Film

Captain America: Civil War

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19/05/16

I’ve been going through a severe bout of spandex withdrawal recently, so I approached this film with extreme caution, despite having heard several favourable reports. The Marvel universe is becoming an out-of-control behemoth, which seems obliged to draw in more and more comic book characters as it trundles along, until there are so many costumed characters onscreen, it starts to overpower the story lines.

Having said that, Captain America: Civil War starts promisingly, roping in some surprisingly serious ideas that for once, do not seem aimed purely at its teenage fan boy audience. In Nigeria, to thwart an attempt by some bad guys to steal a dangerous chemical agent, Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) and three of the other Avengers get a little carried away with the general kick-assery and in a scene that put me in mind of Team America: World Police, a whole bunch of innocent civilians are killed in the crossfire.

The United Nations decides to issue an edict that the Avengers are not to act off their own bat any more but only if and when granted permission to go into action. Half of the team, headed by Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Junior) think this is a reasonable idea and elect to sign the necessary forms – but the other half, headed by Captain America, refuse to commit to it. And then, Bucky Barnes /The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) is roused from his slumbers to undertake a mission on behalf of his Soviet puppet masters and the Captain finds himself torn between helping his old friend or hunting him down…

Up to this point, it’s all nicely done, but then, inevitably, the opposing sides in the United Nations squabble square up for a battle, enlisting extra help from other Marvel characters and the story buckles under the weight of servicing the antics of so many costumed characters – Ant Man, Hawkeye, Black Panther, Black Widow, War Machine, Vision… even Spider-Man (Tom Holland) is brought back into the proceedings as an eager-to-please teenage recruit (a single fun idea in the midst of the mayhem, though it’s nowhere near enough to rescue the film from what’s coming.) The resulting airport-based punch-up seems to go on for ever in that cartoonish 12A way that Marvel have perfected over the years and any hope of coherence goes straight out of the nearest window. Of course its all skilfully done, but it’s somehow distressing to witness so much expertise (and dare I mention, so many millions of dollars) wasted on what amounts to a souped-up brawl.

I appreciate that I’m not in the target audience for films like this, but honestly, Marvel need to understand that less is more. This feels like a great big, bloated exercise in extreme tedium. An accompanying trailer for X-Men Apocalypse appeared to offer another indigestible helping of the same sort of pudding.

Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.

2.5 stars

Philip Caveney

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

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18/05/16

War and comedy can make uncomfortable bedfellows; it’s not very often that filmmakers get the mix right, but that’s hardly surprising when your potential laughs are inevitably punctuated by regular doses of death and devastation. Whiskey  Tango Foxtrot is co-written by former news reporter Kim Baker, based on her book The Taliban Shuffle and essentially, it’s used here as a vehicle for the comedy talents of Tina Fey. Though she has a likeable persona, this is a somewhat hit and miss affair, mostly falling short of real humour and failing to imbue the proceedings with any hint of real peril.

When we first meet Kim, she’s forging a safe but humdrum career as a copy editor at a TV news station in New York. The escalating tensions in Afghanistan, however, create opportunities for ‘the unmarried and childless’ to head out to the war zone and ‘raise their profiles.’ Despite being in a long term relationship, Baker accepts the offer and the next thing she knows, she’s based in Kabul (or as the news teams refer to it, the Ka-bubble) trying to make waves as a news presenter. Her main competition comes from the reckless and highly photogenic Tanya Vanderpoel (Margot Robbie) the only other woman reporter on the scene and someone who has flung herself headlong into the hedonistic lifestyle that reporters follow when they’re not out shooting footage.

Baker’s long-distance relationship soon goes belly-up, but she finds some consolation in the arms of veteran Scottish photographer, Iain McKelpie (Martin Freeman) and meanwhile she’s also come to the attention of Ali Massoud Sadiq (Alfred Molina), a powerful local politician with an eye for Western females. For the first year or so,  Kim does fine, but by the third year audiences back home are tiring of news from the war zone. Only the most dangerous and hair-rising assignments are going to keep her on the screens back in America… but how far is she prepared to go to ensure that happens?

It’s not a terrible film, but neither is it powerful enough or focused enough to hold the attention for very long. More damningly, I don’t feel I really learned anything new about Afghanistan, because everything on the screen was shown from the perspective of a privileged white American, and somehow that didn’t feel like enough. One of these days, Fey is going to find a role that’s worthy of her undoubted talents but this doesn’t really feel like the one to do it for her. This isn’t so much M.A.S.H, as lukewarm spuds.

Maybe the acrostic in the title – WTF – should have acted as a warning.

3.6 stars

Philip Caveney

Our Kind of Traitor

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17/05/16

The recent success of the BBC’s The Night Manager has put the work of John Le Carré back into the public eye, but Our Kind of Traitor (terrible title) isn’t likely to enjoy the same levels of success, despite the presence of Ewan McGregor in the lead role.It’s not an awful film, by any stretch of the imagination, but there’s a plodding, workmanlike feel to Susanna White’s direction which prevents it from ever really taking flight. And then there’s the plot… oh dear.

McGregor plays Perry Makepeace, a university lecturer, who we first meet on holiday in Morrocco with his barrister partner, Gail Perkins (Naomi Harris). Mind you, they’re not having a lot of fun as they’ve gone there to try and get over Perry’s recent fling with one of his students. One night, on his own in the hotel bar, Perry encounters Dima (Stellan Skarsgard) and recklessly accepts an invitation to go clubbing with him and his pals. Dima, it turns out, is a high-ranking member of the Russian mafia, a money launderer, who is about to sign over millions of dollars of ill-gotten gains to a fellow gangster, ‘The Prince’, who is planning to open a bank in the UK. (Well, he’s a mafioso, he’s surely allowed some hobbies?) Dima is painfully aware that the last person who signed over money to this charmer ended up dead, along with all his family – so he enlists Perry to take a flash drive back to London for him and asks him to it over to MI6. Perry being the thoughtful sort, doesn’t even bother mentioning any of this to Gail. (No wonder their relationship is in trouble!) The first she knows about it is when they’re detained at passport control.

Perry promptly comes to the attention of Hector (Damien Lewis) a spy who (like most Le Carré characters) has his own personal agenda and wants to get even with other MI6 operatives who have done him down in the past. He’s keen to enlist Dima’s help to expose those MPs who have been dealing with the Russians on the quiet – but there’s a problem. His employers are reluctant to sanction such a move and will only allow him three agents.  Almost before you can say ‘that seems highly unlikely’, Hector has recruited Perry and Gail to help his team bring Dima and his family safely to the UK. Whereupon all kinds of adventures ensue in a variety of eye-catching locations…

Whether or not you can accept such a risible idea will greatly influence your ability to enjoy this film. I’m afraid I simply couldn’t. The ensuing chase does manage to kindle the occasional bit of tension, but the ultimate overview – that everyone is basically corrupt and nobody can be trusted, soon becomes a little wearing; furthermore, the notion that MI6 can’t afford to enlist enough operatives to handle such a mission successfully is faintly ridiculous. McGregor gives it a go but looks uncertain of himself all the way through, Harris doesn’t really have much to do except stand around looking worried and even the usually dependable Skarsgard has to shout and bluster his way through the proceedings, in order to generate some momentum.

Oh yes, and like most Le Carré stories, there’s a rather downbeat ending, that does nobody any favours. There will doubtless be plenty of people queuing up to tell me I’m wrong, but if this film has a flavour, to me it’s basic vanilla.

3.4 stars

Philip Caveney

Florence Foster Jenkins

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16/05/16

The last time we saw the chameleon that is Meryl Streep in a musical role it was in Rikki and the Flash, where she managed to utterly convince as an ageing rocker with a troublesome daughter. The titular Florence Foster Jenkins is something else entirely. Streep plays a genuine historical character who lived only for music and who enacted a whole series of infamous concerts during the 1940s.

She was remarkable for a variety of reasons. As a teenager, she’d been a musical prodigy but an unwelcome dose of syphilis, passed on to her by her first husband when she was eighteen, had left her incapable of playing the piano. Her only other option was to sing and luckily for her, she had inherited her father’s fortune and was able to fund a series of private concerts. The reviews were generally favourable, largely because of the sterling efforts of her second husband, former actor St Clare Bayfield (played here with great charm by Hugh Grant) who smoothed his wife’s path by bribing reviewers and ensuring that she never ever witnessed people laughing at her – something they were likely to do, because of course, she couldn’t carry a tune to save her life.

The film opens with her auditioning for an accompanist and she soon settles on Cosme McMoon (a beautifully understated turn by Simon Helberg) who finds himself conflicted by his desire to play good music and his understandable horror at the noises he hears coming from the mouth of Ms Jenkins. The situation is manageable when the concerts are kept small and intimate but when on a whim, Jenkins books herself a performance at Carnegie Hall in front of an audience of 3000, it’s clear that Bayfield and McMoon are going to have a more difficult job on their hands. And to compound matters, she’s only gone and made a blooming record!

This is a slight but perfectly judged film, skilfully directed by Stephen Frears and built around a wonderful comic performance from Streep. If you think there’s not much humour to be milked from such a tragic premise, don’t be fooled – you’ll laugh your way through much of this and towards the end, you’ll almost certainly be close to tears. The script, by Nicholas Martin, is adept at confounding your expectations. Bayfield, who at first appears to be an unspeakable cad (he led a double life, living with a young woman, Kathleen (Rebecca Ferguson)) clearly did love his wife and lavished great care and attention on her at every turn, unlike musical virtuosos such as Arturo Toscanini and Carlo Edwards, who happily took a series of cheques from her but never once turned up to show their support.

In an age where the likes of The X Factor and BGT have elevated the championing of musical mediocrity to an art form, Jenkins’ story seems a particularly prescient one – and for Streep’s performance alone, this is worth seeking out.

4.2 stars

Philip Caveney

Green Room

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13/05/16

Jeremy Saulnier’s previous film, the low budget revenge drama Blue Ruin, ticked enough boxes to make him a director to watch. Green Room is a rock-horror vehicle that cranks everything up to eleven, and features the kind of visceral carnage that’s not for the faint-hearted or the weak-stomached.

Third division rock band the This Ain’t Rights are gigging their way around the Pacific North West of America, getting from place to place by siphoning petrol from other vehicles and playing the kind of dives that bring them around six dollars a piece. After a particularly bad night, an embarrassed promoter fixes them up with a gig at his cousin’s place and warns them that the audience will be ‘an unusual crowd’ – by which he means that they are a bunch of shave-headed, Neo Nazi supremacists led by Darcy (Patrick Stewart in an uncharacteristically nasty role, featuring an occasionally wonky American accent).

After an unpromising start, (the band kick off the gig with the Dead Kennedy’s classic – the one that dismisses Nazis in an fairly uncompromising manner) but after that, the band go down quite well and they are just congratulating themselves on being paid a decent fee for a change when they discover the body of a young woman with a knife. Unfortunately for her, it’s stuck in the side of her head. What’s more, the management seem very reluctant to let the band leave and before they know it, they find themselves holed up in the titular green room, wondering if they are going to escape with their lives.

In tone, the film is closer to some of the body shock films of the 70s – as individuals are hacked, bludgeoned and shotgunned to death, the tension begins to wrack up to almost unbearable levels. Anton Yelchin as bassist Pat is the nearest we get to a lead role here and Imogen Poots puts in a decent turn as Amber, a girl who is unlucky enough to have both the haircut from hell, and the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Saulnier’s muse, Macon Blair, has a small but interesting role as Darcy’s right hand man.

Everything builds to a ferocious crescendo, and it’s clear fairly early into the proceedings that  this isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of haemoglobin. As a former band member myself, it recalled some of the worst gigs I ever played at, but thankfully, things never got quite as bad as they do here.

Watch this only if you can tolerate scenes of excessive violence. Things get very bloody.

4 stars

Philip Caveney

The Jungle Book

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02/05/16

It’s a brave man who takes on a classic like The Jungle Book (John Favreau, in case you were wondering) and emerges from the experience without a generous portion of egg spread across his face. There are already two knockout screen adaptations. As a youngster, I remember being thrilled by the Alexander Korda-produced version, starring Sabu – and who doesn’t love Disney’s 1967 animation, the last film that Walt actually had a personal hand in making? So I admit, I expected this to be at best, so-so. But those expectations were kicked out of the ball park within moments of the film actually starting. Make no mistake, this is a magical production in the purest sense of the word. That creaking sound you’ll hear in the cinema? The sound of an audience’s jaws collectively dropping.

I’m not going into the plot, since it’s so well-known, but suffice to say that Favreau and his team have created a stunning CGI word where everything, from the biggest mammal to the tiniest insect is rendered in absolutely believable detail. The time was (not so very long ago) when you looked at a CGI tiger and thought, ‘hmm, not bad but you can tell it’s not the real thing.’ In The Jungle Book, however, the only element that tells you that Shere Kahn isn’t the real McCoy is that a real tiger wouldn’t tend to talk like Idris Elba. (Elba, by the way, manages to invest his animal character with absolute menace.)

As the only human actor onscreen, twelve year old newcomer Neel Sethi looks like Disney’s animated Mowgli come to life – (i.e. adorable) and though the likes of Bill Murray (Baloo) Scarlett Johansson (Kaa) and Ben Kingsley (Bagheera) merely provide voiceovers for their animal counterparts, somehow, their human characteristics shine through. It’s an extraordinary achievement and one can only wonder how Sethi managed to accomplish his role against nothing more inspirational than a blue screen.

Some caveats? Well, I do have a couple. After a while, you notice that the animals are rendered much bigger (150% bigger) than they actually are in real life. OK, we’re told that King Louie is a Gigantopithecus, but in this world, even a baby elephant towers over Mowgli. Favreau maintains that this was a deliberate move to show the animals ‘as they would appear to Mowgli’ but I can’t help wondering if it was really necessary. Also, he decided to incorporate a couple of the better known songs from the animation – this is a Disney studio picture, after all, so perhaps he felt obliged to honour the film’s progenitor. Mowgli and Baloo’s affectionate rendering of The Bear Necessities is fine, but the scene where King Louie (Christopher Walken) sings I Wanna Be Like You-Hoo-Hoo to Mowgli feels like the film’s one misstep and frankly it’s good enough to have skipped that detail (especially as we get a reprise of the song over the end credits).

But these are minor niggles. The mere fact that a packed audience of youngsters sat in absolute silence throughout the screening will give you some indication of just how appealing this film is. They absolutely loved it… and here was one sixty four year old who was in total agreement with them.

4.6 stars

Philip Caveney

Special Correspondents

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01/05/16

Whatever happened to Ricky Gervais? The glory days of The Office and Extras are now long gone and his occasional forays into cinema have amounted to a few average cameos in other people’s movies and the woeful laughter-free zone that was The Invention of Lying. His new movie, Special Correspondents, is a Netflix original (though actually not original at all, as it’s a remake of 2009 French comedy, Envoyes Tres Speciaux). And, though it pains me to say it, it’s a disaster – a ‘comedy’ that fails to raise so much as a smirk.

Gervais plays Ian Finch, a hapless sound engineer working alongside charmless, bombastic reporter, Frank Bonneville (Eric Bana) who has alienated all his colleagues at 365 News and  is now residing at Last Chance Saloon. Ian’s other workmate, Claire Maddox (Kelly McDonald) is the closest thing to a sympathetic character you’ll find in this sorry tale and she isn’t really given all that much to do. Ian is also lumbered with a shrew of a wife, Eleanor (Vera Farmiga) who has all the inherent charm of a car crash and who gleefully cheats on Ian with Frank (though to be fair, Frankdoesn’t know at the time who she is married to).

When a civil war breaks out in Ecuador, Ian and Frank are despatched to cover the story, but Ian, upset by the fact that Eleanor has just walked out on him, accidentally throws their tickets and passports into a passing garbage lorry, leaving them stranded in the USA. Realising that this was his last chance to make good, Frank persuades Ian to help him fake a series of reports from war-torn South America. They are actually holed up in a restaurant across the road with a couple of friends, the almost terminally thick Brigida (America Ferrara) and her husband Domingo (Raul Castillo).

It’s a slight idea and one that is never really nailed – instead, what we get is a lazy, written-by-numbers story featuring embarrassing racial stereotyping, and a series of plot twists you can see coming from several blocks away. More damningly, there’s hardly anyone here you can root for, as McDonald’s character aside, they all appear to be venal, self-interested scumbags with an eye on advancing their own careers. Furthermore, a scene that emulates a faked hostage video is uncomfortably close to images we’ve seen in real life that are a million miles away from anything humorous. I can’t help but wonder if, in the past,  the sadly absent Stephen Merchant acted as some kind of quality control for Gervais. Left to his own devices, he seems incapable of creating anything with any depth.

With a new David Brent movie looming on the horizon, the only hope is that he’s put a bit more effort into that script, because this one is frankly dead in the water.

1 star

Philip Caveney

Victoria

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13/04/16

Victoria (Laia Costa) is a young Spanish woman, living and working in Berlin. We first encounter her dancing by herself at a nightclub and it’s there that she first meets Sonne (Frederick Lau) and falls for his boisterous chat-up lines. She’s supposed to go and open up the cafe where she works, but instead falls in with Sonne and his friends, Boxer, (Franz Rogowski), Blinker (Burat Yigit) and Fuss (Max Mauff) and agrees to go with them to visit a favourite hangout of theirs. As the night progresses, it’s clear that Victoria and Sonne are falling for each other – but when Boxer enlists Victoria’s help to drive a car for him, so he can do a friend ‘a favour’, the mood quickly switches into thriller mode and it becomes apparent that this is not going to end well for anyone involved…

As you may have heard, the ‘gimmick’ with writer/director Sebastian Schipper’s film is that it’s shot in one continuous take, which is of course, a monumental undertaking in itself. (Innarutu’s recent hit Birdman gave the impression of being shot in this way, but he managed to sneak in a few clever edits. This, however, is the real McCoy.) Schipper and his cast and crew manage to achieve their goal with such verve and brilliance, that you feel like applauding their ingenuity. (Apparently they could only afford three attempts to get everything right and the third take is the one they used).

But don’t go thinking that a gimmick is all that this film has to offer. There’s more. Much more. As the story progresses and Victoria and her new-found pals fall deeper and deeper into the brown stuff, Schipper expertly racks up the tension to an almost unbearable degree. This is gripping, nerve-shredding stuff that will keep you on the edge of your seat right up until the brilliant conclusion.

An unqualified triumph. Don’t miss it.

5 stars

Philip Caveney

Midnight Special

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10/03/16

Writer/director Jeff Nichols has given us some fine movies over the last few years but one thing he’s not so good at is coming up with a decent title. Take Shelter? Not one of the best. Mud? A terrible title for an excellent film. And now, here’s Midnight Special, a title that for the life of me I can’t see the relevance of when applied to this absorbing story – but I suppose this is a minor niggle. The film this most reminds me of is ET… though I hasten to add, a much more sophisticated, grown up and gritty version of Speilberg’s sci fi tale.

Alton Meyer (Jaeden Lieberher) is a very special boy. It has something to do with his eyes. He must be kept in darkness as much as possible and has to wear special goggles whenever he steps into the sunlight. When we first meet him, he’s been abducted by his biological father, Roy (Michael Shannon) and his friend,  cop Lucas (Joel Egerton) from the religious community that has looked after him for the past two years. Because of the boy’s habit of ‘speaking in tongues,’ the cult’s leader,  Calvin (Sam Shepard) believes that Alton may be some kind of messiah and he and his followers will do just about anything to get him back, even if it means picking up weapons to enforce their will.

Sam and Lucas hook up with Alton’s birth mother, Sarah (Kirsten Dunst) and the four of them set off on a perilous journey to bring Alton to the special destination where he repeatedly tells them he needs to be – but how can they get there when the combined forces of the FBI, the US military and a bunch of religious fruitcakes are intent on intercepting them?

Midnight Special is expertly told, releasing nuggets of information bit-by-bit, just enough to keep you hooked and to make you want to know more. When the solution is finally revealed it is, quite frankly mind-blowing and at this point, will divide audiences into ‘hell yes!’ or ‘no way!’ categories. I, happily, belong to the former. There are compelling performances from all concerned (Adam Driver is particularly good as a baffled boffin trying to work out what’s happening) and the pace never flags.

This is a riveting story about the power of belief and the lengths to which people will go to honour it. It also confirms Nichols as a film maker at the height of his powers.

It will be interesting to see what he does next.

4.5 stars

Philip Caveney

Dheepan

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08/04/16

Director Jacques Audiard seems to revel in telling the stories of outsiders. Both Rust and Bone and A Prophet went down this route and Dheepan is no exception. The film opens in Sri Lanka, in 2009, at the end of the savage civil war that had lasted twenty five years and claimed more than 80,000 lives. A defeated Tamil Tiger soldier (Jesusthasan Antonythasan), has realised that the only way he can hope to stay alive is to flee the country. At the departure camp, he is hastily put together with a woman he has never met before (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and an orphaned girl (Claudine Vinasithamby), so they can use the passports of three dead people. Their new names are Dheepan, Yalini and Illayaal.

Yalini longs to go to England where her sister lives, but instead they end up in France, where Dheepan has been offered work as a caretaker – but this is a part of France that’s never going to feature in the tourist brochures, a broken down, lawless community where drug gangs rule and where the police never deign to show their faces. Dheepan goes doggedly about his business trying to make friends, while Yalini is offered work looking after an elderly man, whose son, Brahim (Vincent Rottier) is a drug kingpin, recently released from a spell in jail and using his father’s home as a base. Meanwhile, Illayaal is enrolled at a local school where she sets about trying to fit in with the other children, but she is seen as an outsider and struggles to make headway. But can three strangers thrown together in this way ever hope to function as a family?

Dheepan is a fascinating study of the lives of refugees, one that never makes the mistake of falling into cliche. The three lead protagonists feel like real people, with real hopes and real ambitions. Even when the story descends into violence – an inevitability you can feel looming over the story  like a terrible premonition – it avoids all the usual Hollywood action-movie tropes to offer something that feels horribly real. The film’s optimistic coda has been derided by some critics as being unrealistic but they’re surely missing the point – this is just another heartfelt dream that is never going to be achieved.

Dheepan is a brilliant and deeply affecting film. See it but don’t expect a chucklefest. This is a bleak tale by a master storyteller.

4.6 stars

Philip Caveney