real reason for such a theatre-themed rendition, Wright’s excessive cinematic flair not only justifies the stylistic choice but makes it the film’s biggest draw. Returning to the period drama after the critically mauled Oscar-slut The Soloist and the misjudged teen assassin oddity Hanna, Wright has produced his most visually tantalising film yet. There are plenty of examples of his trademark extended tracking shots, which are here used to sensational effect, with scenery and costumes changing on screen within the theatre to transition between scenes. A sweeping ball room sequence builds to a fevered pace to express burning desires and frantic jealousy, while in the film’s greatest set piece a thrilling horse race is remarkably enclosed within the theatre, with the animals thundering across the stage.

Wright regular Keira Knightley stars as the tragically smitten Anna Karenina, who although married to the good but closed-off Alexei Karenin (Jude Law), finds herself unable to resist the excessively charming Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). When the star-crossed lovers meet, sparks all-too-literally fly and a very public scandal is not far off.

Diamonds are your eyes’ best friends

Knightley gives a strong performance in the title role, although she permanently looks too young to play the princess (the passage of time is unfortunately poorly indicated). But her face, captured in repeated close-ups, is as beautiful as the gowns and diamonds that coat her person, and Wright tells his story through her amplified expressions, swamped in light.

Taylor-Johnson as Count Vronsky

As Vronsky, Taylor-Johnson is a weak link, not quite capturing the character’s newfound romantic nature as Anna draws him out of his womanising. Jude Law is surprisingly restrained as the jilted, befuddled Karenin, and is all the better for it – this is one of his finest performances in years. But the film’s most inspired performance is that of Domhnall Gleeson, sporting a luxuriant ginger beard as Konstantin Levin, an idealist aristocrat hopelessly in love with a spoiled young debutante. Gleeson evokes a remarkable sadness coupled with an honest pride that he is doing the best he can with his life, and his scenes are in every case a joy to watch.

The screenplay, by the venerable Tom Stoppard, finds ample romance and tragedy and even a healthy dose of comedy in Tolstoy’s text, and the film never gives way to excessive narration to tell its story. While the pacing runs out of steam for much of the final act, the resolution is well composed and no scene feels out of place.

Whether or not audiences take to the film’s theatrical flair remains to be seen, but Wright’s ambition is not to be scoffed at. With production and costume design more glowing than the Oscar statuettes they will win, Anna Karenina is a visual feast from the moment the curtain goes up.

4/5

(originally published at http://www.filmireland.net)

Total Recall – An unmemorable remake

Colin Farrell as Doug ‘Dougie’ Quaid, aka Carl Hauser (aka Dougie Hauser?)

It’s hard to stifle a giggle as the lights go down for Total Recall when the name of the film’s production studio, Original Film, comes up on screen. Coming 22 years after the Paul Verhoeven-directed version, it’s hard to find much “original” about this Len Wiseman production, at least on the surface. It doesn’t help the filmmakers’ arguments that they insist the film is more closely based on the source material, Philip K. Dick’s short story ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’; but really swathes of Total Recall 2012’s content comes from the 1990 film.

Wiseman, that packer of action who brought us the highly entertaining Live Free Or Die Hard (aka Die Hard 4.0) and the remarkably successful Underworld series, has here steered into cinemas an action movie that builds on its predecessor only in terms of gloss, not in terms of depth or content.

Colin Farrell, on autopilot, stars as Doug Quaid, a worker at a robot factory in a futuristic Britain, which has become the world’s sole superpower after a chemical holocaust made most of the planet uninhabitable. This ever-so-slightly despotic Britain rules over a colony, called the Colony, in what was once Australia, and its supposedly oppressed workforce are imported every day via a colossal elevator, the Fall, which connects the territories via the Earth’s core.

But Quaid is not who he thinks he is. Bored with his dull life and his outrageously beautiful wife (how?!), he attempts to have false memories of a more exciting reality inserted in his brain through a system called Rekall, only to cause a major system crash when it turns out he already has those memories, for real, and everything else has been inserted. Learning he is actually Carl Hauser, a military big wig turned pro-Colony freedom fighter, he goes on the run from the cops (both human and robot) and his wife, Lori (Kate Beckinsale), who is also an imposter and the top agent assigned to keep him under lock and key.

Soon Quaid/Hauser teams up with his real love interest Melina (Jessica Biel), and following clues left by himself before the memory implant embarks on a quest to save the Colony from all-out enslavement by the Big Brotherish Britain.

No-road rage: Kate Beckinsale in her magnetic hover car

Production-wise Total Recall has more money than it knows what to do with. Inspired by, amongst others, Blade Runner and Minority Report, it adequately shows a fusion of cultures (Asian and South American) in the Colony, and the soaring metropolis that has built up around London in the United Federation of Britain. And yet, there’s nothing particularly dystopic about this world. Its class system seems unfair, but not much worse than what we have at present, and the horror that the villains wish to unleash is never actually seen. Unlike the drab and lifeless world of Verhoeven’s Total Recall, this doesn’t look at all like the worst of possible futures.

Yet there are plenty of fine touches in the production; the gravity reversing elevator of the Fall feels fresh to sci-fi, while electric web guns, magnetic hover cars and a device that shoots hundreds of tiny cameras show signs of creativity and inspiration lacking in much of the script. Quaid finds himself tracked not by a bug in his brain as in the original film, but by a mobile phone built into his hand – a technology that feels not impossibly far off now.

Where Wiseman excels is in the lengthy action scenes, which include some barnstorming set pieces, all of which slightly overstay their welcome but never exhaust. Upon being surrounded by elite cops, Quaid proceeds to take them out in a frenetic, sweeping digitally altered single take, shortly before being confronted by his vicious, flexible fake wife, who proceeds to teach him a move or two. Beckinsale is given the majority of the best stunts to do, and performs them with plenty of panache – her knees-first slides are some of the most memorable moments in the film. A major central action piece, involving a series of elevators that can travel sideways as well as upwards, feels a little too much like a Mario Bros. game, with the characters leaping from platform to platform and avoiding getting crushed in corridors. Indeed, the entire film has quite a computer gamey feel to it. The epilepsy-inducing scrolling lens flares don’t help.

Jessica Biel and Colin Farrell in some sort of threatening situation or other

The screenplay by Kurt Wimmer (Equilibrium, Salt) and Mark Bomback (Die Hard 4) is as lacking in urgency as it is in one liners (comparatively, the 1990 film was written by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, who wrote Alien). Worse still it fails to build in any way on the original story, which given 22 years has passed is almost inexcusable. In the interim audiences have been exposed to The Matrix, eXistenZ and Inception, so questions of reality and identity are no longer new, or even pressing. The one scene in the original Total Recall that truly questioned Quaid’s reality (he is confronted by a scientist who claims he is dreaming) is reproduced here in an exhaustingly extended form, where Quaid is confronted by a close friend rather than an expert. The conclusion to the scene is slightly different, but not enough to justify a Total Recall post-Matrix.

Even the always brilliant Bryan Cranston as the villain Cohaagen can’t elevate this film beyond a passing entertainment. Bill Nighy and John Cho show up in brief cameos, but they could be anyone. While Beckinsale looks as though she is always having plenty of fun (her husband directing may have given her free rein), Farrell only really pushes his limits during the action sequences, and slumps when he’s not on the run. A highlight of the film sees him come face to face with an interactive recording of his former self – the two Farrells are played by his very different guises, the clean-shaven, slick-haired, baby-faced Farrell of In Bruges and Phone Booth, and the goateed, dangerous Farrell of Daredevil and Intermission. It’s a cute touch. Meanwhile, Jessica Biel, usually a limited actress, is deadwood in a criminally underwritten role.

For all its gloss and bang, this is a fun but forgettable sci-fi action movie, that crucially fails to justify itself as a remake at this time. There’s plenty of talent evident, let’s just hope it can be used more substantially in future.

2/5

Samsara – Review

Sweeping across the temples of Myanmar

In case you haven’t noticed, we live in a beautiful, enormous world, and for the last 110 years we have had at our disposal the technology to capture its beauty in motion. The makers of Samsara are people who understand that, in its simplest form, cinema is a visual medium that can reveal to viewers the image of anything that exists. So they have some lofty ambitions to begin with, that’s for sure.

Ron Fricke is responsible for the two most important works of “the world as it is” cinema of the last 30 years, as cinematographer on Koyaanisqatsi and director of Baraka, to which Samsara is a spiritual successor. Coming a full 20 years after Baraka, Samsara follows the same concept of juxtaposing imagery of the old, the new, and the timeless, scored by various genres of music, from tribal to drum & bass. It’s hard to describe to the uninitiated, but imagine touring the entire world in 90 minutes, stopping occasionally on your hurricane voyage to inspect the faces of strangers from the furthest corners of the Earth. Samsara is an adventure where you are an omnipotent explorer.

Shot in 25 countries over four years entirely on 70mm film stock, there are too many highlights to list here. Amongst them are throngs of Muslims circling the Grand Mosque at Mecca filmed at high-speed, the camera sailing over endless sand dunes, Tibetan monks slowly creating a vastly detailed, floor-sized artwork out of coloured grains of sand, and a heavily choreographed prison dance number.

Samsara’s seemingly endless array of images and ideas never ceases to boggle the mind; however, the film shows a curious bias towards imagery from Asia, with South America and Australia unnoticed and Europe represented by its cathedrals alone. In this way, Fricke and co. seem to undermine their own message, or at least the sensation that message is meant to evoke.

The film’s most memorable (and, by extension, troubling) sequence is a piece of performance art by a man dressed as a typical Western businessman who, sitting at his desk, enters into a tribalistic frenzy, painting himself with ink, paste and items of stationary as if in an aboriginal ritual. What it says about mankind’s rise from “savagery” to “civilisation” is clear, but its staginess clashes frustratingly with the “world as it is” feel of the film as a whole.

But with that one curious exception, the juxtaposition of images continues to impress. The film takes an extended trip through the Uncanny Valley, showing frighteningly lifelike android heads and heavily detailed synthetic sex dolls. Images of obscure African tribesmen are echoed superbly in the extremes of Japan’s youth subcultures. Shanghai’s slums are seen with tacky, towering skyscrapers in the distance.

The old and the new: ancient customs meet modern firepower

What disappoints most about Samsara is how little it builds upon Baraka and how the world has changed in the 20 years since. There are glimpses of technological advancement – the aforementioned robot tech, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, a block of trash made entirely of discarded circuit boards – but many of the speeding cityscapes and all of the historic and natural landmarks could have been shot back in the early ‘90s. The most dramatic shift in day-to-day human life, the ease of access to information through technology, is represented in only one shot – bored New Yorkers glued to their mobile phones (and one to an iPad) as they ride exercise bikes at a gym. The image speaks volumes, but it is one of a small few that can answer the question “why now?” with regards this film.

Where Samsara really calls back to Baraka is in extending the latter’s most infamous sequence, which saw hordes of tiny chicks pouring down a cascading series of conveyer belts to begin a terrifying life of claustrophobic captivity. Here the food process is seen in greater, more distressing detail, as adult chickens are hoovered back up a conveyer belt towards a fate on a hook, cows are seen living their lives on what is little more than an enormous roulette wheel, and pig meat is stripped and sawn into pieces for distribution. Its message is important, but with these added grotesqueries it says little more than Baraka said with its hapless, tragic chicks.

Samsara is at times too heavy-handed with its messages, at others too obscure. But while it is overall more mournful in its tone than Baraka was, it is no less mesmerising. Sit back and enjoy as it makes gentle love to your eyeballs. Everything else in your day is going to look far less magical by comparison.

3/5

(originally published at http://www.filmireland.net)