Review: Lawless (dir. John Hillcoat)

Story: In the early 1930s, in Franklin County, Virginia, the three brothers Bondurant (Shia LeBoeuf, Tom Hardy & Jason Clarke) make their living by producing and selling moonshine liquor. The arrival of a new, corrupt law enforcer from Chicago (Guy Pearce) and the entrance of two beautiful women (Jessica Chastain & Mia Wasikowska) endanger the brothers’ operations and their family bond.

Forrest Bondurant (Tom Hardy) believes that he and his brothers are immortal. World War I did not kill his older brother Howard (although it did turn him into a drunk) and he himself survived the Spanish Flu. Time and time again in John Hillcoat’s movie, Forrest’s strange superstition will give him reason enough to rush into deadly danger once more. However, the one who really gets his family into trouble is youngest brother Jack (Shia Leboeuf). His ambition, love (for Mia Wasikowska’s daughter of a preacher man) and recklesness may be the undoing of the Bondurant clan.

And this is so typical for this film. Shia LeBoeuf is not an unsympathetic actor. I quite liked him in Disturbia. He wasn’t even the worst thing in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. The Transformers franchise may have not assured me in any way regarding LeBoeuf, but I kept faith in his promise. However, if there is anything that Lawless makes clear, it is that LeBoeuf cannot (yet) hold his own against such powerhouses as Tom Hardy, Guy Pearce and (in a small cameo role) Gary Oldman.

Hardy and Pearce blow LeBoeuf from the screen. And they don’t even have to try. If anything, Hardy seems restrained by the two-dimensional character of Forrest Bondurant. And by the highly episodic character of Lawless. Especially in the first and second act, we seem to witness more or less randomly chosen episodes from the Bondurants’ struggle with the law and each other. A clear, red line is absent.

John Hillcoat previously made The Road, which was the – also very episodic – story of a son and a father after an apocalyptic event. Perhaps Hillcoat has a preference for making episodic films. But Lawless feels as if it should have been a straightforward ambitious-younger-brother-gets-older-brothers-into-trouble kinda story. Instead, the film spends too much time on small town politics and romantic diversions.

And although on the one hand I feel that Wasikowska and Chastain have no function in this film, on the other hand they are the best things in it. Which begs the question: why bring in these enormously talented actresses if you’re not going to use them properly? If you have Chastain and Wasikowska, then give them good lines, a proper role in the story and more screen time. The same is true for the delightful bluegrass soundtrack by screenwriter Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. I wanted to hear more from it in the film than I got.

Final verdict: Lawless is interesting, intruiging even, but unevenly paced, too episodic and hampered by the fact that its leading actor is easily outshone by his colleagues. I’m going to buy the soundtrack album, but the DVD/Bluray will not sorely be missed.

Review: The Dark Knight Rises (dir. Christopher Nolan)

Story: Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight billionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) lives in recluse. Mentally and physically broken by his years as Batman he sees Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) clean up the streets of Gotham. However, the arrivals of the gymnastic burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) and of the cruel mercenary Bane (Tom Hardy) force Batman out of retirement. The question is if he is able to rise up again and confront his present foes as well as the demons of his past.

If The Dark Knight Rises is quite a disappointment, then it is so because of the enormous expectations of fans, and the high bar set by its predecessors, Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). In fact, to call ‘TDKR’ a bad film is unjustified. It is a good summer blockbuster; by far the best of this summer. It grabs such fodder as The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-man in their necks and scoulingly sends them back to kindergarten. And yet it disappoints.

The biggest let down for me was that director Christopher Nolan does not chart new territories and themes in TDKR. Rather, he returns to the issues already covered in quite some extent in Batman Begins. And although Bruce Wayne / Batman does grow as a character, I miss the expansion to Batman’s universe and psychology that made The Dark Knight so very special. From a storytelling point of view it makes sense to make the circle complete, and Nolan does not hesitate to emphasize this, using quite a big number of flashbacks to Batman Begins. But I think he is mistaken to pressume that his audience is not already overly familiar with the previous films.

Valuable time is lost with these flashbacks, and although I do not think that The Dark Knight Rises is too long, I do think it could have spent some of its running time (a whopping 164 minutes) in a more effective manner. On many an occasion, especially in the climactic final hour, Nolan falls back on cheap short-cuts in his staging of the battle over Gotham’s fate. On first viewing these moments may be mistaken for plot holes, but on second viewing they appear to be the result of cramped storytelling and shoddy editing. Unnecessary mistakes that could easily have been solved had Nolan allowed himself more time to stage these scenes properly and less time reinvoking worn down, and this trilogy unworthy, generic stereotypes.

Nolan likes to work with the same people over and over again: Story writer David Goyer, producer Emma Thomas, writer Jonathan Nolan (yes, the brother), composer Hans Zimmer, editor Lee smith and cinematographer Wally Pfister. If I would recommend Nolan to look for another editor if he continues in action films, I must also praise Wally Pfister. Pfister was nominated for an Oscar for The Dark Knight, and he won one for Inception, and in The Dark Knight Rises he delivers again. The vistas of a Gotham under siege are stunning. In cooperation with the special effects team Pfister does something extraordinary: the stunts and effects that in other films seem weightless and immaterial digital constructions have heft and weight and, consequently, realism in TDKR.

Nolan also prefers to work with actors he already knows. Of course he brings back Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman (as Lucius Fox) and Michael Caine (Alfred Pennyworth), but he also calls in the services of his Inception veterans Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard (as business woman and love interest Miranda Tate) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (as Gotham city cop John Blake). And there are surprising cameos by some old characters as well. The only major new face is Anne Hathaway. And it must be said that, in such an enormous ensemble, it is Hathaway who stands out, next to Bale and Gorden-Levitt. The other actors suffer from the fact that their roles are perhaps slightly too marginal and underwritten. Tom Hardy is imposing, threatening and scary as Bane, but he can not rival Heath Ledger’s Joker. He should not want to either, and we should not expect it from him.

As an action spectacle, this film is stunning. Big set-pieces involve a chase scene with multiple motorcycles, a street battle between cops and thugs and, perhaps most memorable, a mid-air abduction in the opening sequence. We should not underestimate the contribution of composer Hans Zimmer to these scenes. The master of the genre almost overplays his hand with a thunderous score that drowns out bits of the dialogue, but the crucial word in this sentence is ‘almost’. Empire compared Zimmer’s soundtrack with an earthquake, and that is an appropriate metaphor. The music defies further description.

By not offering us something fundamentally new, apart from some interesting characters, Nolan deprives his film from the depth and the political commentary that The Dark Knight had. Complaints that TDKR is politically reactionary or conservative miss the point that there is actually a shocking lack of politics in this film. If there is any, it only serves as a masquerade of or a detraction from the actual plot, which then is too light to justify the epic ambitions of the film.

But Nolan does deliver emotionally. The fans who have made his films the huge successes that they are have invested in this world and in these characters. And although this individual film may not be able to match the quality of its predecessors, it does succeed in satisfyingly finishing this particular story of Bruce Wayne. Actually, it might be its strongest point (and this is the only small spoiler! I put into this review) that it finishes the story of Bruce Wayne, but not necessarily that of Batman. A relief for the studio and for the fans.

Final verdict: The Dark Knight Rises is a fitting and satisfying conclusion to what we can now call the best superheroe franchise to date. However, it is also demonstrably the weakest link in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and so it is with appropriate heartache that fans have to say goodbye to their holiday fling of three summers.

Review: A Few Best Men (Stephan Elliott)

A problem with many comedies is that they are so predictable. And this predactibility is a problem, because the secret to comedy is timing. Surprise, and mostly, timing. So if you can see a joke coming from a mile away, than it is probably not going to make you laugh.

That is the theory, but as usually, theory does not really translate flawlessly into reality. The best example of that truthism, with regard to film comedies, is A Few Best Men. This British-Australian comedy is predictable from beyond the grave. However, I laughed. A lot. And especially about the jokes I saw coming.

I honestly cannot say why. Well, there are a few reasons. The first is the films complete unpretentiousness about being anything but what it is. It is not even trying to pretend to be a good film, it is just very, very crude. Another reason, more technical, is an outstanding soundtrack, which has oddly funky music playing softly throughout entire sequences. This lends to the comedy a bit of a silent-era Laurel & Hardy quality. If you think that this insults Stanley Laurel and Oliver Hardy, than you did not know that their films were, to their audiences, exactly what A Few Best Men is to its audiences today: just plain, enjoyable nonsense comedy.

But still, the comedy in A Few Best Men is not of the sort that usually cracks me up. It involves mishaps with cocaine, a disastrous wedding and blokey British guys. Stuff I can usually do without quite well. And now I laughed. Even when I saw the jokes, which were not the kind of jokes I usually laugh at, coming from a mile away.

It is the mystery of comedy. It really is. I cannot say anything else about it. If you see this trailer, and you think it is not for you, than you feel the way I did. And yet… Don’t expect Monty Python, or 1970s Woody Allen. This is not smart comedy. If anything, it is a strange mixture of American Pie and Crocodile Dundee. However, if you even mildly enjoyed these films, you will ahve a 90 minute ball with A Few Best Men.

Trailer Tuesday: Lawless Prometheus Rises

Lawless

Dir. John Hillcoat. Starring: Shia LeBoeuf, Tom Hardy, Guy Pearce, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska & Gary Oldman

Release date NL: November 2012

 

Prometheus

Dir. Ridley Scott. Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce & Idris Elba

Release date NL: 31 May 2012

 

The Dark Knight Rises

Dir. Christopher Nolan. Starring: Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Gary Oldman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Marion Cotillard, Aidan Gillen & Liam Neeson

Release date NL: 20 July 2012

Thursday Movie News Flash Update Blog-message

Things that we’ve learned this week:

Ralph Fiennes might be ‘N’

Iron Man fights Ghandi

 

 

 

 

 

Hunger Games director not to return for sequel

Batman’s baddies speak up

And Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to save the Terminator

Trailer for The Dark Knight Rises online!!!

Quick analysis? This is gonna be dark stuff, with Bruce Wayne leaning on a cane. Michael Caine’s Alfred is in tears and Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) is in a tight spot, politically. A masked Anne Hathaway whispers ominously, and then the shit hits the fan. The Arkham prioners are set loose on the streets of Gotham once more and it turns into a very nasty revolution.  With Batman getting Bane’s “permission to die”… Wow.

Most remarkable is how light the film looks. Batman used to lurk in the shadows: now he is brought into full daylight.

My only worry is about the CG on the collapsing football field and the flying Batwing-kinda-thing. That really needs some more polishing. But there is plenty of time for that in post-production, as The Dark Knight Rises is not set to premiere until July.

The Best Film to Disappoint You This Year – the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy review

It is not entirely fair that I felt slightly disappointed after seeing Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I probable was expecting too much. Much more than any spy thriller could be expected to deliver. But then again, that first trailer was so good, it was such a work of beauty, that Tinker Tailor… was going to be the best film of the year for me. And that was before I even knew what it was about.

So it is not entirely fair, my disappointment. And yet there are valid reasosn for being disappointed as well. But we’ll start with the good things. John LeCarre’s original novel tells an incredibly sprawling, slow story of betrayal and paranoia in the heighdays of the Cold War. It is a cerebral affair. The central investigation is neither Bond-esque, with lots of action, nor Holmesian, with spectacular deductions. At its most action-packed it is a game of mental chess, played by old grey men with histories they do not speak about. To summarize: it is not a particularly filmic, visually engaging affair.

But Thomas Alfredson, previously of the fantastic Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In, has managed to make this story a visually engaging adventure. He has managed to breath life into the dusty archives, the smoke-stained and hideous wallpapers and 1973 London. Due to a combination of gorgeous set design and wonderful cinematography Tinker Tailor… has a unique look and identity.

Also, the film is spectacularly cast, employing more or less the entire who-is-who of British quality actors. Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, John Hurt and Tom Hardy don’t even get that much to do, but when called upon they deliver career high performances. Mark Strong is sensational as the betrayed, wounded and psychologically broken field agent Jim Prideaux. But the most surprising supporting role is for Kathy Burke, perhaps best known from Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth. Burke provides the one laugh in this film, the one moment of relief amongst all the tension. And that moment is memorable.

Having mentioned Oldman, it is now time to kneel down and salute this acting genius. He owns the film as protagonist George Smiley. Smiley is an intelligence legend, forced into retirement after an hungarian operation ending badly. But he is brought back by the powers that be when the pressumedly defected agent Ricki Tarr (Hardy) returns to London, with evidence of a Soviet mole in the highest positions in the service. Smiley is suddenly the only person that can be trusted enough to investigate the matter. Oldman’s Smiley is not a hero, nor a man of action. He is a silent observer and reader, a tactician. Almost inhuman, if he weren’t wounded by the betrayal of his own wife. An career-defining performance that should see Oldman at least nominated for all the major awards.

This is the trailer that got me all excited in the first place.

Why was I then so disappointed? Well, because the plot of the film is a mess. This is such an intriguing story, and for most of the time anyone who has not reas LeCarre’s book, the film was completely incomprehensible. There is the matter of the peculiar lingo for instance, in which the intelligence service is ‘the circus’, the KGB is ‘Moscow Centre’ and Karla is a mysterious person or organisation hinted at but not introduced. Characters appear suddenly and apparently without reason in Tinker Tailor.., and disappear just as quickly. And the pace is all off. Too slow in the beginning and way too fast during the climax, which was completely impossible to follow. But the most annoying things were all the flashbacks, which just robbed the film of its last shreds of coherence. LeCarre often has people telling stories about the past in his novel, and that works fine there, but in this film it does not.

The crowd I was watching the film with, people who had not read the book and had no previous knowledge of the plot, were left with a vacant expression on there faces. Feeling dumb they did not understand something that was nonetheless so obviously of some seriously high quality. A very, very mixed feeling and quite a disappointment.

Update: The Dark Knight Rises

Christopher Nolan has a legendary reputation for secrecy about his future films. Plot details, characters and themes are often not known to the press and the public until the last few, more extensive, trailers arrive. All the more spectacular than that Nolan and his stars Christian Bale (Batman/Bruce Wayne) and Tom Hardy (bad guy Bane) spoke to Empire about the new Batman flick – The Dark Knight Rises – last month. This is what we’ve learned that we did not know yet…

1)      The Dark Knight Rises will take place eight years after the events of The Dark Knight. That is quite a surprise, given the suspenseful state in which the latter film left Batman: his reputation shattered and hunted by the police.

2)      The new film will find Bruce Wayne in a very bad state. Nolan and Bale have spoken about the way in which grief and guilt are the central elements ofWayne’s existence, and how he can no longer live his life like that.

3)      Bane is a terror and a menace. If the Joker was a psychological adversary for Batman, testing him to his principal and ethical limits, Bane will be an enemy that can actually hurt Batman physically. Tom Hardy spoke of the cracking of skulls and the ripping out of spines. Wow. Nolan goes Conan apparently, but Warner Bros. will insist on PG 13 rating and therefore I expect the violence to be mostly suggested rather than lingered on.

The Dark Knight Rises will conclude Nolan’s Batman trilogy that started with Batman Begins in 2005. The film will hit Dutch screens on July 25^th next year. Keep that date free!

 

 

Villains for The Dark Knight Rises revealed?

The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan’s third and last Batman film, is currently in production on set in Pittsburgh. On-set photographers took the following pictures of Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy and Marion Cotillard, in the costumes of their respective characters (and expected villains): Selina Kyle (who may or may not become catwoman), Bane and Miranda Tate. Nolan is very secretive about the plot for the film, so the character descriptions are based on the graphic novels, and may or may not correspond to the role Nolan sees for these characters in his film

Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle:

Selina Kyle is the alter ego of Catwoman, as Bruce Wayne is that of Batman. She has previously been played by Michelle Pfeiffer (in Batman Returns) and Halle Berry (Catwoman). These incarnations saw Kyle having a close relations to cats, but in her first appearance in a graphic novel (Batman #1, 1940) Selina Kyle is simply a very talented, lean burglar with the nickname ‘The Cat’ . The costume in this picture, and the fact that she drives Bruce Wayne’s ‘ bat-bike’  suggest that Nolan has opted for this early incarnation of Selina Kyle.

Tom Hardy as Bane:

In the graphic novels, Bane is a genetically and chemically enhanced super soldier, both physically strong and very intelligent. A version of the character appeared in the dreadfull Batman & Robin, but there he was an animalistic bulk of muscles employed by Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman), and not very intelligent. He was played by Jeep Swenson. In the comics Bane was mostly a villain, although he was at some times an ally of Batman. Ominous omen: in the ‘ Knightfall’  series Bane beats Batman and breaks his back…

Marion Cotillard as Miranda Tate

Marion Cotillard is playing Miranda Tate, who – official communications – Warner Bros. describe as a businesswoman helping Bruce Wayne with his philantropic work. But this costume, and one other photo in which Cotillard is seen climbing out of the Batmobile, suggest that there may be more to her character. Miranda Tate is rumoured to be an alias for Talia Al-Ghul, the daughter of Ra’s A-Ghul, Batman’s opponent in Batman Begins. The character Talia Al-Ghul has a rich history in the Batman comics, at one point being engaged to Bane, then giving birth to Bruce Wayne’s son, and also crossing over into the Superman universe when working for Lex Luthor. So yes, given that Nolan is involved in producing and writing Zach Snyder’s new Superman film Man of Steel, we might expect anything from Miranda Tate.

The Dark Knight Rises is set for a July 19, 2012 release in The Netherlands. Man of Steel for June 14, 2013 (USA).

Preview: The Dark Knight Rises

Last week Warner Bros. released the teaser poster for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, and yesterday they also put an HD version of the first teaser online. A shoddy low-quality version had already been leaked to the internet, but its quality was so bad that hardly anything could be seen or heard in it.

The new teaser still tells us little about the plot: there are some images from Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, and a voice-over by Liam Neeson that comes from the first film. Then: an image of Gary Oldman’s commissioner Gordon on a hospital bed: hurt, weak. He insists that Batman must come back, that they were “in this together”. An unseen Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) doubt whether Batman still exists. Then there are shots of someone climbing out of a hole and of Bane (Tom Hardy). One of his face and one of him approaching a stumbling Batman in an underground location.

And that is it. I am thrilled. I am very much looking forward to the film, yet I am afraid as well. Mostly because of the cast list. The Dark Knight Rises sees Bale returning as Bruce Wayne/Batman, and Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman (Lucius Fox) and Michael Caine (Alfred) return as well.

Tom Hardy will be Bane, who in the comics is a genetically engineered super-soldier or villain. Anne Hathaway is cast as Selina Kyle, and may transform into Catwoman. Hathaway is new to Nolan, but Marion Cotillard and Joseph Gorden-Levitt are not: they worked with him on Inception. Gorden-Levitt will be police officer John Blake, and Cotillard will play Miranda Tate, in the comics also known as Talia Al Ghul, the estranged daughter of Ra’s Al Ghul, Batman’s enemy from Begins. Josh Pence is cast as a young Ra’s, and Liam Neeson is rumoured to return as the old version of the character.

Such long cast lists lead to problems; see last years Iron Man 2. All these well-known actors and characters can hardly all be given the screen time they need to develop their characters properly and play a major role in what still should be the story of Batman. At worst, we could get a mess of a film. However, considering Nolan’s disciplined style of filmmaking that is not likely. More likely is that the film will show an extreme version of the template of The Dark Knight and Inception, in which supporting characters’ emotional or personal development are sidelined in order for them to schematically inhabit the various political, moral or mythological points Nolan wants make.

Something else I fear is that Nolan might move away from the realistic tone of his previous Batman films, and indulge in the more metaphysical themes and plotlines some of the comics (for instance Frank Millar’s “The Dark Knight Returns”) offer. That is something I would not be fond of.

But I had similar fears back in 2007, when I first learned that Heath Ledger, whom I, at the time, only remembered as the teenage heart-throb from 10 Things I Hate About You and A Knight’s Tale, would play The Joker, a role made iconic by Jack Nicholson. And I had my doubts about the pitch for Inception as well: A thriller set within the architecture of the mind? And in both cases my doubts and fears were met by great films. Let’s hope Nolan can do it again.