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Monday 25 November 2013

New Release Review: 'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire'


"If I want a movie that doesn’t end I’ll go to a French movie. That’s a betrayal of trust to me. A movie has to be complete within itself, it can’t just build off the first one or play variations."

So said the current reigning geek god, director Joss Whedon, when talking about Empire Strikes Back, but he might as well have been discussing Catching Fire; a movie with a long start, plenty of middle, but no discernible end.

Catching Fire picks up not long after Katniss and Peeta's surprise win (unless you happened to know the books are a trilogy, in which case it was markedly less surprising) in the first film. Katniss is now stuck playing up the fictional (or was it? *shrug*) romance that got the people of the Capitol to fall for her and Peeta, and that kept them both alive. Now an uprising is in the offing in the districts surrounding the Capitol, and Katniss must help quell it because it's somehow her fault - thanks to some very hazy logic - and the best way to do that is to convince the people that what she did in the arena was done out of love and not defiance.

Catching Fire is split roughly into two halves: the first sees Katniss trying to appease President Snow (Donald Sutherland) by convincing the districts that she really loves Peeta, the second, inevitably, details her return to the arena. It's during this stretch that Catching Fire is simply playing 'variations' (to again borrow from Whedon). The first film had the rather disturbing sight of children killing children; in the sequel it's the past winners who do battle, and they're not so young anymore. So instead it's just people killing people - which dials back the 'disturbing' somewhat. That this part of the film is at all affecting is almost entirely down to Jennifer Lawrence's faultless, and forceful, take on Katniss. Too many of the other actors fair less well: Sutherland underplays Snow's menace and comes off as a creep, rather than creepy; Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the mastermind behind the traps in the latest arena, seems to have wondered in off a completely different filmset (possibly a small quirksome indie film about waistcoat collectors); and Lenny Kravitz continues to be Lenny Kravitz. Which isn't exactly a criticism, but he does stick out a tad. Of the remainder most get short shrift and don't get to leave a mark, good or bad. Both Katniss's supposed love interests are given only a cursory amount of time (out of the fairly sizeable 2 hours and 26 minutes), suggesting that director Francis Lawrence is as disinterested in the Twilight-like love triangle as I am. More problematic is the fact that neither Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) nor Gale (Liam Hemsworth) are anywhere near as interesting as Katniss. They're noble and well meaning but have little else that defines them. So why be Team Gale or Team Peeta? Why not just be Team Katniss?

Balancing out the bad: there's the film's playful dissection of celebrity (which it unfortunately forgets about once the games begin), the special effects work from the perfectionists over at Weta (who have done a better job of realising the arena than Suzanne Collins, the author of the books, managed), a slightly unhinged Jena Malone as one of the returning winners, and Sam Claflin as the lantern-jawed Finnick Odair - who makes a bigger impression in his first 60-seconds on screen than either Hutcherson or Hemsworth have managed over the course of two films. Hell, he practically had me swooning. I realise I was essentially saying 'scrap the teams' earlier, but I do believe I'm Team Finnick.

Ultimately Catching Fire feels like a film of moments. Good ones. But they come round so very rarely.

Overall: 6/10

Monday 18 November 2013

New Release Review: 'Philomena'


As Philomena's credits rolled the collective audience at my screening let out a unanimous 'ahhhh', of the oh-how-sweet variety (as opposed to the oh-the-horror variation). It's that reaction - and the fact that most of those cooing over the film were racing towards pension age - that'll keep far too many people away. It looks like a film made for my mother and your mother and, really, everyone's mother. It looks like a film by the director of the at times too placid, and TV-movie-esque, The Queen (which it is). It looks unlikely to bother anyone; but it's so much better than how it looks.

Philomena is based on a true story written by ex-journalist Martin Sixsmith, here played by a very deadpan Steve Coogan. Sixsmith is approached with a dilemma: Philomena (the perpetually award-worthy Judi Dench) has been searching for her son for 50 years, having signed him away to a nunnery when she was very young, for reasons of guilt, as well as her lack of means. Sixsmith agrees to meet Philomena and, seeing an angle for a newspaper column, grudgingly takes on the 'human interest' story. The pair travel to Ireland, America, and back, bickering mildly as they go. Now that description sounds as dry and restrained as Coogan's performance. It doesn't get across what makes the film so effective: it's an odd couple movie. Sixsmith is the tight-laced one, distant, bitter and scathing, and an atheist through and through. Philomena is the goofy one, prone to non sequiturs, a keen romance novel reader, with an unwavering belief in God. Their chemistry is so good you'll hope for a series of films with the mismatched pair. (Here I'd like to propose the title Philomena II: Philomena Strikes Again.) The circumstances that have brought them together may be dour, but the time spent with the pair never is. It is, by a long shot, the funniest film I've seen this year.

Stephen Frears, he that directed it, has an almost quintessentially TV movie themed story on his hands, but unlike some of his previous efforts Philomena is shot and acted in such a way to transcend those issues. It helps that it looks great, but more important than its looks, it helps that it has Dench and Coogan to hand, who make the story into more than just tabloid news fodder. There are evil nuns, minor conspiracies, religious differences, and other tensions besides, but Philomena manages to ground it all with humour as dry as the Sahara. Which isn't to say it's a perfect film. Stephen Frears, he that directed it, does his best to offer a counterbalance to each theme and character: religion:atheism, drama:comedy, good:evil, tabloid:high-art, and inevitably struggles to marshall all the competing elements. Is Philomena being exploited by Sixsmith or is there a balance between both their needs? A more difficult question to parse, is Frears (and Coogan and Jeff Hope, who wrote it together) guilty of the same? There's obviously no malice on their part, and Coogan and Dench's real life counterparts have given their blessing, but the film still struggles to answer those questions, and is often too forgiving of Sixsmith, pushing him towards several unlikeable acts, then letting him off the hook before he has to see them through - leaving the film's most important questions hanging unanswered. That the film is conflicted might not be so bad. In a warped way it suits the material to a tee.

Overall: 8/10 

Monday 11 November 2013

New Release Review: 'Gravity'


I don't like being underwater, feeling my lungs burn for oxygen. Even with scuba gear it doesn't get much better: being told to regulate your breathing, to take it slow and steady, leaves you wanting, needing, to do the opposite. It's an alien environment, and we're far from well adapted to it. Gravity takes that feeling and runs with it. Set 420 kilometres above the Earth, in a zone called the thermosphere, Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is working on the Hubble Space Telescope when things go awry - and the outer reaches of our atmosphere isn't a place where you want things to awry. Left tumbling through space after satellite debris tears into the telescope, Stone's first problem is... Well her first problem is that she's tumbling through space. Her second problem is that her oxygen is running out. At this point Gravity is barely 10-minutes into its story, and things aren't going to improve much for Dr. Stone.

Let's start with the plaudits: Gravity is beautiful. It's either a string of virtuoso set pieces (I counted at least six) or it's just one big set piece. The hyperbole on the posters is, for once, actually accurate: it's 'nail-biting' and 'armchair-rending', it'll have your 'stomach twisted in knots' and your 'lungs screaming for air'. There wasn't one shot, one moment, that made me question whether what I was seeing was real. It was so immersive, so believable, that when Stone's oxygen ran low I switched to short steady breaths, just like I'd been taught; when Stone couldn't breathe, I didn't breathe; when she needed to hold on tight, or else be thrown into oblivion, I held tight (albeit to my armchair, which is probably less structurally sound after I'd pulled at it for 90-minutes). Gravity is a thrill ride.

Now, with that hearty backslapping out of the way, onto the nit picking. Gravity is a survival tale set not just in the most brutal environment in existence, but also the most isolated (or isolating?). Our heroine is truly alone - and we are alone with her. Which is where things get problematic. Bullock is great as the distant, anxious, specialist whose on her first space mission, but there's no reason to care about Stone. Bullock is playing an everywoman in the same way that Harrison Ford and Jimmy Stewart played the everyman, and the point of such a character is that we're able to put ourselves into their shoes. And we do (not least because Cuaron often uses a first person perspective, forcing us to see things through Stone's eyes), but to really make that work, to really make the film a masterclass of filmmaking - which Cuaron's Children of Men was - you have to care about Stone beyond a general feeling of 'Ooooooh, gee, I'd hate to be in that situation'. In Children of Men the characterisation may have been secondary to the technological wizardry, but in Gravity it feels like characterisation comes third or fourth on the list of priorities.

That said, Gravity is impressive. It is astounding. But, more than anything, it's a roller coaster ride in space.

Overall: 8.5/10

Tuesday 5 November 2013

New Release Review: 'Thor: The Dark World'


The unimaginatively titled Thor: The Dark World opens thusly: the coming Convergence (also known as: plot convenience) allows the Dark Elves - the sworn enemy of Odin and his brethren - to travel where they like. They intend to use the Aether (also known as: the MacGuffin) to make themselves invulnerable and convert the dark matter of the universe into, um, darker matter? Or something. Honestly I'm not sure. Anthony Hopkins' Odin seemed as bored giving the exposition as I was on hearing it. The main thing to take away is that the Dark Elves should be kept away from the Aether, which has found its way into the bloodstream of Natalie Portman's astrophysicist (because if it didn't then Portman would have nothing to do). Whilst all this is going on Tom Hiddleston's Loki sits in a cell, stealing the film whilst going nowhere and doing nothing, having misbehaved a tad during the events of Avengers Assemble.

MacGuffins are a given in action films, and even more so in comic book ones. They're not always a bad thing. They can be used well. The first film had a MacGuffin of its own, The Tesseract, but it was smartly deployed. In Thor: TDW there's no sense of weight or history to the barrage of MacGuffins we're told about. The Marvel comic books might have a long history involving the Dark Elves, the Aether, and the rather handy Convergence, but in the film they feel conjured from thin air. They're handy plot devices and little else. Somewhere out there is a cut of the film that shows why Malekith (Christopher Eccleston), leader of the Dark elves, has such a bee in his bonnet about Asgard; but after test screenings Aaron Taylor, the director, decided to cut them in favour of more Loki scenes. Now I'm all for more Hiddleston, but the scenes that have been added in - 'jammed in' as even Taylor admits - are fairly obvious. They're fun enough, but they slow things right down and tell us zero, zilch, and nada, about Malekith.

The film mostly focuses on getting Thor (Chris Hemsworth) - probably the least interesting character in the film after Kat Denning's intern Darcy - from one punch-up to another; which is a problem because Thor is just Superman with a hammer. He's an indestructible titan. At one point he gets punched in the face, repeatedly, by a demonic looking Dark Elf who is imbued with the power of something-something-blah-blah. After taking a beating that ought to have liquidated his organs and crushed every bone in his body, Hemsworth sits up with a couple of a slight scuff mark on one cheek. Yes, he's a superhero, and ought to be able to take the hits reasonably well - but there's no danger here. The only reason the final action sequence is even remotely entertaining is because of a fun distortion of time and space that means the battle rages through the air, atop skyscrapers, over mountains, and on different planets; but at no point is there any reason to fret over Thor's safety. He's a god. He'll be just fine.

That said, it is fun. And funny. Very funny in fact. None of the moments rival the first film's Thor-in-a-pet-shop moment, but Marvel still understand that Thor (and his brethren) are a little hard to swallow, even in a world full of men and women wearing capes and tights, and instead of ignoring that fact they highlight it, make fun of it, and in doing so the gods of Asgard almost seem to fit in.

Overall: 6/10