James Bond has returned in… Skyfall
This year sees 50 years of Bond and, for once, we’re talking about films that I have a history with. The first film I ever remember seeing was A View to a Kill and I saw every Bond that came out from then on.
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I saw Looper a few weeks ago now but I’ve been putting off the review, mainly because I just don’t know what I can say about it… “It’s a good solid sci-fi flick that you should go and see” seemed a little sparse. So… I thought a bit harder and this is what I came up with.
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I have to admit, it was with a certain degree of trepidation that I toddled along to Bollywood blockbuster Ek Tha Tiger on Saturday night. I’d never seen one before but they’re all singing and dancing and that kind of thing aren’t they?
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The Bourne Legacy is in a bit of a conundrum.
Basically it was a sequel that no-one wanted but most were still optimistic about.
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When is an Alien movie not an Alien movie? When it’s a sci-fi movie, it seems.
In preparation for Prometheus I watched Alien, Alien3 and Alien: Resurrection during the week*. Truth is, I was never massively into the first two Alien films. I don’t have a problem with them per se, my hazily remembered impressions were positive… I just don’t care about them. I’d never seen the last two so now seemed as good a time as any to “get around to it”.
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Man on a Ledge is one of those small films that creep up on you… You have no idea they exist and then BAM! They’re all over the place and it turns out they even have people you’ve heard of in them.
As a result, I went into Man on a Ledge only knowing that it starred Sam Worthington, Elizabeth Banks and Jamie Bell. And I put it to you that this is the best way to be. So if you haven’t seen it you can stop reading now. Not that I’m going to give away spoilers, I do, of course, have a no spoiler policy, but it’s worth not even having any expectations.
Course, from the title, Man on a Ledge sounds like a high concept thriller… but it’s actually not. Which was somewhat disappointing to me but how or never. The premise is that Sam Worthington plays a disgraced cop, convicted of a crime he swears he did not commit. He’s exhausted his last appeal and now faces 25 years or so in prison. He’s obviously not happy about this. To tell you any more would be giving things away so I’ll move right along.
What you get with Man on a Ledge is a tight, taut thriller. It’s relatively short, at 102 mins, and it manages to pack a surprising amount of plot in that time. Crucially though, and you’d think this would be something that more films would focus on, the plot makes sense. Well ok, being honest, there’s a couple of rather large plot holes, but they’re nothing that are worth focusing on. You can skim over them with ease.
What keeps the film moving is it’s tight structure. It never gets boring as, with almost clockwork precision, an interesting plot point is revealed nearly every 15 mins. This makes it feel a little like an extended TV show, but that’s not to its detriment. If it’s a TV show, it’s a good one with much higher production values and a rather more talented cast than you might generally get on TV. Except on HBO. They get some serious stars over on that channel…
Another thing that I enjoyed about it, though it is part of what firmly takes it out of high concept territory, is that there’s a bit of levity to it. We don’t spend all our time being very serious on the ledge. There are some great and very funny scenes with Jamie Bell and Genesis Rodriguez, good fun as supporting characters. Rodriguez is certainly an actress I’d like to see in more English speaking roles, I think she could be a great comic actress. Her next role is in Will Ferrell’s Casa de mi Padre, so here’s hoping my hunch is right! And, of course, that Will Ferrell’s new film is actually funny…
My only real criticism of Man on a Ledge is that there may be a slight dragging toward the end.. but I think that has more to do with Ed Harris. He seemed a little confused as to why he was there. He never seemed comfortable in the film. Perhaps he just never got on board with the concept… All in all though, Man on a Ledge is a neat little thriller. It’s probably not going to set your world on fire, but it’s well worth a look.
6.5/10
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Steve Soderbergh continues his traipse through the genres with his latest offering, Haywire. This time he’s decided to make an action film.
I wish he hadn’t.
Haywire is a truly bizarre piece of film-making. It’s as though a rabid jazz fan decided to make an arthouse action flick. I don’t understand why this film happened. At all. I did not enjoy the experience of watching this experiment and I do not want to see one again.
Thing about the film is, it’s not that Soderbergh is a bad director. It’s like Contagion in that sense. It looks good, the acting is… acceptable. It’s just… not a good film. I have no doubt in my mind that Soderbergh has made the film he set out to make, I just don’t know why he made the choices that he made. At every turn there is, what I think is, a mistake.
I’ll start with the score. There are large swathes of the movie with no music at all, we’re just left with silence and the occasional burst of ambient noise. Which is fine. Except all at once this random, jazzy, elevator type music will start up. I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about this. The music neither takes it’s cue or gives a cue as to what’s happening on screen at any time. There is a long action sequence near the start where you hear nothing at all but this weird tinkling jazzy music – all kinds of, quite frankly, mad stuff, is going on on-screen and all we hear is… music. No shouting, no conversing, no effects at all. Why?
The cinematography was similarly strange. Vast parts of the movie look like they were shot in ambient light. To the extent that it’s hard to make people out from time to time, and I don’t mean because they were hiding in shadows. As a result there’s quite a dull palette on offer here – browns, greys, blacks and the occasional hint of blue. That’s pretty much it. It doesn’t make for an exciting watch.
Not quite the same but similar was the camera work itself. It’s not that it’s particularly shaky, a pet hate of mine. It’s that, at times – especially when Carano is running around – the camera is all over the place. Swooping over her head, swinging around a corner, poking her in the eye. Sometimes there’s a long shot, just for the craic it would seem. I don’t know what effect they were trying to achieve… It’s as though they’d heard somewhere that your camera should get involved in the action but they weren’t sure what it meant. It was just confusing.
And while we’re on the subject of confusing… the plot. I don’t want to give anything away but there really seemed to be a lot of convolution for convolutions sake. I’m actually still not entirely sure where we finished up on everyone. It doesn’t matter though. I don’t care and I don’t think they did either. This picture was about ass kicking. Which brings me on to…
… The script. I’d almost forgot the script. Easy thing to do since there wasn’t much of one. Most of the dialogue was functional. Generally it seemed to just serve to get Ms. Carano from one reason to kick someone’s ass to the next.
It was as though the whole thing was a pastiche of a ’70s action film, or worse still, a pastiche of a Quentin Tarantino pastiche of a ’70s film. Except for a scene where a camouflage faced Carano stares into a fire in the darkness, the light flickering on her face. That’s when I thought, maybe he’s going for the early ’80s?
It’s hard to find anything to like about this movie but I will say this one thing. Gina Carano sure can kick ass. Of course, being a professional MMA fighter, you’d hope she could. That element of the film was relatively satisfying. Compared to what you’d usually see in films, these fights looked very realistic. They weren’t a blur of fists and quick cut camera work, so that was nice. They also sounded realistic. I’m not sure if that was a good thing though, we’re used to the more snappy side of foley artistry for fist fighting so it sounded a bit deadened to my ears.
The rest of the surprisingly stellar cast were also good, Michael Douglas played his role with remarkable aplomb, considering he was only in it sparingly. Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender and even Channing Tatum got on board when they were needed. I also wanted to single out Bill Paxton as well, as her father. Nice to see him around, albeit briefly.
Oh, there’s also some amusement to be had from the fact that it’s filmed in Dublin. It’s kinda cool to see the streets you walk every day in a movie. Even if I throughly disliked the movie.
The fact is, friends, this isn’t the film that it could or should have been. I don’t know why Soderbergh decided to make it in this fasion, but I think that Carano actually has a chance at being an action hero. Unfortunately films like this aren’t going to do her massive favours. It’s not the worst film I’ve ever seen (which one friend of mine exclaimed after the screening) but it certainly looks like an early contender for one of the spots near the bottom… She gonna need something with a little more pizzazz to get the audience to notice her.
Around the time of Contagion, Soderbergh announced that he was planning to take some time out from film-making to work on his painting… Here’s hoping. Maybe he’ll come back fresh and reinvigored rather than churning out sad facsimiles of genre films.
3.5/10
Read MoreSo… my first review of 2012 is a film that was probably one of the first films I saw in 2011… As it so happens it’s also turned out to be one of my top films of 2011. How’s about that. I’ll be doing a post on my 2011 top films soon enough but for the moment here’s the review
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In Time is the latest film from writer/director Andrew Niccol, who wrote and directed Gattaca. I love Gattaca. Really, it’s one of my top 10 films. So obviously this meant I had fairly high hopes for In Time. Not massively high because well, S1m0ne was a bit of a strange one and I’d heard pretty poor reports of Lord of War… but still, I liked the concept…
In Time is set in a world where time has literally become money. Each child is born with 1 year in the wallet (a glowing set of figures on their arm) and at the age of 25 they stop ageing and start spending the money on their clock. Time can be earned and spent and when it runs out, poof, you’re dead.
It sounded like a potentially fascinating setting for a film. Unfortunately, with In Time, Niccol has wasted the concept. It actually starts off reasonably strong, I’ll spare you the details but basically JT is a lowly factory worker, working to his last minutes every day. One night he comes across a mysterious stranger who, for relatively interesting reasons, gives him a lot of money. I liked that, there were myriad directions to go in with that idea… and that’s the problem.
This film has no idea what it’s trying to say. Time is money. Great. Money brings you time. Cool. Now what? Apparently “what” is a “cat and mouse game” brought about by a ridiculous misunderstanding. Which develops into some kind of a bloodless Bonnie & Clyde caper. Somewhere, somehow, I think they were trying to make some commentary on society, but it was hard to tell as they desperately tried fabricate a whole bunch of unnecessary villans while throwing in a few scenes where we could appreciate how good-looking the leads were.
It really just didn’t know how to stick the knife in… if indeed that’s what it was trying to do. What we’re left with is bits and pieces of ideas. They’re obviously trying to make a comment on banks and the current economic situation, but then they seemed to get scared of it. They danced around, having a peek at it, then backing away and bringing the film back into its (weak) characters. And the heist stuff, that could have been fun, but they had no time, no time. And what about Cillian Murphy’s timecop? He could have been quite the character… but we had to go take a wander down thug town for no reason. This film could have been fascinating and insightful, I mean that time is money is a good strong concept. But no. It was not to be.
Ahh… to be honest I don’t really want to go to hard on it. You might like the fact that it’s quite light for such a lofty concept. I didn’t but then I am quite the sci-fi fan and dystopia is my fiction of choice. So really, this movie just spit at me. I mean, don’t get me started on how messy the actual mechanics of using money is in this society. Really. It’s just, it makes no sense. It kills me a little.
Oh, if you’re wondering if JT can act, he’s ok. Nothing to write home about. Following up The Social Network with a couple of comedies was a good idea but he’ll have to work a bit harder on the next one if he wants to get any respect.
I suppose the main problem I had was that, the stranger and his motivations at the beginning had made the film seem quite ambitious, but in the end it turned completely away from that. I just hope that some time, in the future, someone takes the “time is money” thing and actually runs with it. It could even be Niccol again if he promises to make a proper movie with it. I love his aesthetic but… Why? Why did he do this?
5/10
Strange, strange, strange.
I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting to like Red State. I liked the trailer but I’m not particularly a fan of Kevin Smith; I can still smell Cop Out from here… then again, I did really like Zack and Miri Make a Porno and I thought Chasing Amy was kind of interesting. So maybe I shouldn’t have been so apprehensive.
I guess the big issue was that, a lot has happened since Zack and Miri and I just wondered, is he really up to making a good movie? I mean, it looked like a cool horror film and I liked horror but… I am so often disappointed by horror as well that there just seemed no point to being properly excited.
As a result… and likely as a direct result, I really quite enjoyed Red State. It’s not the finest piece of drama I’ve ever seen, nor is it the funniest comedy, but there’s was just something about it. It had an idea behind it. Now, it was a pretty simple and obvious idea – to make extremist Christians and federal goverment organisations look stupid – but it was relatively well thought out and that’s more than I can say for some horror films. Ok ok, that’s not fair, I’m simplifying, but the point is it tried from something a bit more than a slasher film.
In case you haven’t seen the trailer – and I won’t go beyond what you see in the trailer – Red State starts off with 3 high schoolers boy being lured with the promise of sex, to the compound of an extremist Christian group. Next thing you know, the ATF show up and all hell breaks loose – Waco style. You can see the various trailers in my clips and trailer: Red State post if you fancy a look.
The big thing that surprised me about the film, especially after the trailer, is that Red State isn’t a horror film at all. It’s… hmm…. I can’t really put it in a genre. That’s what’s interesting about it. Kevin Smith really does seem to try and do something new here. Unfortunately for him, he just can’t quite seem to get it right. There’s a lot wrong with this film. A lot wrong. That’s not say that you shouldn’t see it. But be warned…
First issue is… the dialogue between the teens, ably played by Kyle Gallner, Michael Angarano and Nicholas Braun, is some of the worst I’ve ever heard. Now, I never really notice swearing, honestly I don’t, and it doesn’t particularly offend me, but you couldn’t help but notice it here. These kids talked for twice as long as they should have with all the swearing. Seriously. A bit is fine. Some is fine. This was excessive. This was just stupid. Nobody talks like that.
Secondly the film is very inconsistant. It seems as though it’s trying to appeal to a teen audience at some points, a gore crowd at others, the arthouse audience along the way and just a broad cinema audience at times. It skips all over the place, never quite managing to focus or develop properly in any direction. It’s frustrating.
There are some other specific weak points that will test the audience. There’s a monologue from Parks which went on about 5 minutes too long and there’s one girl who’s just terrible. The sooner she was off the screen the better. It can’t be escaped though that the main problems are in the script and direction. Small niggling points like those can be ignored if the film hung together better.
To be honest, it’s just a shame, because I think there are flashes of greatness. Michael Parks and Melissa Leo put in some great performances and, as I mentioned, the teens (?) are relatively decent – shame about the dialogue. It’s also quite a fearless film in many ways, possibly borne of the… situations… Kevin Smith has found himself in recently. I just wish that… I think that… it just needed someone else to step in and reign him in.
Anyway, I do think Red State is worth a look. I wouldn’t call it some kind of return to form, or say that it shows Kevin Smith as the brilliant film-maker we know he can be. Hell, I never thought he was much of a film-maker anyway. But do go along and see it, or pick it up on DVD when it comes out. It’s not going to be a massive waste of your life. It can’t be really, it’s quite short.
6.5/10
