The Big Fat Review Part I (Life of Pi, Lincoln & Django Unchained)

Story: It has been two months since I last posted a film review on this site. I just stopped writing, in the middle of the Oscar season. I had my reasons and I can come up with good excuses, but I also have something better. The Big Fat Review. Because the fact that I stopped writing about films, does not mean that I stopped watching them.

Life of Pi was astonishing. Mind-blowingly beautiful. I felt a bit uncomfortable at first with the entire religion subtext, but Oscar winning director Ang Lee solved this problem beautifully in the last act.  Central to this film is not, in my opinion, that this is a story that will make you believe in God. Life of Pi is a film that makes you understand why people, when confronted with circumstances wildly beyond their control, choose to believe in God. Curiously, the visual effects company that won the Life of Pi its second Oscar has gone bankrupt.

There is no director in the history of movies who can get away with a philosophical discussion in the middle of a dinosaur-movie for kids, and who also directs a political debate in a historical drama as if it were a nail biting action scene. Lincoln is a classic example of ‘pompous Spielberg’, following such films as Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, Amistad and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This does not mean that the film is not good. Because it quite clearly is. Daniel Day-Lewis is astonishing as Lincoln, but his thunderous performance does draw too much attention away from equally fantastic turns by Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Curiously, while Lincoln was about the political fight for the abolition of slavery, it did not bother showing or pointing out what a terrible injustice and crime it was. That specific historical lesson is told by Quentin Tarantino in Django Unchained, his long-awaited ‘Southern’.  I have my issues with Tarantino, and these issues played up again during Django Unchained. I can do without the sadism. I don’t need to see a man being torn apart by dogs. It is enough for me if this cruelty is suggested. Tarantino films are almost always way too long. And too talky. And every character in it speaks like Quentin. But, and herein lies the great difference with the reprehensible Inglourious Basterds, I believe that Django Unchained has a clear moral centre. The sadism is inflicted by the bad guys, and is there to highlight the immorality of slavery.  It does help that the fantastic Christoph Waltz is this time one of the good guys. While Samuel L. Jackson, Jamie Foxx and Leonardo DiCaprio all put in good performances, they are blown away by mr. Waltz.

The Big Fat Review will continue this weekend, with discussions of Silver Linings Playbook, Robot & Frank, Pitch Perfect, Arbitrage and Zero Dark Thirty.

Rest of the year agenda + nominations Jasper’s Take Awards 2012

Having survived Roland Emmerich’s 2012, it is now time to do some introspection. So the rest of this week of the year will be devoted to looking back on the ‘year of film’ that 2012 was. What have we got in store for you the next few days? Well, first of all – today – I will present the nominees for the Jasper’s Take Awards 2012. As introduced last year, the  Jasper’s Take Awards celebrate all those qualities films can possess that are generally overlooked by the Academy, the Hollywood Foreign Press Agency and the British Academy. The winners of the 2012 awards will be announced one week from now, on Sunday December 30th. Of course you are more than welcome to try and influence the outcome, by posting good arguments in favor or for candidates on this website, on twitter or on facebook.

Another yearly feature in the last week of the year are my Top 10 and Flop 10 of the year: lists of the ten best and worst films we’ve been presented in the last twelve months. Please do not that these lists only contain those films that I saw in the cinema and reviewed on this website in 2012. Michael Haneke’s Amour, for instance, wont be on any list, because I have not been in the mood for any Haneke film this month. The Flop 10 will be posted online on December 29th, and the Top 10 – appropriately, on the 29th.

A new last-week-of-the-year feature will be the little essay titled ‘What kind of year has it been?’ In this little post, which will be posted on December 27th, I will look back on the year, discern some trends and surprising developments, and also discuss those films which just did not make it into either the Flop or the Top 10. Inbetween all this looking back and introspecting I will try and deliver some reviews of Ang Lee’s Life of Pi and Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina.

But now: The nominations for the  Jasper’s Take Awards of 2012:

The Michael Bay Award for loudest action film: The Avengers, Dredd 3D, Wrath of the Titans, Prometheus, The Amazing Spider-Man

The Adam Sandler Award for least funny comedy: The Campaign, American Pie: Reunion, Dark Shadows, The Watch, The Inbetweeners

The Intelligent Design Award for worst case of history rewritten: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Iron Sky, The Help, Hugo, My Week With Marilyn

The Iron Man 2 Award for least inspired sequel/prequel/spin-off: Wrath of the Titans, American Pie: Reunion, Prometheus, Men in Black III, The Amazing Spider-Man

Finally then, a positive award:

The Martin McFly Award for best use of time travelling: Looper, Total Recall, Men in Black III, The Muppets (travel by map scene), Skyfall (look, it’s the car from Goldfinger! How did that get here?)

And last year’s favourite gets to make a comeback:

The Mind Heist Award for most enthusiasticating trailer: Skyfall, Cloud Atlas, Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da, Moonrise Kingdom, Argo

For inspiration, look up last year’s winners!

The Movies of This Winter…

The Big’uns:

 Jack Reacher (dir. Christopher McQuarrie) stars Tom Cruise (oversized smurf) as a former military man who is described, in Lee Child’s novels about him, as a blonde giant of a man. Little that can go wrong there then. Wreck-it-Ralph (dir. Rich Moore) is a Disney feature about the bad guy in an arcade game, who decides that he does not want to be the bad guy anymore and sets out on a journey to other games. Very promising indeed, if only for the appearance of beloved characters from games that were played by people who were kids in the 1990s. Django Unchained will see Quentin Tarantino tastelessly screwing up (movie) history once more, now with the help of Jamie Foxx, Christopher Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio. Get your act together Quentin, and go make another Jackie Brown. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters could be real fun, or it could be the next Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. But it is directed by Norwegian horror prodigy Tommy Wirkola, and stars Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton, so the odds are reasonable. Finally, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey sees Peter Jackson (and everybody else involved in the LOTR madness) revisiting Middle Earth. I expect abolutely nothing from this mind-numbingly boring property, so I won’t be disappointed in any way. On the plus side: the 48 fps images look good in the trailer, and in Martin Freeman it does star a personal favourite of mine.

 

The Award Darlings

You’d think that a book about a boy and a tiger in a little boat would be unfilmable, but Ang Lee decided to give Life of Pi a chance. In 3D. Also considered unfilmable was David Mitchell’s book Cloud Atlas, but Andy and Lana Wachowski, together with Tom Tykwer, decided to give it a try. However good the film may turn out to be, it won’t win prizes. It’s too weird probably. Much more conventional is Hyde Park on Hudson (dir. Roger Michell), about president Roosevelt (Bill Murray gunning for a career Oscar) receiving the King and Queen of England as his guests. Speaking of American presidents: Steven Spielberg’s biopic Lincoln stars Daniel Day-Lewis, so Bill Murray may have to wait for his Oscar a little longer. Another biopic that may score big is Hitchcock (dir. Sacha Gervasi), starring Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren. Already a favourite is Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, the Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman starring The Master. Argo (dir. Ben Affleck) will be a contender, as will Les Miserables. The latest one is directed by Tom Hooper, who dug up quite some gold for The King’s Speech two years ago. And if the director is anything to go by, look out for Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. A new The Hurt Locker? We’ll have to wait and see.

Trailer Tuesday: The Cloud Life of Master Oz

Cloud Atlas

Dir. Tom Tykwer. Starring: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Susan Sarandon, Ben Whishaw & Jim Broadbent

Release date NL: November 29, 2012

 

Life of Pi

Dir. Ang Lee. Starring Irrfan Khan, Suraj Sharma & Gerard Depardieu

Release date NL: December 20, 2012

 

The Master

Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Philip Seymour Hoffman & Laura Dern

Release date NL: December 6, 2012

 

Oz: The Great and Powerful

Dir. Sam Raimi. Starring: James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams & Zach Braff

Release date NL: March 7, 2013

Trailer Tuesday: The Shadow of Prometheus’ Huntsman Diaries

Dark Shadows

Dir. Tim Burton. Starring: Johnny Depp, Eva Green, Chloe Moretz, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jackie Earle Haley, Helena Bonham Carter & Christopher Lee.

Dutch release date: May 10, 2012

 

Prometheus

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

Dutch release date: May 31, 2012

 

Snow White and the Huntsman

Dir. Rupert Sanders. Starring:  Charlize Theron (again), Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth, Sam Claflin and a bunch of British guys as the seven dwarves.

Dutch release date: June 7, 2012

 

Chernobyl Diaries

Dir. Bradley Parker. Starring: Jesse McCartney, Jonathan Sadowski & Olivia Dudley

Dutch release date: TBA

Misjudged Eulogy of Early Cinema – the Hugo review

The two most Oscar-nominated flms this year are the fantastic The Artist, the big favourite that has received ten nominations, and Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s first 3D and first family film. It has received eleven nominations, mostly in technical categories, although Best Film and Best Director are also on the list. Curiously, both films are about the past of cinema. But whereas The Artist is a wonderful birthday party, Hugo is a bittersweet eulogy. At its better moments at least.

Because for the longest part of its running time, it is boring, standard fare. My list of things that I dislike about Hugo kicks off with its infuriatingly romanticized, stereotypical representation of 1930s Paris, a quality which the film curiously shares with another overhyped nominee, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. But at least Midnight in Paris admitted that this representation was a fantasy. This is literally a film in which the Eiffel tower can be seen from every window in the city.

The second problem is the story, which is strangely two-sided. There is a bit about a young boy – the titular Hugo Cabret – living in the walls of a train station, operating the clocks and trying to rebuild the automaton his late father left him. And when this story is more or less told and done with (after a little more than an hour, a proper running time for a mediocre kids’ flick) another story begins, about an old and bitter shopkeeper and his mysterious past. Needless to say, that story is much more interesting, and I would have loved to see it as a proper drama on itself.

The third problem lies very close to the second problem. It is the actors’ performances. As the depiction of Paris, they are so stereotypical that it hurts. Starting with the young Asa Butterfield (Hugo), who for the sake of his youth will be spared harsh criticism. And continuing with the also-very-young Chloe Moretz, who we have seen in such better form in Kick-Ass and Let Me In. Far more problematic is the supporting role of Sacha Baron Cohen as the station chief, who is a stumbling cliche of a man, and a painfully underused Jude Law as Hugo’s father. The only major cats member who fare better are Sir Christopher Lee as a bookshop owner, also much too little in the picture, and Sir Ben Kingsley, as the ill-fated shopkeeper. Also, what is it with the thick English accents in a film set in Paris? What is the point of that?

The good things then. First of all there is the 3D, which is actually justified in some moments; for instance when showing the inner mechanics of the station clocks, or in flashbacks to the first years of the twentieth century. It isn’t perfect, but it shows at least a bit of potential for the technology. Unfortunately an inferior variety of the technology is used – the one with the heavy glasses that give me headaches – instead of the more common and superior RealD.

The second good thing are those flashbacks, which are the crown jewels of the film and which belong to the second, more interesting, part of the story. Without giving away too much, these are the scenes that won Hugo its Oscar nominations, the technical ones as well as the ‘ major’ ones. They are the ones that won over the hearts of film ‘connaisseurs’ (rather than fans or the regular audience) and members of the Academy. There may be some rewriting of history going on in the process, when the First world War substitutes for copyright struggles and financial misadventures, but that fits the drama and is pardonable.

Director Martin Scorsese is a film connaisseur. A lover of the history of the medium and the art, as his many documentaries on the subject clearly show. In interviews he says that he wanted, for once, to make a film that his children could enjoy, who are too young for Taxi Driver or The Departed. But it was a mistake to make his first 3D film, and an ode to early cinema at the same time. The three objectives fit crudely together, much unlike the perfect mechanisms of the clocks and the automaton.

Hurray! Trailers!

The Raven

A Se7en-like adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe poem about a bird tapping on the window? Why not if it has John Cusack starring and it is directed by theu guy who did V for Vendetta.

Dir. James McTeigue. Starring: John Cusack, Luke Evans, Alice Eve & Brendan Gleeson.

Release date: March 9 (USA)

Hugo

Martin Scorsese making a kids’ film in 3D? Either the world has gone raving mad or this is the best idea ever. Probably something in between.

Dir. Martin Scorsese. Starring: Johnny Depp, Chloe Moretz, Jude Law, Christoper Lee, Emily Mortimer, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ben Kingsley, Ray Winstone, Asa Butterfield & Michael Stuhlbarg. Wow.

Release date: February 16 (NL)

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The last book that made me cry, by Jonathan Safran Foer. The adaptation of his other novel – Everything is Illuminated-  was a bit of a downer. Let’s hope for more with this one.

Dir. Stephen Daldry. Starring: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, John Goodman, Max von Sydow, James Gandolfini, Jeffrey Wright & Thomas Horn.

Release date: February 9 (NL)

Half a Good Movie – the Captain America: The First Avenger review

Marvel’s superhero round-up project The Avengers (set for next year) has so far pulled off some tricks I did not see coming. It is not as simple an accountancy sheet film project as it may seem at first sight. Sure, the idea of bringing all your major superheroes together in one film and giving each of them one or two films before that to introduce the character seems as logical as it seems profitable. But a closer look at the superheroes in question shows some underlying threats.

Marvel’s Avengers aren’t actually first rank characters. There is no space for Spiderman here. Actually, the Hulk is the only one who is obviously an iconic presence and an interesting character. Iron Man, being a billionaire-in-an-invincible-suit type of hero, could easily be seen as a rip-off of DC’s Batman. Thor is as bombastic as he is ridiculous and CaptainAmerica. Well… I’m sure Marvel executives must have had their doubts about the international bankability of a nationalistic propaganda tool who is not so much a flag-waver as he is a flag-wearer.

But as I said: most of the tricks have been pulled off. Ironically it is only the Hulk whose cinematic appearances have not yet been very successful. Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003) was too much of a metaphysical meditation in order to be a good blockbuster, and The Incredible Hulk (Louis Leterrier, 2008) was too much of an ordinary blockbuster in order to be an interesting film. But Iron Man’s character has been well-sketched in two films starring Robert Downey Jr. and Kenneth Branagh actually managed to balance pantomime and action thrills in Thor.

And the one whose character seemed the less interesting actually gets the best introduction so far. Captain America: The Last Avenger is in its first hour an excellent character study. In the manner of Batman Begins the film takes us well into the second hour before Chris Evans’ titular captain gets to kick evil butt. Unfortunately the film does quickly lose all kinds of interest from that point onwards.

But that first hour is great. A digitally shrunk Evans plays Steve Rogers. Back in 1942 he is a young man too physically weak to join the army, but too much set on standing up against (nazi) bullies to give up. He is drafted into a science project by Szientist-Wiz-A-Dzjerman-Aczent Stanley Tucci. Artificially pumped up to bodybuilder size he is subsequently, and against his will, only used as an army propaganda tool – presenting fund raiser shows and punching Hitler-imitators. Until the moment that he gets the possibility to perform some real heroics. There is some proper comic-book morality here: Rogers is the perfect man to become the perfect soldier exactly because he is weak and puny and therefore knows the importance of justly wielded power.

Evans is convincing, and is supported by an excellent supporting cast: Tucci has a small but nice role, Tommy Lee Jones is a walking cliché as the army general; but who could do that better? Hugo Weaving is outrageously evil as the mutated nazi Red Skull (even the normal nazis think he is a lunatic), and Toby Jones provides some comic relief as Weaving’s assistant. Only Hayley Atwell is a bit shallow and bland as love interest Peggy Carter.

The action in the second hour is not so captivating, mostly because no-one is in real danger at any moment, and we already know how things will end because of a pre-credits prologue set in modern times. Much better is an earlier Brooklyn set chase sequence, because it makes optimal use of the otherwise redundant 3D: The action during this sequence is all set along the axis between foreground and background, rather than horizontal or vertical across the screen. Director Joe Johnston uses the new technology here to evoke a cinematic space in which the hunter and the prey meaningfully relate to each other.

So. The pieces are set, the cards are on the table and we must now brace ourselves for next year, when all these super powers are unleashed in one and the same film. Let us hop that film is more like Iron Man or Captain America than that it is like Iron Man 2 or The Incredible Hulk.

Fair Game But Dull Cinema – The Fair Game Review

Now, there’s two ways too insult a movie. The first one is walking out of it. I’ve done that a couple of times. First with Spike Lee’s terribly misogynistic She Hate Me, later with a disgusting horror flick called The Ruins and most recently when I gave Inglourious Basterds a second chance.

The second way too insult a movie is different may seem less harsh, but is actually more so. To walk out of a film at least means the film touched you, that it moved you. Not pleasantly probably, but still. It matters to walk out of it. You make a statement. You draw a line. But this second way of insulting a movie comes out of utter disinterest. Boredom. I’ve done it once before, with Avatar, and I did it again with Fair Game (dir. by Doug Liman)

I took a bathroom break.

I walked out of the film, but only to relieve myself. After that I just took up my place, looked at the screen, noticed after a minute I hadn’t missed much and sat out the ride. Fair Game is so dull and predictable that it couldn’t force me to squeeze my bladder. Now that’s quite something for a cinephile like me. At least Avatar had the excuse of being three hours long and shown without an intermission. Fair Game doesn’t even get close to the two-hour mark. And yet it is so boring.

Just to recap: Fair Game is the story, based on a real scandal a couple of years ago, of a CIA operative (Valerie Plame, played by Naomi Watts) whose cover is blown by White House officials after her diplomat husband (Joe Wilson, played by Sean Penn) publicly denies the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Eventually the scandal was exposed and White House advisor Gordon Libby was fired and prosecuted.

Penn and Watts give great performances (they played a couple under duress previously in The Assasination of Richard Nixon), it must be admitted. And it is honestly a delight to see Naomi Watts back on form after a string of weaker performances that was kick-started by her role as scream queen in King Kong in 2005 and reached its utter low when shoe voiced Suzie Rabbitt in David Lynch’s incomprehensible Inland Empire mess.

But great performances don’t make up for the many wrongs of Fair Game. First of all. The WMD plot is really, really outdated. Let’s call it the ‘Green Zone’ fallacy; when the MacGuffin that drives the plot is not really mysterious or exciting (anymore). Now that is one thing. But the biggest problem is that Fair Game should really be about Wilson and Plame and the stress put on their marriage by Wilson’s disclosure and the subsequent mud-slinging campaign and death-threats. Instead, the turning point of Plame’s cover being blown comes only after an hour or so: the first hour is spent explaining how the White House faked the evidence from the intelligence agencies. Which is really, really a passé point to make. Now the interesting part of the film hardly lasts for half an hour. This is the part that I’m interested in, this is where the actors can go from good to great, but it is cut short.

Liman has chosen to make a film about politics rather than a film about people, and the result is Michael Moore without humor but with two great actors short-changed on their talents.