Film

Chappie

18/03/15

Few directors have made such a triumphant cinematic debut as South African,Neill Blomkamp. His first feature District 9 was an assured production, a canny blend of science fiction and social commentary, that blasted his career into the stratosphere. His next offering, Elysium was rather less successful but nonetheless, very watchable, even when it suggested that a human being could undergo drastic bodily surgery without bothering to remove his T-shirt. Chappie, however, is a real dog’s dinner of a film. Not only is it incredibly derivative (it comes across as an unwieldy amalgam of Robocop and Short Circuit) it features clumsy scripting and some pretty terrible performances in key roles.

In a futuristic Johannesburg, everyday policing is carried out by ‘Scouts,’ humanoid robots, capable of making their own decisions. They are the brainchild of Deon (Dev Patel) a nerdy worker in a giant corporation who dreams of one day creating a true AI – a robot capable of independent thought and the appreciation of art and music. This idea is pooh poohed by Deon’s workmanlike boss, Michelle (Sigourney Weaver, with very little to do but sit behind a desk and look stern.) Deon’s success is also envied by his macho associate, Vincent (Hugh Jackman), who has his own law enforcement project waiting in the wings and doesn’t mind taking a few shortcuts. When Deon runs some unauthorised experiments on a damaged Scout, the result is Chappie, (voiced by Blomkamp regular, Sharlto Copley) but things become complicated when Deon and his creation are kidnapped by a couple of local hoodlums, Ninja and Yolandi, who want to use the robot for their own nefarious purposes. They set about teaching Chappie how to be bad…

As in his previous films, Blomkamp is great at achieving a credible look in his futuristic world and the motion capture work employed here is of the very highest quality, so it’s a shame that the same care and attention hasn’t been lavished upon a credible script. Events pile haphazardly one on top of the other, but seem to follow no discernible logic, while the aforementioned Ninja and Yolandi are portrayed by a couple of South African rappers (they haven’t even bothered to change their names) who between them display the acting skills of… well, a couple of South African rappers. Frankly, they stink up the screen, which drives a fatal nail through the heart of the film.

The word is out that Blomkamp’s next project will be part of the Alien franchise, but he’ll have to work very hard indeed to rise above the scrappy disappointment that is Chappie. What a shame.

2.8 stars

Philip Caveney

Still Alice

16/3/15

Still Alice is of course, the film that secured Julianne Moore a well-deserved Oscar and this tale of a fifty year old Professor of Linguistics, struck down by Early Onset Alzheimers, becomes even more poignant with the news that writer/co-director Richard Glatzer, died just two days after the Oscar ceremony. (He suffered from the rare but equally debilitating condition ALS.) The film is surprisingly understated, avoiding the excesses of so many other medical issue dramas and it could be argued that it cuts away before things get too messy, but the enterprise is held together by Moore’s extraordinary performance, which instills a kind of creeping terror in the viewer; we’ve all experienced many of the problems she encounters here. Who hasn’t found themselves walking into a room and then drawing a blank as to why we’ve gone there? Could what we’ve dismissed as mere absent-mindedness be something more sinister?

We first encounter the eponymous Alice at a University lecture where she momentarily forgets what she’s about to say. A little later whilst jogging around her hometown, she suddenly discovers that she doesn’t recognise her surroundings, even though she’s right outside the University where she works. (This scene is terrifying.) Alice’s husband and fellow academic, John (Alec Baldwin – don’t be afraid, he’s quite good in this) tries to do what’s best for his wife, but the demands of his own career cause complications and there are more of those too for Alice’s children, when it transpires that the rare type of Alzheimer’s she’s suffering from is familial – it can be passed on to them. This is devastating news for eldest daughter Anna (Kate Bosworth) who is trying to start a family of her own, while flakey youngest daughter, Lydia (Kristen Stewart) ironically manages to grow closer to her mother as her condition advances. From here, we witness the gradual disintegration of Alice’s life as with each successive day, a little more of her memory is eroded and irrevocably lost.

Still Alice isn’t a great film – indeed, with a lesser performance at it’s core, it could easily have stumbled and fallen, but it does have Moore’s intelligent and heartfelt input and that’s enough to kick it out of the stadium. I was warned that I would need a box of Kleenex for this one, but though I sat there consumed with dread throughout (my own Mother suffered with Alzheimer’s for the last ten years of her life) I managed to stay resolutely dry eyed – a testament, I think, to the fact that the story never panders to histrionics and presents a realistic portrayal of an illness that surely does require more research and investment than it’s currently receiving. Worth seeing? Yes, but mostly for Julianne Moore at the top of her game.

4.2 stars

Philip Caveney

It Follows

01/03/15

The horror movie genre has been in a sorry state for some time now, lost in a welter of found-footage shaky-cam cliches that neither surprise nor scare the viewer – so it’s heartening to witness what feels like the beginning of a new wave of scare movies that offer something a bit more original. First up was Jennifer Kent’s antipodean frightener, The Babadook, which delivered a well needed kick to the ailing beast. Now comes It Follows, a film that despite owing a massive debt to the work of John Carpenter, nonetheless offers an interesting new direction, one that manages to generate genuine dread throughout the film’s duration.

Jay (Maika Monroe) is the unfortunate teenager who after indulging in a little casual sex with Hugh (Jake Weary) is rather bluntly informed that she has now inherited the unwelcome attentions of a shapeshifting creature that will pursue her (luckily it only moves slowly) and will kill her unless she first has sex with somebody else, thereby diverting the creature’s attentions to the new partner. The creature, which comes in a whole variety of guises, from an old lady to a urinating teenager, is only visible to those who are being hunted by it.

You could look at this film as an allegory about STDs and you could also criticise its rather protestant approach to promiscuity (something else it has in common with Carpenter – in Halloween, the sexually active girls are murdered by Michael Myers, whilst virginal Jaime Lee Curtis survives) but what you won’t be able to deny is that David Robert Mitchell’s adept handling of the material wracks up almost unbearable levels of tension. The comparisons with early John Carpenter don’t stop there – the gliding steadicam shots along suburban streets evoke the semi-legendary setting of Haddonfield, while the wiry synthesised score also recalls that director at the height of his powers. It’s hard to believe that this is accidental, more likely a homage.

But while it wears its influences on its sleeve, I don’t want to deny Robert Mitchell’s undoubted skill at creating something refreshingly original in the world of horror. This is unsettling stuff that will make you feel very uncomfortable and that, after all, is the name of the game.

4.4 stars

Philip Caveney

Project Almanac

26/02/15

I’m generally a bit of a sucker for a time travel movie and the trailer for Project Almanac looked fairly promising, so I decided to catch this one on the big screen. To give it its due, there’s a really intriguing idea at the heart of this and the film starts well, but sadly doesn’t maintain its own high standards throughout. It’s the story of five American teenagers, led by science-whizz David (Jonny Weston) who discovers that his late scientist father was working on something pretty special down in the cellar – a time machine. Not only that, he’s left full instructions on how to finish building it. David is tipped off to the fact that he’s going to be successful at doing that when he watches an old videotape of his own seventh birthday party and spots his eighteen year old self, reflected in a mirror. That’s a lovely idea and frankly the best thing in the film (and perhaps not surprisingly, the trailer.)

The early sequences when the kids put the machine together are nicely done and they somehow manage to convince you that they know what they’re talking about. For the first half hour or so, the film galumphs entertainingly along, barely pausing to draw breath. This being an MTV production, the teenagers desires are straightforward. Should they go back and assassinate Hitler? No, they just to win the lottery, pass their exams, buy flash cars and visit the Lollapalooza music festival! But it’s while they’re there that things begin to get complicated as David announces his love for Jesse (Sofia Black-D’elia) and breaks his own self-appointed rules in order to go back a second time to claim that first all-important kiss. As is often the case in such stories, he unwittingly causes a butterfly effect, the ripples of which create troubling problems that effect the world in general – everything from broken legs to plane crashes – and the more he frantically zips around in time trying to sort things out, the more disasters he causes and the less engaging the film becomes. Director Dean Israelite (seriously) employs the rather over-used ‘found footage shaky-cam’ technique for the early sequences, then throws it out of the window when it becomes unworkable. It doesn’t help that our luckless teens occasionally talk about their favourite time travel films – ‘Hey, have you seen Looper? Great movie!’ – which only serves to emphasise the fact that what we’re being offered here isn’t anything like as assured as that one, or indeed any of the others that are mentioned.

By the final third, the film has collapsed into a shambling series of bewildering events that only serve to illustrate that the film has failed to deliver on its initial promise. A shame but that’s the way the cookie crumbles time wise.

2.8 stars

Philip Caveney

Wild

21/02/15

I’d pretty much given up on the idea of ever seeing this one on the big screen, because of its all too brief appearance at the local multiplexes – but if ever a subject was designed for cinema viewing, Wild, with its magnificent vistas of mountains and prairies, is surely the one. So thank goodness for the FilmHouse, Edinburgh, a superb little independent that shows smaller ‘art house’ movies long after they’ve moved on from bigger venues. (If you’re ever in Edinburgh, do seek it out. It’s an object lesson in how to run an indie cinema.)

Wild is based on the autobiography of Cheryl Strayed (not so much a name as a job description) who after the death of her beloved mother, Bobbi (Laura Dern) has slipped into a life of heroin addiction and infidelity. Newly divorced from her long-suffering husband, Paul (Thomas Sadoski) she decides she needs to spend a little time on her own and rashly sets out to walk the Pacific Crest Trail, a distance of over one thousand miles. (It should perhaps be pointed out that Strayed had no previous experience of hiking, just a burning desire to complete the self-imposed task.) What follows is an account of her travels and the people she meets en route, cleverly intercut with flashbacks to earlier memories. Ably directed by Jean Marc Valleé, this is an engaging story with some fine location photography and a solid performance from Reece Witherpoon, who manages to convincingly play Strayed at all stages of her life (including, annoyingly, her college years.) If the overall effect is less powerful than say Into The Wild, a film with which it will inevitably be compared, it’s nonetheless very watchable and its only slightly marred by an ending that wanders rather too deeply into fridge magnet territory.

In what has becomes a popular trope amongst film makers, a sequence of photographs over the end credits show the real Cheryl Strayed and demonstrate how accurately Valleé and his crew reconstructed events.

4.5 stars

Philip Caveney

Selma

08/02/15

Selma chronicles the turbulent three month period in 1965, when Dr Martin Luther King led the protest to try and obtain equal voting rights for black people in the Southern states of America. Even though that right had already been officially granted, the powers that be had conspired to ensure that it was one that would never be claimed, so King set out to lead a series of ‘peaceful’ marches from the town of Selma, Alabama to the capital city, Montgomery. What happened next is a matter of history. The racist police and redneck citizenry enacted violent and bloody opposition to the event, beating and in some cases murdering the marchers with apparent impunity.

Make no mistake, this is an important film. It examines one of the most shameful periods in civil rights history and largely gets its message across. But it’s also a curiously muted affair, a consequence perhaps of its 12A certificate, something which demands that the more distressing scenes are somewhat airbrushed. Curiously too, the film makers were denied the use of any of King’s legendary speeches, mainly because the intellectual property rights are tightly controlled by his children and they wouldn’t allow the use of them here (oddly though, they had no problem licensing the “I have a dream’ speech to a French telephone company for an ‘undisclosed sum.’ Go figure.) This meant that screenwriter Paul Webb had the unenviable task of writing some original speeches for one of the greatest orators in history.

Much wrath has been incurred over recent weeks by David Oyelowo’s supposed snub by the Oscar and BAFTA panels. Many have suggested that his performance was overlooked simply because of his race. The truth is that he does offer a solid, understated portrayal of MLK, one that is full of dignity and one that captures the man’s distinctive voice patterns with remarkable alacrity, but at the same time, it doesn’t really have the stature (or the histrionics) expected of an Oscar contender. There are other solid performances on offer here too. Tom Wilkinson shines as Lyndon B. Johnson and Tim Roth perfectly nails the unpleasant, racist demeanour of Governor George Wallace. And yet the events are related at a funereal pace and there are too many scenes of King sitting in darkened rooms, brooding over his next move.

A good film then, though perhaps not a great one – but at the same time, a film that absolutely demands to be seen by as wide an audience as possible. I was warned to expect to shed tears for this and though a notorious ‘weeper’ that didn’t actually happen. But a palpable sense of shame did remain with me, the shame that in my own lifetime, events like this were ever allowed to happen. It also helped me to appreciate the immense courage of all those people who put their lives on the line in the name of civil rights.

4 stars

Philip Caveney

X Men: Days of Future Past

07/02/15

Of the many superhero franchises out there, (and there does seem to be an awful lot of them) the X Men films are the ones that interest me the least, so perhaps it’s not really surprising that I’ve waited this long to catch up with the latest instalment. It seems to me as po-faced and inert as the rest of them and somehow the bewildering array of mutants with the power to do ‘incredible’ things – bend metal, set objects on fire, affect the weather, make balloon animals… (OK, I made the last one up, but you catch my drift?) somehow never manages to ignite my interest, let alone suspend my belief.

DFP opens in a gloomy dystopian future (aren’t all futures like that in the cinema?) where colossal killing machines are on the verge of wiping out Mutantkind and where Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart sit around looking constipated, while other, younger mutants run frantically around being killed (or are they?It’s that kind of movie.) In a last-ditch effort to save the world, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is sent back in time to the year 1973, to try and prevent the introduction of the very events that have ignited this grim future. Once there, he has to reconnect with Charles Xavier (James MacAvoy) and persuade him to lend a hand. There then follows a convoluted storyline that’s based around the assassination of JFK and there’s even a cameo by President Richard Nixon (Peter Camancho), who it seems might be just the man to initiate a future disaster. Meanwhile, Doctor Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) has created mutant-seeking robots and is itching to turn them loose…

Amidst all the ponderous twists and turns, DFP offers one truly brilliant sequence, the scene where Quicksilver (Evan Peters) runs around in super-fast mode, altering the potentially fatal consequences of a police shootout. It’s extraordinary and all too brief and there remains the conviction that this was the set piece that director Bryan Singer was planning all along and that the rest of the film was just an excuse to set it up. Sadly, Quicksilver doesn’t have much else to do in the movie, which is a shame, because if there’d be more of his antics, this review might have been a tad more enthusiastic. But for me, this was overly complicated nonsense, expertly mounted, glossily filmed and featuring a host of talented actors, all of whom needed every ounce of their skills in order not to look bored.

3.2 stars

Philip Caveney

American Sniper

1/2/15

The unprecedented success of this film at the American box office, displays the depth of feeling that the US audience (especially those who vote Republican) have for Clint Eastwood’s biopic of Chris Kyle, proclaimed on the poster as the ‘most lethal sniper in history.’ Interestingly, it’s not something that Kyle himself ever wanted to boast about and as the film makes clear, it’s a legacy that took a terrible toll on the man himself and, indirectly, even led to his own death. There are many liberal-minded people who have been quick off the blocks to denounce this as dumb, Republican rhetoric, a recruitment film for would-be psychopaths, racists and the NRA, but I honestly feel that those who denounce it are failing (perhaps deliberately) to see it for what it is – a grunts-eye view of the war in Iraq from the perspective of somebody who had the unenviable task of actually being there.

The film begins with a young Chris being taken hunting by his daddy and making his first ‘kill,’ a deer. (So far, so redneck.) We then gallop on some years to find an older Chris (a beefed-up Bradley Cooper) witnessing the attack on the World Trade Centre and promptly enlisting in the Navy Seals. The man is a unabashed patriot who doesn’t hesitate to do what he perceives as ‘his duty to his country.’ He undergoes a brutal training regime and his gift for target shooting some comes to the fore. And all to soon, he’s in Iraq, on the first of four punishing tours, working as a sniper, only to discover that his first target is a little boy carrying a lethal weapon…

Now, if there is a criticism to be made of the film, it’s this. We only ever see the ‘enemy’ from the point of view of the American soldiers and, to a man, woman or child, they are all duplicitous, evil villains, every one of them intent of killing the infidels at any cost. Common sense tells us that that simply can’t be the case and it would have been nice here to have witnessed some Iraqi characters portrayed in a more sympathetic way, but that clearly wasn’t Eastwood’s objective here and he ignores it.

But don’t go thinking either that this is a film that glorifies or whitewashes the war in Iraq. It’s a savage, visceral recreation that horrifies as much as it thrills and Eastwood makes it clear how such a career exacts a punishing price on those who live it, something that is clearly demonstrated by Kyle’s fraught relationship with his wife, Taya (Sienna Miller), whenever he comes home on leave. Cooper plays Kyle as a big, genial giant, a quiet man who constantly hides his inner turmoil from the world and who only eventually finds release by working with veterans who have themselves been damaged by the war. Whatever your political take on this (and there’s no doubt that Eastwood pitches his tent squarely in the Republican camp) the film surely doesn’t deserve the approbation that’s been heaped upon it. It’s well directed, its battle scenes are unflinching in their graphic detail and at no point does anybody stand up and make a speech about how America has done the right thing.

War is always a tragedy and American Sniper never pretends that it’s anything else.

4.2 stars

Philip Caveney

Inherent Vice

31/1/15

Paul Thomas Anderson has been responsible for some of the most exciting and challenging films of recent times – Magnolia, Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, The Master... cinematic masterpieces one and all. What then are we to make of his latest offering, based upon a novel by Thomas Pynchon, a drug soaked, paranoia fuelled ramble through the minds of a bunch of disreputable, low life residents of California in the year of our Lord, 1970? The main question that kept occurring to me throughout was ‘why?’ The second was ‘What the…?’ Because though it grieves me to say it, this film is an incoherent mess that can only be deemed a shattering disappointment.

Doc Sportillo (Joaquin Phoenix) is a permanently stoned PI, operating out of the back of a dentist’s surgery and showing none of the requisite skills you might reasonably associate with that role. He’s approached by his ex, Shasta (Katherine Waterston), now stepping out with the mysterious property tycoon Mickey Wolfmann. She informs him that something strange is going down and asks Sportillo to do some snooping on her behalf. There’s also the little matter of a fugitive saxophone player (Owen Wilson) a mysterious yacht called The Golden Fang and a buttoned-down police officer (Josh Brolin) who seems to have no higher objective in life than to beat Sportillo up every now and then. I’d like to offer bit more information on the actual story, but the baffling jumble of odd happenings and misadventures that ensue are frankly mystifying. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that nearly every character talks in a mumbling monotone, that Sportillo seems incapable of doing anything until he’s had yet another joint and that random characters appear and disappear like the figments of an opium dream.

On the plus side, the era is convincingly evoked, a whole team of talented actors do their best with what’s on offer and the cinematography echoes those pre digital days of the decade that fashion forgot – but at over two and a half hours long, the story soon runs out of steam and leaves us floundering in a sea of bafflement with very little information to help us float. If this film resembles any other it’s Polanksi’s Chinatown, with perhaps a spoonful of The Big Heat thrown in for good measure, but Inherent Vice is simply not in the same league as either of those classics. It’s (dare I say it) a bit of a bore.

File this one under M for ‘Missed Opportunity.’ What a shame.

2.1 stars

Philip Caveney

Kingsman: The Secret Service

31/1/15

Matthew Vaughan, creator of Kick Ass, has made no secret of the fact that he’s long held a desire to direct a Bond movie. With Kingsman: The Secret Service, he may just have gone one better, creating an irreverent spoof that’s surely strong enough to become a franchise of its very own. Actually, in tone, it’s probably closer to long running TV series, The Avengers, a surreal blend of action, espionage and dark humour, but whatever it’s inspiration this works brilliantly, setting off at a brisk canter and accelerating into a full gallop.

Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is a teenager on a sink estate who’s life seems to be heading rapidly down the toilet. He’s surrounded by thugs (one of whom has got his grips on Eggy’s Mum (Samantha Janus) and his future looks decidedly bleak. But little does he suspect that he has an ally in Harry Hart (Colin Firth) a member of a secret organisation known as Kingsman. A pre credits sequence has revealed that Hart owes his life to the action of Eggsy’s late father, a member of the same organisation. Hart has vowed to take care of his son. So Eggsy finds himself invited to undergo the society’s ruthless initiation course, coached by Merlin (Mark Strong) a kind of Q figure, with access to all kinds of state-of-the-art weaponry. Along the way, the world faces destruction at the hands of Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) a communications billionaire with a fiendish plan to stamp out global warming and…

You know what? The ins and the outs of the plot hardly matter. Suffice it to say that Kingsman ventures into areas that the Bond franchise wouldn’t dare to tread. Based on a graphic novel by Dave Gibbons and scripted by Vaughan and Jane Goldman, the film is an inspired mix of action, comedy and cartoon violence that never falters and never loses it’s grasp on an audience’s attention. Firth convinces as an action hero with more than a passing nod to John Steed, a secret agent who is as concerned about the cut of his suit as he is about nailing the villains. Newcomer Egerton (looking eerily like a young Leonardo Di Caprio) clearly has a bright future ahead of him and should Vaughan decide to go this route a second time, I for one will be first in the queue to watch it. Superlative stuff.

4.8 stars

Philip Caveney

Bouquets & Brickbats

Theatre – Film – Comedy – Food

Film

Chappie

Still Alice

It Follows

Project Almanac

Wild

Selma

X Men: Days of Future Past

American Sniper

Inherent Vice

Kingsman: The Secret Service