An Aaron Sorkin Double: The Trial of the Chicago 7 & The West Wing Special

"The whole world is watching!" So goes the battle cry of the crowds waiting outside the courthouse where seven anti-war protesters and a member of the black panthers were being prosecuted in 1969, in what became one of the most bizarre trials on record. It's just a shame no one's watching the film about it - at least according to Netflix's Top 10 listing. Despite an all star cast (including Sacha Baron Cohen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Keaton, Frank Langella, Eddie Redmayne, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Mark Rylance), Aaron Sorkin's latest verbal tsunami has gotten little to no fanfare.

The story, which deviates relatively little from what was actually said and done, sees the Chicago 7, plus Black Panther Bobby Seale, in court over whether they attempted to incite protesters to riot during an anti-war protest. Cutting back and forth between the trial and the events that lead-up to the riot, we slowly get to know each of the 7 (well, except for a couple of them, who we're told in passing are only there so that the prosecutors can seem lenient when they let them off without charge) and learn how the protest morphed into a brutal and destructive run-in with the police.

Sorkin the director is still little more than a reliable journeyman, getting the job done with clarity and efficiency, but not with much style or flair. Fortunately, we also get Sorkin the writer, who can still turn what should by rights be a prosaic exchange about a government or law into a lyrical, funny and hypnotic back and forth - one that's loaded with smarts (and a ton of exposition). 

That Sorkin's cast is full of ringers doesn't hurt: Rylance is still an understated powerhouse; Baron Cohen lets his charisma shine through, and proves he's capable of far more than he's been giving us over the last two decades; Keaton, Redmayne and the majority of the rest of the cast comfortably deliver a script that requires them to deliver lines at hyperspeed; and Langella has a grand ol' time as the deeply flawed judge of the case - although he's so sneeringly evil, he sits on the brink of unbelievability. But the real standout is Abdul-Mateen as Bobby Seale. What he goes through, and how he's treated in a court of law, ought to defy belief - but given the times we're living through, it seems all too possible an outcome even 50 years later.

7.5/10 - Despite its lack of flair, it's still worth a look.

And very briefly (well, brief-ish), a shout out for Sorkin's recent re-staging of The West Wing episode "Hartsfield's Landing". Due to the current state of the US of A, it's more exhilarating than ever to briefly live in a beautifully shot and scripted bubble where those voted into public office want to affect positive change. That said, my response to this special may be driven by the fact that I love the show with every fibre of my being, so seeing the actors take up their parts for the first time in 14-years was always going to blow my mind.

With that caveat about my blinkered all-consuming love for West Wing out of the way, it really is stunningly shot. Despite being filmed in a theatre with a relatively spare set, director and co-creator of the series Tommy Schlamme does wonders with the space, managing to cross-cut between different settings with subtle staging, and he frames and shoots much of the episode so that the show feels more cinematic than ever. That the performances aren't an imitation of what the cast did before also helps, as each actor brings the weight of time and experience to bear on their parts. The choice not to imitate is particularly true of Sterling K Brown, who fills in for the much beloved John Spencer, who died during the filming of the last season of West Wing. He has the same gravitas as Spencer, but he finds his own way into the part.

When the special airs in the UK (it's currently only available in the US via HBO Max, but discussions are underway to get it over here relatively soon), it's unclear whether they'll include the straight-to-camera segments (where there were once ad breaks) urging American voters to get out and vote. Although they can be overly earnest - which is pretty much West Wing in its comfort zone - they're also funny; particularly one in which Lin Manuel-Miranda is forced into comparing Hamilton with the glories of The West Wing.

10/10

TV Review - The Haunting of Bly Manor

 

'Tis the season of ambitious horror series swinging big... And mostly missing. There's the fitfully ingenious Lovecraft Country and its soporific central mystery; the stunningly shot The Third Day, successfully riffing on The Wicker Man, and then outstaying its welcome by an hour or three; and now we have The Haunting of Bly Manor, aka The House Where Accents Go To Die.

Loosely adapted from Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, which has been adapted many, many times, including the faultless '61 film version The Innocents, and more recently, the thoroughly mediocre The Turning back in the halcyon days of January. Its title overhaul is to tie it to showrunner Mike Flanagan's brilliantly chilling series from last year, The Haunting of Hill House. A fact that's hard to miss, given how it transplants the majority of the cast from Hill House, and sees Flanagan (and his set designer Patricio Farrell) once again building a creepy home from a scratch. Also present: a fright of ghosts (Fact of the Day: 'fright' is the collective noun for ghosts). Not so present: all that many frights.

Moving The Turn of the Screw's action from 1898 to 1987 - bringing it just close enough to the present to channel a little Stranger Thing's-like nostalgia, but not so up to the present that the story has to contend with mobile phones, which have been poking holes in horror plots from the moment they were invented - the series trundles along quite happily at first. In quick succession, we're introduced to the bright, bubbly and haunted (because of course she is) American abroad Dani, who's made the new governess at Bly; her employer, the scowling and haunted (yes, he's haunted too) Henry Wingrave; his reliable but haunted (it's probably safest to assume everyone's got a haunted vibe, okay?) housekeeper Hannah; a brooding and enigmatic gardener, Jamie; the ex-(very ex) governess at Bly Manor, Rebecca; Henry's raffish, Scottish valet, Peter; amiable chef, driver, and dogsbody Owen (who actually seems pretty chipper and non-haunted); and last but not least, the quirksome, almost irksome, Wingrave siblings, Flora and Miles.

Over the show's nine episodes, most everyone gets a solid hour dedicated to their backstory. Although the scares are rarer than in Hill House, they're no less effective when they come around. Where the torrent of jumps were in the previous series, we instead get a greater focus on slow-burn mysteries and a nicely chilling atmosphere. It's only when we get into Peter and Rebecca's soporifically tedious love story that things start going awry. Partly, because it feels like it'll go on beyond the heat death of the universe, but mostly because of over familiarity. The Turn of the Screw is an old, old tale, and plenty have liberally stolen from James' original story over the last one hundred plus years, so neither Peter and Rebecca's doomed affair, nor most of the other characters' backstories, will surprise anyone. But what really sinks the show is England. More specifically, keeping it set here, rather than shifting it across the pond. Now I should point out that I have a tin ear for accents. I could meet someone with the thickest Glaswegian accent going and I'd still ask bemusedly "So... where you from?". And I'm married to a Glaswegian. And yet even I can tell that the stiff upper lip accents being put on by most of the cast are like nails on a chalkboard, and would be deemed 'a bit much' by the Monty Python boys. But a special mention needs to go out to the worst offender, Oliver Jackson-Cohen's Peter. His supposedly Scottish accent is like listening to your 8-year-old nephew doing a bad Gerard Butler impression - but with a foghorn.

Despite these issues, and they are neither few nor slight, Flanagan still knows how to orchestrate the hell out a scare. Unfortunately, with the scares so rare over the nine-hour stretch, I'm betting many will bail before they get to some of the show's best jumps.

6/10

TV Review - Lovecraft Country - Season 1

 

Who to blame for Lovecraft Country? 

To be clear, the show isn't bad. In fact, at times, its exhilarating how well it blends racial oppression in 50s America with horror stories from the last century. But as a loose anthology, it lives and dies by how well it riffs on each episode's old school horror.

The spine of the show's story, holding its many and varied episodes together, follows war vet Atticus (Jonathan Majors), who returns home to 1950s U.S. of A. after serving in South Korea. Almost immediately, he goes in search of his missing father (Michael Kenneth Williams) with the help of his childhood friend, Letitia (Jurnee Smollett), and his uncle, George (Courtney B. Vance). Between them, Majors, Smollett, Williams and Vance have more charisma than should be healthy for a person - but it's all in service to a sub-Lost mystery that drags us, again and again, away from each episodes principal horror story. It gets so bad that you end up resenting the core cast as the camera cuts back to them trying to decipher another book, chant or hieroglyph.

But when the show works, good God does it work. In its ingenious third episode, it subverts the traditional haunted house story by having the inhabitants in greater danger from those made of flesh and blood, harassing them from without, than by the tortured souls haunting them from within. In its darkly funny fifth episode, it takes a queasily graphic approach to body horror, whilst wryly detailing a strange kind of code switching. But to get to these episodes, you have to wade through a shambolic story about magicians - played by the Ku Klux Klan, but with sparkly magic - and a tonally jarring Indiana Jones adventure. 

So who's to blame for Lovecraft Country's ramshackle nature? It'd be easy to put it all on wunderkind producer JJ Abrams, who knows how to set up a show, but is less able to see a story through to the end (see: Lost, Alias, Westworld, Fringe, and the list goes on). But given that there are more than twenty producers on LC, it's hard not to imagine that that's an awful lot of people, of which more than a few must have been pulling in a different direction to everyone else...

6.5/10

Tenet (AKA How We All Tried to Stop Worrying and Went Back to the Cinema)

72-hours after seeing Tenet, I'm approximately 72% of the way to pinning down each of its temporal gear shifts, and making sense of how they fit into the story's labyrinthine whole. If you're keen to see Christopher Nolan's latest brain teaser with zero knowledge of what's coming your way, then you may want to skip this write-up, but if there's ever been a film where it's worth having a slight toehold on what's coming your way, it's this one, and there isn't anything below that isn't already in the trailers.

After passing a brutal test, our protagonist (literally styled in the credits as The Protagonist, and played with buckets of suave by John David Washington) is semi-inducted into the titular organisation. What's Tenet's role? To trace back (/forward?) inverted objects that have come from our (potential?) future, and which may herald the end of the world (and universe?) as we know it.

The introduction of inverted objects, which you can only affect if you can envision altering them in the future, rather than in the present, is head scrambling all on its own. So when the film starts throwing inverted people into the mix, you have two choices, go with it, and feel your way through the time shifts with your gut, or give up. This is neatly summed up by Clémence Poésy (offering up some Basil Exposition), who stops just short of staring down the barrel of the camera when she tells Washington: "Don't try to understand it, feel it." 

From here the film dives head long into a world of espionage, picking up characters and complicated histories left, right and centre: we learn about the villain of the piece, Andrei Sator (a very OTT Kenneth Branagh), and his wife (an archly vulnerable Elizabeth Debicki); Washington's team gains a member or two (including the eminently watchable Robert Pattinson); and Michael Caine pops up to steal the film with a single scene. Complicating matters, there are plenty of characters that are referred to but that we never meet, and yet we still have to place them and everyone else's relationships to one another within a complex chronology of past, present, future, second present inverted/reverted, and more. If all of that sounds hard to grasp, then I've done my job, because in the moment its like trying to keep a hold of a David Lynch fever dream.

Inexplicably, Nolan and his sound design team clearly came to the conclusion that all of the above was much too easy to track, so large tracts of dialogue are lost to the blast of jet engines, crashing waves, explosions, or (a la Dunkirk and The Dark Knight Rises) good ol' face mask garbling, as one person or another shout-blusters through their face mask, allowing us to grasp three out of every 10 words. 

Despite all of the hurdles the film places in our way - in an apparent attempt to reduce our enjoyment and appreciate it only on a coldly practical level - it's somehow still enthralling. As an action film its almost unique, with Inception being its only closest relative, and that film now feels breezily straightforward in comparison. When Tenet's temporal complexities click into place and make a degree of sense (at least on a gut level), like during a forwards/backwards car chase, it's genuinely a marvel. But just as you start to get a feel for its dizzying plotting, it throws another barrel load of names, MacGuffins and spy shenanigans your way, and doesn't wait to see whether you'll drown in them or not.

I will be rewatching it, but I suspect the revisit will highlight just how lacking the film is on a human and emotional level. Ultimately, I suspect it will be remembered as a summation of Nolan's lifelong predilection with timey-wimey-ness, and which can be summed up with Michael Caine like-fashion: 'Time. It's a funny old thing, ain't it?' 

It's either a 7 out of 10 thanks to its structural brilliance or a 4 out of 10 because the whole damn thing may be meaningless. Right now, I'm honestly not sure which...

Fissure

Assuming the 12-minute short Fissure is intended as a proof of concept, then it’s an interesting one. The opening scene shows a fleeting distorted memory in which a child disappears during the handful of seconds her parents look away. When the child’s mother, Kate (Emma Laidlaw), wakes from her nightmare, a white board behind her bed gives a running count of the number of ‘Days Without Incident’. Kate is seriously ill at ease in the real world, and the peculiar distortions from her dreams appear to be seeping into her waking life. During the scenes that follow it briefly looks like Fissure will tell its story almost entirely without dialogue, but a little before the halfway mark Kate begins to speak, and that’s when the endeavour becomes more aggravating than compelling.

For a small budget short, the directing and editing (by Paul Wright) is a cut above, but the film suffers from a script (Paul Wright again) that aims for enigmatic but misses by some margin. When using drugs, Kate sees her child again and is sure that she’s alive in a hinterland beyond our senses. What follows throws up far too many questions for a film with such a short running time, and the overriding impression is that the film is no more au fait with the answers than we are. Here are just a few of the bothersome questions it isn’t interested in answering: What is the hinterland? How did Kate’s daughter get there without taking any drugs? Who else lives there? How is she not dead from starvation? Why doesn’t Kate’s ex think his daughter is alive when all she’s done is disappear? And most importantly, why should we care?

That Laidlaw never truly disappears into the role of Kate doesn’t help matters. When faced with longer takes, the discomfort of her character seems to speak more to Laidlaw’s own discomfort as an actress.

If this is just a tease for a future longer project, then it does have some promise. But if this is a fait accompli, and there are no answers coming, then what we have here is Lost on a smaller scale: some interesting ideas, a solid execution, but no real idea just what is making everything tick.



It’s been quite awhile since I’ve updated the blog, so I have an overwhelming need to give a round-up of my top 10 films of 2017 (so far). (Just as so very many other blogs and websites have done.) It's been a pretty awesome year so far:

1. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)

2. The Handmaiden (Chan-wook Park)

3. Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan)

4. La La Land (Damien Chazelle)

5. Lion (Garth Davis)

6. Baby Driver (Edgar Wright)

7. Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi)

8. Lady Macbeth (William Oldroyd)

9. Get Out (Jordan Peele)

10. 20th Century Women (Mike Mills)

 

New Release Review: 'The Music Factor'

Before I dive into this review about the documentary 'The Music Factor' I feel I ought to point out that I do know the director. That said, I've informed him that just because we're on nodding terms doesn't mean I'll be nice. But then I'm rarely nice, so I believe he already knows to be wary. So, now that that's out of the way, on to the review:

Achieving fame and fortune in 17 weeks is an insane idea, but thanks to the wonder that is reality TV, you can. In some instances, it happens even faster - like when people become famous for being themselves (isn't that what TV presenters do?) - but the music world has yet to work out how to reduce it further. On 'The X-Factor', from the moment you audition to the release of your Christmas single (if you're the winner) there's a mere 17 weeks. Which is demented. And insane. It's dementedly insane. But that's exactly why so many queue round the block to audition. Why put in hard graft when you can almost guarantee yourself a job just by nailing an audition on prime-time TV? In Chris Ridgway's fleet-footed 30-minute documentary he and his team (including filmmaker Mike Staniforth) set out to get a local indie band from the wilds of Manchester, England into the top 100 chart during the same week that the latest X-Factor finalist lays waste to all before them. That's how daunting a task it is to break into the very top: there's no point even considering the loftier positions.

Stepping up to the plate to achieve the impossible are The Mantells, an amiable trio made up of Tom Barrow, Dale Moran and Lewis Moran. The documentary breaks down exactly what it takes to make in the industry: thousands of hours of practicing together, hundreds of gigs (and you need to be sure to choose the right kind of gigs), umpteen sly attempts to sneak your EP into the right hands (note: don't send it to the BBC, they'll figure it's a suspicious package and will send it off to be destroyed), and plenty of sacrifices, not least of which include dropping out of university, quitting your job, and missing out on most key events in the lives of those you love.

Ridgway and Staniforth have put together a highly polished doc that lays out its intent early on and then goes about breaking down the process of its impossible task in minute detail. Something that would have helped its telling, especially in its closing stretch, would have been to adequately get across how it felt for the band to put in all that hard graft. We're told in no uncertain terms what they would need to do, but there's a fair time jump between the band recording their single and the moment they check their place in the charts. But then coming out of the documentary wanting more is no bad thing. It's likely one that The Mantells, with their toe-tappingly catchy single, would approve of; always keep your audience wanting more.

Overall: 7.5/10 

Should the above have piqued your interest, you can find the full doc here.

Top Ten of 2015 - A sketchy review of the year

A part of me loves lists. Ask me what my all-time top ten is and my mind immediately goes to John Cusack in 'High Fidelity', doing his best to round out yet another decidedly niche top five list. He slaves over each choice, making sure it doesn't let down the whole. A perfect (or seemingly perfect) list has a sense of completism about it - which is ironic since you have to rule so much out to create it. Creating something that has a definitive quality requires some graft, but, in the end, it looks all so satisfying.

There's another part of me that will have no truck with lists. How you feel about a film can change. And even the most devout cinephile can find a film has passed them by. So how could the list ever be definitive?

This is the first year in awhile that I've caught enough of the big hitters to be able to take a relatively decent punt at what I'd have in my list, and the 'High Fidelity' instinct is hard to subdue, so here goes; just bear in mind my umpteen reservations about the matter:

Top Ten (counting down, in time-honoured fashion):

10. It Follows
Death personified, relentlessly stalking teenagers (albeit at a nice and leisurely pace), and literally doing it because of the teens promiscuity, is both a new and a very smart spin on an old trope.

9. Wild Tales
Argentinian short film anthology. Not all of the shorts hit home, and some of them fit ill into the film's theme of violence and vengeance, but its opening and closing tales are worth the time spent all on their own.

8. Mistress America
Previously I've found Noah Baumbach a tad trying. His films have, on more than one occasion, projected a smugness that makes them hard to warm to. But with 'Mistress America' he balances it with strong (and even warm) characterisation, and by producing his funniest script so far; no doubt helped by his co-writer and star Greta Gerwig.

7. Song of the Sea
Much as liked 'Inside Out', it's Tomm Moore's 'Song of the Sea' that snuck into a nook in my head and refused to leave. The attention to detail in the drawings, the stunning soundtrack, and the perfectly cast voice actors makes the whole thing feel so lived and charming that it's heartbreaking that so few have seen it yet.

6. Amy
I don't tend to cry at films. I don't tend to cry full stop. But Asif Kapadia's documentary on Amy Winehouse had me in tears of indignant anger almost throughout. It's a fascinating documentary that shows how the media were almost as culpable for what happened to Winehouse as her nearest and dearest were. If you don't leave the film red-eyed and fuming then it's possible you're broken inside.

5. Steve Jobs
I was predestined to like this one. Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin: what's not to like? It's smart, witty and surprisingly thrilling for a film that's ostensibly about three product launches. Probably the most quotable film of the year.

4. A Most Violent Year
J.C. Chandor deconstructs the myth of the American dream. Admittedly if that were the logline then it'd explain why so few saw the film, so let me try again: the film is tense, gripping and immaculately acted - and contains one of my favourite soundtracks of 2015.

3. Mad Max: Fury Road
George Miller's return to the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max is more of a rollercoaster ride (in similar fashion to 'Gravity') than it is a film, but it's a hell of a ride all the same.

2. Sicario
I can't fault 'Sicario'. The editing, cinematography and soundtrack come together to make one of the most relentlessly tense films I've ever seen.

1. Whiplash
I may be biased about this one, as it chimes so strongly with my view on the (necessary) relentless dedication needed to truly excel at something, but I found it so perfectly encapsulated the sacrifices you have to make, whilst also detailing the problems inherent in that mindset, that no other film was ever going to touch it.

Outliers that I couldn't quite crowbar in:
Of the indie movies: 'Coherence', 'The Signal', 'The Falling', 'Digging For Fire'; of the award-noteworthies: 'Ex Machina', 'American Sniper', 'Girlhood', 'Still Alice', 'Mommy', 'Going Clear'; of Hollywood's output: 'Inside Out', 'Danny Collins', 'Top Five' and 'Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation'.

Films that got an unfair drubbing:
'Focus' - fun and light, with an equal opportunities approach to sexual objectification. 'The Man From U.N.C.L.E.' - ditto.

Films everyone else seems to like, but, really, why??:
'Spotlight' - fails to pack a punch despite its subject matter. Mark Ruffalo's overacting doesn't help. 'Birdman' - Best film that seems like a play that didn't quite manage the transition to film - and probably ought to actually be a play.

Best non-2015 film I saw this year:
'The Broken Circle Breakdown'

Film that may have finally ended a career:
'Aloha'. Tellingly, Cameron Crowe's next film is a TV movie. (The sketch up top, which plays off of 'Say Anything', is my sort of In-Memoriam-of-the-Career-That-Was.)

And For Full Disclosure, here are the 2015 noteworthies that I have yet to catch:
'While We're Young', 'A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence', 'Hard to be a God', 'Eden', 'White God', 'The Lobster', 'Love is Strange', 'Macbeth', 'Bridge of Spies' (which I'm watching tonight), 'Carol', and 'The Look of Silence' (and I also need to track down the preceding documentary: 'The Act of Killing'). Maybe the list will change, maybe not. 

Let me know what you thought were the best of the year, and which should have made the cut, in the comments section below.

New Release Review: 'Beasts of No Nation'

War is hell. No surprise there. Add children and matters just get worse. Three sentences in and already I worry that I'm sounding flippant... It's hard to write about something that's terrible and true and is somehow not in our distant past. Cary Fukanaga (the writer/director) faces the same trouble whilst putting it on screen.

Beasts of No Nation is set in an unnamed African country and follows a young boy, Agu (Abraham Attah), as he goes from a happy, if impoverished, life with his family, to a dead-eyed follower of Commandant (Idris Elba), the leader of a growing rebel group prone to guerilla warfare. The steps that take him from his family life to his rebel life are much as you'd expect: death, manipulation, death, a spot of black magic, drugs, and more death.

This isn't the first film to touch upon child soldiers, or soldiers so young that they might as well be children (the brutalising Come and See is particularly worthwhile, so long as you don't mind being flung into an emotional pit of despair for almost 3 hours), but Beasts of No Nation is the first to properly tackle the story of child soldiers in Africa - at least outside of documentaries. There's much to like, if 'like' is the right word when dealing with a film whose subject matter couldn't be bleaker: Fukunaga's cinematography is stunning; Dan Romer's score is highly evocative, and Attah's performance as Agu is preternaturally good. But, oddly, the film has little emotional impact. It'd make sense if the initial horrors hit home, whilst the subsequent ones became less brutalising due to the constant onslaught of death and depravity, making our journey through the film mirror that of Agu's. Unfortunately, that's not what happens. (At least not to me. Which suggests either a misstep on the filmmaker's part or means I'm dead inside... ) Instead, to appreciate the gravity of the situation, I found I had to step out of the film and tell myself 'This is something that happens', at which point the impact of what was happening finally landed - but not before.

Further compounding the problem is Elba's Commandant. As charismatic as Elba is - and he's very charismatic - he's simply too likeable. When he does terrible things it's hard to equate them with Elba, as he remains amiable, if occasionally irascible, throughout. At times, it felt like his TV character Luther had taken a wayward path in recent years (his wandering accent rather accentuated the impression). When things don't quite work out for him you don't think 'Aha! Karma has come for thee Commandant!' Instead you think 'Gee, that's a shame. I hope things start to look up for poor Elba'.

All told Fukunaga's film is still impressive, even if it's impact is more cerebral than emotional.

Visceral impact: 6/10
Impact-once-the-gravity-of-the-situation-hits-home-after-some-musing: 8/10
Overall: a conflicted 7/10

New Release Review: 'Sicario'

A truck (that looks rather like a tank) charges along baking tarmac towards its destination: the front wall of a nondescript house in a nondescript American neighbourhood. In less than a minute, and using only a handful of shots, director Denis Villeneuve builds an unrelenting tension that doesn't let up till the credits roll. Once the truck arrives, bursting through the wall of the house, the tension barely abates, but at least the situation is clarified: the truck contains an FBI strike team, and the house and its occupants are part of Mexico's drug cartel. Understanding who, what, why, where and when will turn out to be a rare thing in Sicario, where ambiguity and confusion reign supreme.

We experience most everything through the eyes of FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), who leads her strike team in the latest raid in a long line of raids, this time into a veritable house of horrors. Drugs are seized and bodies (presumably of rival cartel members) are found, and there seem to be an unlimited supply of both, as the feuding cartels continue to take pieces out of each other whilst also sending as much of their product across the US/Mexican border. Plan A in the 'war' against drugs clearly isn't working; enter Plan B in the shape of consultant Matt Graver (Josh Brolin). His task: "To dramatically overreact." He offers Kate the chance to join him and his team - which includes another outside consultant, the taciturn Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro) - as they set out to bring order to chaos. And so begins Kate's journey down the rabbit hole.

It's apparent within the opening moments that Sicario is a Hamlet-drama, i.e. anyone and everyone could be dead by the end of the tale, and Villeneuve uses all the tools at his disposal to accentuate that sense of perpetual danger: Roger Deakins stunning cinematography, with its canny use of space, only ever revealing enough of our surroundings to make us wonder what's happening just out of sight; Jóhann Jóhannsson's score, which might be the most relentless thing about the film, as it builds quietly, but insistently; and Blunt's confused and horrified Kate, our audience surrogate, who can deal with a house full of decomposing bodies, but finds the ambiguity of Graver's actions and agenda much more unsettling.

There's much more I could write about Sicario - there's Del Toro's enigmatic turn as Alejandro, the cog around reach everything else is moving; there's the matter of do-the-ends-justify-the-means of what Graver and his team are doing; there's Villeneuve's expert direction, which isn't so surprising after Incendies and Prisoners - but, for the most part, that all needs to be seen to be appreciated. So go watch it already.

Rating: 10/10

New Release Review: 'Whiplash'

Very quick and very sketchy this one - time ran out on me.

I run. It’s a thing I do. I don’t jog, or go for weekend jaunts in the park. I run – and I run fast. Miles Teller’s character Andrew, the 19-year-old at the centre of Damien Chazelle’s film Whiplash, drums. He doesn’t kind of drum. He doesn’t drum in a band, or for fun, or for kicks. He drums because he wants to be great. And not just great, but one of The Greats. Why mention the running? Because, for better or for worse (likely the latter), I understand Andrew’s tunnel vision approach to life.

When Andrew is noticed by an infamous conductor at the Shaffer Conservatory – the best music school in the United States – there’s a part of him that knows he’s finally where he belongs. Terrence Fletcher, the conductor in question (played by J.K. Simmons, letting out his inner sadist), is no doubt used to such hubris. Hubris doesn’t get you anywhere; pain and dedication (and a bit more pain) are what get you where you want to go. Fletcher finds Andrew’s weaknesses and exploits them, beating him down till there’s little left of him besides ‘the drummer’. And it doesn't take much to begin stripping Andrew of his identity, because he’s ready to do that already. He’ll give anything in service of the dream, because the dream is all that matters.

Chazelle’s film is visceral, intense and relentless. I'd throw in a few more adjectives, but I think I'd be in danger of sounding hyperbolic... But then what follows is going to sound pretty hyperbolic anyway: the performances Chazelle gets out of Teller and Simmons are among their best! And may be among their very best! (It's amazing how exclamation marks make things sound trite or false.) Films that deal with genius, or virtuosic ability, or with a character’s desire to achieve perfection, almost universally stumble when trying to show those things. Art of any kind is subjective, so proving that an artist or a writer or a musician is more capable than their peers, is difficult. Usually the filmmaker resorts to beating the audience over the head with heavy handed exposition: we're told a writer or musician is great, therefore they are great. Not a terribly satisfying way to tell a tale. Chazelle takes a different tact; he shows us instead. Andrew bleeds for his art, literally, and he’s told again and again he isn’t good enough, and yet he sounds pretty darn good throughout. (Although I might not be the best gauge for this. I just thought drummers liked to casually hit stuff.) But that’s part of the point. There’s good, and then there’s great. Where is that line, and when do you know you’ve crossed it? Andrew is made to question himself and what he’s doing, and Chazelle is ever-cagey about telling us whether Fletcher is running Andrew through a very long trial by fire – how else are you supposed to become the best? – or is merely satisfying his ego.

I run. I race. I compete. And there’s an awful lot I’d sacrifice to push through to become The Best. It’s a strange mindset for some, and it’s perhaps even stranger to see it reflected back at you. It both makes complete sense and also seems a tad deranged, but my instincts tell me there’s a part of all of us that can relate to Andrew and his relentless dream.

Rating: 10/10

New Release Review: 'Calvary'

With John Michael McDonagh's latest, Calvary (which I have called 'Calgary', 'Cavalry' and 'What film are we going to see again?', and I apologise to Mr. McDonagh for my ineptitude in this matter), he proves he's just as capable a writer as his brother (Martin, In Bruges), but perhaps not quite as capable a director.

Getting its first act over and done with in a single scene, Calvary opens with Father James Lavelle (Brendan Gleeson) in the confession box, listening to a parishioner tell him that he's going to kill him because he's a good man. Why kill a good man? Because who would notice the death of a bad one? Odd as this sounds, in the end it turns out there's a strange sanity to the plan's seeming insanity. But that's for the end, which is a good seven days away: the amount of time given to Father James to 'put his house in order'. And it's a rather cluttered house: his daughter (Kelly Reilly) has returned home after an attempted suicide, an older member of the congregation has been ruminating on doing the same, another parishioner is thinking of doing it to others, whilst a previous member of the flock (Domhnall Gleeson) has done it already (several times in fact), and that's just the first few troubled souls. There's also a misanthropic millionaire (Dylan Moran), a cuckolded husband (Chris O'Dowd), a nihilistic doctor (Aidan Gillen), and a cretinous back-up priest. As Father James attempts to offer guidance to his wayward flock we're trying to guess which is his would-be murderer. Something the Father doesn't need to do. He already knows.

Calvary is so very close to being spectacular. Most will probably find it out and out spectacular, and with good reason; and truth be told the issues I have with it are minor, and mostly due to my being particular (see: awkward). So don't take the following to seriously. First minor irksomeness: it's shot on digital. The format has the capacity to look majestic, as it does here during the grand sweep of the exterior shots, but when McDonagh shifts inside the look suddenly becomes muted and oddly framed. At times the film looks like it's the best acted, best written episode that Coronation Street never saw. Second irksomeness: it feels like theatre. It's almost pure dialogue, the characters (as described above) wouldn't sound out of place in a farce or a comedy of errors, and the few times the film goes meta it's almost as if it thinks it's a play. Now I like theatre, I'm all for theatre, but a film that feels like it (yes, whilst also feeling like TV) can seem like it's at war with its medium. On the flip side, the dialogue is a thing of beauty. Which makes for a pretty good flip side.

Since I've started with the hyperbole I might as well continue. Brendan Gleeson does his best work since In Bruges, Reilly is quietly affecting, O'Dowd and Moran show they're capable of playing far darker shades then they'd previously hinted at, Domhnall Gleeson (Brendan's son) gets a single scene, but it's a killer one (pun possibly intended), and the rest of the cast all get their big moments too. So many of them initially seem like stereotypes, but the truth is they're wearing their extravagant roles as masks. Over the course of Calvary's running time those masks get gently pulled back, and it's hypnotic to watch.

Ignore my quibbles. All told, it's rather spectacular.

Overall: 8/10

New Release Review: 'Captain America: The Winter Soldier'

During the lead up to Captain America: The Winter Soldier's release everyone's being noticing that Robert Redford is in it, and that it has a conspiracy at its centre; from which they've concluded that the film must be a 70s style conspiracy thriller. Which makes the genre sound like a rather simple construct: Redford + conspiracies = 70s conspiracy thriller. Now everyone is seeing the connection. But like most conspiracy theorists they’re seeing something that isn’t really there. 

Picking up a little while after Avengers Assemble, Rogers (Chris Evans) is still adjusting to life in the modern day. He spends his nights handling missions for SHIELD, although any morally grey tasks get passed on to the less ethically stringent Natasha (Scarlett Johansson) since her boss, Nick Fury (played by the ever present Samuel Jackson), believes his all-American boy scout has a blinkered and idealised view of the world. Nick's boss, Alexander Pierce (Redford), is even more of a pragmatist, and is intent on shoring up the world’s defenses so that all the really bad world-ending stuff stops happening. The slight knock on effect of his plan is that the Free World’s idea of freedom might constrict a tad. Throwing a spanner in the works of all this is our other titular character: The Winter Soldier, a mysterious masked menace. 

Despite Rogers being one of Marvel’s least interesting characters the setup is interesting. Rogers is the embodiment of everything America can be but that image doesn’t fit well with SHIELD’s foreign (or domestic) policy. Seeing him deal with that would have been more than just engaging, it would have given Evans something to do for once; but there's little to the setup beyond the tagline. The Russos are more interested in slightly above average bombast. On the odd occasion when the film achieves comfortably above average bombast it’s hard to care. There's a certain irony that for Captain America to work, the henchmen of yore (particularly the early-Bond era iteration) have had to go from never hitting their target to always hitting their target. Every shot is either a headshot or body shot, and every one of them ricochets off the Cap's shield. Why no one aims for his legs is one of the Marvel Universe's greatest Mysteries. 

As for the other characters, Jackson is really just a glorified extra; The Winter Soldier feels like an afterthought who might have amounted to something if he weren't played by a charisma vacuum; and Johansson’s still-not-interesting-enough Natasha is used as a half-hearted love interest. A subplot that's scuppered by the fact that Evans has more chemistry with a bearded Apple Store Genius. (No, really). 

If Captain America: TWS really wanted to work as a 70s-inflected conspiracy thriller than it would need a conspiracy that couldn’t be unravelled at a glance. Instead, in a story where we're told to trust no one and that nothing is at it seems, you'll mistrust exactly the right people and know exactly what is and is not as it seems. The film has more in common with later decades: taking the 80s indifferent attitude to felled henchmen, some of the action set pieces from the 90s (the opening feels like Under Siege if it were condensed to just 6-minutes), and from the 00s and 10s the Russos borrow the big bombast (most notably the money shot of huge-ship-crashing-into-big-city, which is a particular favourite right now). 

Cap 2 briefly aspires to the touchstones of the 70s, but too quickly gives in to the often overblown stylings of the years that followed.

Overall: 5/10

New Release Review: 'Starred Up'

The words 'British', 'gritty' and 'prison drama', when used in close proximity, don't tend to lead to packed out cinemas. That Starred Up is also brutalising, horrifying, and highly uncouth (with a particular fondness for using 'see you next tuesday') rather compounds the problem. Fortunately there's a counterbalance: it's f***ing great.

Eric (Jack O'Connell), 19, is 'starred up', the term for premature upgrading from a Young Offenders to an adult prison. After just shy of two decades of solving his problems with violence (which works surprisingly well, except for its habit of becoming self-perpetuating) he's close to institutionalised. As an example of how that would play out over another two decades we have Neville (Ben Mendelsohn), Eric's father, and long time resident of Eric's new home. Father and son are cut from the same cloth; they only know violence, they only understand violence. Neville has the instinct to play father (his orders of "Listen to the gentleman" and "Be good in class" are beautifully out of place in the prison setting), but his practical knowledge is somewhat lacking. Prison therapist Oliver (Rupert Friend) has a better idea how to help: a neat process known as 'talking'. All he needs to do to is convince Eric to get out of his own rage-fueled way, keep Neville from interfering, and manouever around a narrow-minded Governor (Sam Spruell). Oh, and also keep Eric alive.

Starred Up is, for all intents and purposes, a horror movie. Once we know what Eric's capable of -- how he can lash out and bring his world tumbling down in an instant -- the tension level is set high, with no intention of abating. To manage this the film takes a note out of Sam Raimi's horror playbook: add humour. Without the script's occasional lightness of touch the experience would be too dour, grim and, well, British.

The director, David Mackenzie, has previously proven himself very capable (far more people should have seen Hallam Foe by now), but here he makes a big leap forward, most likely thanks to first time writer Jonathan Asser, who used to work in the penal system, in effect in the same role as Friend. Asser's sharply observed exchanges, especially in the group sessions where he juggles a half dozen different volatile, but fragile, characters, are what make Starred Up unique. Everyone onscreen is fleshed out in a way you rarely see in British cinema, or cinema in general. As for the cast, just take whatever over the top superlatives you read on the film's poster, then add a few more: O'Connell is phenomenal, utterly convincing, showing the duality of Eric, that he's fragile and lethal, angry and broken, with a keen intelligence under the bravado; Mendelsohn, now perpetually typecast as the rage-fueled disappointments in society's gutter, continues to give each of his burnouts their own distinctive and warped manner; whilst Friend, best known for his forgettable one-note performance in Homeland, considerably steps up his game. Which would seem to suggest he's being underused in the American drama. There's only one hiccup: Spruell's Governor, who is one step away from being a full-on moustache-twirling villain. And that one step is really just the growth of a moustache for said twirling.

Up until the film's closing scenes it's grounded, credible, harsh, funny and fascinating. When it switches from grounded to high drama it's no less effective, but it's a shame there wasn't another way to play things. A more credible way. Which is little more than nitpicking. Asser and Mackenzie have created a brilliant raging account of a flawed system, and they've managed to do it with heart.

Overall: 9/10

New Release Review: 'Under the Skin'

Does a film need a story? Or a character arc? Does a film even have to entertain? Jonathan Glazer, the director of Under the Skin, is certainly making the case that it doesn't. His latest is pure art. It'll have no truck with entertainment; it has more serious concerns: the nature of humanity, the dichotomy between the exterior and the interior, and other wordy and weighty matters.

Based on Michel Faber's novel of the same name, Glazer's film is less an adaptation and more a thematically linked sister piece to the novel. We follow Scarlett Johansson's unnamed alien as she stalks the streets of Glasgow, sashaying through shopping centres, backstreets and clubs to snare dull-witted men. Which makes the film sound like Species -- and I suppose it is -- only without the sex, or any immediately apparent (or even belatedly apparent) motivations. Johansson's interstellar foreigner eventually follows the same emotional journey as her literary counterpart: she's an alien, she has a job to do, she comes to question that job -- albeit in abstract fashion -- and runs from it when she begins to experience a sort-of humanity.

Little to none of the above is ever stated or made clear, it's just... Inferred. If you know the source material then said inferring might actually be possible. If you don't, then best of luck, because Under the Skin isn't interested in being explicable. It's about mood, suggestion and perception. It's a chilling film, with imagery that's striking and warped. It manages to be both singularly beautiful and blandly common within the space of a few frames; there's nothing like hearing people talk about Tesco's and Asda to pull you out of a film. It is by turns imperfect, amateurish and fascinating.

In some quarters the film has been described as erotic, which is inaccurate. It's primal. As Johansson strips off, enticing her prey further into her lair (and keeping them from noticing it's decrepit inhuman aspect), there's an insistent beat to the soundtrack, suggestive of the men's mental faculties being overridden by their desire. All they see is their need. Glazer wants us to see ourselves through an aliens eyes: we're petty, driven by hunger, sex and tribalism. Which sounds like an interesting film, but for it to work we'd need to get behind that alien perspective. Casting Johansson as the alien is both Glazer's best and worst move. Johansson has never been the most electrifying screen presence, and is usually at her best playing things of beauty that are hollow inside, as she did in Ghost World and The Man Who Wasn't There. Here she's used to similar effect, with the one (rather critical) difference being she has to carry the film; something she's struggled to do at the best of times, but here becomes impossible because Glazer limits her range of expressions to 'blank-face': whilst out hunting, 'slightly-animated-face': when her prey are with her, and 'confused face': which she tries on during the closing act. These constraints are about accentuating the alien-ness of it all. It works, but it doesn't give us a reason to care for Johansson's kind-of-serial-killer or for us to begin self-analysing and wondering at how we're all just rutting animals.

Under the Skin is, as a piece of art, intriguing; but as a piece of cinema it's ultimately lacking.

Overall: 5/10

New Release Review: 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'

Wes Anderson's latest is a confection that looks like a pop-up book, by way of a stage play, which got turned into a film. In other words it's a Wes Anderson film; only this time even more so. Picture the exacting, ostentatious set design of his previous films, then take that image a step further into picture book unreality.

We begin in the present day, in the non-existent Republic of Zubrowka, as a young girl opens the book 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'. From there we trundle backwards in time and hear from the famed author that produced it (1985), then meet the man who inspired it (1968), and finally settle into the heart of the story: the trials and tribulations of Zubrowka's greatest concierge (1932), Gustave H. The well meaning, poetry-spouting Gustave works day and night -- with an emphasis on the latter -- to keep the wealthy guests of The Grand Budapest Hotel happy. Unfortunately he falls afoul of the family of one of his wealthier patrons when she's shuffled off this mortal coil rather more promptly then she had anticipated. Gustave is, in short order, gifted with a priceless heirloom, threatened with violence for being indecent with an older woman, and is betrayed by his nearest and dearest. Then things get worse.

Anderson's always had a good ear for dialogue, and his craftmanship -- from the sets and the clothes to the militaristic precision of his busy scenes -- has never been up for question; but it often feels like he's waiting a beat for the audience to laugh, when all they can do is nod sagely and agree that the line, the setup and the acting in that moment were indicative of a sharp, dry and knowing wit. Which sounds like how a hipster might show mirth, but isn't quite close enough to actual, normal laughter. In The Grand Budapest Hotel he's learnt how to bridge knowing-a-thing-is-funny with making-the-thing-funny. Part of this is down to investing his characters with a warmth that had been missing before; at least until Fantastic Mr. Fox and Moonrise Kingdom. The odd friendship between Gustave (played by the usually grim and dour, but here surprisingly funny, Ralph Fiennes) and his lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori) feels real despite the unreality of their world. As long as we believe in them, and the people they care about, then it's very easy to get caught up in the ride. Because of this, when Anderson punctures their egos and that of the rest of his vast array of characters, it works far more effectively -- and amusingly. Here it's affectionate, whilst in The Darjeeling Limited, and so many others, it could feel cruel. Even the villains of the piece, the family Desgoffe-und-Taxis (a name almost as satisfyingly silly to write as to say), are easy to like, or at least to laugh at. Adrien Brody's counterintuitive insults and Willem Dafoe's gaping maw make them oddly likeable.

There's further minutiae that adds to the whole: Anderson's love of idiosyncratic words, the frenetic pace, visual gags and slapstick that strangely recall 80s TV series Police Squad!, the throw-away -- but perfectly cast -- cameos, the heartfelt narration from F. Murray Abraham (as a grown-up Zero). It all comes together to make one of Anderson's least trying films. In fact it's pretty much likeable through and through.

Overall: 8/10

Disappointment of the Week/DVD review: 'Safety Not Guaranteed'

To the best of my awareness Safety Not Guaranteed is the first -- and thus far only -- film to take a real classified ad as its inspiration. Although 'real' might not be the right word. The ad was filler for a magazine, but it was well written filler; it had a good hook, simple concept, deadpan delivery. The internet lapped it up. In tone and conceit the film is true to the ad's spirit, but well written it is not.

The story -- well, 'story' is probably too strong a word, but it'll have to do -- focuses on Darius (played by the Queen of Deadpan: Aubrey Plaza), an intern at a magazine where she's mostly ill-used. Her sort-of superior Jeff (Jake Johnson) pitches an idea for a piece based on a classified ad he's seen, which reads: 'Wanted: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.' Jeff is given leeway to chase down whoever wrote it, so he ropes in Darius and shy retiring intern Arnau (Karan Soni), and goes on the hunt. What follows is rather too lacking in plot or character to be worth transcribing. There are no credible hurdles for these characters to overcome, no relationships that ring true, no arc on which they're taken. On a script level the film is inert.

Plaza, although interesting to watch, is one-note in the role of Darius (a name which I will forever associate with the Persian King circa 550BC. When I first heard someone use her name, which wasn't until the halfway point, I thought it was a code name... ). Her perpetually deadpan delivery works well in moderation, ideally as part of an ensemble; here she's the focus - so not so much with the moderation and the ensemble in this instance. The casting isn't much better when it comes to the rest: Johnson is likeable as Jeff, when he probably shouldn't be, Soni is wooden rather than his true aim: emotionless, and Mark Duplass -- who plays the possibly doolally writer of the ad -- is lacklustre; giving off the impression that he's in the film as a favour to the director, first timer Colin Trevorrow.

Problematic as some of the casting and editing may be, the real problem is the writing. Subplots are dropped or forgotten, and one particularly odd sequence involving a prosthetic was seemingly included just to pad out the running time. When Arnau is hastily given a truncated subplot of his own during the last third it, in essence, wraps up with the messages 'Don't be yourself!' and 'Peer pressure. It works!' Writer Derek Connolly, also a first timer, hints at interesting subject matter, raising themes of loneliness and belonging, only to meander around them in his conclusion-less script.

Safety Not Guaranteed is a comedy. I know this only because IMDb and Wikipedia, as well as the film's production notes, tell me so, because the film is never knowingly funny. Instead it appears to be aiming for the easier, broader target of generic-quirky-indie. A hodgepodge of a word, but the right one.

Overall: 4/10

New Release Review: 'Her'

How quickly you get onboard Spike Jonze's Her depends on how bearable/cutesy you find the name Theodore Twombly (played by the ever-awkward Joaquin Phoenix) and how effective/thematically-pointed you find his job. The year is 2025 but feels like 2015, if Apple were allowed to design the world for a year. Theodore is about to be newly divorced, has a circle of friends so small that it's more of a triangle, and compounds his relative isolation by spending his days writing love letters for the emotionally tongue-tied; neatly keeping himself from dealing with his own stunted emotions. Doubling down on his hermetic life Theodore buys the latest OS ('operating system'), which comes with an enticing new feature: artificial intelligence. His OS chooses the name Samantha (and is voiced with surprising range and depth by the often one-note Scarlett Johansson). Samantha is funny, sharp, and (not surprising given the casting) rather sexy. But ultimately she's a disembodied voice constrained by the small (and of course immaculately designed) box that contains her being. A modern day genie in a bottle.

Thanks to some deft writing and great performances the film skips past a lot of problematic questions about what Samantha is. Theodore likes her, trusts her, perhaps even loves her, but the moment you think of what she is, Theodore's very own genie, personally created for him based on his answers to a handful of questions (such as the always reliable 'What's your relationship like with your mother'), the whole dynamic seems even more warped than it already is. Part of that is intentional. Samantha literally belongs to Theodore. He owns her. How many people have said the same of their other halfs? (Even if they didn't mean it quite as literally as Theodore.) There are other knowing relationship parallels, such as Samantha's emotional growth and evolution beginning to outstrip Theodore's. Later in the film, in one perfectly written scene which echoes so many break-ups, Theodore asks if she's talking to anyone else (rather than the usual enquiry of whether she's sleeping with anyone else), and the answer feels painfully true despite its science fiction twist.

Jonze recently said that Her isn't about our relationship with technology, it just uses technology to find a new way to explore relationships. Which rather fudges the truth. There are one too many cut aways of crowds flowing past Theodore, talking on their phones or just scanning them, keeping themselves apart. Isolated. No one looks 'connected'; they look alone. By falling for an operating system is Theodore the same, or is his relationship real? Jonze toys with the question but ultimately takes any choice out of Theodore's hands. Possibly because even he doesn't know.

Making the whole thing go down with more ease than it probably ought is Hoyte van Hoytema's beautiful cinematography. The film pops with bright bold colours, reds, yellows, oranges, evocative of late summer (or perhaps just of iPhone ads). Which goes some way to selling this not quite future.

Her isn't as unique as its premise initially seems (Ruby Sparks plays with similar ideas and is well worth hunting down), but it is surprisingly touching. With a clearer voice it might have ranked alongside Jonze's best. Instead it's just very very good.

Overall: 8/10

New Release Review: 'The Lego Movie'

'The Lego Movie' is a rather bland and generic title. Bland titles are usually a cause for worry; titles that end in 'Movie', even more so (see: Epic Movie, Disaster Movie and Scary Movie. Or, y'know, don't). Fortunately The Lego Movie comes from the minds of Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who were responsible for the brilliantly demented Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

The plot of The Lego Movie could easily be described as that of The Matrix because, well... It is. Except with a lego Neo, and rather more boundless joy. We follow Emmet (our Neo), a regular (lego) guy, working as a construction worker amongst thousands of others, all of whom follow the meticulous design plans laid down by Lord Business (essentially The Architect from The Matrix Reloaded). In Lord Business's world there is no creativity or choice. Everything must be built exactly as the instructions dictate. But there is a prophecy, about a 'piece of resistance', and a master builder who'll wield it and free the world. After happening upon the 'piece' it looks like Emmet might just be the (lego) man his world needs.

From this unlikely springboard we get one scene after another of beautiful chaos. There's so much happening in the foreground, background and, well, the middleground, that even the animators of the sight-gag heavy Aardman films would struggle to catch it all in one viewing. And once you realise the pair had the audacity to remake The Matrix as lego, only with added fun, you're distracted on a whole other level as you start seeing parallels everywhere: Good Cop/Bad Cop is Agent Smith, Wildstyle is Trinity, Vitruvius is both Morpheus and The Oracle, and Batman is... Um... Cypher? Or is he just Batman? But then who's Uni-Kitty? Is she The Oracle? What about Pirate Metalbeard? It's possible I'm overthinking this.

The reservations I have about the film are slight: the visuals are, at times, too chaotic (the exact opposite of the altogether too empty backgrounds in Frozen), something which probably couldn't be helped when making a film set in a world made up of little bricks; the film's central message is laid on rather thick, but it's a good message all the same; and finally, although it's funny and engaging, and you somehow end up rooting for little yellow toys that waddle divertingly, there are a couple of moments in the film where you wander if it isn't all just a very shiny surface.

In summary: someone remade The Matrix via a toyline, and somehow it's rather good.


Overall: 7.5/10

New Release Review: 'Lone Survivor'

Lone Survivor, a title so generic and forgettable that I can barely keep it in mind even whilst typing it, is based on the book of the same name: a true account of a Navy SEALs mission gone awfully awry. SEAL Team 10 go into Afghanistan to take out a Taliban leader, but the mission's compromised when a goat herder and his sons stumble across them; one of the few noteworthy moments in a film more interested in the immaculate recreation of a firefight than in dealing with difficult moral questions. Not long after this the team find themselves surrounded by a 50-strong contingent of Taliban fighters. Which is when the film Peter Berg really wanted to make begins; and it turns out that film is Assault on Precinct 13. The team of four, Marcus (Mark Wahlberg), Mikey (Taylor Kitsch), Danny (Emile Hirsch), and Matt (Ben Forster), are beset on all sides. Shots fly, RPGs are launched, and shrapnel goes everywhere. It's intense, disorientating, and probably not far from the truth of what happened that day. Several times the team comment on the astonishing speed of the horde: they're fast. Impossibly fast. Another (likely unintended) nod to Precinct 13. And that's the trouble. Is it a stylish action-thriller, in line with Berg's underrated The Kingdom, or is it a brutal realistic account of a terrible day (see: anything by Greengrass)? Berg goes back and forth between the two approaches, but never settles.

Even if the film weren't tonally confused, it still barely qualifies as a story. Instead it feels like a detailed recreation for a news segment. There's no reason the event can't be moving and compelling, but Berg does nothing to justify the film's existence. The SEAL team are so devoid of defining characteristics you wonder how they tell each other apart behind their thick beards. That the survivor of the title is the least fleshed out of the team is especially odd. The group have an easy manner with each other, highlighted by some passable banter, but they're each defined by a single characteristic or, if they're really unlucky, a single fact. One is engaged, another is married, the third one is competitive, and the fourth is... Well... His beard is rather straggly. Maybe he feels less secure around the more manly beards? There's more character work done in that sentence then the script does for any of the team during the entire running time. It's not until the closing act, when a small village intercedes and attempts to offer protection to our titular survivor - this despite the fact that it would mean their annihilation by the Taliban - that the film wakes up. Suddenly interesting questions are posed and deeper themes are intimated; but it's too little too late.

At the very beginning of the film there's a montage of real footage of men going through the gruelling training regime to become a Navy SEAL. Most who watch it will quickly realise they probably aren't amongst the 0.01% who are cut out to be a SEAL. Berg's film seems to exist purely to confirm that. SEAL Team 10 take bullet after bullet and keep moving. They take falls that would leave most human bodies in pieces, then get up again. Lone Survivor shows you how much hurt a body can take; but it doesn't show you much else.

Overall: 5.5/10

Random side note:
This does answer one of the greatest mysteries in film. (Okay, that might be slightly hyperbolic, but only slightly.) The mystery: why would Berg direct Battleship? Dear god why!? He's hardly a highbrow director, but even his weakest films have some intellect. Battleship has aliens, Rihanna, a complete lack of anyone saying "You sunk my Battleship!" (which is unforgivable), and a dearth of intellect. So why do it? Turns out it was a bargain. Universal would only give him the cash for his latest, Lone Survivor, if he made their little film first. Not a great bargain.

New Release Review: 'Inside Llewyn Davis'

February, 1961. New York. Llewyn - who I can't stop calling Llewellyn - is on the stage at the Gaslight Cafe singing "Hang me, oh hang me". For the three minutes the song lasts Llewyn Davis seems soulful, thoughtful, and compelling. He isn't. It takes perhaps another three minutes to get that. Every minute afterwards just clarifies it. Since the shortest accepted running-time for a feature film is (roughly) 72-minutes it's unlikely Inside Llewyn Davis would be released if it were 6-minutes long... But it would have been a better film.

The story runs thusly: there isn't one. Not really. Llewyn is an aspiring musician who sleeps wherever he can beg a couch. He's good at what he does, but not quite good enough. He's wrung out, tired, and close to giving up. He has family, and some friends who can still bear the sight of him, but he drifts in and out of their lives, leaving minor chaos in his wake. Very minor. He accidentally locks a cat out of its home (and carts it around with him for most of the film); he heckles a performer; he gets a friend pregnant; and he reduces one of his hosts at dinner to tears. Little of it makes an impression on him. Although he does seem a little sorry about the cat. That's about the sum of it. As Coen brother number one (Joel) said of the film: '[It] doesn't really have a plot [...] that's why we threw the cat in.'

It opens well enough, quickly setting the scene - almost any shot in the film could pass for a 60s folk album cover - and the music, to my layman's ear, fits credibly into the era; but the film never escapes the first act. Instead of a second act we get the opposite: act nought. (Or perhaps 'act minus one'.) Even when the film becomes a road movie and Llewyn has a clear destination, it never shakes its aimlessness. The lack of momentum is then compounded by the film's elliptical structure, which, although elegantly done, gives the impression that not only is Llewyn stuck in purgatory, we're stuck in it with him. Which doesn't make for the most rewarding cinema experience.

Inside... still feels like a Coen brothers film, thanks to the fantastic casting done by Ellen Chenoweth (who particularly excels at casting doddery old secretaries), but there's little to the script, which leaves everyone somewhat adrift: Oscar Issac expertly handles the singing but inspires little more than indifference as Llewyn; Carey Mulligan, a fellow folk singer (and one time fling), hurls out insults with an anger that seems paper thin; and John Goodman, as a random jazz musician, follows Mulligan's lead and shouts and bellows to make up for lack of characterisation. No one else fairs much better. Except perhaps the cat; the film's most interesting character. And I'm only being slightly flippant in writing that. (Behold as he wrestles with themes of identity and gender!) He's certainly the most likeable character. Whilst others do nothing, he acts. This is known as 'having agency'. Shame none of the humans do.

Overall: 5/10