I mean Christ this does look like maybe the most cliched thing ever, but I like the cast enough and it looks quite nice. Honestly looks just really forgetable in the end.
Month: January 2017
Thoughts on Nails Trailer
Omg this looks so bad help
I do like Ross Noble though it just looks terrrrriiiiibbblllleeeee, quite visually stylish though.
Movie Review: Fargo
Directors: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Writers: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Stars: William H. Macy, Frances McDormand, Steve Buscemi
Verdict: Really good
Oh yaaaah, YAAAAAH – It’s Fargo.
Breakout film for Golden Llama winners The Coen Brothers, Fargo won them their first Oscar, an Oscar for Joel’s wife Frances McDormand, (Mississippi Burning, Almost Famous), (although I think The Golden Llama is far more prestigious), Fargo has spawned a 2 series running spin off show, a made-for-television sequel starring Edie Falco, (no, me neither), and some of the most memerable scenes, characters, and accents in recent film history.
Fargo follows pergant police cheif Marge Gunderson on her quest to solve a triple murder and the bungling criminals who perpetrate such a crime. What starts out as a simple hostage situation goes horribly south in this tale of blood in the snow.
I’m gonna level with you – I’ve never quite fallen in with Fargo. I went in knowing it was a black comedy and found myself not laughing very much, it’s not as if I didn’t like it, I just found myself a bit disapointed. I think Rotten Tomatoes had it right, “Violent, quirky, and darkly funny, Fargo delivers an original crime story”. Going into Fargo I think it’s important to remember that it is first and formost a cime story that’s actually played pretty straight, it just happens to be really funny. Steven Buschemi, (Reservoir Dogs, Monsters, Inc., Boardwalk Empire), gets it. He plays it really straight but all the time there’s this underlying level of irony to his entire performance that will effect you but you have to work quite hard to actually notice. At least with The Big Lebowski or Hail, Caesar! you know where you stand, although there are other elements to them that are just as important to understanding entirely what the movies are trying to do, they are first and formost comedic efforts. I mean just look at that ‘If only it were so simple’ scene from Hail, Caesar!, or the ‘look at that parking lot’ scene if we’re there from A Serious Man but we’re really getting off topic I feel. It’s important I think that the Coen Brothers started off working with Sam Raimi, because The Evil Dead, maybe better Evil Dead II, is a horror film that just happens to be funny. All of the Coen’s work mixes genre pastiche with comedy and I think it’s important that I’ve been so impressed by works like Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There, No Country for Old Men, and Inside Llewyn Davis in the mean time because that’s in the same vein as Fargo of a movie where the comedy is incedental, and blossoms like a bullet wound at the most unexpected moments.
So what bought me to this realisation? What finally enabled me to get Fargo? I think it was probably that between now and the last time I watched it I fell in love with the TV show. The first series of which tonally is almost identical. Billy Bob Thornton, (Armageddon, Princess Mononoke, Bad Santa), in Fargo TV is extraordinarily reminiscent of Peter Stormare’s, (Until Dawn, The Big Lebowski) bleach blonde phychopath from the original, who is just extraordinary, deadpan, really threatening, maybe the second best performance in the movie next to Frances McDormand’s iconic turn as Marge. The TV show cracked the nut for me. I’m not going to pretend Fargo is my favourite Coen brothers work although it’s probably their most celebrated. In fact, it does have a really troubling attitude to non-caucasians which thinking about it you could actually find in a lot of the Coen’s work but they do get a caucasian to play the literal devil in Barton Fink so I’m not sure how warranted that is. Despite this though, Fargo is a funny, dark, and occasionally, suprisingly brooding and exciting work that has a subtle but strong message that it graduly pokes to you like a stack of chips at a betting table before you get it at the end.
Movie Review: Trainspotting
Director: Danny Boyle
Writers: John Hodge, Irvine Welsh
Stars: Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller
Verdict: Brilliant
With the long belated sequel being released we thought we’d take a crack at one of the most important British films of the 90s, (there weren’t many), and one of my personal favourites; Trainspotting.
Trainspotting follows the story of Mark ‘Rentboy’ Renton in 90s Edinburgh trying his level best to give up heroin amongst friends who really, don’t help. This includes Sick Boy, Spud, Swanney, Tommy, and Begbie, most of which are introduced to us in a lovely, now iconic football montage.
I think it’s things like that football montages that help form the genius of Trainspotting. I said in my Don’t Breathe review, (here), about how in Trainspotting the genius of it is that the characters aren’t just heroin addict wasters, a quality probably inherited from the Irvine Welsh novel which I still havn’t read but it was Danny Boyle, (Slumdog Millionaire, 28 Days Later…), who made the observation. The characters of this film are funny, eloquent, they know a lot about Sean Connery, and they’re crap at football. Trainspotting does have some incredible cinematic sequences but at the heart of it are characters who are, self admitedly bad people, but not completely, and not irredeemably.
Considering how ill experienced most of the cast were it is incredible quite how well played they all are as well. Ewen Bremmer, (Snatch, Black Hawk Down), who plays Spud, is an extraordinarily underrated actor and he is definitely not Spud in real life, if you see him in interviews he is much more intelligent and confident and eloquent. He really goes for it in this film, and he’s extraordiarily funny, that sequence with the dirty sheets is quite something. As soon as you see Johnny Lee Miller’s, (Elementary), Sick Boy on screen with his muscular neck and his schock of blonde hair he is an immediately imposing figure, this mixture of cheeky chap, and almost Anton Chigurgh from No Country for Old Men or Ben Mendelsohn from Rogue One. He has this sort of perreneial bad guy, wriath of impending doom sense about him some times. Although Begbie played by Robert Carlyle, (28 Weeks Later, The Full Monty), is probably the more showy performance, and defintiely the scarier one, Sick Boy is actually probably the more destructive influence in Renton’s life.
I heard Danny Leigh say that Danny Boyle always directs like he’s on his 7th can of Red Bull, and there are many sequences like that in Trainspotting, but the best thing is when he lets silence rest on screen. There’s one scene in a pub that’s one of the best scenes I’ve seen in a long time. What people do forget though is that although, for example The Worst Toilet In Scotland scene, even though that scene goes about as far as it can down the rabbit hole it comes out into something ethereal and funny and beautiful. Like the overdose sequence becomes something surreal and wonderful and melancholic whereas a different director would just make it horrible. There’s actually a lovely story about a sound editor who showed a producer the first cut of that scene set to Perfect Day by Lou Reed and the producer said ‘it’s wonderful, don’t show Danny because we can’t afford the song’ and it was actually David Bowie of all people who saw Shallow Grave and loved it and convicned Lou Reed and Iggy Pop to let Danny Boyle use their songs.
The thing is about trainspotting is, to quote Mark Kermode, at Danny Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony we could have divers coming out of fountained toilets and babies with their heads turned round the wrong way crawling over ceilings and we’d all go, yeah it’s Trainspotting, but we’d forget quite how striking and horrible and incredible those sequences were the first time. They just happened to have passed into the general public conciousness now. It’s also incredible that such a high brow film makes such low brow humour work because it does have a bit of a pop sensibility. It’s probably the most mainstream surrealist peice you’ll ever see.
The film isn’t perfect, the film does feel a bit split in half and as a Londoner the introduction-to-London montage is, frankly, laughable in it’s pastiche but maybe it’s meant to be. After all Renton goes to London to get away from crippling heroin addiction so he would maybe idealise it in the manner of someone who’s never been there; before he sees it can be just as seedy as anywhere else. It can also be at times, over edited, but for a purpose, because a lot of scenes are absolutely perfectly edited. In the end whatever problems Trainspotting has, which are few, you can’t deny the film’s cultural impact, a modern classic, there’s nothing quite like it, and it actually adapts it’s sourse material better than most, streamlining the story, maintaining the qualities of the book, and adding plenty of cinematic verve.
Movie Review: Girl, Interrupted
Director: James Mangold
Writers: Susanna Kaysen, James Mangold, Lisa Loomer, Anna Hamilton Phelan
Stars: Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie
Verdict: Good enough
James Mangold is a very interesting director. Having made his name with Cop Land, which was meant to be more a Sylventre Stallone vehicle than anything else, him proving to everyone he can do serious, non Rocky, non First Blood, (a.k.a. Rambo), type stuff, (look how that went), he then moves on to this, Girl, Interrupted, a very different film; based off a very well respected literary source, also more of a vehicle for a supporting actor who is more known for less wighty work, (Angelina Jolie). Before going on to make a Johnny Cash biopic, (Walk the Line), the remake 3:10 to Yuma; of which I’m a big fan, and a couple of Wolverine movies…
Intersting guy.
Girl, Interrupted follows a rich middle/upper class girl in the 60s who seems unstuck in time, much in the way Billy Pilgrim was in Slaughterhouse-Five, played by Winona Ryder, (Stranger Things, Black Swan, Edward Scissorhands), who checks herself into a mental institution for women and then, well, drama happens.
Girl, Interrupted has it’s flaws definitely, but it is still a very engaging film. It has a very well cast, and star studded, cast of actors that form an ensemble around Ryder, who until last year’s Stranger Things has been sorely lacking from our screens because she is a very talented, if occasionally one note, screen presence. The cast is rouned out by the likes of Woopie Goldberg, (The Color Purple), Elizabeth Moss, (Mad Men, The One I Love), Jared Leto, (Requiem for a Dream, Dallas Buyers Club), and Brittany Murphy, (King of the Hill, 8 Mile, Clueless). Although sometimes they’re performances, ANGELINA JOLIE INCLUDED — I DON’T CARE THAT SHE WON AN OSCAR – can come off sometimes as a bit one note and sometimes wooden, there are some incredibly striking moments of real acting from all included.
The film has sequences that are incredibly directed, some of them are directed like a horror film, and I was really hiding behind the back of my cardigan; others have that engrossing high drama sense of the audit scene from The Master; and others have this strange other worldy feel of young girls running off to escape into fantasy like Pan’s Labyrinth, or Yeat’s The Lost Child, except it’s just to the basement to do some bowling.
The film has received some sniffy reviews, it currently sits at 54% on Rotten Tomatoes, and you can see why. It has definite pacing issues, it’s a bit structureless, as I said the acting is frequently below where I’d like it to be, and I could have done with some more thorough characterisation. In the end I think the film has suffered in adaptation and having to loose things in that process as all book adaptations have to. I really want to read the book, but the film is a flawed, deeply flawed, but all the same definitely an engaging, suspensful and at time mournful drama with a strong female cast.
Nerwriter on The Master
Fucking love this guy.
I’m gonna have to watch this movie again with new eyes because I seriously think I’ll like it a lot more.
Always loved this scene though.
Movie Review: Hot Fuzz
Director: Edgar Wright
Writers: Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg
Stars: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Paddy Considine
Verdict: Real good
Of course when Edgar Wright, (Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), sets out to lovingly poke fun and the buddy cop/action genre he ends up making a superior buddy cop story.
Hot Fuzz follows the story of PC Nicholas Angel, as played by Simon Pegg, (Star Trek Beyond, Shaun of the Dead), who begrudgingly has to take a promotion in a remote fictional country town called Sanford. Very quickly he begins to sense that something’s amiss, and to quote Simon Pegg, “in order for us to have an exciting movie, something is”.
Sometimes it’s very hard to review comedies because there are only so many ways you can say that something just isn’t funny. So it delights me to tell you that Hot Fuzz is, very funny. Like the best pastiches, the best jokes work outside of it being a pastiche of films like Man on Fire, Point Break, and Bad Boys. God it’s weird listing a film made by a woman, (Katheryn Bigelow’s Point Break), amongst the filmography of Tony Scott and Michael Bay. Anyway – my point being that at that point in Airplane! where Leslie Neilsen says ‘of course I’m serious, and don’t call me Shirley’, it works as a joke by itself, it’s just a joke that’s grown organically out of the ridiculousness of a pastiche situation. By the same merit, it you want to set The Last Boy Scout in Cornwall, then it makes perfect sense that there’s going to be a lot of really funny jokes about how Angel thinks that everything’s murder, in a town with no recorded murders. A statistic that in the last act changes drastically, actually no it doesn’t because one of the jokes is that no one actually dies in the last act depite all the crazy action and violence. The really great thing about that premise is that Wright, Pegg, and Frost have accidentally stumbled on another load of references from a whole nother genre of films, films like The Wicker Man and Straw Dogs. Straw Dogs does actually get a very direct and on the nose reference when someone gets attacked by a man trap but not quite in the same way as in the original but it’s a really nice reference. I do just want to take this moment to say that this film is not just references to other films, as I said before most of the humour are jokes that evolve organically from the situation.
I have to take a moment to talk about the cast list, because honestly, it just looks like they’re showing off at this point. Simultaneous walk on performances from Martin Freeman, (The Hobbit, Sherlock, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), Steve Coogan, (Philomena, Knowing Me, Knowing You, 24 Hour Party People), and Bill Nighy, (Love Actually); Bill Baily pops up for seconds at a time, the lead cast includes the likes of, *takes in deep breath*; Paddy Considine, Nick Frost, Timothy Dalton, Jim Broadbent, Olivia Coleman, Edward Woodward, Rafe Spall, Stuart Wilson, and Stephen Merchant, and more. What’s better is, they’re all really, really good! This seems to be a trick that Edgar Wright has pulled off with all of his 4 films, which is just to pull together a lot of really talented performers into a great ensemble cast, of the new wave of great british talent, and to a degree members of the old guard like Bill Nighy and Edward Woodward. Honestly I’d give the movie credits as I do normally for all of them but I would seriously be here for the whole review doing so.
That doesn’t mean that the film doesn’t have problems. There is a strain of boardy humour with Olivia Coleman that I have previously been uncomfortable with. However, I have a lot of respect for Olivia Coleman, I think she is one of the best actressess working at the moment. I think y’know, if she’s ok with this sort of role then I am, and it’s not even particularly severe. The second problem; in the third act is falls into, less pastiche more blatant ripping off of style, particularly Tony Scott who does have a very distinct visual style and Edgar Wright copies it very well. When you take that and put it in a remote countryside town there’s actually something rather cute about that kind of visual sensibilty, and it’s not like the jokes stop. The third act is still very, very funny, so this issue is more forgivable I think.
The great thing about Edgar Wright comedies is how straight they play them, they do have a strain of the Leslie Neilsen, deadpan pastiche films like Airplane! and The Naked Gun which I have a huge amount of affection for, and in an age filled with pastiche films like A Haunted House, Epic Movie, Scary Movie, Disaster Movie, Meet the Spartans, I could go on – in an age filled with these utterly ridiculous, outdated in five minutes, mostly boring, (and this is from someone who enjoyed the first Scary Movie in parts), pastiche films, it is a joy to have something as well written, as brilliantly directed, as star studded and well acted, as affectionate, and racous as Hot Fuzz. The World’s End is still my favourite of the Cornetto trilogy, (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End), I think it’s the one with the highest laugh rate, but Hot Fuzz is pretty damn sweet.
Movie Review: Under The Skin
Director: Jonathan Glazer
Writers: Walter Campbell, Jonathan Glazer, Michel Faber, Milo Addica
Star: Scarlett Johansson
Under the Skin is not a movie best served by my traditional review structure, it’s not a film best served by telling you the plot, or even some stuff about how it was made. Being in the enviroment I surround myself with as a film junkie it’s pretty hard not to hear and see a lot about Under the Skin, and it’s a movie that’s best enjoyed if you see these things for the first time in the movie. The closest I can really give you is that it’s like 2001: A Space Odyssey mixed with Eraserhead, mixed with The Man Who Fell to Earth. It starts with a sequence that looks like the end of 2001: A Space Oddyssey directed in the style of Eraserhead, and this is all from the man best known for making Sexy Beast. The film famous for Ben Kingsley’s stream of expletives, now I’m no stranger to strings of expletives, in fact I embrace them, but this is such a different kind of movie to Sexy Beast. You could almost say, it’s a completely different beast. Under the Skin is a great Dirty Science Fiction film, (a term I’m trying to popularise coined by Golden Llama nominee Denis Villeneuve and his cinematographer Bradford Young for Arrival), it’s a really tense drama with hints of horror, it’s a crap rom-com, but it is still a fantastic movie.
If I was doing The Golden Llamas in 2014, Under the Skin would definitely at least have been nominated for score, cinematography, directing, editing, sound, and also best leading actress. Scarlett Johansenn is an intersting case, she has been in films since a very young age and is now best known for bid budget, high profile fare like Avengers Assemble and Lucy, but by now I guess she has enough speed boats to really pick and choose what projects she takes and when stars start get to that point it can tell you a lot about them, based on what they choose. So how pleasing is it that she took this project on? This tiny, microbudget affair from Scotland, (by the way there really needs to be more films set in Scotland), and also how pleasing is it that she’s really, really, good? The whole film really rests on her performance and she carries it off really, really well.
I used to have this film professor, who in one of his seminars went on and on about how much he hates the term reaslism, but that really is the buzzword for this movie. There’s something they, now quite famously, did during the production of this movie, it really works but knowing that going in has ruined the experience of the movie for some people so I’m going to keep my mouth shut. It works because it really authentically creates a world. The locations feel like Scarlett Johansenn is actually in Scotland. The kind of people who show up are not the kind of people who normally feature in movies but they’re the kind of people who, if you were to go out onto the streets, you might easiler run into. The locations don’t look like they were chosen purely to be cinematic they look real because they are. You really feel like an alien out on the streets with the main character.
It has incredible cinematography and score. Seriously this is one of the best shot movies I have seen in a really, really long time. When the drama opens out onto the Scottish countryside, it’s like I want every frame of this as a poster somewhere in my flat. There are many moments that just make me stop and think, ‘wow, I do live in a beautiful country’. The score is unsettling, and appropriately used. I’m seeing Jackie tonight which is scored by the same person, Mica Levi, and I can’t wait.
Under the Skin is a movie that could really take you by suprise watching it. It’s a bit slow to start out with but it very quickly becomes much weirder, more exciting, and utterly twisted than you’d have any right to reasonably expect. It’s a film that contantly finds new things to show you, constantly goes in new directions, and you can be fairly certain that whenever you think you know what’s going to happen next, everytime you think you know what direction this film is going, you’d be wrong. That is really the genius of this film. It’s a film with endless different readings, and meanings you could see in it, it’s a film that plays with your empathy in really intersting ways and I really, really like it. A lot of people will see things in reviews like surrealism, sort of senses of creeping amorphous dread and not watch it but you should give it a go. You might like it, just, be open to new things, and this is a very new thing. I think it’s a film that will benefit from multiple viewings and I, frankly, can’t wait.
WARNING THOUGH: If you are triggered by scenes of sexual assault, there is a scene of attempted rape in this movie that is one of the most viceral and disturbing attempted sexual assault sequences I have seen in quite some time. So, watch at your own discretion.
Thoughts on trailer for Dangerous Game
I saw a Guardian article that questioned whether or not this can be real, and to be honest I’m inclined to agree with him.
Aside from the fact it’s a Point Break rip off but about Premier League footballers starring the son of George Best, it’s all a bit, you wot?
It also looks like one of the worst home grown films sice Hell’s Kitchen just saying.
Cinefix What’s The Difference – A Clockwork Orange
“we were sitting in the corova milk bar, drinking miloko velocet, miloko plus, or milk +, trying to make up our razoodoks what to do with the evening”… I think that’s the quote…
anyway, Cinefix’s What’s The Difference are back and they’re doing Stanely Kubrick again. This time it’s his cult classic, A Clockwork Orange.
The Hipster Llama 