Film

Ricki and the Flash

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06/09/15

Let me start with a question. Is there any role on this planet that Meryl Streep can’t actually play? I only ask this because we’ve segued straight from a trailer for Suffragette, where she portrays Emmeline Pankhurst, to this little gem, where she plays Ricki Rendazzo, an ageing rocker, struggling to keep her dreams of stardom alive as she fronts a small time band (the eponymous Flash) by night and works by day at the checkout of an LA supermarket.

And you know what? Streep absolutely nails it.

The film starts as it means to go on, with Ricki’s band blasting out a credible version of Tom Petty’s American Girl and for once, in a movie, this sounds like genuine musicians playing genuine music – as well it should, because Streep recorded her own vocals for this and she’s fronting a real band, featuring Rick Springfield as the new man in her life, Greg.

When Ricki takes a call from her ex-husband, Pete (Kevin Kline), informing her that their daughter, Julie (Streep’s real life daughter, Mamie Gummer), has just been dumped by her husband and is feeling pretty low, Ricki heads back to Indianapolis, to try and mediate with Julie and to reconnect with her two sons, who have pretty much cut Ricki out of their lives since she broke up with their father. She also has to deal with Pete’s new wife, Maureen (Audra McDonald), a woman who seems to have been invented simply to illustrate the true meaning of perfection. Can Ricki have any hope of patching up all those wounds from the past? Or has she simply been away for far too long?

This is a gorgeous film, perfectly pitched to avoid stereotyping and mawkishness. It’s cleverly scripted by Diablo Cody – the scene where Ricki sits down for dinner with her estranged family (including her son’s fiancee) is a comic masterclass – and there’s a resolution here that, in the wrong hands, could have come across as hopelessly sentimental but, guided by seasoned professional Jonathan Demme, is an absolute triumph. Cody has some history here. Her mother in law apparently fronted a rock band for years and that experience has clearly paid dividends. That odd title isn’t doing the film any favours at all, but you really should check this out. It’s a heartwarming tale about love, relationships and the redemptive power of rock n’ roll,  well worth the price of admission.

4.6 stars

Philip Caveney

American Ultra

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05/09/15

Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg) is a small-town guy, stuck in a dead end job at the local convenience store. He spends his spare time smoking dope and doodling ideas for a comic book featuring a space travelling super monkey called Apollo Ape. Luckily, he’s in a long term relationship with Phoebe (Kristen Stewart), who seems to be his perfect soulmate and who tolerates the fact that Mike has crippling anxiety attacks whenever he tries to travel. Most recently, a long-desired vacation to Hawaii is nixed, when he finds himself running to the john to vomit. As is so often the case in movies like this, all is not what it seems and circumstances conspire to reveal that Mike is in fact, a brainwashed undercover CIA operative, who has been waiting for a certain sequence of words to reactivate him.

Eisenberg is, as ever, a likeable screen presence and Kristen Stewart was always a better actress than the execrable Twilight series allowed her to demonstrate. The first third of this movie is great fun, as Mike realises that he has the potential to be a highly skilled assassin – but once those talents are acquired, the film loses some of its appeal as it becomes a series of ever more complicated Heath Robinsonesque  murders. All manner of gadgets are utilised in Mike’s struggle for survival – mallets, screwdrivers, frying pans and claw hammers – you get the impression that here’s yet another film that must have been sponsored by B & Q. The action is unflinchingly bloody, but shot with enough cartoonish relish to just about excuse its most brutal excesses. Topher Grace and Connie Britton as two warring CIA honchos add depth to Max Landis’s script and there’s an appealing cameo from Bill Pullman as their ruthless boss, but the conviction remains that this could have been better if it had managed to maintain the more appealing elements on show in the first half hour.

American Ultra is eminently watchable, but could easily have been something more than that.

3.8 stars

Philip Caveney

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

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02/09/15

We were far too late getting on to this – largely because an entire month of reviewing at the Edinburgh Fringe left us with too little time to actually make it to the cinema: a sorry state of affairs. Rogue Nation is the latest improbably titled instalment in Tom Cruise’s evergreen TV spy spinoff and as the series goes, it’s one of the better efforts – an adrenalin fuelled romp with an outrageously daft plot and a whole heap of inexplicable gadgetry to help the IMF team achieve their goals.

The film starts as it means to go on with the throttle wide open. Ethan Hunt attempts to board a plane… after it’s taken off. (Don’t try this at home. That’s my old stamping ground of RAF Wittering hundreds of feet below, by the way and yes, that is Cruise clinging on to the side of the plane. Nobody can say he doesn’t earn his millions.)

Hunt is on the trail of a mysterious organisation called The Syndicate, who have dedicated themselves to the eradication of the IMF and who are headed up by evil villain, Solomon Lane (a deeply creepy Sean Harris.) As Hunt hurtles around the world, evading assassins and leaping athletically from very high buildings, back at base, Brandt (Jeremy Renner) is engaged in a more pedestrian battle as grumpy CIA man, Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) attempts to get the Impossible Missions team shut down. It seems he finds them a bout too reckless for his liking. Soon Hunt is pretty much out there on his own, aided only by his hapless bessie mate, Benjie (Simon Pegg, who must be relieved to add a much-needed hit to his CV) and by the mysterious Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) who keeps popping up just in time to save Hunt’s life.

It’s fairly pointless to go into the plot. Most of it is unfathomable and all of it is unlikely, but it’s presented with enough tongue-in-cheek brio to suspend your disbelief. There’s an ingenious set piece at the Vienna opera house, while an underwater sequence where Hunt has to hold his breath for three minutes wracks up the tension to an almost unbearable degree. On the downside, there’s a  motorbike/car chase that seems a tad perfunctory this time around, but that’s a minor quibble. Overall, this is a superior slice of entertainment, which should keep you riveted till the final credits. And of course it still features Lalo Schifrin’s sinewy, unforgettable theme tune, which is a thriller all by itself.

What else can I say? Mission accomplished.

4.2 stars

Philip Caveney

Southpaw

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06/08/15

Jake Gyllenhaal is always an interesting actor and, in Southpaw, he’s pulled off yet another transformation, piling on the muscle and jettisoning his good looks to play light heavyweight boxer Billy Hope; indeed, it’s hard to believe this is the same actor who gave us the creepy, emaciated ambulance-chaser he portrayed so brilliantly in Nightcrawler. We first meet Billy as he grimly holds on to his title belt in a bruising, bloody confrontation with a much younger fighter. The boxing sequences don’t really compare with the mesmerising, almost dreamlike sequences in Scorcese’s Raging Bull, but they’re nonetheless realistic enough to make the more sensitive viewers wince. But fate is waiting in the wings for Billy. When his wife, Maureen (Rachel McAdams) is accidentally shot dead in a fracas at a charity event, Billy finds himself on a slippery slope downhill as, in quick succession, he loses his licence to fight, his home is repossessed and his daughter, Leila (a winning performance from Oona Lawrence) is taken by child protective services. This is all harrowing stuff and director Antoine Fuqua mines it expertly for maximum distress; at several points I find myself tearing up. Can Billy ever find redemption and rebuild his career? Hey, is the Pope a Catholic?

It has to be said that from this bleak first third, the film enters a very familiar trajectory as Billy teams up with washed-up-boxer- turned-trainer, Tick Wills (Forest Whitaker), who quietly guides his protégée back to the top of his game. (Anyone who’s seen Rocky, will know the form. In that film, Burgess Meredith did pretty much the same with Rocky Balboa.) Whitaker manages the role with his customary skill and there’s a surprisingly decent turn from 50 Cents as a mercenary boxing promoter (who ironically declared his own ‘strategic’ bankruptcy recently – is this where he got the idea?).

Maybe Billy’s fall from grace is a little over the top – could anybody as successful as Hope fall quite so fast and quite so hard? And maybe his path back to championship fitness in just six weeks is a little too easy, encapsulated as it is in a perfunctory training montage. But nevertheless, the final confrontation is compelling enough to keep you on the edge of your seat till the final count.

All in all, this is decent entertainment with a distinctly gloomy edge.

3.8 stars

Philip Caveney

The Legend Of Barney Thomson

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29/07/15

Robert Carlyle has been suspiciously quiet of late, but The Legend of Barney Thomson, based on a series of novels by Douglas Lindsay, puts him on both sides of the camera, as he directs and stars in this gruesome farce concerning the misadventures of a Glaswegian barber. Barney (Carlyle) has been working at Hendersons for most of his adult life but because he lacks ‘the chat,’ he’s beginning to prove unpopular with the regular customers and is on the verge of being given the push. This is a disaster for him as Barney is a tragic character. He has no real friends and his diffident personality (a far cry from Begbie in Trainspotting) means that everyone takes advantage of him. This includes his pushy mother, Cemolina, (a scene-stealing turn from Emma Thompson as a chain-smoking, foul mouthed harridan with a gambling addiction.) Meanwhile, Glasgow is being rocked by a series of murders, made even more shocking by the fact that the killer has a predilection for mailing body parts from the victims (all male) to the next of kin. Events become more complicated when Barney unexpectedly finds himself in the frame as a potential murder suspect and soon falls under the watchful gaze of the vicious DI Holdall (Ray Winstone).

Once you get past the outrageous nature of the plot and the fact that everything is played with the volume turned up to eleven, there’s much to enjoy here as the hapless Barney stumbles from one potential disaster to another. Carlyle uses some infamous Glasgow locations as his backdrops and even though the results are unlikely to endear themselves to the Scottish tourist board, they give the film a definitive look and style that speaks volumes. There are also some superb cameos here – Tom Courtney as the priggish Chief Superintendent McManaman is an absolute hoot, while Ashley Jenson makes a meal of her role as an uptight Detective Inspector locked in a bitter feud with Holdall.

While the film is far from perfect, it’s nonetheless entertaining and occasionally had the sparse audience at the showing we attended laughing out loud. But a quick glance around the less-than-packed auditorium speaks volumes for its chances of success. A pity, because this is a bold film, that takes no prisoners. And that’s a rare thing in these troubled times.

3.7 stars

Philip Caveney

Inside Out

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28/07/15

Viewers of a certain vintage may retain fond memories of The Numskulls – a weekly story in The Beano which featured the inside of a young boy’s head and the cartoon creatures that operated his moods, emotions and functions. The similarities are probably coincidental, but with Inside Out, it’s as though the team at Pixar took that same basic premise and elevated it to levels of sophistication that The Beano could only dream of.

Most of the action takes place inside the emotional world of a young girl called Riley, who has recently been uprooted from her home in Minnesota to live in an unfamiliar new house in San Francisco. The dominant force in her world up to this point has been Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler) but as Riley’s comfortable existence is rocked by unforeseen problems, the other resident emotions – Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear start to exert their influences too. Writer/directors Pete Docter and Ronaldo Del Carmen have created a complex internal world where everything depends on the different emotions working together as a team. Joy is convinced that in order for Riley to be truly happy, her influence must dominate proceedings. When Sadness (Phyllis Smith) attempts to be involved, the equilibrium is upset and Riley’s world appears to be in danger of coming apart at the scenes. Joy and Sadness now have to team up in order to put her back on an even keel.

Pixar have always been brilliant at creating films that are as appealing to adults as they are to children and after a recent run of disappointments (Cars 2 anyone?) it’s great to see them back at the top of their game. Indeed, Inside Out is so sophisticated you can’t help suspecting that the adults get by far the better deal here; where else would you find a kid’s animation that gleefully references Roman Polanski’s Chinatown? Don’t get me wrong, the film is surely big enough and shiny enough to keep the younger members of the audience happy, but they’ll be missing so many sly in-jokes and observations that can really only be fully appreciated once maturity has kicked in.

Suffice to say that this is delightfully inventive stuff that never loses pace or its unerring sense of direction, and there’s a conclusion here that will wring real tears from all but the stone-hearted. When Pixar was purchased by the Disney organisation, there was much dark speculation that it would find itself neutered by the House of Mouse, so it’s heartening to report that Inside Out steers well clear of the usual ‘quest for happiness’ ending and opts instead for something a tad more realistic. Don’t miss this one – and whatever you do, don’t feel that you need to have a child in tow in order to enjoy it. This film would give Sigmund Freud a run for his money.

Don’t be in too much of a hurry to vacate your seats either. In the usual Pixar tradition, there’s an end credit reel that provides some of the film’s funniest moments.

5 stars

Philip Caveney

Maggie

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24/07/15

– How about a zombie film? Starring Alpha-Republican-hardman Arnold Schwarzenegger, you say.

– Nah, I say. I think I’ll pass. I mean, I do quite like stories of the living dead, but I really can’t be doing with all that boring Mr Macho stuff.

– Go on, you say; it might be good. It’s been plucked from Hollywood’s infamous ‘Black List’ of unproduced scripts and championed by Schwarzenegger himself.

– And that’s supposed to make it better?

– Well, we haven’t got anything else planned for the evening.

And, you know I’m a sucker for the whole cinematic experience, even if I’m not so keen on the movie, so yeah, why not? And off we go.

And, oh, but am I glad we did.

Maggie is a zombie movie unlike any I have ever seen. John A Scott III’s debut screenplay is slow and tender, warm and sad. There’s only minimal lurching and wounding, and the bullets put through the zombies’ heads are shot reluctantly and with compassion. Maggie (Abigail Breslin) is a wayward teen, who, having run off to explore the bright lights of the big city, calls home to ask her father (Schwarzenegger) for help. She has been infected and is in quarantine.

This particular dystopia is more humane than most. Infected people are assessed and then allowed home to live out the remainder of their ‘human’ days. When the time comes, they are supposed to return to quarantine, where they will be dispatched via lethal injection. Police patrols have lists of those on furlough, and round up those whose families struggle to give them up. The focus then is not on survival; it’s not about encountering the slavering hoards and protecting what you have from others who want in. Instead, this is the story of a family learning to let go.

There’s not much in the way of backstory or character development – and I think that’s to the film’s credit. Maggie’s likes and dislikes, dreams and fears are just not that important now. She and her family are living in the present, dealing with the day-to-day. We are trusted to engage with their predicament on this human level; the fripperies we use to label and identify are stripped away and we are left with just the basics: love and empathy and muddling-through. I thought it was wonderful. Even the dragged-out ending (Now? No. Now? Not yet. Now?) served to underline the hardship: how do we know when the time is right; when are we ever ready to accept a loved one’s death?

So this is a zombie movie, yes, but it’s also unlikely to appeal to those in search of frights and thrills. It’s more of an allegory, really, for the way we deal with disease and disaster. (And yes, I know that zombie movies are usually allegorical to some degree, but this is one more so. It’s Allegory Plus.)

It’s definitely worth watching.

4 stars

Susan Singfield

Hector and the Search For Happiness

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20/07/15

The presence of Simon Pegg in a movie can usually be relied upon as some kind of quality control, but as Hector and the Search For Happiness proves all too readily, this can’t always be relied upon. Based upon the best selling self-help book by Francis LeLord, the film tells the story of Hector (Pegg) a successful psychiatrist, happily living in London with his girlfriend Clara, (Rosamund Pike.) But talking to a succession of depressed people on a daily basis eventually has an inevitable effect on him and he undergoes a bit of a mid life crisis; whereupon he tells Clara that he needs to go off and ‘find himself’ or more accurately, to find the essence of pure happiness.

To this effect, he visits China (for no apparent reason other than Chinese people are considered to be quite happy.) He  goes to work with an old college friend in Africa, and, in the final segment, he visits Los Angeles and his old flame, Agnes (Toni Collette) now a happily married woman with two children and a third on the way. Pegg tries hard to instil the proceedings with some degree of interest but is ill served by a story that despite involving so much travel is clearly going nowhere. It’s all a bit vapid to be honest. There’s some nice scenery to enjoy along the way and several serious actors appear in minor roles – Stellan Skarsgard, Jean Reno and Christopher Plummer to name but three, but apart from a few fridge magnet bon mots, there really isn’t an awful lot to be gleaned from the story, which eventually collapses into a conclusion that is so mind-numbingly predictable, we could have saved Hector the price of all those air fares.

2 stars

Philip Caveney

Jurassic World

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19/07/15

In 1993, the release of Jurassic Park was a genuine game-changer. It was the first time that CGI had been convincingly used to create realistic-looking dinosaurs (rendering the pioneering stop-motion work of people like Ray Harryhausen obsolete virtually overnight.) It was directed by Steven Speilberg at the height of his powers and even if Michael Crichton’s source novel was just anther riff on one of his earlier ideas (Westworld), it nonetheless deserved to be the blockbuster it undoubtedly was. There were a couple of underwhelming sequels in the 90s that never really capitalised on the central premise and now here we are, more than twenty years later and Jurassic World has recently become the biggest grossing film in history.

I put off watching this one for quite a while, mostly because I suspected I’d be disappointed. But after all the furore about its earnings, I had to give it a shot. What becomes clear from the outset is that despite the care and effort that has been lavished on making those dinosaurs look absolutely real, no such effort has been made with the screenplay, which features so many ridiculous ideas, it’s hard to know quite where to start.

It’s twenty two years after the events of the first film and Jurassic World on Isla Nublar is now a successful theme park. Quite how the operators obtained the licence when so many of its previous visitors had been eaten by the exhibits is never mentioned. Let’s face it, in terms of safety records, this place makes Alton Towers look like a vicarage tea party. In a sort of amped-up version of Sea World, tourists flock to watch the antics of giant dinosaurs. Well, yes, who wouldn’t? But there’s a problem. Apparently, audiences are growing tired of seeing ‘ordinary dinosaurs.’ Yeah, like that would happen. With this in mind, the island’s boffins have been doing a bit of gene splicing and have come up with a bigger, louder, toothier creature called Indominus Rex, which they’re keeping in a secret enclosure on the island. Apparently, it occurred to nobody that this might not be the most sensible move ever.

Now we’re introduced to Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) who operates in some kind of PR capacity at the park. Just to give her something more to worry about, she’s tasked with looking after her two cuddlesome nephews who are on holiday, escaping from their parent’s marital problems. You can’t help wondering how Claire ever got her job; she’s frankly useless at PR and even more useless at looking after kids, making one bad decision after another, each one seemingly intended to plunge her luckless nephews deeper and deeper into the brown stuff. It gets worse. The woman doesn’t even have the sense to take off her high heels when running from a dinosaur! Luckily, she has hunky Owen (Chris Pratt) to fall back on. He’s an animal expert who is currently training three velociraptors to work as a team – sort of like a Dino Whisperer. But he’s somewhat hampered by the ambitions of Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio) a ruthless park contractor who is such a pantomime villain, he may as well have the word ‘dodgy’ tattooed on his forehead. Hoskins sees the velociraptors as potential military weapons and is clearly biding his time, waiting for the right moment to step in and take control of them.

That moment arrives when the Indominus Rex escapes (honestly, who saw that coming?) and starts gleefully chomping down on the tourists. It’s now up to Claire and Owen to sort out the situation…

Look, I get that Jurassic World is a family film, one that has to appeal to viewers from twelve to twelvety and I can’t really argue with the kind of success it’s enjoying, but honestly, how did this damp squib of a film become the runaway success of the year? There’s not an original idea in it, all the best sequences riffing on tropes that featured in the original. The lack of chemistry between Dallas Howard and Pratt is a real problem (a scene where they pause mid-carnage for a quick snog is rewarded with gales of laughter from the audience.) And perhaps most damning of all, there is no sense of peril here – remember the knockout scene in Jurassic Park where the kids were pursued into a kitchen by the velociraptors? You actually felt they could die in there. There’s nothing here to equal that – the two kids in this movie experience all kinds of dangers, but you never feel they’re being threatened by anything more lethal than a shedload of pixels. It’s by no means an awful film, it’s just a bit… meh.

I’m looking forward to the next one in the series, where Dallas Howard, Pratt and the entire board of Jurassic World end up in court, accused of causing the deaths of hundreds of innocent tourists. Now that would put a different spin on the franchise!

3.5 stars

Philip Caveney

Love and Mercy

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11/07/15

Music biopics can be perilously tricky affairs. Far too often, they come across merely as karaoke reruns of the original events and only a very few ever succeed (or even bother) to try and probe beneath the shiny surface. Happily, Love and Mercy belongs in the latter category. Bill Pohlad’s film offers two Brian Wilsons for the price of one.

In the 1960’s-set first strand, a bulked up Paul Dano does an uncanny job of portraying pop music’s most celebrated tortured genius, complete with the chubby bewildered features and the pudding basin haircut. The recreations of the band’s early concerts and TV appearances are uncannily accurate. After the Beachboys’ initial successes with their surfing songs, Brian suffers a debilitating panic attack on an airplane, and elects to stay in the studio and create music while the rest of the band head off to Japan on tour.

In the second, 1990’s-set strand, we meet another Brian Wilson, post nervous breakdown and in the clutches of bullying psychiatrist, Eugene Landy (Paul Giametti in a fright wig, looking strangely like Melvyn Bragg.) In these sequences, Brian is played by John Cusack, who is of course a very accomplished actor – but he  looks nothing like Wilson, or for that matter, Dano. The conclusion has to be that the director was trying to make a statement about his subject’s schizophrenic nature but I couldn’t help feeling that he’d have done better to stick with Dano throughout.

Once the two time frames are established the film cuts effortlessly back and forth, between two major stories. In the 60’s, Brian’s mounting confusion alienates him from his fellow band members and family – but here the film manages to nail the creative process of recording better than most other films I’ve seen. It’s wonderful to watch as a pop masterpiece like God Only Knows is assembled virtually note by note, before finally blossoming into the sublime finished product we know and love.

In the second storyline, a heavily sedated Brian, always accompanied by Landy and his henchmen, wanders into a car showroom to purchase a Cadillac and makes a connection with Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks.) The two of them start to date and Melinda quickly begins to realise that Brian is under Landy’s control, every bit as much as he suffered under the tyranny of his abusive father, Murray. But how can she extricate him from his self-inflicted woes? And does Brian even want to be rescued?

This is by no means a perfect film, but it’s intriguing and compelling enough to keep you hooked to the end and there’s some fabulous sounds to enjoy along the way. At the film’s conclusion we get the added bonus of the real Brian Wilson performing the wistful song from which the film takes its title. You don’t have to be a Beachboys fan, but it certainly helps.

4.2 stars

Philip Caveney