Film

The Theory of Everything

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6/1/15

After the tragic tale of Alan Turing as portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game, prepare to be totally devastated by the almost equally tragic tale of Professor Stephen Hawking. Even if this story has a more uplifting conclusion, (Hawking winds up as a National hero rather than being chemically castrated) there’s still plenty to weep over along the way so be prepared and take along a good supply of tissues.

Based on the book my Hawking’s ex-wife, Jane, the story begins in 1963, where a vigorous young Stephen (Eddie Redmayne) is studying his craft at Cambridge University. The period detail is quite nicely captured, though this is a 1960s where (apparently) nobody smokes a cigarette and where a firework display looks decidedly better than the dismal pyrotechnics I remember from my own youth. But these are minor niggles. After a chance meeting at a pub, Stephen connects with Jane (a radiant Felicity Jones) and after a little uncertainty, they become lovers. But tragedy waits in the wings when after a fall, Stephen is diagnosed with motor neurone disease and told that he has two years to live. Cue the tears.

The remainder of the story is how the couple triumphed against all odds, managing to become parents three times over and how Stephen came to write the most successful book that nobody actually read. It’s also essentially about how Jane sacrificed so much in order to be Stephen’s full time carer. If you were worried that it would be all hearts and flowers, don’t despair, because there’s a fairly sour conclusion to this real life tale that’ll get the old tear ducts flowing all over again. A host of solid performers struggle to make themselves visible in minor roles (poor Emily Watson barely gets a look in) but this film belongs entirely to its lead actors. Redmayne is frankly astonishing, managing to inhabit Hawking’s tricky persona with ease and never losing sight of the man’s innate dignity, but it’s Jones who is the real revelation here, portraying Jane as a woman determinedly maintaining her English Rose composure whilst clearly displaying every inner torment through those soulful eyes. It’s surely a performance worthy of Mr Oscar when the time comes around.

The Theory of Everything is more than just another tearjerker. It’s stylishly done and comes complete with two superb performances fitted as standard. Just don’t forget to take that box of Kleenex!

4.6 stars

Philip Caveney

Annie

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4/1/15

Will Gluck’s reworking of Annie is a curate’s egg of a movie. The screening we attended what not so much peopled by ‘little girls’ whose freckles needed stamping on, as by women my age, who had clearly been fans of the 1982 version – and if they were anything like me – had high hopes this might have more verve and sparkle than the anodyne 1999 Disney adaptation. It certainly does have more verve and spark. In the lead role, Quvenzhané Wallis (an absolute delight in Beasts of the Southern Wild) is as feisty, kooky and determined as she needs to be and, she’s charming too, so that her disarming of Jamie Foxx (the restyled Daddy Warbucks) is quite credibly portrayed. The modernisation is nicely handled also. Foxx plays Will Stacks, a self-made mobile phone entrepreneur in need of a better media image; his cribs-style apartment is pure property porn. Rose Byrne as his PA, Grace Farrell, is perfectly adequate and it’s good to see Annie’s friendship with the (accidentally) racistly-drawn character of ‘mystic’ Punjab ousted in favour of a more sympathetic relationship with Warbucks’ chauffeur, Nash (Adawale Akkinuoye-Agbaje.)

But there are some unfortunate mis-steps too. Cameron Diaz’s Miss Hannigan really doesn’t work. She’s unconvincing as a foster mother of any sort, lurching and gurning her way drunkenly around the children’s home, clearly playing at trashy rather than living it. The music’s a bit hit-and-miss too. There are some interesting re-arrangements of the the old songs and a few new numbers thrown in to good effect, but they all lack lung-power and musicality; surely every musical needs at least one big blousy number? In 1982 Annie had some to spare. Here, they have been summarily kicked out and this is a mistake I think. Likewise the half-hearted choreography. Back in the day everyone hoofed it up in great style but here the actors stumble apologetically around as though they don’t quite want to admit they’re actually in a musical.

Overall, I liked it. Sort of. But I don’t see it capturing the imaginations of today’s kids in the way that Aileen Quinn and Carole Burnett did in the 80’s. This version simply isn’t strong enough to compete with everything that has gone before.

3.1 stars

Susan Singfield

Birdman

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1/1/15

The first film of the New Year turns out to be this quirky and offbeat offering from Alejandro Gonzalez Inaritu, a riveting slice of cinema that’s actually all about live theatre and the essential differences between the two media. It’s heartening to see a packed screening on opening night for what is essentially a highly experimental work, one that has as many questions as it does answers and one moreover that is cleverly edited to look like one continuous tracking shot.

Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) is undergoing a long dark night of the soul. Formally the star of a series of successful superhero movies, he is attempting to rejuvenate his career by appearing on Broadway in an adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story which he has written himself. When his lead actor is injured the night before the first performance, he manages to acquire the services of Mike Shiner (Ed Norton) a conceited method actor who is as destructive as he is accomplished. Meanwhile Riggan juggles the affections of his daughter cum personal assistant, Sam (Emma Stone), his lover Laura (Andrea Riseborough) his lead actress Lesley (Naomi Watts) and his manager, Jake (an unusually retrained Zach Galifiniakis.) But the spectre of his previous screen persona still haunts him and he is having terrible trouble differentiating between what is real and what is imaginary…

The film is never less than captivating and from time to time takes off on inspired flights of fantasy that dazzle the eye and stir the imagination. Keaton is a revelation in the lead role, giving the audience insights into the mind of a man who is constantly on the edge of insanity (his previous incarnation as Tim Burton’s Batman gives the story added poignancy) and the script comes laced with a vein of dark humour that never shrinks from savaging the very industry that has nurtured it. If the other films of 2015 are in this league it’s going to be a fine year indeed.

4.8 stars

Philip Caveney

Exodus: Gods and Kings

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30/12/14

Ridley Scott is perhaps the closest thing we have to a director of the stature of David Lean. Unabashedly old school he is never happier than when commanding armies of extras on a massive scale, so perhaps it was inevitable that he would eventually take on a biblical subject – the story of Moses. Here, the great man is played by a scowling Christian Bale who at the beginning of the film is fighting the Hitites alongside his ‘bessie mate’ Ramses (Joel Edgerton.) But when Ramses becomes pharaoh, word gets out that Moses is actually an adopted hebrew, a fact that gets him banished from Egypt and sent back to join ‘his people’ where before very long he is instructing them to seek their freedom.

There has already been some controversy about this film which features two caucasian actors in the lead roles and Scott’s reply (that it was all about getting funding and who would pay to see Mohammed Whatever in the lead role?) was understandably badly received, but I’m going to put that matter aside and concentrate on what’s on the screen, which really is a great big curate’s egg of a film. This being a Ridley Scott production, there are scenes of incredible cinematic splendour – the construction of the pyramids is amazing, the Plagues of Egypt are particularly jaw-dropping and the climactic parting of the waves is nail-biting stuff – but along the way we have to endure too many turgid scenes of people standing around in temples talking in (suspiciously contemporary terms) about fairly boring subjects. And one has to wonder why Scott bothered to engage the services of Sigourney Weaver when he wasn’t going to bother to give her anything to say. What I did like was the daring treatment of many of the accepted fantastical elements of Moses’ story. The parting of the waves is quite clearly a tsunami, we see Moses himself carving the ten commandments onto stone tablets and most contentious of all, ‘God’ is depicted as a scruffy kid with a bad haircut. Some will hate this, but what was the alternative? A white haired, bearded old geezer speaking in a stentorian voice? A bit too Life of Brian, methinks.

in the end, Scott does it his way and God help anyone who stands in his path. Overall, I enjoyed this, but those slow lengthy passages dragged down the final score somewhat. One thing is clear. When it comes to epic cinema, nobody else comes close to the majesty that is Ridley Scott. On a sad note, the film is dedicated to his brother, Tony, who took his own life in 2012.

3.8 stars

Philip Caveney

Big Eyes

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30/12/14

Tim Burton’s latest offering eschews the weird and wonderful fantasy for which he is best known and concentrates instead on a ‘so weird it has to be true’ tale about bad art and flawed people. In many ways, this is Burton’s best work since Ed Wood, with which it shares some DNA – scriptwriter Scott Alexander worked on both movies.

The film opens in the late 1950’s and Burton has skilfully evoked the era in his own exaggerated, slightly surreal way. Amateur painter, Margaret (Amy Adams) has just run out on her husband, taking her young daughter Jane along with her for the ride. She finds work and in her spare time tries to sell her paintings, a series of (rather dodgy) portraits of big-eyed children. She soon encounters Walter Keane (Christophe Waltz) another wannabe artist and the two of them hit it off. Within weeks they are married. When Keane’s flair for publicity starts to kindle interest in Margaret’s art, he persuades her to let the world believe that he is actually their creator and to release them under the signature of ‘Keane.’ She reluctantly goes along with it. But neither of them have realised quite how successful Margaret’s paintings will become. As the millions begin to roll in, Margaret finds herself increasingly tortured by the deceit that they have created; and the desire to be recognised as an artist. When the marriage starts to founder, it’s clear that one way or another, the truth will have to come out.

This is an intimate, small scale story that gets to the heart of the thorny subject of intellectual property. Adams and Waltz are both superb in their roles (Waltz has some particularly funny scenes, particularly in the courtroom drama at the film’s conclusion) and Burton is always better, I think, when his creative juices are reined in and he works with somebody else’s script. (Like many critics, I feel he’s lost his way lately – Alice In Wonderland was a particular disappointment, even though it racked up huge receipts at the box office.) Big Eyes however, is an excellent film and one that stands with his best work.

4.4 stars

Philip Caveney

One Chance

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24/12/14

Biopics are a notoriously difficult medium in which to score a cinematic hit, especially when the subject of said biopic is not particularly famous. Paul Potts’ singular claim to fame is that he was the winner of the very first series of Britain’s Got Talent. Since then, he’s remained pretty much out of the public eye, though by all accounts, he’s doing quite well for himself.

This film follows Paul (James Corden) through his episodes of childhood bullying, his inability to please his steelworker father (Colm Meany), his more sympathetic relationship with his mother (a criminally underused Julie Walters) his days as a salesman at Carphone Warehouse and his on-off romance with Julz (the ever-delightful Alexandra Roach.) Matters come to a head when, on a self-financed opera-course in Venice, despite showing considerable promise, his nerves eventually get the better of him when asked to perform for his hero, Pavarotti. There are also a couple on incidents of incredible bad luck which seem solely designed to put him off pursuing opera-singing as a career. Corden does a good job of making us care about Potts (indeed, it’s hard to understand why such large numbers of the general public reserve levels of contempt for this actor that would seem more suited to a fascist dictator.) While One Chance is hardly world-shattering stuff, it’s nonetheless an enjoyable slice of entertainment that actually managed to make me listen to the words of Simon Cowell without breaking out in hives.

The film died at the box office and it’s easy to see why – after all, who was it aimed at? Too trivial for opera-lovers, too serious for fans of BGT, too obscure for those who enjoy a good biopic. But nonetheless, this makes for decent family viewing on DVD.

3.8 stars

Philip Caveney

3.9 stars

Philip Caveney

Mr Jones

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Mr Jones is one of those low budget fright movies that allows a brief glimpse of the very good idea that lies at it’s heart, shortly before driving it into oblivion with a stack of ‘seen-it-all-before’ cliches. Unusually, this one starts unpromisingly, gets really good for about twenty minutes and then goes right off the boil, to the point where it’s a real challenge to stick with it to the bitter end.

Scott (Jon Foster) and Penny (Sarah Jones) are a pair of young film makers with a relationship that has drifted into the doldrums. In order to try and fix things, they take the unusual step of heading off into the wilderness for a whole year to see if they can ‘find’ each other. To make matters even worse, Scott decides to film a daily log and even devises a camera that can film the two of them simultaneously. (This will prove handy later on when things get nasty for them, but doesn’t always convince as a cinematic device). When a mysterious hooded hermit steals Scott’s rucksack, the couple go in search of it and find the workshop of ‘Mr Jones’ a mysterious clandestine artist (think Banksey only with weird sculptures) and quickly decide that the best way to rescue their relationship is to shoot a sneaky documentary about him. Because that makes perfect sense, right?Scott heads back to the city to invite various art experts to comment about Jones’ work (this is where the film all too briefly becomes rather interesting.) On Scott’s return however, things get uncomfortable as Jones starts hanging around the couple’s backwoods cabin, acting in a threatening manner.

This is where the film blows it all with a succession of (supposedly) creepy scenes of the silence, silence, silence, boo! persuasion and the story’s ultimate ‘twist’ (Jones’ identity) surprises absolutely nobody, since we all guessed it ages ago. The shame here is that this could have been a lot better than it actually is.

File it under ‘missed opportunity.’

2.5 stars

Philip Caveney

Venus In Fur

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17/12/14

In his private life, Roman Polanski has incurred the wrath of many people. He’s also the cinematic genius who created masterpieces like Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown. It’s often hard to weigh these two truths against each other. Can we really judge him only on his work and conveniently blank out what he gets up to in private? You’d have thought that in his current state of disgrace, he’d stay well away from films of a questionable sexual nature, so what are we to make of Venus In Fur, a movie whose very raison d’être is to stir the murky waters of human sexuality? Based on the play by David Ives, it’s a two-hander, which is played out in a deserted theatre and as with his previous movie, Carnage, Polanski has made no real attempt to ‘open it up’ for cinema viewing. To further cloud the waters, the film stars Emmanuelle Seigner (or as she’s sometimes know, Mrs Polanksi) and Mattieu Amalric, an actor who bears a strong physical resemblance to the director. What was Polanski trying to say here? Is this intended to be some kind of vindication of his personal life? It’s hard to say but surely these things cannot be mere coincidences?

Amalric is Thomas, a writer and director, who has just been auditioning a series of actresses for the lead role in his titular play, an adaptation of the infamous novel by Baron von Sacher Masoch (from whom the word ‘masochism’ derives.) We join Thomas at the end of a fruitless audition, where he’s expressing his hopelessness at ever finding a young woman capable of playing his heroine, Varda. Then a woman stumbles into the theatre, a woman with that very name, who begs him for the opportunity of a quick read-through with him. Tom is reluctant at first, but eventually succumbs to persuasion and quickly begins to realise that not only is this Varda very accomplished in the role, she seems to know an awful lot more about him and his work than he might have expected. As the actors become subsumed into their respective characters the sexual politics swing back and forth as they struggle for supremacy…

First of all, both Seigner and Amalric offer nicely nuanced performances and the onstage antics aren’t anything like as overt as you might have supposed. There’s little in the way of nudity and the film has comfortably managed a 15 certificate. The script veers from clever and incisive to occasionally rather clumsy (some vague hints that Seigner’s character might be supernatural are never really consolidated.) Ultimately, the film is fatally skewered by a sudden (and frankly rather risible) ending that undoes much of the actors’ best efforts to make this unwieldy contraption fly. It’s by no means awful, but neither is it in the same league as Polanski’s best work and this one should be filed under ‘interesting failures.’

3.5 stars

Philip Caveney

The Love Punch

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6/12/14

Sometimes in cinema, you encounter a bit of fluff. And other times, you encounter double fluff with extra fluff and i suppose this is the file to which you would safely consign The Love Punch. This light comedy featuring more mature actors than you’d normally expect to see in this kind of story was probably aimed at the same audience that The Exotic Marigold Hotel mined so effectively, but it’s nothing like as assured and it has to be said, it’s profoundly silly, to boot.

Pierce Brosnan plays Richard, an affable chap who works for a multi-national company (in what capacity, we’re never entirely sure.) He’s divorced from Kate (Emma Thompson) with whom he maintain an affable friendship (cynics will mutter that we’re already straying into the realms of the unbelievable.) When the company is purchased by a ruthless asset-stripper, the pension scheme into which Richard and most of his staff have bought, (Kate too, as it happens) is rendered entirely worthless. The head asset-stripper decamps to Paris in order to get married and publicly purchases a ten million dollar diamond necklace for his beloved, whereupon Richard and Kate hatch a plan to pop across the channel and nick it (as you do.) They also enlist the help of their plucky neighbours, Penelope and Timothy (Celia Imrie and Timothy Spall) and with a confidence that belies their humble origins, the foursome set off to take on the bad guys.

The problem is, that the characters manage to assay their chosen mission with such aplomb everything seems faintly unbelievable. And more fatally, there’s never any real sense of danger, no fear that something might go wrong for them, even when Richard and Kate find themselves in the back of a van perched on the edge of a cliff. Obviously, the veteran actors all make the most of this meagre material and the film’s enough to pass an undemanding hour or so, but nothing more than that. This is perfunctory film-making at best. You’ll have forgotten the details before the credits have finished rolling. And will Richard and Kate get back together? Who cares?

2.8 stars

Philip Caveney

Paddington

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30/11/14

For what is ostensibly just another children’s movie, Paddington arrives surrounded by controversy. It has a PG certificate (mildly ridiculous when you think of the kind of big budget carnage that generally acquires a 12A) and others have complained that this new cinematic manifestation features a bear (voiced by Ben Whishaw) that is decidedly ursine and not at all like Michael Bond’s original teddy bear creation. At the end of the day all this matters little. The film is a real delight, cleverly put together and featuring plenty of content to appeal to the more mature viewer. In fact, it might be true to say that much of it will be wasted on really young viewers and there are a couple of scenes here (mostly those featuring evil taxidermist, Millicent (Nicole Kidman)) that may actually traumatise them.

The film begins with an origins story (something that Bond never bothered with) which shows a family of rare bears in ‘darkest Peru’ that are discovered by British explorer Montgomery Clyde (Tim Downie.) From him they learn to speak English and acquire a liking for marmalade. When he departs, he leaves them with an open invitation to visit him in London. But it takes a tragedy (an earthquake) to galvanise young Paddington into heading for England.  At Paddington station, he meets the Brown Family – Hugh Bonneville as an uptight insurance broker and Sally Hawkins as a much more free-thinking book illustrator. The Browns and their two children take Paddington in as a guest and much hilarity ensues…

And it does ensue, most convincingly. In fact, the script by Paul King, never puts a paw wrong, milking the slapstick sequences for enough laughs to keep a young audience entertained, whilst delving into more wistful pastures for older viewers. There’s a wonderfully inventive feel to the film – a host of Heath Robinson-esque inventions, some really appealing visual tricks (a repeated trope of the Brown’s home depicted as a doll’s house is a particular pleasure) and of course Ms Kidman’s character which introduces a touch of menace that the original story lacked. Despite so many doubts, the film makers have done credit to Michael Bond’s original creation (he himself has said that he can ‘sleep easy’ after viewing it) and have successfully ‘opened it up’ to create a satisfying family entertainment, that only the grumpiest viewer will find fault with. A well-deserved hit for the festive season.

4.6 stars

Philip Caveney