Strong Melodrama With Excellent Actors – the The Fighter review

Mark Wahlberg really wanted to do this movie. He went from studio to studio and from director to director with the script for The Fighter. He even kept in form for boxing for over five years, so that he’d be ready as soon as production could start. At some point Darren Aronofsky was set to direct the film, but he decided to do Black Swan. Probably a smart move, considering the visual and thematic resemblances of The Fighter to Aronofsky’s previous film, The Wrestler.

Wahlberg eventually got David O. Russell to direct. Russell had worked with ‘Marky-Mark’ previously on Three Kings. Actors supporting Wahlberg in his turn as heavy-weight boxing champion Mickey Ward are Christian Bale, Melissa Leo and Amy Adams. All three of them got nominated for Oscars, and Bale and Leo deservedly bagged the awards as well.

The Fighter tells the story of the abovementioned Mickey Ward, whose biggest fight is not in the ring, but outside it. There he struggles with a dominant mother, who manages his fights, and the legacy of his older half-brother Dicky Ecklund: a local hero who once knocked out Sugar Ray Leonard but got addicted to methamphetamine and crack. Now Dicky trains Micky and the entire family (including seven hilariously trashy sisters) are supported by the money Mickey makes serving as a stepping stone to better and heavier fighters.

Of course, until a new love – Amy Adams – and a fight with his brother persuade Mickey to take an alternative path to boxing fame. The question is, can Mickey become world champion without the support and love of his family?

The Fighter is an excellent drama, with a superb cast. Wahlberg got robbed from an Oscar nomination. Amidst the mayhem and madness acted out by Leo, Bale and Adams he keeps a cool head. The others may get all the attention with their surrealistic rages, Wahlberg remains the sympathetic, real protagonist without whom the whole picture would descend into absurdist chaos. Which is not to say that Leo and Bale undeservedly won: mother Alice’s pain is felt as she tries to manage and support her white trash family, and Bale is amazing. He physically transformed into a drug addict, with all the jittery manners and nervousness injected into a body stripped from any muscle or fat it does not necessarily need to keep him alive.

The only drawback to The Fighter is that it is not really an original story. It is based on true events, but also feels at times as a remake of, or a tribute to both Rocky and Raging Bull. Although DeNiro’s Jake LaMotta of course became a champion despite himself, and Mickey becomes a champion because of himself, and despite his surroundings.

But even though you know how it is going to end, the fights themselves remain really tense, exciting and suspenseful. Boxing really is the most cinematic of sports, however you feel about the sport itself.

Why don’t people go to the movies in movies?

This is something that just came to my mind. Although ‘watching television’ is quite often featured in television, the movies don’t crop up often in films.

As said in television this is very different. The Simpsons’ the image is that of the family, on the couch, watching television, and certain local television persona play important roles in the narrative. In Friends the joy of watching television in a comfortable chair, and of watching such shows as Baywatch are returning themes. The British comedy The Royle Family is mostly filmed from the perspective of the television. 30 Rock is about the creation of a fictional SNL like television show. South Park has used and thematically employed television in a number of ways: ‘Cartoon Wars’ (part I and II) and the double episodes ‘200/201’ dealt with censorship, and the former also with the rivalry between comedy shows. South Park even proposed that the whole of planet earth was a show about to be cancelled by an alien network. Finally, Mr. Bean devoted an entire sketch to not being able to watch television.

But in the movies, people don’t really go to the movies that much. I was struck to see Mark Wahlberg take Amy Adams out on a date to see a movie in The Fighter. Dates in movies are almost always dinners. Or visiting plays or concerts. Hardly ever watching a movie. Bella Swan takes two boys to see a film in Twilight: New Moon. Other recent trips to the cinematic cinema I cannot recall.

Woody Allen of course used to go to the movies a lot. In Hannah and her Sisters it is a Groucho Marx flick that makes the neurotic Allen character to understand the meaning of life. Allen even stands line for films, this leading top the amusing discussion about and with Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall. Much earlier Alfred Hitchcock situated Sabotage (1936) in a neighborhood cinema.

Groucho Marx and the Meaning of Life in Hannah and her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986)

Even if people go to the movies they hardly ever just go to the movies. First of all, they hardly ever go to see a real existing film. Bella Swan takes her lovers to see an action flick called ‘Facepunch’. Surreally, this droopy wet romantic twagedy (i.e. a tragedy for tweens) has a leading lady with an aversion of droopy wet romantic twagedies. And if the film is real, there is something wrong with it: Accidentally, Wahlberg takes Adams to see the French flick Belle Epoque. He falls asleep and she complains afterwards that there wasn’t enough sex in it. In the Dutch action flick Vet Hard a car crashes into a cinema and through a screen, thereby killing two famous Dutch film critics. And The A-Team disturb drive their van through a cinema screen in order to set Murdock free from prison. The other inmates immediately praise the level of the 3D effects…

The spectacular high point is Notting Hill. In this film movie star Julia Roberts dates non-movie star Hugh Grant. Think about that. He gets to see all her non-existing movies, which he apparently did not know. And as a highlight he has to put on his scuba goggles, because he has lost his glasses, and without them he cannot see the screen properly! Wow.

Perhaps it is just not a good idea to go and see a film in a film. It did not work out for Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds. His treatment of the proto-nazi mountaineering flick Die Weisse Hölle von Pitz Palü was disastrous…

Do you know any good or bad (recent or ancient) examples? Please let me know…

Bonkers and Bad and With Too Little John Hamm In It – the Sucker Punch review

There is no need for averting the issue. Zack Snyder’s new film Sucker Punch is really bad. Like, properly bad; a bad bad film (as opposed to a good bad film as Machete or a bad good film like Hereafter). The man who remade Dawn of the Dead and adapted the graphic novels 300 and Watchmen for the big screen utterly fails now that he is presenting a film based on his own ideas and writing. Amongst those who did not ‘digg’ the stories of 300 and Watchmen there were still some who gave Snyder the thumbs up for his explosive and extremely violent action scenes. But now even those cannot save the film.

So, there is a plot. It is not that this is an ‘empty’. But the plot is completely bonkers. Not ‘a bit unlikely’, or ‘hardly believable’ but entirely nonsensical. And you know, even that need not be a problem (see A Hitchhikers’s Guide to the Galaxy). But this film takes itself very, very seriously, as an allegory for, well, Life, the Universe and Everything I guess. This is an attempt at a summary of Sucker Punch’ story: Young woman ‘Baby Doll’ (Emily Browning) is locked up in a gothic asylum for psychiatric patients after accidentally shooting her little sister when their step father threatened to rape said sister. To psychologically survive the asylum she imagines it to be a bordello in which she and the other girls are enslaved hookers (‘cause that is so much better) and to escape with four fellow inmates she must retreat in an even deeper level of fantasies. These videogame like ‘missions’ are themselves allegories for the bordello-level-of-reality attempts to gather four artefacts that are needed to escape the asylum. Thus Baby Doll and her friends get to massacre giant samurai trolls, steam-powered German World War I zombies, orcs and fire-breathing dragons and futuristic robot soldiers.

As I said: Bonkers. But this is just the start of the awfulness. The soundtrack is a mess. Snyder did surprising things with the eclectic Watchmen soundtrack, but the same strategy backfires terribly in Sucker Punch. It goes wrong from the start, with a totally inappropriate cover by Emily Browning of The Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) over the opening credits.

The action scenes are disappointing. The worlds Snyder creates, especially a Paris battlefield in the WWI section, look great, but the violence, so brutal in his previous films, is not felt. It is directed at monsters, not people, and takes place on fantasy levels, where all real threat or danger is absent. The film has a 12 certificate and perhaps Snyder aimed to entertain teenage boys rather than adults. This can also be seen in the whorish outfits of the girls. These outfits show plenty skin, but there is nothing sexy, erotic or arousing about them.

Everything and everyone in this film is a stereotype. Dirty fat old men, a polish Matriarch, a weasel-like director of the facility, an old wise man and also the girls themselves. Add obligatory rain and thunder claps, images of hard, degrading work and finally the title of the film itself. I was going to write a remark about the total randomness of the title Sucker Punch, but as the entire film is a mash-up of random clichés taking themselves seriously, the title may be the most appropriate thing about the whole affair.

And then there is the last act, in which the film returns, first to the bordello and then to the level that resembles any type of reality most; the psychiatric institution. Suddenly the story becomes exciting, the characters become real, the danger is tangible and there is even a real, proper twist. And there are two minutes of Jon Hamm showing how much better he is than anything else in the film. And then you see that Zack Snyder knows how to make movies. He just should stop writing them himself.

Acting Talent Wasted on Failed Film – the Get Low review

Get Low is an original story based on true events forced into the straightjacket of conventional American filmmaking. Usually that is a good thing. In this case, it is not.

Aaron Schneider’s film tells the story of the hermit-like Felix Bush (Robert Duvall) who wants to throw a funeral party for himself, while he’s still alive. Everyone who has a story to tell about him is welcome to join. The whole affair includes a lottery (the prize of which is Bush’ property after his death) and is organized by undertaker Bill Murray and his apprentice Lucas Black.

What gets in the way of this original idea becoming a really good film is that it is not a French film. In a French film people can come together and eat and talk and tell stories. And for a French film, that’s good enough. Unfortunately, Get Low is an American film, so there needs to be a plot that progresses. There needs to be character development, and most of all, there needs to be a realistic motivation. ‘Cause normal people don’t throw funeral parties for themselves.

And thus Get Low is not a film about the stories that people tell about Felix Bush the hermit. Actually, not a single story is told by anyone once the long-awaited party has begun. Get Low is about the story that Felix Bush himself has to tell, the big revelation of his motivation to live his life in seclusion. The big ‘Something Terrible’ that he has walked around with for forty years and that he wants to get of his chest. Because normal people do not live their life in seclusion for no particular reason. This ‘Something Terrible’ involves Sissy Spacek and is actually not that interesting when revealed.

It is a pity to see Duvall, Murray and Spacek waste their time in this failed film. They each give strong performances with what seems the slightest ease. And the much younger Lucas Black stands his ground against these acting giants, turning his role into the moral centre of the tale.

Avoid if possible. Better rent The Godfather, Ghostbusters or Carrie.

More Comedy than Western – the Rango review

Rango is a film made by film buffs, and presumably for film buffs. It fires more obvious and less obvious references to other films at the audience than a keen viewer can keep up with. Nonetheless, it is not a very good film buff’s film. But it is a good comedy.

Against the film can be said that the references are too obvious to produce any sense of pride in a geek, once they are noticed. And yet the casual viewer may miss many cues, especially those that matter. Rango references a great number of westerns, swashbucklers and adventure films but its central plot premise is a mixture between Chinatown and For A Fistfull of Dollars. And The Muppets. Especially the first two do not belong to the category “films that everyone has seen at some point in their lives”.

Furthermore: Rango is not a really good film buff’s film. ‘Cause: what fun is there in watching a film for the sake of seeing what films the director has seen that you also happen to know? Film buff’s films like these are not a guilty pleasure. They are pedantic exercises in faux-elitism. The true guilty pleasure is to spot similarities between (moments in) films that were never intended to be there in the first place. But in Rango there is no space for such moments, so crowded is it with obvious, intended references to director Gore Verbinski’s DVD collection.

Verbinski (mostly know for the first three Pirates of the Carribean films) apparently wanted to make a film buff’s film, but failed to do so. In the same way that he wanted to make a western: Rango is so western that it stops being one. You cannot make a western and reference Sergio Leone, the man who practically killed the genre by loving it too much and choking its last breath out of it in a just-too-strong embrace. It took the western twenty years to recover from Once Upon a Time in the West, and in the meantime the stories westerns told moved to science fiction; most notably to Star Wars and Back to the Future. If you reference Leone you cannot be making a western, in the same way that you cannot reference Disney as Shrek did, and make a fairytale film at the same time. Shrek is not a fairytale, as Rango is not a western.

But like Shrek, Rango is a lot of fun. A whole lot of fun. The idea of a lonely thespian chameleon with an identity crisis (and literally no name) accidentally finding himself in a dusty western town in need of a hero is comedy gold. And with Johnny Depp voicing that chameleon – and his Pirates nemesis Bill Nighy voicing opponent Rattlesnake Jake – such comedy gold can be converted into the hard cash of plenty laughter. Especially when you add a chorus of mariachi owls and such lines as “stay in school, eat your veggies and burn all books that are not Shakespeare.”

In short, Rango looks like a film made form the left-overs from all Hollywood cutting floors. Like its protagonist it does not know what it wants to be. But its journey towards finding out what it is – really funny and bittersweet – is captivating. By the way: the film also boasts the most beautiful computer animation I’ve seen in years and its excellent action sequences form a strong argument against 3D.

Shocking, but not because it is good or bad – the Hereafter review

Hereafter is not a very good film. But it is not as bad as many would have you believe. It ranks amongst the lesser of Clint Eastwood’s films, and the fact that he has two lesser films in the space of a year (Invictus preceeded Hereafter) may be a bad sign, but just as Invictus, Hereafter is not really a bad film.

It is a remarkably sentimental film, although Eastwood was never shy for sentimentalism in the last twenty years (only Mystic River has no sentimentality in it at all I believe). The new thing is that Hereafter is so conventionally sentimental, and so convolutedly plotted. The film tells the three, ultimately intertwining, stories of French journalist-with-a-near-death-experience Marie (Cecile de France), San Francisco based former medium George (Matt Damon) and London street kid Marcus (Frankie and George McLaren), who saw his twin brother Jason die in a traffic incident.

One thing that these stories show is that Clint Eastwood, for all his liberalism and openness to the rest of the world, is an essentially American filmmaker. The segments of the film that play in San Francisco show Eastwood on amazing form. The American blue collar working class milieu and the more up-scale middle class downtown scenes are handled with a care and sensitivity that is lacking from the scenes in Paris and London. Especially a scene involving a cooking class, a blindfold and Matt Damon carefully flirting with Melanie is breathtaking. Bryce Dallas Howard (The Village) is amazing as the damaged woman Melanie, who wants to connect to George, but stumbles upon the wall of isolation he has build around himself. Damon himself is on top form as well, proving once more that he is not just the most bankable actor in Hollywood, but also amongst the best of his generation, next to Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio. Giving this performance in Hereafter, just after his show-stopper turn in True Grit almost feels like bragging, or showing off.

Eastwood’s Paris however is superficial, and his direction in another language not as confident as it was in Letters from Iwo Jima. London is worse. Eastwood does not know which London he wants to show: landmark London, with its tourist highlights, or the underbelly of the East End. It does not help that the twins portraying Marcus and Jason speak as if they are at Hogwarts, rather than in 21^st century London.

The biggest problem of the film however is the difficulty with which the three stories are forced to intertwine. This requires bringing in the Asian tsunami of Christmas 2004 and the tube bombings in London in 2005, and that is not a good sign. The whole affair feels forced and unnatural in a way that Eastwood films seldom are.

Which also brings us on the subject of the tsunami. I’ve just got to spoil this plot point. Marie has a near death experience when she falls victim to a tsunami in an Asian holiday resort. Hereafter was released last Thursday in The Netherlands, a day before the disaster in Japan. I saw the film yesterday. It is no-one’s fault, but it is shocking to see a natural disaster, the first images of which are showing on televisions worldwide, now also on the big screen. And to see it so well done. The similarity, the visual accuracy (perfection is a completely inappropriate phrasing) is unsettling. Especialy as the use of CGI is not apparent, apart from the shot of the initial wave. This happens in the first minutes of the film, and the audience does not recuperate.

I may easily forget most about Hereafter in the following years, as it is a quite unremarkable Eastwood film, but these images will haunt me.

A Palpable Sense of Redundancy – the The Eagle review

There is a problem with The Eagle. And that problem is called Centurion. Both Centurion and The Eagle (previously known as The Eagle of the Ninth) were scheduled to be released last summer, and both have as their subject the same historical event: the disappearance of the Roman ninth legion in the north of Britain in the early second century AD.

Centurion, directed by Neill Marshall, was finished and released before The Eagle, which put the producers of that film in an awkward position. Centurion was an original script, and horror-specialist Marshall had turned into an adult chase film with extremely violent and realistic battle and fight scenes. The Eagle, on the other hand, is based on a 1950s children’s book by Rosemary Sutcliff, and directed by Kevin McDonald. McDonald is a great director, who made a name for himself with The Last King of Scotland and State of Play, but he is a specialist in drama, not in action scenes. As a result, The Eagle, despite a proper decapitation in the first act, is a rather bloodless affair with ill-staged and incomprehensive action and battle sequences.

But the problem runs deeper. ‘The Eagle of the Ninth’ was a children’s novel, but one from the 1950s. Even kids today, with the literary baggage of Harry Potter, expect more than a straightforward ‘two-friends-on-an-adventure-to-recover-a-missing-golden-eagle’ story. And adult viewers really need a lot more than that.  Its grounding in a children’s novel is exactly the weakest element of The Eagle, but to ditch it would mean to ditch the one thing that really sets it apart from Centurion. Had the producers managed to get their film ready first, this would not have been a problem. But they didn’t, and as a result, The Eagle feels like a film that does not really want to be there at all. There had to be a release, because the film was already so far in production, but a palpable sense of redundancy surrounds the entire affair.

This trailer looks really cool he, but unfortunately there is nothing in the film that’s not in these 3 minutes.

The casting does not help. Channing Tatum as protagonist Marcus Aquila looks like an American fighter pilot, or a troubled college kid. But he does not look or sound like someone who grew up in second-century Gaul. In the first half hour, I’m willing to suspend my disbelief, helped by the fact that Tatum’s big emotional outburst occurs off-screen. But then Jamie Bell enters the story as Marcus’ British slave-friend (that does not sound well, does it?) Esca. And Bell blows Tatum from the screen. Suddenly we notice that Tatum is the new Tom Cruise, but not in good way. He has only two expressions: expressionless, and constipated.

In the second and third act I keep thinking that I want to see more Mark Strong, and more Donald Sutherland. And more women! Come on, it may have been a 1950s boys’ novel, but not have a single speaking woman in all of Britain seems at best improbable.

Nothing good to mention then? Well, there’s Jamie Bell, who I think is really good. And Sutherland and Strong are good in supporting roles. There are moments of really good lighting. And the opening scene, on a boat on a river briefly reminds me of Terence Malick. But only very briefly.

Thriller-trailers

The Adjusment Bureau (George Nolfi)

Source Code (Duncan Jones)

Super 8 (JJ Abrams)

Scream 4 (Wes Craven)

Nolanography

No comment ont his gorgeous little work of love.

Mini reviews: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Another Year, The Social Network, The Losers

Sometimes I get to watch films faster than I can keep up with in terms of writing reviews. Over the last couple of months I saw four films I haven’t been able to write about yet. So here are some very brief reviews of The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Another Year, The Social Network and The Losers.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (dir. Michael Apted)

This third installment in the Narnia movies series is uncomparable to the previous two films, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, which themselves are very different as well. The setting and the structure of the narratives are different for each film, as they are different for each of the eight books that C.S. Lewis wrote about the magical country (in contrast with the repetetiveness of the first six Harry Potter books). In this film the youngest two Pevensy kids, Edmund and Lucy, return  to Narnia with their obnoxious cousin, Eugene, to join king Caspian on a nautical quest to find seven noblemen and save Narnia from a mysterious green mist. Disney dropped the series after the disappointing box office take of Prince Caspian, and 20th Century Fox picked up the rights, but made the film on a considerbaly smaller budget. This shows especially in the CGI, which is not up to the current standard. The very episodic structure of the story fo the book does not translate well onto film, but Will Poulter (Son of Rambo) as eugene is a revelation. A wonderful child actor who will hopefully return in the next installment, The Silver Chair.

Another Year (dir. Mike Leigh)

A delightful new dramedy by Mike Leigh (Naked, Happy-go-lucky). Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent play the middle-aged British couple whose dinner parties serve as a safe haven for their more troubled friends and family. Tom and Gerri provide a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on for Gerri’s alcoholic colleague Mary (a stand out performance by Lesley Manville) and Tom’s old (and equally alcoholic) pal Ken. During just another year their son starts a new family, while an older brother of Tom suffers a big loss. Tom and Gerri are there for everyone, without interfering or meddling in others’ business. Heartwarming.

 

 The Social Network (dir. David Fincher)

Much lauded as this year’s film about our time, The Social Network tells the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose determined quest to ‘bring the entire social experience of college’ online results in alienation with his girlfriend and former best pal. Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield shine in the central roles, while Arnie Hammer is sensational, playing both the Winklevoss twins. Director David Fincher tells the story with great control in a  non-chronological order, the music is spot on (Oscar winner), the editing is flawless (Oscar winner) and Aaron Sorkin’s dialogues are razor sharp (Oscar winner). But the essence of the story comes down to the punch line: “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies” and nothing more. The real film about what Facebook really is and can do is Catfish. Meanwhile, I don’t really care about these annoying American college kids and their empty self-obsessed lives. The Social Network is an excellent film that is nonetheless instantaneously forgettable.

The Losers (dir. Sylvain White)

This film wins the Jasper’s Take award for the most cliched and pointless action flick of the year. Watchmen‘s Jeffrey Dean Morgan leads a team of betrayed CIA operatives in an attempt to get even with the executive who set them up and to clear their names. Idris Elba (The Wire) gets too little to do with his talents. Zoe Saldana is a redundant skinny girl who is good with guns, but there is much fun to be had with Chris Evans’ (the new Captain America) science nerd Jensen. Jason Patric is the most ridiculous bad guy of the year.  The plot has no surprises after the 5th minute, and the film does not know if it wants to be Mission: Impossible with kills or The Expendables light. It makes perfect sense that this film did not get a Dutch cinema release.

By the way. I got only 11 out of 18 of my Oscar precidtions right. Should I find another hobby?