Movie Review: La La Land

Director: Damien Chazelle

Writer: Damien Chazelle

Stars: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone

Verdict: A Joy

Y’know just before going into this movie I was like “I had a load of horror films in my top list for 2016, wouldn’t it be funny if La La Land was my favourite of the year for 2017?”. I mean all the peices were in place, I loved Chazelle’s last film Whiplash, (my dad said, ‘a film about a jazz drummer, what was the point?’ would it be too obvious to say that’s kind of missing the point of it?), Ryan Gosling is one of my favourite actors working at the moment and I’ve always felt Emma Stone, (The Help, Easy A, Birdman) has had the potential to do great things, and I’ve been looking for a really great musical to fall in love with. I will say though, I saw this on the 8th at a preview screening, (I know how luxurious, little old me), 8 days into the year and I feel it’s pretty safe to say this might well be my favourite film of 2017. Then again I havn’t seen 20th Century Women, yet which just seems geared towards me. 

La La Land is, at it’s core, a fairly standard romance, it’s essentially a twist on Singin’ in the Rain only, better, and less sexist. A lonesome jazz pianist meets a struggling actress and at first they hate eachother but, y’know what, very quickly the ice begins to melt. The premise may be conventional but how the story unfolds from then on is not, and the plot is really just an excuse to have dazzling set peices and musical numbers. 

Not since I think Mad Max: Fury Road have I seen a film as dedicated to purely entertainng you as this one. It begins with one of the best cinematic traffic jams since Sicario, and one of a very different sort. Instead becomming one of the tensest shootouts I’ve seen for quite some time, it turns into one of the most dazzling, colourful, and best choreographed dance routines I’ve seen for quite some time. It’s all filmed in long takes to sell the routines, and the routines are great. No one fucks up, it’s all synchronised and just looks dazzling. The cinematography on display is truly astounding. It was done by Linus Sandgren, who most recently did Joy, which I recently reviewed, (here), and the cinematography was actually probably the best thing about that film. Actually to hear him talk about the difference in approach for those two films is very intersting. 

The performances are lovely. Who knew how funny Ryan Gosling was? He’s turning into a proper Ryan Goose, but I feel like that joke’s been done to death at much earlier stages of his career but there aren’t many adult gosling puns you can make. He’s had three movies out in last year and this year; this film, The Nice Guys, and The Big Short. This role combines the wit of The Big Short, which was actually the film that made me stop and go ‘wow Ryan Gosling knows exactly how to do comedy on a technical level well done him’; with the physical comedy of The Nice Guys; with the melancholia of Drive. There’s a face that Ryan Gosling does at the end of that iconic lift scene in Drive of just utter sadness and longing and regret and it’s a great face, and he’s really good at it, and he does it a lot in this film. He is really, really good, and he sings and dances and plays the piano and it’s lovely. Emma Stone I have never before seen at this level of good. She has a way of talking that makes it sound like it’s coming out of an actual person. She looks like she’s improvising in the sense that it doesn’t look like she’s saying lines that she’s rehearsed, she looks like someone having a conversation in real life. She is such an individual screen presence that it’s almost incongruous but I’m really glad she’s there because I love that manner of acting and I wish more people were doing it. 

If I was to nitpick I would say that it is a bit contrived, there’s one particular scene where Ryan Gosling makes a point about Emma Stone’s heels so she immediately gets tap shoes out of her bag and you go ‘oh right it’s this kind of musical’ but that’s not really representative of the rest of the film because in general, La La Land does make an effort to seem natural. Chazelle has talked in interviews about wanting to make it feel like you were ‘falling into’ the songs and for the most part I think he manages it.

If you go out onto the street and ask people to name a director, they’ll probably say, Steven Spielburg, (Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial), Stanely Kubrick, (The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey), Martin Scorcese, (Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street), maybe George Lucas, (Star Wars), and probably Micheael Bay, (Transformers). If Damien Chazelle keeps this up, this already quite extraordinary winning streak after only two big films and co-writing credits on 10 Cloverfield Lane, he might well join that linneage. You see the poster and it’s incredible that any film could get that many five star reviews and they wouldn’t have to scrape the bottom of the barrel of publications to get them. I tell you now, if I did stars, they could have included me. It’s wonderful!

Movie Review: Don’t Breathe

Director: Fede Alvarez

Writers: Fede Alvarez, Rodo Sayagues

Stars: Stephen Lang, Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette, Daniel Zovatto

Verdict: Really, really, fucking good

Have you every watched a movie and actually been distracted by just how good it is? Like not on a Birdman, ‘oh that’s so good’ level, I mean on a ‘that’s a really clever artistic choice, well done you’ level. That’s the experience I had with Don’t Breathe. I won’t win Oscars, but it should. 

Don’t Breathe is an exploitation thriller b movie where three low life theives try to rob a blind veteran of his life savings and things go south pretty fast, it doesn’t sound very engaging, or that you’d like the characters, but the movie pulls it off. It’s essentially the type of movie I’d watch with my Dad when my mum and my sister weren’t around, sleazy horror films like The Corridor, and Se7en, but done with such a clever eye for film making that it stands out from the crowd. 

The key to Don’t Breathe is this; Danny Boyle said something of Trainspotting, a film I have abounding affection for, when he made it, that these characters may be junkies, but that’s not all they are, they’re funny, and complex and they have they’re own dimensions. There is an absolutely fabulous line in Trainspotting that has always captured this for me, it’s when Renton says of his mother, “she was, in her own, socially acceptable way, also a drug addict”. In Don’t Breathe, our characters are low life thieves, but that’s not all they are, they have dimensions and hopes and dreams and motivations that makes you care for them, and without that, all the stylish film making in the world couldn’t help you. 

The film does have style, and a lot of it. It’s directed by Fede Alverez, best known for the remake Evil Dead, and he’s set up to tackle the next English language ‘Tattoo’ film, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, and taking over film David Fincher’s, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is no stylistic mean feat. In this film Alverez uses style how it should be used, for really economical story telling. There is one long take that puts one in mind of David Fincher’s Panic Room, a very underrated film, that like that Panic Room long take builds tention, whilst simulatenously setting up things that will pay off later. So it will show you object X and then later a set peice will take place around object X and you’ll go OMG NO THAT’S GONNA HAPPEN! But the film still finds ways to subvert your expectations; it’s really great. Because of the nature of the film, there’s a lot of silence so visual communication is a must and it does that really well, a lot of other stuff is done in the soundtrack. Now the film I think has Oscar worthy sound design and sound mixing, (to a layman there’s little difference so just, the sound is really well done), and it’s not just a There Will Be Blood thing, which incedetally also has great sound design in other areas, where “look, he’d deaf or they’re being quiet so we’re going to cut the sound!!!!” it’s done so that you can hear every little sound. I mean it won’t get Oscar nominated because it has a turkey baster full of human semen in it, but it should. I mean seriously there were moments in Don’t Breathe where I was like, ‘oh no, OH NO, oh fuck that’. In the same way The Neon Demon deserves oscars for score and cinematography but it has lesbian necrophilia and the academy is like 90% white men, then again maybe they’re perverted white men who knows…

Anyway…

Technicaly brilliance aside, what it leads to is a tense film full of some really gripping set peices, there’s one in a car, another with some night vision that’re some of the most gripping sequences I’ve seen in maybe any film of this year, in fact Don’t Breathe is definitely in the running for my favourite of the year, but I havn’t really been keeping track. It’s incredibly cineliterate, you can see references, as we’ve already said, to Panic Room, but at one point to Fight Club, and Fight Club references can often run you into trouble but this film does it right I think, and most obviously it references I think The Silence of the Lambs or maybe Sicario, depending which you prefer to call. It might be a bit riduclous at times, but it’s a compliment to the film that that didn’t bother me. I watched it pretty late at night, and it just left me feeling completely wired, it’s great, and actually at the end has some political bite. 

For me, 5 stars, and I don’t really do star ratings so, y’know, it’s good innit. 

Also Stephen Lang, (Avatar, The Men Who Stare at Goats) is great with very few words. 

Movie Review: Arrival

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Writer:Eric Heisserer, Ted Chiang

Stars: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker

Verdict: A joy

There are some films you need to see twice, be they Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, or any other famous twist movie you can think of. Arrival doesn’t necessarily have a twist but it has a development of an idea that will make you see the movie in a new light. I would have gotten my review of Arrival out a week ago when it still would have gotten me views, (boy the internet moves fast), I might even have been able to review it in the uni paper, but I walked out and thought, ‘before I can even begin to review this movie I need to see it again’, both so I can see if the ideas in it hold up, and to see if my flaws with it hold up.

Arrival follows Amy Adams, (Nocturnal Animals, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Big Eyes), who plays a linguist hired to translate the alien’s language when they quoteunquote ‘arrive’. The film also stars Jeremy Renner, (The Hurt Locker, The Avengers, American Hustle), as the physicist hired to find out what he can about the aliens, Forrest Whitaker, (Platoon, The Last King of Scotland, The Butler), who seems to never be out of work, which is good because he’s a very good actor, and Michael Stuhlbarg, (A Serious Man), who seems to just be taking fun bit parts these days but he does it very well, and well I’m glad he’s in work. 

There’s so much to love about Arrival, the score is fantastic, the cinematography is masterful, and it’s this extraordinarily emotional story that’s also incredibly intelligent. It’s like someone gave Roland Emmerich, (Independence Day), a heart and a brain. The director in this case in a guy called Denis Villeneuve, (Prisoners, Sicario), who made his breakthrough with some incredibly dark thrillers and there are moments in this film where he does go full Villeneuve. The moment when they first enter the pods really puts you in mind of that extraordinary traffic jam sequence from Sicario, and whilst those moments are incredibly well done on first viewing it doesn’t sit particularly well with the tone of the rest of the film, which is sort of verging on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Upon a second watch when I didn’t get into the film just as the opening montage was starting, I got in well before, (incidentally the montage takes on whole new meanings upon a second visit), the dour tone of the rest of the film worked a lot better and the tonal problems became a lot less jarring. 

One problem I did find, and this might spoil a bit but I’m going to really try, is that Arrival looks at these ideas of time, not time travel, but ideas of how we view time, that don’t hold up as well as they do in, let’s say a Kurt Vonnegut, (Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions), story. Walking out of the cinema I said to my mother that it doesn’t hold up perfectly and she said it never does, but it really does in this Vonnegut book. In fact if they’d have just corrected this one scene it would have held up a whole lot better. Also, with the very best will in the world , Villeneuve is not an actor’s director. Adams I think will get nominated but more for the character and the role than her acting in it, Renner actually I think is the best actor here, and he’s normally really boring. Stuhlbarg is very good in his small role which he always is, and he’s perfectly serviceable but no one’s stand out and Whitaker really can’t do the accent. 

That being said, Arrival is a film about mothers, and the experience of parenthood and what it means to be a parent, and when I watched this the first time I was sitting next to my mother, and it’s a film that made me feel grateful for my mother and it’s a film that made me feel shitty for all the times I had been less than appreciative, and it’s a film that didn’t necessarily make me want kids because I don’t but it’s a film that made me get it, because it explained it in a way that aligns with my core philosophical belief system. It aligns with things I’ve told myself to get me through hard times. And I just cried, a lot, a lot a lot. 

The film may not be perfect because it’s not, and in the end the film makes me really excited for the new Blade Runner movie, Blade Runner 2049, which Villeneuve is helming because he shows off things in Arrival that I think would be better suited to that movie. That being said, when it delivers an emotional payload like it does the end, it kind of transcends flaws, although they have to be mentioned.

Villeneuve is worth your box office vote, this film is a challenging, interesting, and intelligent film, go see it because then we’ll get more like it. Arrival is good for cinema as a whole, if it does well. Go see it, despite it’s flaws. It’s looking like I’m going to see it for a third time, and I can’t wait. 

I tell you what though, I thought Doctor Strange was a dead cert for the VFX Oscar. The interesting thing is that the Doctor Strange VFX is that whilst it’s entirely immersive its not nearly as seamless as Arrival, which I didn’t actually realize until I thought about what VFX Arrival would need. Arrival should be up there with Doctor Strange although Doctor Strange should win, and I think will win. 

Movie Review: Looper

Director: Rian Johnson

Writer: Rian Johnson

Stars: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, Jeff Daniels

Verdict: Good fun

Is it just me or does director Rian Johnson, (Brick, The Brothers Bloom, Breaking Bad), have major childhood issues? Think about it, Brick is a noir murder mystery set against the back drop of a high school, The Brothers Bloom is about a pair of sibling con men, and Looper has Freudian, psychoanalytical readings a plenty to sink your teeth into. I might not be far wrong here. 

Looper is an action sci-fi noir film from the man who’s to bring us Star Wars: Episode VIII. It has a time travel premise that would honestly take me the whole of this review to lay out to you, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s (Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, 500 Days of Summer), character has a speech memorised and everything. Needless to say, himself, 30 years from now is around making business  and some very bad people want to hurt both of them, or one of them, this time travel shit is confusing. I mean that’s one way of saying it, another way of saying is that it’s clearly evident that this film’s time travel laws make absolutely fuck all sense and crumble upon the slightest inspection. In fact there’s one scene that has been cited the world over as echoing the scene from Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me in which Austin is told not to worry about the ins and outs of time travel, before Bazil Exposition turns to the camera and goes “and I suggest you do the same”, Bruce Willis, (The Sixth Sense, Die Hard), keeps repeating to Gordon-Levitt that “it doesn’t matter” increasingly forcefully until he shuts up. The thing is about that time travel is that it makes just enough sense to keep you engaged, and it does at a first glace it seems perfectly fine but as the film goes on it begins to fall apart but you’re hopefully so involved in the drama at that point you might not care. 

The key success of Looper is that it does the three things that sci-fi has done brilliantly but separately since its inception, except all at once; it explores interesting scientific little widgets like, ‘what if this particular brand of time travel was a thing and it just went horribly wrong’, in the vein of, maybe Ex_Machina, Moon, or Blade Runner; it explores sort of real emotional/political depth, (less the political in this case), like District 9 or A.I. Artificial Intelligence; and it provides great crashbangwhallop set pieces in the vein of The Matrix and Star Wars, and it does each of those things perfectly fine. Emily Blunt, (Sicario, Edge of Tomorrow), very much provides a counter to the raging, and actually slightly problematic machismo of the rest of the film. She only shows up until the last act and the only real women character up until that point is the typical noir prostitute/stripper girlfriend stereotype that is really just tired and slightly offensive at this point, but Emily Blunt, probably the best thing about the film, isn’t exactly strong and indomitable, she has moments of weakness and fault but they give her character a depth and complexity that works very well with her bolder moments and honestly she’s just fantastic. The machismo is definitely there with the film’s action and noir trappings, Jeff Daniels, (The Martian) is there doing that thing he does of looking quite amicable and friendly but also like he’s also going to alternately fire you or snap your neck depending on the age rating of the movie, and Bruce Willis does that thing Bruce Willis does of stroking his ageing ego by holding a very bug gun very high on his body and firing it very quickly and loudly with a very big frown shouting very gratuitous insults. However, I think the film does enough for me to forgive it. Paul Dano, (Love & Mercy, There Will Be Blood) is there, and I love Paul Dano, and I’ll watch him in anything, but honestly he’s wasted here and he can do better I know he can.

All in all, Looper is a fairly ambitious piece that succeeds through a heartfelt plot, a level of cineliteracy I liked, (there’s one shot of Bruce Willis before he’s lost all of Gordon-Levitt’s hair that is unmistakably a visual reference to The Fifth Element that I quite enjoyed), and a neat little sci-fi widgety plot as well as some top notch world building and production design from Ed Verreaux, (Jurassic World, Rush Hour 3). 

7 Things You Didn’t Know About Sicario by Cinefix

One of my favourite YouTube channels talks about one of my favourite films of last year, Sicario.