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

New Release Review: 'The Wolf of Wall Street'

If you're sat in the cinema watching the credits roll, and you're not making a sound, nor is anyone else around you, odds are you just saw a film of great import; probably a true story, unflinchingly told. But there is another, rarer, reason for such silence, known as the 'Well... Where to begin?'

A bit of background first: The Wolf of Wall Street is the sort-of true tale of Jordan Belfort, a New York stockbroker with no moral compass. If you've seen Boiler Room or Wall Street, or any number of documentaries, then you'll get the gist of what Jordan's up to. For those that haven't seen the above, it's not terribly important that you know. Belfort (played by a very game Leonardo DiCaprio) tries to explain what he's doing on a few occasions - talking directly to the camera - but then waves it off, telling us not to worry about it. It's illegal, what else do you really need to know? Director Martin Scorsese does spend a bit of time showing the ins and outs of Belfort's double dealings, but since that's been well documented before (again, see the films above) he's more interested in showing just why Belfort would do what he's doing, and apparently the only way to get that across is with three hours of every known kind of objectification.

After walking for a spell, and spending as much time as possible avoiding it, my companion for The Wolf of Wall Street gave their thoughts on the film:

Companion: "Well... When it worked, it really really worked."
Me: "Yeah? Which bits really worked?"
Companion: "Um... There- There was that bit that... Uh..."

They'd forgotten. The film was so long, so of-a-kind, that little stood out. Which is a strange sentence to write considering the epic excesses to which we're witness; but that is what's hobbled it: it's a film about excess, but the film itself gives in to that excess. Not twenty minutes into the film Scorsese tell us all we needed to know on the subject: Matthew McConaughey's senior stockbroker, a dapper figure that Belfort looks up to, takes the young man to lunch and gives him the equivalent of Wall Street's 'Greed is good' speech. In his slightly unhinged discourse we can see both the appeal of what he offers whilst hearing how hollow it sounds. Spending the rest of the film showing just what this well dressed Mephistopheles was offering goes from being salacious to tedious before we're even out of the first act.

Many have accused the film of being misogynistic. I don't think it's misogynistic but I do think that it makes one too many tonal missteps - making it far too easy to level the charge. Scorsese's attempts to make the excesses of sex and drugs distasteful, by dialling things to eleven, might have worked if used sparingly; but because it's relentless, because he makes it the entire reason for the films existence (and that isn't much of a reason for existing) he becomes complicit in the things he's shown. It doesn't feel like he's stepped back and asked us to come up with our own conclusions - instead it feels like he's taking part.

I've got no problem with sex and drugs. I watch HBO. My tolerance is pretty high. But The Wolf of Wall Street is 60-minutes of plot, and 120-minutes of sex and drugs. A ratio that Game of Thrones wouldn't even try. The film is all about the high; perhaps you'll get caught up in it, but when you come down from it you'll struggle to explain its virtues.

Overall: 4/10

New Release Review: '12 Years a Slave'

The year is 1841. Two slaves heave a body overboard, leaving it to the sea. As the first looks on in despair the second tells him 'He's better off than we are'. Over the next 134-minutes 12 Years a Slave will go about proving that.

Based on the memoir of the same name, 12 Years a Slave tells the story of Solomon Northup: a black man, born free, but kidnapped and sold as a slave under false pretences. Solomon is given a new name, one he'll answer to or be beaten to within an inch of his life; after all, it's hard to sell a man if he keeps insisting he's free, and has a name which leads to proof of that fact. He's then shipped off and sold. That we know he'll eventually attain his freedom does little (by which I mean it does nothing) to soften the blow of what's to come.

It seems strange that motion picture (of one kind or another) has been around for 136 years but this is the first feature film to put slavery front and centre, and deal with it frankly. Others have dabbled with it, but it's been a subplot. We'd see its repercussions but get little more than glimpses of the thing itself. Director Steve McQueen conjures some startlingly effective imagery by not only putting slavery at the centre of the film but by making it commonplace. McQueen foregrounds the horror, then allows life to go on in the background as if nothing's wrong. The whippings are just another sound mixed in with the rustling of the corn stalks and the shifting of the trees.

I'm struggling to avoid using the word 'faultless' to describe the film. It's dangerous to say something's perfect - it's too easy to begin dismantling the assertion - but 12 Years a Slave, for me, was just that. The cinematography was reminiscent of Terrence Malick's nature-inflected lensing, but more grounded, more believable; the score by Hans Zimmer is surprisingly subtle, and is only noticeably Zimmer-y during Solomon's brief tenure on the ship that takes him to his new life - the oppressive doom-laden music that accompanies this sequence is a little on the nose, but it's very effective; and then there's the performances: Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon, Benedict Cumberbatch (Solomon's first master), Michael Fassbender (his second), Lupita Nyong'o (as a slave caught between Fassbender's lust and his wife's loathing), Paul Dano (once again playing a creep, and doing it well, but maybe he should branch out now that's he's mastered it?) and many others, completely disappear into their roles. Of them all Ejiofor has the hardest task: it's a quiet un-showy part that requires him to shrink inside himself. His back slowly curves and his voice deadens as he tries to fade into the background, to go unnoticed, to survive.

The film strikes only one off note: Brad Pitt as an open minded Canadian. Not that you'd know he's Canadian, as Pitt employs the same overly ripe Tennessee accent he used in Inglorious Basterds. There's something about Pitt that feels anachronistic. He doesn't belong. He can be a capable actor, and fits into the same period setting just fine when he's called upon to be otherworldy (Interview with a Vampire), but here that works rather less well.

12 Years... won't be for everyone. Solomon is a passive character. He has to be to survive. But for some that might make the film too much like a catalogue of facts - albeit beautifully and starkly rendered ones. If you can get lost in Solomon's journey the film is utterly immersive, brutalising, and eye-opening.

Overall: 10/10

New Release Review: 'All is Lost'

If you watch All is Lost pay very close attention to its opening lines, because it's all you're going to get of backstory. In fact it's practically all you're going to get of dialogue - except for a cry or two for help and one well earned expletive. Robert Redford's mini monologue hints at a turbulent past, a family left broken or, perhaps, something else entirely. Because that's all it is. A hint. A suggestion. The film says make of it what you will, because it's not going to mention it again, nor is it going to give you anything else to guide you.

The story is simple: Redford, the film's one and only cast member, and credited simply as Our Man, wakes to water filling his cabin. His boat has been struck by a wayward shipping container, and it's just the start of his troubles. Over eight days he'll use body (albeit a slow and aged one) and soul to hold his boat together; but (non-spoiler alert!) as the title suggests, it's unlikely to end well.

All is Lost is a film paired down to its bare elements. For some that makes it the purest kind of cinema. It sticks so rigidly to the central tenant of screenwriting - show don't tell - that it almost feels like its being wilful about it. To a degree it can't help it: Redford is on his own, he has no one to talk to, so how could the film do much of any 'telling'? But that doesn't mean we should be left quite so lacking in things with which to connect. Halfway through the film Redford takes a sextant (a ye olde' form of plotting your ship's course) out of a box and briefly looks at a letter attached to it. The letter's open. There's nothing written on the front. For a moment it looks like it might be a window into his past. The sextant must be a gift from a loved one! Maybe a dead son? He's escaped to sea to forget that tragedy! Except no. What's more likely is that it's from the makers of the sextant and it simply says 'Thank you for buying from Sextant Suppliers - purveyors of top quality sextants!' For those that were frustrated by Alfonso Cuaron's at times heavy handed use of backstory in Gravity, here director J.C. Chandor offers a counterpoint. This is what Gravity would have been like without it, and it's not an entirely welcome change.

In another actor's hands the above might not have been so frustrating. You don't need backstory to tell a story, but you do need an actor with whom you can empathise, and onto whom you can project a past, whether bleak or otherwise. Redford's screen persona tends to be charming and suave, but with a hint of smugness to it. Here that sits ill, and in a film with just one actor, that's highly problematic.

Chandor's film is often compelling, and at times beautiful, but it's ultimately to cold and distant to care about.

Overall: 7/10



Since I've been away for a spell I've also set down a few quick lines on some of the other recent releases:

American Hustle - Great cast, great director, mostly okay film. In the early noughties there was a glut of conman films with tricksy intricate plots and not a single character you could trust. American Hustle sits neatly amongst these. The only thing that marks it out as different is its warped sense of humour (which is most notable in Bradley Cooper's pent up aggression and Jennifer Lawrence's beautifully unhinged singing). The gang orchestrating the (accidentally) long con on a group of gangsters and senators are all amusingly colourful, but continually having to guess at their true motives - particularly those of Amy Adams - becomes exhausting, and then annoying. Perhaps the main problem is that it's an ensemble film that keeps trying to pick a lead, but doesn't know how to settle on one. 6.5/10

Frozen - The youngling I took along to Frozen stated that it was his favourite film ever. Since said youngling has been on steady diet of Pixar and Miyazaki, that's high praise. Frozen is dryly funny, with some fantastic songs (and I don't tend to go in for this whole musical malarky), but it often looks oddly empty. It's been animated immaculately, but there's an awful lot of dead space on the screen, as if the filmmakers want to make it as easy possible for Disney to turn it into a hit stage show on Broadway. How else to explain the large empty sets the characters inhabit? Yes, the characters live in vast castles that are supposed to highlight their loneliness and isolation, and yes, the environment just beyond them is a vast snowy tundra, and very pretty for it - but it still looks more like a broadway set than it does their home. 7/10