braisedbywolves | Entries tagged with films

I took a week off in the middle of December (because I had holidays to burn before the end of the year) and generally had a nice relaxing time after the months beforehand. I took one day to go to the cinema though, and saw four films - ironically I could probably have fitted in more on a weekend - you get more 10am/10pm shows then.

The films I think largely cover the points of the cultural spectrum:

Gravity starts with a long shot in a couple of ways, a full 17 minutes without a cut. Alfonso Cuarón isn't new to that - there's a half-hour compilation* of all of his takes from his previous film, Children of Men, which run longer than 45 seconds - but this really is a masterwork, moving from an image of the earth in space towards the Hubble, introducing the characters, and then setting things in (sorry) motion. It'd be great to watch in any context, but assuming you know going in that it's not 90 minutes of pals pal around in space, it's also a great ratcheting up of tension - the perspective seems forced by the imaginary camera rather than the character or the normal plot beats, so you get to see some things in the background which the normal contract of film would demand that the camera follow, or acknowledge, even if the characters don't.

After that, the film continues on its path, not diverting very much from a series of predicaments and how the leads get out of them - not much in a sense happens but it's consistently gripping (and occasionally funny). Sandra Bullock is effective throughout, which is pretty much all the role calls for. By comparison George Clooney is used effectively as his own shorthand, cocky and twinkly with hidden depths. I'll be interested in contrasting it to All Is Lost when I see it.

Also it's worth pointing out that it's very very worth seeing it in 3D - it's an amazing show of masteryby Cuarón, and will hopefully be very influential as it's turning from gimmick into medium.

*Obviously you shouldn't watch that if you've not seen Children of Men. You should go see Children of Men as soon as possible instead.

Escape Plan is a fairly straightforward sell - Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger sharing billing at last (after a few brief cameos by Arnie in Expendables movies). The problem unfortunately is that when they're actually on screen together, only one of them has the charisma to actually propel the scenes through the dialogue. It's effectively a heist movie - Sly is an expert in prison security who tests them by breaking out, until he's tricked into a prison that has been built to the handbook he's produced, and has to rely on the genially deranged Arnie to help him get out.

Most heist movies are, like sci-fi, logic oriented, and so we get an origin sequence, Sly breaking out of a prison and then explaining his feat to the Governor - here's what he can do, here's how he works. And then, like any good magic trick, the situation adapts to nullify his powers (literally codified as his handbook on the serious prison's Governor's desk), and then the restraints are further defeated, or ideally turned on themselves. The problem I had with this is that, past a certain point, Arnie and Sly get access to guns, and it switches from a magic trick to magic - they have the protection of a pure soul that they are used to, their bullets never miss while the baddies' always do.

It's still a largely entertaining film though, some of that coming from Arnie cheerily playing a nutball, some of it a christmas pudding of casting - Jim Caviezel! Vinny Jones! 50 Cent! Vincent D'Onofrio! Unsurprisingly, if you think you might enjoy it, you probably will.

Leviathan also starts very slowly, in complete darkness and a growing mechanical noise. Eventually something starts to appear in the bottom right of the screen, bright orange and indistinct, and then eventually slowly it becomes clear that you're in a boat, viewing the scene from a spray-covered camera perched on a hat worn by one of the crew, looking over at his co-worker as they silently drag in a chain, connected to a larger chain. Our point-of-view man yells over to tie the chain around the metal post nearby, which his colleague doesn't do, and already the overwhelming sound and grimness of demeanour causes me wonder, partly from having seen Gravity, whether this film would also open with a death in the first shot. But it doesn't, and instead the machinery continues with it's purpose, dragging in another enormous catch of fish to be processed.

It's billed as a documentary, but to be honest, I'd describe it more as an art film which happens to be about stuff that's actually happening, similar to the Andy Warhol's work. The comparison to Gravity is strengthened a bit by the length of the shots - I would describe it as meditative, if you were up to meditating on the noise of heavy machinery and gurgling waters. I may have fallen asleep a few times (in the very cosy second ICA cinema), but each time when I woke up, the scene was still going on. There was a laugh in the cinema right a the start for the announcement that the film's rating was due to "One use of strong language", but to be honest I don't remember one use of language.

Also like Gravity it's worth seeing* in a cinema, not for the video but the audio this time. The trailer gives you a good idea.

*I am aware that there's not a lot of use in me saying this now, as opposed to a month ago when I saw it.

And the last film of the day was Frozen, which I'd been a little apprehensive about, but went to on the grounds that it was boasting a pedigree of Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph, and as tattered as the claims of "from the makers of" usually are, being willing to claim those films at least seemed worth rewarding. In fact it's co-written and co-directed by Jennifer Lee, who was one of the writers on Ralph, which is actually (and appallingly) the first Disney film with a woman in a director's chair.

It's a (considerable) reworking of the The Snow Queen, where the queen is Elsa, one of a pair of princesses, some of her later actions forced by her love of her sister Anna and wish to protect her from Elsa's powers. If you might be thinking that this sounds slight familiar, the casting director has got there ahead of you, and so Ella is played by Idina Menzel, the original Elphaba from Wicked:

In fact if there's a problem, it's that the film sets this up all so heart-breakingly, and then leaves most of the time to Anna's love triangle / attempts to reach Elsa / funny snowman sidekick. None of which is bad at all, and it's definitely enjoyably on it's own terms (plus, songs by the song-writers of Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon) but a film with more Elsa would have been great.

I went out to see this in the mighty Peckhamplex, with

moleintheground and

angelv and

oddnumbereven.

It the third (after Oblivion and After Earth) of the "man, fvck this planet" trilogy, made by that nice man who made District 9. You're quite possibly aware of the premise - All the rich people live in a lovely satellite ringworld, all the poor people on Earth can suck it. Here comes Matt Damon to sort things out!

The story's not that much more complex than that, most of the attraction comes from good stunt casting - William Fichtner as evil factory boss! District 9's Sharlto Copely as a shaggy Afrikaner "operative"!* Some guy who I was convinced was one of the hobbits! - and from some excellent special effects work. It does have serious case of Moppets Wise Beyond Their Years, and also does sloow down at the end, quite literally in places - it's worth remembering that District 9 was in fact "brought to us" by Meaningful Slomo addict Peter Jackson.

I think I'd really like to see Neill Blomkamp direct a film written by a good sci-fi writer - until then this is a very watchable way to spend your time.

* As a white South African, Blomkamp is more than happy to play on the fact that audiences are quite happy to love to hate white South Africans. Arnold Vosloo cannot surely avoid his casting calls forever.

Being, as previously discussed, similar to bands watched at a festival.

Firstly, we were I think flying BA to Bangkok the way out, then QANTAS on the other three flights (->Sydney, Sydney->Singapore->London). They were all well equipped with films, but the last leg was on an Airbus, which took it to ridiculous extremes. Yes, we will have two more from the current range, and four more from the 'Encore' range, and oh how about a new category called Oscar-Bait* with 95 films, including basically every classy English-language film of the last decade? I made a list of about a dozen films that I'd like to be seeing from the shorter menu - in a way I'd quite like to just spend 48 hours of a holiday watching films I've missed and occasionally being fed, were it not for the fact that the jetlag would kill me boom dead.

*name may not be accurate, but Oscar was definitely in there.

On the way out:

Madagascar 3, as previously mentioned.

Men In Black 3, from a series which could probably coast on the genial interaction of Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith for a while - though I'm not sure that I saw MIB 2, so I might be wrong there. Anyway, this is basically formed around a genius bit of casting - an old enemy pops back to 1969 and kills Jones's Agent K, so Smith's Agent J also takes the trip back to before the murder and meets the young K, played by Jones's No Country for Old Men co-star Josh Brolin. Brolin's impersonation is pretty good, and the story rolls on with the same beats as you'd expect (including stereotypical reaction to a black man in a sharp suit and a sharper car in 1969). There's a chase or two, some shooting, and a lovely turn as Emma Thompson as the new head of the service post Rip Torn - though the new history of her and K having A Thing in the past does kind of take the shine off the high point of the original MIB.

Ponyo, the latest from Hayao Miyasaki (so, 4 5 year old then), which I had gotten the impression was a more minor work (and which I almost felt like I'd seen already based on the sheer amount of 'making of' material I'd seen when we visited the Studio Ghibli museum in Japan three years ago). It's a smaller film, the inspiration is to an extent The Little Mermaid, but it's also based in a small coastal village, so some of Miyazaki's gentle environmentalism appears when the forces of the deep come to retrieve the titular sea-creature-turning-into-a-human. It works largely because Miyazaki is as equally skilled at depicting the comfortable routines of village life, the precariousness of that life in the face of uncaring nature, and the usual dreamlike presence of mystical non-human beings. And it reminded me of course that one of the more unsettling aspects of things dreamlike is not that weird things are happening, but that everyone else seems fine with them.

On the way back:

Avengers & "Only the Joker scenes of" The Dark Knight (IE about 85% of it in the end): these are obviously both great at what they're doing - an interesting comparison of the "Ahaha it is my plan to be captured do you see" where, for all his later protestations of "Do I really look like a guy with a plan?", it's the Joker that has clockwork in motion, and Loki who is basically just turning up to throw rocks at the spinning plates. It is an awful shame though that we won't get Batman 6: Ah Heck With It, Here's Another 90 Minutes Of The Joker.

Captain America, which was the only pre-Avengers film that I missed. I sort of meant to see it, but basically I reckoned I had the basics - skinny kid, Super Soldier serum, punching Hitler, probably something to do with the Red Skull. They were unlikely to decide that his parents were spies or that he was a clone, for example (though I've just remembered that the new Spiderman movie did go for that first one). And sure enough when he appeared in the Avengers, he worked pretty well by himself - the only thing I wouldn't have expected was a pre-existing connection to the Cosmic Cube, and they cleared that up pretty well.

As a side note, I really hadn't considered how much Chris Evans actually brings to the job until I watched some of the Avengers without sound over on someone else's screen on the flight over, and was wondering "why are these superheroes listening to the galoot with the head-cap?".

So, anyway, for an entirely inessential film, this was a lot of fun. It's pretty funny in a lot of places, including at least 15-minutes about Captain America's first post-serum job, appearing as propaganda to sell more war bonds. Also let's hear it for the stunt casting!

Toby Jones as Arnim Zola, world's most put-upon Nazi genius
Tommy Lee Jones (again) as Tough Gruff General
Dominic Cooper as Leonardo DiCaprio as Tony Stark('s dad)
Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull, the human-hating head of Hydra
hilarious sfx as Chris Evans's weakling lower body
Stanley Tucci as Doktor Erskine: "Yes I am a German, but I am not one of those Germans that idolises physical perfection, you have me entirely wrong there. I value strength, and will, and around these we will build physical perfection - oh what is everyone staring at me like that for now?"
New Doctor's companion Jenna-Louise Coleman as the blind date

30 minutes of Bernie - there is not in general a Richard Linklater film that I don't want to see, but possibly not the ideal venue for a gentle comedy about murder in Texas.

20 minutes of The Master - also not the right venue, but I think re-engaging with this will involve walking into a showing when it's 20 minutes in rather than be hit in the face repeatedly by the incisive characterisation that Joaquin Phoenix's character is possibly a little obsessed with sex.

Total Recall: God this is terrible though. I spent more of the film than I expected sitting through the moderately entertaining action and chase setpieces, appreciating the admittedly fine world design, waiting for the stuff from the trailer to finish and the film to start. Shockingly the arrival of Bill Nighy is a trend for the worse, as he talks wee Colin Farrell through the basics of "Dude did you ever consider that our version of reality is based on what you can remember?" - this shortly after they have actually brought to the front and disposed of the actual "is this real?" ambiguity in the plot. I have to confess that I've not seen the original of this - of the three great Verhoeven movies that are getting remakes, I have only seen Starship Troopers, not the original of this or Robocop. I should probably fix that, huh?

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Andrew Farrell

Entries tagged with films

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