Results: The Jasper’s Take Awards 2012

The least coveted awards in the film business. The ones about which Matt Damon might have said “which ones?” The ones that even Kate Winslet is not interested in. They’re here. They’re now. The Jasper’s Take Awards 2012 (not Winslet and Damon, though that’d have been very cool). So, I hear you thinking, who are the ignorant winners?

The Michael Bay Award for loudest action film

In the absence of Michael Bay himself this year, and with the knowledge that I did not go and see the reportedly deafening Battleship, this award goes to – drum raffle and big bang – The Avengers. A film so loud that my review was literally unhearable in the mayhem…

The Adam Sandler Award for least funny comedy

Adam Sandler himself churned out two hugely unlikable ‘comedies’ this year (That’s My Boy and Jack & Jill), but to let him take part in this awards race would be unfair to the other contenders. So which movie was the least funny funny-film in 2012? Don’t laugh! It was The Watch. The only good thing about this film is that it reminded me of The IT-Crowd…

The Intelligent Design Award for worst case of history rewritten

There is actually some fun to be had with the idea of moon-nazis. And there is something charming about a British bloke making up an affair he had with Marilyn Monroe. Hugo sweetened the history of early cinema a bit too much, but had a good heart. But real toe-curling history-twitching this year concerned the painful subjects of slavery and racism. The award is shared between Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (this year’s worst film in general) and the painful The Help (aka White People Solve Racism).

The Iron Man 2 Award for least inspired sequel/prequel/spin-off

Next year this award can be properly awarded to Iron Man 3 of course, but for now we’ll have to make due. What was the least-inspired, most blindly-cash-grabbing sequel, threequel, spin-off, prequel or reboot of the year? Of course! It was the entirely unwanted The Amazing Spider-Man. A film that was only made so that Sony could keep the rights to the world’s most boring super hero.

The Martin McFly Award for best use of time travelling 

Quite some time-travelling going on this year. Or going to be in the history of thirty years from now. Looper had me wondering too often ‘what? And ‘how?’ Men in Black III was simply caught up in its own inconsistencies. Total Recall went back to the eighties and stole the set of Blade Runner, so that rules it out of competition. Which made me choose between Goldfinger‘s Aston Martin turning up in Skyfall and the eventual winner: The Muppets! Yes! Now that Einsteinian physics is re-established, surely the travel-by-map option constitutes bending the rules of light and time?

The Mind Heist Award for most enthusiasticating trailer

The most difficult choice. Argo‘s use of Dream On? The mysterious moodiness of Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da? Skyfall‘s breath-take-away-er? Fiveandahalf (!) minutes of Cloud Atlas? All worthy contenders, but the award for the best trailer goes to….

Review: The Bourne Legacy (dir. Tony Gilroy)

Story: Jeremy Renner is Alex Cross, another agent in the secret Treadstone project of the CIA. His superiors want him dead to cover up the project after Jason Bourne exposed it. Together with a doctor (Rachel Weisz) who is also on the kill list, Cross escapes and sets out to reclaim his life.

I have never been a big fan of the Bourne movies. I liked Robert Ludlum’s novels well enough, but I though that The Bourne Identity was a poor adaptation. The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, directed by the much lauded Paul Greengrass, took their titles from the novels, but nothing else. Supremacy and Ultimatum are widely considered to have changed the face of action films. But I never much cared for that new face. The shaky camera style that makes it impossible to keep up with what is happening in an action scene is in my opinion but a trick to conceal that the filmmaker does not know how to properly shoot an action scene.

(Proper action scenes, I think, are hardly shot anymore, now that this trick has become widespread. Even the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace was hampered by it. I much prefer old-fashioned action set pieces like those directed by Michael Mann or Philip Noyce)

Where I find Greengrass’ contribution to the Bourne series to be overrated, I must admit that I was a big fan of Matt Damon as Bourne. Over the years, I’ve grown into the idea of Damon as a bona fide character actor, rather than as a Hollywood pretty boy. But for the fourth film in the Bourne series, The Bourne Legacy, both Damon and Greengrass have not returned. Tony Gilroy is now in the director’s chair. He was one of the writers of the previous films and he directed the exciting thriller Micheal Clayton. And the leading man is now Jeremy Renner, the rising star of The Hurt Locker, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and The Avengers.

In The Bourne Legacy, Renner does a decent job with admittedly poor material. This film is shockingly underthought and underwritten. Entire plot strands and developments make no sense at all (including a lengthy opening scene in Alaska). Characters are introduced and dropped at a whim, or not used at all (why Joan Allen’s Pam Landy had to reappear is a mystery to me). Curiously, the action scenes were better than they ever were in the previous films. Especially the Manila motorbike chase is a spectacle the likes of which we have not seen since The Matrix Reloaded.

Verdicht: This film will entertain as long as you do not overthink it. Renner and Weisz are always a pleasure. There is some realy good action. But I can’t escape the thought that this was an idea for just another action movie first, and that the Bourne label got stuck onto it later, for marketing purposes only. And exactly that change has made this film such a mess.

Catching – the Contagion review

Forgive the pun in the title. But coming out of Contagion one can do with some mild-mannered, light-hearted tongue-in-cheeking. For Steven Soderbegh’s latest thriller is gripping to say the least. Contagion mostly calls into recollection Traffic, Soderbergh’s other multiple-plotline ensemble piece about a terrible disease keeping the world in a deadly grasp. And although Traffic’s drugs are referred to as a disease only in a metaphorical sense, Contagion is a about a real disease. A terribly nasty virus carried over from bat to pig to Gwyneth Paltrow and then the rest of the globe. ‘What if’ SARS, the bird-flu or the pig-flu had been as apocalyptic events as sometimes was predicted? Well, for a start the USA would run out of body bags within twelve days.

Soderbergh shows the spread of the disease, its impact on everyday life and the efforts of scientists and doctors trying to find a cure and containing the virus in a documentary-like fashion. He therefore uses the handheld cameras and unusual angles he also used in Full Frontal and Sex, Lies and Videotape. Soderbergh famously switches between such high-brow experiments and more traditional commercial fare (Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels) and Contagion is something in between. It is an enormous flick, in terms of cast, sets and scope, but it is delightfully devoid of cheap thrills and easy emotions. Soderbergh is one of the few directors – the only other one I can directly think of is Christopher Nolan – who get to make serious and intelligent films with huge budgets. Contagion gets to spend time in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Atlanta, London and Hong Kong.

And it stars no less than six big names: Matt Damon is the common citizen caught up in the epidemic pretty early and Gwyneth Paltrow is his cheating CEO wife. Laurence Fishburne is the head of the Centre for Disease Control that tries to find a cure to the disease, and Kate Winslet is his on-the-site organizer. Marion Cotillard is a WHO researcher trying to track the origins of the virus in China and Jude Law is a weasily blogger who makes money out of panic by selling fake medicines online. And if you’d think that wasn’t enough to keep track of: Elliott Gould, John Hawke and Jennifer Ehle also have substantial roles. The last one is even essential.

No surprise then that not everyone gets too shine. While Winslet, Paltrow and Fishburne are impressive, Cotillard and Law feel superfluous. Cotillard even disappears from the film halfway through, only to get a small payback at the end. Ehle on the other hand is only introduced properly, as anything else but a lab-coat, almost near the end of the film. But if there is any star to this film than it is Matt Damon. It is becoming baffling, the last two years, how he lifts up anything he does, how he squeezes real character out of little material, and how he fits in such diverse roles: The Informant! True Grit, Hereafter, now Contagion. Wow.

While the plot may feel fragmentary at moments – perhaps more suitable for a television miniseries – Soderbergh’s style is properly cinematic, combining wide vistas with close inspection of minute details. And to top it off Contagion boasts a stunning and sinister musical score composed by Cliff Martinez. Contagious, gripping, catchy. Forgive the puns that are my sighs of relief after finishing this film uninfected. Go and see, and for God’s sake don’t cough during the film: you’ll make everyone run for the door.

And more… trailers

Plenty of noteworthy trailers to share this week. Today the teaser for The Dark Knight Rises will be released (officially that is. Earlier this week bad quality versions already leakd online). Before that, a few other treats:

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Dir. Guy Ritchie. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law & Noomi Rapace.

Release date: December 15 2011

Contagion

Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Starring: Marillon Cotillard, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne

Release Date: October 20 2011

The Iron Lady

Dir. Phyllida Lloyd. Starring: Meryl Streep, Jim Broadbent & Roger Allam.

Release date: December 8 2012

Four Chases and a Wedding – the The Adjustment Bureau review

Four Weddings and a Funeral is for people of my generation (and taste; others might prefer Pretty Woman) the essential romantic comedy. I suspect it of being the main reason for marriage being fancy again (previous generations had their essential training in romantics in The Graduate or Last Tango in Paris). And for setting the template for each following boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl-boy-meets-girl-again-boy-loses-girl-again-boy-crashes-wedding-boy-and-girl-live-happily-ever-after type-of-film. In any genre 

And that includes science-fiction. The Adjustment Bureau is basically Four Weddings and a Funeral, the twists being that he is American and she is English, and the Weddings have been replaced by chases while the Funeral becomes a wedding.

Based on a story by much-abused-in-Hollywood scifi writer Philip K. Dick, The Adjustment Bureau sees up-and-coming New York politician David Norris (Matt Damon) diverging from the meticulous planning of his life when he meets English ballet dancer Emily Blunt. Except that his plan is not written by his campaign managers (as he jokes in an early speech) but by a semi-metaphysical ‘Bureau’. The agents of this bureau, led by John Slattery (of Mad Men fame), subsequently pull all the tricks up their sleeves to get Norris literally back on track.

A pity the marketeers of this film felt they had to steal the Sunshine theme music for this trailer. It doesn’t fit the mood of The Adjustment Bureau.

Do you know these moments in films set in cities that you know well, where you immediately notice that the geography has been tempered with? Your protagonist turns a corner in a familiar street and suddenly finds himself at the other end of the city, yet continues his business as if nothing happened? The Adjustment Bureau mocks these moments, by inserting special doors in New York City through which the agents of the Bureau can quickly move anywhere: from the Yankees Stadium to the Statue of Liberty to the Empire State Building. It is up to Damon and Blunt to be awed by this phenomenon, and they do awe very well in this film.

As they do the film very well. There is an assured yet fresh spark between the two leads, and their romance is one the viewer really cares about. Blunt’s turn as a dancer repairs some of the damage done to that profession by Natalie Portman in Black Swan, whereas Damon convinces as a politician (even going so far as to include appearances on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show in this film). Knowing Damon’s politics, no-one should be surprised if in a few years he does a liberal Schwarzenegger. Until then, 2011 is really his year. Dutch cinema audiences saw him, the span of three months, pull of show-stopping performances in True Grit, Hereafter and now The Adjustment Bureau. The combination of his three roles in these films shows him not only to be a Very Good Actor, but also one of those actors that have a chameleonic quality: Damon never looks the same in any film (apart from the Bourne series of course).

Meanwhile, debuting director George Nolfi (he previously wrote the screenplays for Ocean’s Twelve and The Bourne Ultimatum) keeps the pace high, the action scenes clear and the exposition chatter to a sci-fi minimum.

With its light-heartedness, its likeable characters and its high suspense The Adjustment Bureau combines touches of Hitchcock with the sentiments of classic Hollywood cinema, and it convinces as perhaps the first rom-com sci-fi flick.

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 Great Western With Touches of the Coen-esque – the True Grit review

People should stop proclaiming the western dead. Really. It is just weird. Every time a new western comes out, people proclaim the genre dead and see the arrival of the new film as an incidental or ‘short-lived’ revival. Or a tribute. It’s like going to your grandfather’s 87^th birthday and telling him that the fact that he still lives is (co)incidental. Apart from pretty weird this is actually really rude.

Of course, westerns do not get made as much as in the golden age of the genre, the 1930s and 1950s. But then again, after the introduction of film sound in the late 1920s people thought westerns would not be made anymore, as location shooting (basically the right of existence of the genre) had become difficult and expensive. Yet the western persisted. And in the 1960s, when the genre supposedly reached its climax with the spaghetti-westerns of Leone (he made five of them in total), Sam Peckinpah and John Ford were still making (their best) films. And John Wayne finally got his long-deserved Oscar, for the 1969 adaptation of Charles Portis novel ‘True Grit’.

Since then westerns have always been made, be it with lesser frequency. We’ve seen Eastwood’s Unforgiven, the remake of 3:10 to Yuma, Seraphim Falls, Appaloosa, the comic-book nonsense of Wild Wild West and Jonah Hex and more contemporary fare as Brokeback Mountain and No Country For Old Men. And later this year we will still have the genre cross-over Cowboys & Aliens.

So, the western is not dead, and the Coen Brothers’ new version of True Grit is not a tribute or an incidental film. It is a frickin’ good film. A great western. Not a typical Coen film, but filled with enough bizarre details, in-your-face violence and remarkable dialogue to be recognizable as a Coen product.

Jeff Bridges stars as Reuben ‘Rooster’ Cogburn, the ‘Dude’ filling the boots of the ‘Duke’ (John Wayne) with ease and charm. He is a drunk, disgusting US Marshall, but a man of ‘true grit’. Therefore he is hired by 14 year old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) to arrest or kill Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the man who killed her father. But this Chaney is being pursued by Texas Ranger LaBeouf (Matt Damon) as well, as there is a bounty on his head for another murder. The three of them pair up and venture into Indian territory in a pursuit of justice and/or vengeance.

All the attention surrounding this film has gone to the Coen brothers, of course, and to Bridges and Steinfeld, who got Oscar nominations for their roles. But the real stand-out performance here is Matt Damon’s. He is nigh unrecognizable for those who recall the Bourne films, with his fancy manners and his big greasy moustache. He is at first an unlikable, full-of-himself macho, but in the second half of the film he opens up and shows a humanity and righteousness that is truly moving.

True Grit is a great western. The films looks gorgeous, the achievement of cinematographer Roger Deakins. The snowy winter landscape of Oklahoma-to-be has a barren-ness that is the absolute opposite to the sun-drenched Monument Valley of the classic John Ford films.

Touches of the Coen-esque can mostly be found in the old-fashioned, razor sharp dialogue (for instance in the scene in which Mattie outwits a horse trader) and in some absurd appearances of minor figures, like the dentist covered in a full bear fur, including head and teeth. The brothers don’t shy away from rough violence either. But unlike so many other action films, Coen films make the violence hurt, badly. There is no glory or ‘cool-ness’ about it. The Coens show the Old West as it was: a dangerous, violent and sometimes outright scary place.

Mind you: this film is no A Serious Man or No Country For Old Men. It is not one of the films that define the Coen borthers as film makers. But it is a very good film, and it is good to see the brothers develop and change themselves, still, after more than twenty years of film making.

T-t-t-t-trailers

The Tourist (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)

Depp! Jolie! Venice! Action! Comedy! and a director with a name that suits a Bond-villain. What’s not to like here?

True Grit (Coen Brothers)

Coen Brothers do Western with Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon. Will they be running for Oscars again?

The Tempest (Julie Taymor)

The strangest play by Shakespeare, brought to you by the woman who already gave us the mind blowing Titus. With Helen Mirren as the femalized lead.

The Thorn in the Heart (Michel Gondry)

The director of The Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind presents a documentary about his own family.

Turbo (Steffen Haars & Flip van der Kuil)

The new high (or low) in Dutch bad taste. White provincial trash responds to economic crisis by stopping to pay for anything. Confrontation with the state ensues. Spin of from the tv series New Kidz.

Damon backs out of Bourne 4 – Tragedy ensues?

I wrote on this page last week about the resurrection of action franchises. Somewhat prematurely I wrote that Universal’s hiring of Tony Gilroy as a director for the fourth Jason Bourne film, The Bourne Legacy, might also be an attempt to lure star actor Matt Damon back to the franchise. Yesterday the news came out the Damon will definitely not return to the role of Jason Bourne, and that no other actor will take over the role. So The Bourne Legacy will be a film about Jason Bourne, but without him.

Gilroy said this need not be a problem: the story will continue where the third film stopped, with the final disappearance of Bourne from the Treadstone headquarters in New York. It will follow other characters from the film in a new plot development.

Now this might actually work. The word ‘legacy’ in the title somehow already supposes that the man himself is absent. But on the other hand. A Bourne film without Jason bourne… Isn’t that like a Bond film without James Bond? X-Men without mutants? The Muppets without, well, muppets? Star Wars without Yoda? Or Star Wars with Jar Jar Binks?

Feel free to respond or comment. I’m curious for your opinions.

Action Franchises: Resurrected!

Three film franchises have been “officially rebooted” this week. To quite some enthusiasm on my behalf I must say.

Christopher Nolan officially admitted that he will direct his third Batman film (after Batman Begins and The Dark Knight). The fact that he is very pleased with the material and the script (which he penned down with his brother Jonathan) suggests that the screenplay is nearly done. Nolan refuses to go into details, although his commitment to the project makes it likely that Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and possibly Morgan Freeman will return for the third film.

Meanwhile, Warner Brothers have a second super hero franchise to boast about: Superman. Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns (2006) was a tad of a disappointment, so for the reboot they have now hired Zack Snyder as a director. Snyder already made Dawn of the Dead, 300 and Watchmen for Warners. His Legends of Guardians premiered this week and his forthcoming Sucker Punch is highly anticipated. He is regarded a visionary director on the level of the visuals, but his films are sometimes criticized for lacking in content. However, with a story written by David Goyer (Batman Begins) and Christopher Nolan (him again), and with Nolan as a producer overlooking the project, the quality of the project’s content seems safeguarded.

A third franchise rebooted this week (and let’s just say it is saved from the graveyard) is the Jason Bourne series. After Paul Greengrass quitted the series due to financial disputes with studio Universal, lead actor Matt Damon pulled out to. Now that Universal have signed Tony Gilroy to direct The Bourne Legacy, they hope to persuade Damon to come back. Gilroy did writing work on the previous Bourne films, and directed such thrillers as Michael Clayton and Duplicity. Gilroy allegedly wasn’t happy about the way the former three Bourne films worked out, so this time he’ll have the chance to do things his way (as he also wrote the script for Legacy). I’m not as thrilled by the news as I was about the other two franchises. I remain one of the few people who consider Matt Damon completely unconvincing as an action hero, and I thought the third film (The Bourne Supremacy) was uninspired, with the car chase being a complete copy of the Moscow set chase from the second film. However, if Damon decides not to return, Gilroy and producer Frank Marshall will be forced to find a new original take on the material that may even please me (considering that I really liked Robert Ludlum’s novels).

Together with the recent confirmation that the as of yet untitled ‘Bond 23′, directed by Sam Mendes and starring Daniel Craig, is back online after the financial misadventures of studio MGM, these news flashes confirm that very little will really change in action film land. Thankfully.