Reviews - 2004

The Aviator

The new Martin Scorsese film and it's an improvement over his last - Gangs of New York. It's a biopic of Howard Hughes - aviator, film maker, and obsessive-compulsive sufferer, and Hughes did lead a very interesting life by all accounts. Although I enjoyed this film a lot it's not without its faults. It's by no means a bad film, but biopics by their nature tend to be problematic for a lot of people because they get wrapped up in whether or not the events depicted in the film really happened and in what way, which events the director has concentrated on, and which he's glossed over etc. etc. Well here's the thing; a filmmaker usually takes a stand on his subject, and it's usually favourable because he admires the person he's making the film about, or he wouldn't want to make it in the first place. Consequently the viewer doesn't get the whole truth of the man, and so I believe that anyone watching a biopic should forget the fact that it's a 'true story' and just watch it for the same reasons as you'd watch any other film. After all, any information you already have on the subject came to you as second hand knowledge anyway, so you've no way of knowing fact from fiction. The other problem people have complained about with this film is that it just seems to stop with no real conclusion, but I think that there are two reasons for this: The first is that DiCaprio is just too young to pull off the ageing, reclusive Hughes successfully, and the second is that every other telling of the Hughes story concentrates on the intriguing rumours and sensational conjectures surrounding the latter half of his life which, in truth no-one really knows anything much about, so Scorsese rightly decided not to tackle that part. Having said all that, there is much to admire in this film; its rooted in a fantastic portrayal of Hughes's early life by Leonardo DiCaprio which alone is more than worth the price of admission. The other performances are all very good, especially Cate Blanchett, Alan Alda and a nice cameo from John C. Reilly. It looks great, with some snazzy cgi, nice cinematography and some entertainingly flambouyant camerawork. All things considered this is a very good effort.

Closer

This film is okay if you're in the mood, but what a mood you'd have to be in. A surly, bad tempered, resentful mood I think. The four leads are all in good form - Jude Law puts in a decent performance, Julia Roberts does another Notting Hill turn, Natalie Portman is all grown up and looking good, and Clive Owen's performance is several notches higher than his usual standard. But it's a kind of jaded, spiteful film with nothing good to say about people and the world they inhabit. Very pessimistic and ultimately quite depressing unless you feel the same way about life, in which case you can revel in the hurtful things these people say and do to each other, but really - what's the point in that?

Collateral

New Tom Cruise film, and I believe it's the first film he's played a proper baddie. Again I'm going to have to warn anyone who hasnt seen this film and doesn't want to know what happens at the end to stop reading now. Yet another weak - and silly - ending. I enjoyed this film quite a bit for about three quarters of it's length. From about this point on though events get more and more unbelievable with each passing scene, and finally it all descends into dumbness. And just for once I'd appreciate the killer (Cruise) getting away with it. Hollywood just can't stand to have a protagonist who does bad things get away with it: that's just sending the wrong message to the kids - 'people who do bad things will be punished' is the message and I'm really tiring of it. The film could have been great if it had kept up the tone of the first three quarters.

Crash

A good ensemble piece dealing with the racism rife in American society today. Crash is the second film as director from writer Paul Haggis (the first being Red Hot in 1993) and it's a quality production featuring some outstanding performances. Matt Dillon is very good as a working class cop on the beat and Don Cheadle is as brilliant as ever as an ambitious detective. There are a few surprises such as Thandi Newton - an actress I normally dislike - turning in a very strong performance and Brendan Fraser and Sandra Bullock popping up as a district attorney and his wife - always a surprise to see either of them in anything serious, but both decent. There aren't many characters to root for because everyone is pretty racist and dislikable for much of the time but it's well done, if a bit contrived..

Dead Man's Shoes

This was a nice surprise for me. Normally I wouldn't go out of my way to catch a British film, but this was a well executed piece of independent cinema, full of wit and suspense which has none of the glitz and pizzazz of your typical Holywood production - which was very refreshing. It's a fairly grim tale of revenge which doesn't put a foot wrong from start to finish. I enjoyed this film a lot and would recommend it highly to those with the stomach for some refreshingly realistic brutality, peppered with some very funny situations. It looks like it's only a matter of time before Shane Meadows gets his big break and bursts into the mainstream with a bang. I look forward to it.

Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind

This is bizarre. Written by the (surely unbalanced) Charlie Kaufman this is the kind of film that will stand up to repeated viewings - if only to understand what the hell's happening most of the time. Kaufman's tales usually spiral off into odd, skewed situations that turn in on themselves, but there's always a thread of logic running through them guiding the way for the dedicated viewer. Patience and unflagging concentration will be rewarded in this tale of lost love, regret, and wiped memories which features some excellent performances - especially Jim Carrey in a career best turn. The plot, involving an organisation which erases painful memories of people with whom clients have been involved is reminiscent of a lot of Philip K. Dick books and stories concerning the nature of reality and unreliable memories, and it's presented here with a lot of skill and panache by director Michel Gondry. But this is really Kaufman's show all the way. One of the most interesting films I've seen in a long time. Hollywood needs Charlie Kaufman.

Harry Potter And The Prisoner of Azkaban

This is the straw that broke the camel's back - I won't be watching any of the forthcoming Harry Potter films now that I've endured this mess. There are too many obstacles to enjoying the Harry Potter films that simply cannot be overcome. The three lead characters; Harry, Ron and Hermione are played by people who just can't act. They're all horribly embarrassing, especially Daniel Radcliffe in the lead role - and we're stuck with Radcliffe for the full seven films no matter what. This film, which incidentally is adapted from what I would say is the best Potter novel so far, has been dumbed down almost to the point of parody. The direction is staggeringly slipshod; scenes are cobbled together with very little care or attention to detail, and the filming style is flat and uninvolving - it actually seems like a low-budget television production which has a tight shooting schedule and little money, with a cheap hack at the helm of it all. The characters, so well observed and grounded in the novels, are merely one dimensional cardboard cutouts in the film - which explains a lot of the terrible acting I suppose: Poor old Professor Dumbledore - played with a gentle winsomeness in the first two films by the late Richard Harris is now a hard-edged autocrat as played by Michael Gambon. And it's decisions like this crucial miscasting that pervade the whole production. Such a pity - peach of a book; train-wreck of a film.

Hellboy

Nazi's! Mutants! Occult Experiments! Monsters all over the shop! This is fun, and it's professionally done. The film starts during the end of World War II when a troop of soldiers find a strange little red gargoyle, who's slipped through the gateway from Hell during an impressive experiment performed by Rasputin the mad monk! Anyway, the troops adopt him and name him Hellboy. For the rest of the film we follow the adult Hellboy on his missions for the government, which mostly involve battling lot's of monsters for reasons that, from the viewer's point of view don't really matter too much. What really matters in this film as far as I can see is that Hellboy has a big stone arm and horns on his head that he keeps cropped with an industrial sander. It's also kind of cool to have your superhero chomping on a cigar and bitching about how all these damn monsters keep hassling him. So, if you can take the film on that kind of level then it's a lot of fun. Kind of ditzy ending though.

I Heart Huckabees

Now this is a strange one. It's pretty much just a film about philosophy, but it's done in quite an interesting and fun way. Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman are a man and wife team of existentialist detectives trying to save a couple of clients (Jason Schwartzman and Mark Wahlberg) from an evil nihilist, whose book is threatening to send them off the edge of reason. It all starts off so well and almost holds it together, but the centre of this movie can't hold and everything starts to unravel and eventually spins apart, and becomes a bit of a mess. It does, however have a lovely sense of humour about itself and its pretensions, and consequently endeared itself to me. The best thing about the film though is Dustin Hoffman whose performance is just sublimely watchable. The other performances are very good aswell. All in all a good effort.

The Incredibles

There's nothing particularly wrong with this movie, but I didn't care for it much. The jokes were, for the most part, flat and forgettable. There was no sense of excitement, or danger, or tension. The story seemed more of an afterthought than an adventure - just an excuse for some set-pieces which, when they came seemed predictable and a bit dull. In fact I found myself spending large chunks of this movie pretty bored. It seemed to me like Pixar were on autopilot with this movie. Technically it's as impressive as anything else Pixar has done, but I thought it was just missing that certain something.

I, Robot

I'm getting a bit sick of saying the same thing over and over again about the latest Hollywood blockbusters. They're all broken and they're all broken in the same way. Hollywood's idea of what constitutes cinematic quality is astonishingly wide of the mark.This film consists solely of cliche after cliche, implausable and downright stupid action sequences and an incomprehensibly daft story, all smothered in glitz and technology to try and hide the lack of any real quality. If you pay any attention to the dialogue in I, Robot you'll find yourself wincing so often you'll feel like someone hooked you up to a set of electrodes, and if you appreciate fine acting then don't look to Will Smith - he's supremely, embarrassingly bad; every time I see him in a film I can't shake the memory of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, because that's the extent of his acting talents. Another sub-mental, tedious waste of money.

Kinsey

Liam Neeson is very good as the biology professor turned pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. With a tremendous amount of field work and years of tireless probing Kinsey compiled the most comprehensive record of human sexuality in America. Upon publication it caused an outcry among the public and sexual behaviour previously thought to be rare or even non-existent amongst 'normal' people was suddenly revealed to be more prevalent than anyone suspected. The film concentrates on Kinsey's struggles to find acceptance and funding for a project which many were reluctant to hear about let alone participate in. Neeson's Kinsey is a man of science to the exclusion of everything else, which makes for some intriguing scenes where the people around him are caught in a vortex of emotion and Kinsey, at the centre of it all, remains perplexed at the consternation he has caused by a few harmless questions about their sexual predilictions. An interesting one.

The Ladykillers

Each Coen Brothers film seems to be worse than the last recently but I enjoyed this film more than their last - Intolerable Cruelty, which itself wasn't bad. George Clooney saved Intolerable Cruelty and Tom Hanks does a similar job with The Ladykillers, although he's given a run for his money by Irma P. Hall as the gullible old landlady Hanks and his cohorts descend upon in a bid to relieve the nearby casino of it's takings. As with all the Coens's films there's a lot to appreciate - it looks gorgeous as all their films do, and there's a dozen lovely touches every five minutes or so. But it's the dialogue that wins the day in this film. Almost every line uttered keeps a smile on your face and Tom Hanks's hilariously delivered professorial verbosity is just priceless. All the performances are excellent and the banter between the various members of Hanks's crew is amusing. Although it's a great film for what it is, it's a slight tale - as all the recent Coen films have been - and I find myself wishing the boys would make a film with some real substance; something to sink your teeth into. A word of warning though to those that have seen the 1955 original of which this film is a remake - I haven't seen that film, and so had nothing to compare it to, and this may have been a factor in my enjoyment of this film.

Layer Cake

Solid first film from Matthew Vaughn starring the recently announced successor to Pierce Brosnan as the new 007 Daniel Craig. I can see Craig as the new Bond - he has that Bond-ish way about him. He's the best thing about this film, which is a Lock Stock and Two Smoking barrels type gangster flick set in present day London. I found this much more enjoyable than Lock Stock because although it's sprinkled with visual tricks and flashy techniques, it doesn't over-use them a la Guy Ritchie. There's nothing much story or plot wise to distinguish itself from any other gangster film but I can think of a lot worse ways to spend two hours.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zisou

This is the fourth film by Wes Anderson, and it's excellent fun. Bill Murray is in top form as Steve Zissou - a kind of Jacques Cousteau but with a fraction of his budget. He's leading a crew of assorted misfits on some Boy's Own style adventures including hunting the fearsome Jaguar shark which ate his second in command 'for revenge'. The ensemble cast is in fine form and they all look as if they are having a whale of a time - if you'll pardon the pun. This is one of those films that improves in your memory after you've finished watching it. The atmosphere is just so inviting that it draws you in and makes you want to spend more time with the characters - I happily watched it again the next night.

The Machinist

Although this film is nicely done, the main reason for watching is Christian Bale: It's hard to take your eyes off him - partly due to his scarily ghost-like appearance, but mainly due to his astonishing performance as a man with more personal demons than you can shake a stick at. Looking like a refugee from some concentration camp, he grabs the film by the scruff of the neck and drags it along behind him as his quest to find out what's going on takes us to the outer reaches of human paranoia. I was a bit concerned that everything would just sink into silliness as so many of these types of films do these days, but the tale unravels in a satisfyingly tidy way in the end. Add some smart direction, interesting cinematography and a good supporting cast in to the mix and you can be sure things never become dull.

Million Dollar Baby

Clint Eastwood's new film, which is a hot contender for the best picture Oscar this year - and I can see why: It's a sentimental tale of fighting against the odds - the number one favourite theme of the Academy. There are really two films here; one with Clint Eastwood (Frankie Dunn) and Morgan Freeman (Eddie 'Scrap-Iron' Dupris) - which I found very interesting, and another with Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank (as Maggie Fitzgerald) which I found predictable and hackneyed. The first film, which features Frankie and Scrap facing their respective demons and reflecting on their lives and what might have been is a classy and understated character study featuring dialogue and performances that are top notch. Eastwood's character in particular is a fascinating meditation on regret, loss and redemption, and his performance is probably the best of his career. I don't think Eastwood gets enough credit as an actor. This first film is so good that it almost makes up for the deficiencies of the second film, which features Frankie training Maggie from eager beaver trailer trash kid with heart to seasoned professional to fame and fortune then disaster. This second film is all cliche and clumsiness with events presented in such a cursory manner as to reduce it to TV movie-of-the-week status. All the subtlety and reserve of the first film is lost in the second - a brash, shallow movie riddled with unsubtle emotional manipulation: Maggie's final boxing match (complete with hapless referee and snarling, over the top villain), her embarrassingly one-dimensional family's bid to wrest her money from her, the retarded young man's bid for boxing success at Frankie's gym. These scenes should make anyone cringe at the cack-handedness of the characterisations. The contrast between these scenes and the scenes with Frankie and Scrap in the first film is so marked that it's hard to believe they were penned by the same author. At the end of the day this could have been an absolute classic had the second half of this film been less cliched, more polished and less tear-jerky. In short, if it had toned down the Swank story and concentrated on the Eastwood/Freeman story. As it is the film taken as a whole is mediocre. It's a competent re-telling of an oft told tale with a dash of controversy, but no more than that. As a footnote I have to say that Million Dollar Baby also blatantly cribs from that other popular favourite starring Morgan Freeman - The Shawshank Redemption - and it loses points for that too.

The Passion of The Christ

It took me a while to see this film because I wasn't that interested to be honest, but everyone made such a fuss about it I finally watched it. I must say that apart from the whole thing seeming a bit silly, what with the Devil lurking about behind the scenes and lots of snarling Romans having a real laugh torturing Jesus, it struck me as really rather pointless; if you are a believer then you already know the story, and you have the utmost sympathy for Christ right from the outset and you know what's going to happen so all that's left is to wallow in all the misery and despair. If on the other hand you're a non-believer can you enjoy it purely as a piece of cinema? Well, no not really - Mel Gibson, whose pet project this is, directs with a degree of proficiency but he does suffer from an over reliance on slo-mo and of course the film as a whole is as subtle as a chainsaw. There is no story to speak of - just endless sequences of flagellation, brutality and random acts of violence which gets old very quickly and after the 100th sock in the jaw or whip on the back it really ceases to mean anything. In actual fact there's something faintly disturbing about the whole enterprise; you have to wonder why anyone would want to watch a man being brutalised for almost two hours non-stop. I mean, that's it - that's all there is to this film.

Ray

Biopic of music pioneer Ray Charles, who died last year. Taylor Hackford does a nice job of showing Ray's childhood and the onset of the disease which would strike him blind at a very young age. Needless to say the music is sublime and the performance from Jamie Foxx is uncannily accurate - the Oscar is as good as his. There are some effectively creepy touches concerning Ray's guilt over his brother's death and there is some insight into what it means to be black, blind and independantly minded in the deep south in the forties and fifties and through to the times of de-seggregation. An accomplished film, with good performances all round and a story that's never less than interesting.

Secret Window

This film, from a story by Stephen King, started off with a lot of promise and held it all together for quite a while but as with most Hollywood films it loses it's way badly towards the end. Johnny Depp is very good as always, and John Turturro is suitably menacing as the thorn in his side. It's all proficient enough, but no surprises and a shame that it all just sinks into silliness in the end.

Shrek 2

Another day in Hollywood, another sequel, another disappointment. I wasn't a huge fan of the original, but this sequel is inferior, as most sequels are. One of the most annoying things about this is it's determination to be 'hip', and that includes aping popular films and playing contemporary rock songs over the action, which is headed straight down the MTV road and just doesn't work. If only the people in charge could let go of the notion that every successful film has to have a sequel then we wouldn't be subjected to so many unimaginative rehashes of films we've seen before.

Sideways

Charming road movie featuring some nice, easy performances from a few fine actors. Paul Giamatti is wonderful as Miles - English teacher, failed writer, and wine lover, and Thomas Haden Church is his actor friend Jack who's accompanying him on a tour through the Californian wine country on Jack's last week as a single man. They hook up with a couple of female companions and the scene is set for some mid life crises and heart to hearts among some interesting detours and choice debates about the relative merits of pinot and cabernet. This is a very well written, breezily directed film which is a breath of fresh air on a summer's day. One to kick off the sandals and watch in a hammock with a nice drinky.

Sky Captain & The World of Tomorrow

This film is just wrong-headed, in my opinion. It tries to be just like one of those old Flash Gordon type Saturday matinees and fails miserably because it's so obviously trying to do so. Jude Law is perilously close to WoodenTophood and Gwyneth Paltrow is just embarrassing. Actually the whole movie is pretty embarrassing - it just doesn't work. It's not engaging at all, there's no tension or excitement, and the situations are unbelievable and silly. Any attempt to follow the story and make sense of it all can only lead to disappointment, and so the whole enterprise is a waste of time. Dire.

Spartan

Crafty film from David Mamet. It's a boys adventure type espionage thriller starring Val Kilmer, and the action scenes are well handled, with a good sense of tension and suspense. Val Kilmer is one of those actors who you just know is great, but who doesn't seem to land the great parts, and he's pretty good here. I thought this film could have been very good but it was let down badly by a really weak ending. Pity, because it was shaping up to be quite interesting.

The Terminal

There's a telling remark uttered by a security guard in this film when Tom Hanks asks him what he's supposed to do in the airport while he's waiting , and the guard says, 'There's only one thing to do in the terminal - shop'. How true. That's what I was forced to do for most of this film, what with the constant bombardment of unsubtle product placement marketing for Burger King, Borders books and Swatch watches. When the film was over I thought I'd just arrived home from a marathon Christmas shopping expedition. This is the worst example of product placement profiteering since last year's 'I Robot', and it's bloody annoying. 'The Terminal' is a crass, insubstantial, flimsy excuse for a film which even the lovable Hanks can't charm you into liking. It's an apparently true tale of a man stuck in an airport for the best part of a year for reasons which seemed to me all the way through the film to be wholly spurious. This film starts off with a silly premise, then gets more and more silly until the spectacularly stupid climax - two gruellingly dull hours later. So at the end of the whole affair I was left thinking 'so what'? and 'who cares'? and 'I want my two hours back, you cheap, manipulative, mass market paperback of a movie'! If this is where Stephen Spielberg's head's at then god help us when his version of War of The Worlds is released later this year.

Troy

This is what Hollywood thinks is an accomplished film which is why there is no hope for Hollywood-made films for the forseeable future. This film is so far off the mark of what constitutes a good film that it would be funny if you didn't stop to think of the colossal expense of it and how many great little independent films could be made for the same money. Terrible.