Month: January 2019

Welcome to Marwen

05/01/19

Robert Zemeckis is a veteran director who refuses to rest on his laurels. Over the years, he’s been responsible for some major hits – Back to the Future, Forest Gump, Who Killed Roger Rabbit?  – and, of course,  there’ve been a few misfires –  Beowulf for example? And The Polar Express is a film that tends to divide viewers.

Welcome to Marwen is a ‘so weird it must be true’ story, based on the life of artist, Mark Hogancamp, though it should be noted that, like a lot of ‘true’ stories, the scriptwriters don’t hesitate to jettison those facts that don’t fit with their vision of the tale.

Hogancamp’s backstory is a harrowing one. A talented artist with a passion for World War 2 imagery and an obsession with wearing women’s shoes, he drunkenly confessed this to some strangers he met in a bar, who then ambushed him and beat him mercilessly, putting him into a coma for nine days. When he finally came back to his senses, he found that he had lost all memory of what happened to him before the night of the attack – and he could no longer remember how to draw.

When we first encounter Hogancamp (Steve Carell), he is engaged in a long-established photography project that is an attempt both to rekindle his artistic abilities and to come to terms with the awful hate crime that has robbed him of his former life. In his garden, he has constructed Marwen, a miniature Belgian town, occupied by Nazis and populated by dolls. It’s here that his avatar, Captain Hogie, a fearless maverick (who also has a liking for high heels) is running an energetic resistance movement, backed up by five female freedom fighters – all based on women who are important in the artist’s life,

It must be said that the women in question seem to take his somewhat creepy depictions of them with unbelievably good grace, but I guess they knew him before he was attacked, and are prepared to cut him some slack.

Of course, this being a Robert Zemeckis film, Hogie’s adventures are recreated through state-of-the-art motion-capture and there’s no denying that the ensuing scenes are an extraordinary technological achievement. But the main problem is that the film can’t seem to decide what it wants to be. For the most part, it’s about a man going through a slow healing process and gradually gaining the necessary strength to confront his assailants in court, but the real life scenes are regularly interspersed with more of those mo-cap sequences and I can’t help feeling there’s rather too many of them and that – until the very end – they all seem to play out in exactly the same way, without really advancing the story.

There’s a tendency too to punch home the film’s messages with a heavier hand than seems strictly necessary. Déja (Diane Kruger)’s significance, for example, is immediately apparent, but spelled out laboriously for the hard of thinking,

Carrell, it must be said,  is terrific in the lead role and Merritt Wever is appealing as the manager of the local toy shop who quietly carries a torch for him.

Welcome to Marwen is never less than interesting – but, despite all that cutting-edge brilliance, there’s something here that doesn’t quite add up to a satisfying night at the cinema.

3.8 stars

Philip Caveney 

 

 

Free Solo
Alex Honnold making a rope-less ascent of the famous Seperate Reality, a difficult over hanging hand rack that is perched 500ft. above the Valley floor. This route has only been done rope-less three other times.

04/01/19

There’s something endearing about people who have a mission in life: an obsession so integral to their being that it defies all rationale. There are not many – not even many rock climbers – who would look at the sheer cliff face of Yosemite’s El Capitan and think, ‘Yeah, I’d like to scramble up that. On my own. Without a rope. Without anything, except a good pair of shoes and a light dusting of climbing chalk on my hands.’

But Alex Honnold is as single-minded as they come, and free-solo-ing means the world to him. He knows the dangers. Ironically, within the parameters of what is undoubtedly a hugely risky business, he’s actually pretty risk-averse. He plans carefully. He practises. He doesn’t let the fact that there’s a film crew following him influence his decision about when to climb. But still… There’s no denying that his death is only ever one unlucky slip away, and the tension generated by this movie is almost unbearable.

It’s a fascinating story, actually, despite the narrow focus. Honnold is an engaging character, good-humoured and self-aware. An extra layer of human interest is added when Alex hooks up with Sanni McCandless, and finds himself negotiating a serious relationship for the first time, testing the boundaries between his compulsion and his love.

The crew are an active part of this documentary, present on film, serving almost as a Greek chorus: commenting on the action and offering their opinions. They’re all climbers; they’d need to be – and so they understand the enormity of the undertaking. Their responses inform ours, and we spend a lot of time sharing their awe and disbelief.

The landscapes are stunning, and we are left in no doubt as to the scale of this feat. I will never understand what motivates someone to do something like this, but there’s no denying how impressive Alex’s success is. It looks like something beyond human capability. And yet there he is, just doing it.

4 stars

Susan Singfield

 

 

Life Itself

02/01/19

There’s a lovely little movie trapped inside Life Itself. An arch, playful, beautifully acted and intriguingly populated film, with a gently emotive storyline. It’s all there: ripe and ready. Unfortunately, it’s covered in an unwelcome layer of fridge-magnet cod-philosophy, with a side helping of pomposity thrown in. Oh dear.

Things start well. We meet Will (Oscar Isaac) as he stumbles drunkenly into a coffee shop, clearly having hit hard times. His therapist (Annette Bening) encourages him to talk about his relationship with his wife, Abby (Olivia Wilde), and their back-story is revealed in a series of flashbacks. The idea of the unreliable narrator is introduced early on, and reinforced by Abby’s student thesis on the subject. Life, concludes Abby, is the ultimate unreliable narrator, more random and unpredictable than anyone cares to acknowledge. Her friends like the idea, but she fails her course, because the essay strays too far from literary criticism.

Still, as the film goes on to show: she’s right. Time and again, writer-director Dan Fogelman pulls the rug from under our feet, throwing us swerve balls and catching us unawares. The action moves, almost arbitrarily,  from Will and Abby’s New York to Javier González (Sergio Peris-Mencheta)’s Spain – where all the dialogue, naturally, is in Spanish – and back again to New York, where we meet Will and Abby’s daughter, Dylan (Olivia Cooke). All this I like. The characters are captivating, and the seemingly unrelated strands are pulled together expertly. Segmenting movies into ‘chapters’ seems to be a bit of a recent phenomenon, and it works well here. Antonio Banderas is wonderfully understated as the emotionally needy Mr Saccione, and Laia Costa, as Javier’s wife, Isabel, really lights up the screen.

So why doesn’t it work? Because that premise, of life being the ultimate unreliable narrator, is overworked. It’s not left to be played out; we’re not trusted to understand without an actual lecture, delivered in the final chapter by Elena (Lorenza Izzo), Dylan’s teenage daughter, who, we discover, has been narrating throughout. There’s not enough substance to the idea to merit this much talk; it’s a simple – dare I say banal? – concept, enough to carry a story but not to bear such scrutiny. It takes itself too seriously, accords itself too much weight. And that’s a real shame.

There’s a filmed Q and A at the end of our screening, but it reinforces rather than alleviates our concerns. The interviewer, Jenny Falconer, talks of weeping copiously as she watched, but we both feel curiously unmoved. It’s clearly a movie that wants to tap into our emotions, but the narration distances us from events, and makes that level of engagement difficult. I don’t mind this – the film is at its best when it’s witty and stylised, which it is, a lot of the time – but it feels muddled, as if the ‘message’ is getting in the way of all the good stuff that’s on offer here.

3.3 stars

Susan Singfield

 

The Favourite
Emma Stone in the film THE FAVOURITE. Photo by Yorgos Lanthimos. © 2018 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation All Rights Reserved

01/01/19

Since 2015’s The Lobster, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has established a reputation for quirky and enigmatic films that approach their subject matters from completely unexpected directions. Take The Favourite for instance. This sumptuously dressed costume drama offers us a story that seems as mad as a box of frogs – but it only takes a cursory Google search to establish that most of what happens here cleaves fairly close to established historical truth – proof if ever it were needed that fact can be a lot stranger than fiction. That said, Lanthimos finds ways of amping up the oddness to the max.

We are in the early 18th century, in the court of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), a troubled monarch plagued by recurring bouts of gout, who wanders about the place like a sulky teenager. She is totally under the control of the manipulative Lady Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), who – as well as being Anne’s secret lover – also uses her to further her strong political ambitions. Into the court comes Sarah’s cousin, Abigail (Emma Stone), whose family have fallen on hard times and who is now looking for gainful employment. Sarah grudgingly takes her in as a servant, but Abigail soon tires of a life of drudgery, and decides instead to insinuate herself into the Queen’s good graces, something she proves to be rather adept at.  It isn’t long before a powerful rivalry is ignited between Sarah and Abigail and it’s clear that both women are prepared to do whatever it takes to gain the upper hand.

Lanthimos manages to convey an atmosphere of cold suspicion beautifully and his regular use of a fish eye lens amplifies the claustrophobic ambiance of this troubled court. The film is built around three superb performances from the female leads, with Colman already nominated for a best actress Oscar, and Stone and Weisz for best supporting actress. Indeed, the three of them dominate the film to such a degree that few of the male characters get much of a look in, though I do enjoy Nicholas Hoult’s sardonic turn as Harley, leader of the Tories, who forms a sneaky alliance with Abigail in order to oust his political opponents from power. Those of a prudish persuasion should note that the film is rumbustious enough to fully earn its 15 certificate – some of the scenes here are a bit saucy, to say the very least.

With a running time of just under two hours, The Favourite positively gallops along, making me laugh out loud and, occasionally, gasp in surprise. It would be very hard to think of a more enjoyable way to begin a new year’s viewing.

4.7 stars

Philip Caveney

 

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch
Black Mirror Season 5

30/12/18

We haven’t reviewed earlier episodes of Charlie Brooker’s excellent Black Mirror series, mainly because we don’t really do TV shows – but a couple of things feel different this time around. For one thing, with so many feature films making their debuts on Netflix these days, it seems more appropriate. And for another, Bandersnatch is something of a game-changer. This is an interactive story, heavily influenced by the ‘make your own adventure’ books of the 1980s and one in which viewers can participate. As the tale unfolds, we are faced with a series of simple decisions: should a character choose Sugar Puffs or Frosties, for example? Clicking on one suggestion or another will influence what consequently happens on the screen. It starts small but the choices become ever more dramatic as the story scampers along.

It’s 1984 and young Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead) is an ambitious video game designer, who, after the tragic death of his mother, is living alone with his secretive father, Peter (Craig Parkinson). Stefan, when not spending time with his analyst, Dr Haynes (Alice Lowe), is developing a brand new game called Bandersnatch, which he takes along to major video game publisher, Tuckersoft, headed by ponytailed entrepreneur, Mohan Thakur (Asim Chaudrey). At the initial meeting, Stefan is introduced to one of his video game designer idols, Colin Ritman (Will Poulter), and is subsequently astonished to discover that the team like his ideas and want to offer him the opportunity to make it a reality.

But will he accept the offer? Well, that’s kind of up to you…

Bandersnatch is an astonishingly meta idea. As our choices send the action into deeper and ever more labyrinthine rabbit holes, it occurs to me that I am watching something that I am, however tangentially, able to influence. Rather than just being a passive observer, I am involved in the creation of a fiction. It gets even more interesting when characters I am trying to influence begin to disobey me. This is a genuinely exciting idea and it soon becomes apparent that the episode may require at least one repeat viewing to see if different choices will radically affect the outcome.

I’m not suggesting that Bandersnatch is one hundred percent successful. There’s a tendency to come up against buffers which repeatedly send you back to watch the same sequences over again – and I can’t help feeling that one particular outcome may happen in every version of the story – but Brooker deserves plaudits for coming up with this – and Netflix too, for having the chutzpah to finance it.

Where this concept may lead audiences in the future opens up fields for speculation, but to me it feels like an interesting first step. Watch this space.

4.7 stars

Philip Caveney