Standard Biopic, Unfortunately – the J. Edgar review

It is hard to make a good biopic. Mostly because, usually, a person’s life, the events in it and the order in which they happen don’t correspond well to the conventional structure of a fiction film. So filmmakers have to rearrange, squeeze and fit in and sometimes come up with all kinds of artificial devices in order to have a proper three-arc structure with two clear plot points and a satisfying climax.

The most common device used by filmmakers to make the story fit the structure is the flashback, possibly with voice-over. This gives the filmmaker the chance to tell two parts of a life’s story intercut rather than straightforward. Preferably this is a flashback in which an old person remembers his or her youth. Effective, but a bit boring. Another device is the writing down of memoirs. This is the device Clint Eastwood chose for J. Edgar, his biopic of legendary FBI founder and director J. Edgar Hoover. Also effective, and slightly less corny than the flashback.

Leonardo diCaprio plays Hoover, both in his prime and in his old age. Many have commented on the make-up and prosthetics of the old version of the character, deeming them unconvincing. I disagree. Hoover was completely recognizable, and I had never the idea that I was watching the actor diCaprio. What I found more distracting was the high-pitched voice with a drawl of a Southern accent. It may be a realistic impersonation ofHoover, but not pleasant to listen to.

DiCaprio does a good job, although this is not a performance of the same quality as the ones he gave in Catch Me If you Can, Shutter Island or Inception. Judi Dench is enjoyably creepy as Hoover’s overbearing mother, although the suggested causal relationship between Hoover’s alleged sexual orientation and his relation with his mother is an anachronistic example of ‘momism’ and can be experienced as quite insulting to homosexual people. The stand out performance of the film however is by Armie Hammer, the actor who had is breakthrough in David Fincher’s The Social Network. There he played two twin brothers, here he plays the old and the young version of Clyde Tolson,Hoover’s closest friend and ally and, some say, his lover. And he is very, very good. Unfortunately Naomi Watts is somewhat underused as Helen Gandy,Hoover’s lifelong secretary. That is a pity because when she is allowed to act, she shines.

It is so hard to do a good biopic. J. Edgar is another example of films that just want to squeeze in too much. Much like Oliver Stone’s Nixon and Alexander, or the fictional biopic The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Much more successful examples are Walk the Line, which focused on the early part of Johnny Cash’ career, and Eastwood’s own Invictus (2009). That last film is to me a key example of a good biopic. In that film Eastwood dids not tell the whole story of Nelson Mandela’s life, but chose to capture one period, the Rugby World Cup of 1995, in order to let all the important parts of the man’s character and history come to the surface.

J. Edgar, unfortunately, is nothing like Invictus. It is too long, and in the end a bit boring. And it uses too many of the clichés of the biopic genre. Clint Eastwood obviously played it safe after the disappointing responses to last year’s Hereafter. I, however, would rather see him experimenting more, and would take for granted the inevitable occasional miss.

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.

Where We Stand: Nine Months in the Multiplex

It is September. We’ve had the Oscars, Cannes and the blockbuster season, and this weekend saw the end of the Venice film festival.  So, most of what was to happen in film this year has already happened. Time for a little overview then.

Last year I kept lists of the best ten and the worst ten films of the year. I’ve done the same thing for this year so far. And to start off on a good note: this year’s worst films aren’t that much worse than last year’s worst films. 2011’s Clash of the Titans was Conan the Barbarian, in terms of noisy nonsense, but Conan still offered some fun. Last year we had a Sex and the City sequel, this year we had the third Transformers movie. Those two cancel each other out. The same goes for Sucker Punch and Prince of Persia, and for Get Low and Fair Game. The ‘worst films of 2011’ list, for all the dreadful terrors that are on it, is not my main concern.

I have two main concerns. The first one is the list of films that should have been on the ‘worst film’ list, but aren’t there, because the list is already filled. I’m thinking of Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter, of the superfluous The Eagle, of the failed Horrible Bosses and the incoherent The Rite (review forthcoming). That these films are now in the large bulk of ‘mediocre’ films is a problem.

My second concern is the ‘best films of 2011’ list. There are films on there that really don’t deserve to be there. Mainly because I am still to stumble upon anything resembling A Serious Man, or The Hurt Locker. True Grit, though good, was nowhere near the Coen’s best work, and Oscar grabber The King’s Speech felt strangely tame and artificial, despite outstanding performances.

So on this year’s ‘best of’ list, so far, we find such films as Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Rango. For a film to be simply exciting (Rise…) or simply funny (Rango), and for it to showcase impressive technological advances (both) is now good enough. Just compare: In 2010 the one animated movie on the list was Toy Story 3. Now it is Rango.

Of course The Fighter was excellent, and so was Black Swan. And Bridesmaids was fantastically funny, despite the excessive vomiting and diarrhea. Source Code is the closest we’ll get to an Inception this year. But it is the closest to it, not a match. Furthermore Bridesmaids doesn’t hold up to Four Lions or Kick Ass. And I am yet to find anything as emotionally charged as Winter’s Bone or El Secreto de Sus Ojos. Harry Potter 7.2 was satisfying, but not much more than that…

Nothing to feel really good about then? Well, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger were not as bad as I expected them to be. They were surprisingly entertaining actually, apart from the action scenes. X-Men: First Class lived up to its expectations, and Fast Five was an outrageous guilty pleasure. These films kinda make up for the big let down of Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides.

But in conclusion, all in all? Quite too many films did not live up to potential or expectations or the sheer common decency of meeting the lowest level of quality you can still get away with. 2011 is just not good enough. Yet.

What’s left to look forward then? Well, the award films will start pouring in, with strong contenders in We Need To Talk About Kevin, Martha Marcy May Marlene, War Horse, The Help, The Iron Lady, We Bought a Zoo and The Ides of March. And perhaps the The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo remake. But I’m looking forward most to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which really should see Gary Oldman pick up a long overdue little gold statue.

Best of 2011 so far: Black Swan, The Fighter, The King’s Speech, True Grit, Rango, Source Code, Bridesmaids, Harry Potter 7.2, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Tree of Life.

Worst of 2011, so far: The Green Hornet, The Green Lantern, Paul, Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Unknown, Sucker Punch, Get Low, Conan the Barbarian and The Tree of Life.

Yes. Malick’s is in both categories. Everyone who has seen it will understand.

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.

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.

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.