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Bobby (Dir: Emilio Estevez) 70/100
A look at the lives of various staff and guests of the hotel Robert Kennedy is visiting on the day of his assassination. Your enjoyment of this film will probably depend on your political leanings, and those with a hatred of liberals need not apply. It's a very good effort from Estevez, who also wrote the film and acts in it, but it's certainly not without its faults; the portrayal of Bobby Kennedy as some kind of martyred saint is one dimensional to say the least, some of the characters are a bit cliched, and the pacing is lethargic - I occasionally had the feeling that the film was going nowhere and was taking its time getting there, but I never really found it dull or unengaging. If you just go with the flow you'll find some nicely observed characters, some well written dialogue, some funny moments, and a whole bunch of fine acting. It seems to me that director Emilio Estevez may well be a big fan of Robert Altman's Nashville, and while this isn't as accomplished as Altman's seminal piece it's aspiring to the same heights, and Estevez should be applauded for his ambition, if not quite for his execution. It's a little rough around the edges, and the last act is particularly overwrought and lacking in subtlety, but is nevertheless effective for the most part. I would have thought this would be the kind of film the Oscar Academy could get behind - certainly if there were any justice Sharon Stone, who delivers a performance of uncommon depth and poignancy, should be acknowledged at the vey least. |
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The Bothersome Man (Dir: Jens Lien) 85/100
Very weird and really well done film from the obviously talented Jens Lien, about Andreas - a man who arrives in a strange city one day with little idea of his purpose, or even how he came to be there in the first place. He's welcomed into the city with open arms and everyone seems friendly, if somewhat distant. He settles into a life of pleasant enough mundanity but struggles to make connections with those around him and begins to suspect something's awry. From slightly mysterious but seemingly innocuous beginnings the film gets progressively darker and more sinister as events unfold, until we're sharing in some powerfully disturbing scenes with Andreas desperately trying to figure out what's going on and how to escape. There's a serene surreality about this film that's somehow typically Scandinavian in its stoic and bland oddness. Trond Fausa Aurvaag gives a brilliantly focussed performance as the tormented main character and the whole production exudes the highest quality, from the fantastic cinematography to the brooding score. Certainly the best film to come out of Norway I've seen so far. |
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Casino Royale (Dir: Martin Campbell) 90/100
Without a doubt the best Bond film there's ever been because almost everything that was wrong with the Bond franchise has been fixed. Gone are the dodgy double entendres. Gone are the silly gadgets. Gone is the bumbling fool that was Q. Gone are the ludicrous villains who lust after world domination. Gone are the superfluous Bond bimbos. Those were the things that made the Bond films ridiculous, albeit in an occasionally entertaining way. What remains is a high octane, high class espionage caper with a no-nonsense terrorism plot, great action sequences that aren't too silly, and some brutal fight scenes featuring a proper get-the-job-done-at-all-costs type of Bond played by Daniel Craig - who is about as good a Bond as you could hope for. On top of all that we have an excellent villain in the shape of Le Chiffre - played with a quiet menace by the wonderful Mads Mikkelsen, the beautiful Eva Green as a proper love interest for a pretty heartless and bitter Bond, the legendary Giancarlo Giannini as a friendly MI6 agent, and a fabulous Aston Martin car that the filmmakers aren't afraid to wreck. It's ironic that this, the most modern incarnation of Bond, actually comes from the very first Bond novel that Ian Fleming wrote, way back in 1953. If the rest of the Bond films are up to this standard I'll be first in line to see each one of them. |
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Children of Men (Dir: Alfonso Cauron) 80/100
Adapted from a P.D James novel this is a thoughtful, well presented and quite exciting look at a bleak future London that exists in a world where humans can no longer procreate. We follow Theo Faron - a former activist enlisted to help transport a miraculously pregnant girl to scientists working on the fertility problem to save humankind from extinction. Director Alfonso Cauron has captured British life and the character of the people rather well and has managed to portray a future Britain that seems authentic - quite an achievement for someone who hails from Mexico! Clive Owen seems to improve with each film he makes and gives another solid performance here, and Michael Caine is on hand to help out in a nice cameo. There are quite a few powerful scenes in this film - most of which explode out of nowhere and leave you breathless. The few action set-pieces that are central to the narrative are quite visceral and expertly filmed. Children of Men didn't have a promising start in life because it wasn't really pushed by the studio and the trailer that promoted the film didn't do it justice but this is a film that will probably garner quite a loyal following and will grow in stature as time passes. It's one of the few films set in a dystopian future that successfully creates a world that's both familiar and at the same time frighteningly alien, which lends it an air of authenticity, even though the premise of the film, and some of the events portrayed are somewhat far-fetched. |
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The Departed (Dir: Martin Scorsese) 50/100
The new Martin Scorsese film and it's a straight remake of the excellent Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs. Obviously I'll never know how I'd feel about this film had I not seen the original but as I have I'll say that this isn't nearly as good. For me there are three major problems with The Departed: Firstly, Jack Nicholson's performances can sometimes veer into porcine territory and in this film he's teetering on the brink a lot of the time. His part, originally played wonderfully by Eric Tsang would have been better suited to Robert DeNiro, who would have invested it with more genuine menace and less cartoonish leering. Secondly there are a number of scenes that are very derivative, of Scorsese's own films in particular: The opening scene is nicked from Goodfellas music and all, and the scene on the beach is lifted from Casino, to name just two. Obviously nothing to concern viewers who haven't seen these films, but troubling on general principle. Lastly and most importantly the ending has been altered significantly in a way that changes the whole point of the film. This last point is almost unforgivable considering Scorsese really should know better than to do something like that. The Departed does have an ace up its sleeve though: Leonardo DiCaprio. He is excellent in the part that was originally played to perfection by Tony Leung. DiCaprio reminds me of a young DeNiro, and when he's onscreen you're not focusing on anything or anyone else. The central idea of two moles on either side of the law each trying to uncover the other's identity is a compelling one that works really well, but Scorsese hasn't brought anything new to the table in terms of style or originality so it's all kind of pointless. My advice would be to stay away from this and just watch the original instead. |
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The Lives of Others (Dir: Florian Henkel Von Donnersmarck) 85/100
Brilliant film about the secret police in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The late Ulrich Muhe stars as Wiesler, a Stasi agent sent to investigate the life of a famous liberal playwright and his lover. Stationed in the attic, Wiesler becomes more and more absorbed with every detail of the couple's lives and spending so much time around them his beliefs start to be challenged. Muhe's performance is captivating and is worth the price of admission alone; his emotional transition over time from loyal and conscientious party member carrying out his job with ruthless efficiency to a much more sympathetic character as he gets to know and empathise with the people he's been tasked to observe is utterly absorbing and a great job of acting from Muhe. In addition, the mood and the setting of East Berlin in the mid eighties is captured perfectly. This is a provocative and powerful film that provides a glimpse into a terribly oppressive situation suffered by a great many people and it does so with a great deal of subtlety and understanding. |
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Rocky Balboa (Dir: Sylvester Stallone) 75/100
I've always thought that Sylvester Stallone had the potential to be much more highly regarded than he now is; he can be a decent actor - in First Blood, Paradise Alley, and F.I.S.T and he had some early success writing and directing - before money and fame got the better of him. Since those days though he's really done nothing of note with the exception of Copland in 1997, so I approached Rocky Balboa with some trepidation - after all Stallone is now 61 years old and even George Foreman was only 49 when he made his last comeback, so credibility is stretched to the limit. Fortunately - miraculously even - he seems to have pulled it off. This, the sixth and final Rocky installment is quite a noble end to the series after all the glitz and silliness of parts 3 and 4 and the wrong-headedness of part 5. Rocky's back in the projects, his wife's dead and his no-good brother in law is still hanging around. On the other side of the boxing world the new heavyweight champion is bored - most of his opponents have been cherry picked, he's never gone the distance - there's just nobody decent around to fight. That's the cue for an exhibition match with Rocky and off he goes back to the gym. Stallone - who also wrote and directed the film - understands boxers and why they fight and that's the reason this film is halfway believable. Of course the premise is a bit silly, but once you get past the premise this is a much more down to earth, nostalgic look at an old boxer's life and philosophy and as such is one of the best Rocky films, and as an added bonus it features one of the best motivational monologues in movies. |
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A Scanner Darkly (Dir: Richard Linklater) 80/100
I've always been a big fan of Philip K. Dick's books. The films that have been made from his fiction have ranged from very good (Blade Runner) to pretty bad (Total Recall) but director Richard Linklater has nailed what Dick was all about with this film - the nature of personal identity, the perception of reality, the meaning of consciousness and so on. Keanu Reeves stars as Bob Arctor - an undercover cop assigned to investigate some small time drug dealers. Linklater captures the strange atmosphere of drug-induced paranoia brilliantly with bizarre conversations between the main characters. The most interesting aspect of the film though is the 'scramble suits' the cops wear to protect their identities and was the main reason it was impossible to adapt the book into a film shot in the traditional way. However, thanks to Linklater's revolutionary Interpolated Rotoscoping animation technique (which he first used in the excellent Waking Life) this problem has been overcome, enabling him to portray the intriguing scenario of Reeves the cop investigating himself, as it were. Aside from the fascinating concept and interesting execution the film is pretty aimless a lot of the time and so won't be everyone's cup of tea but really it's well worth a watch and my gut instinct is that it will probably improve with each viewing, and certainly has the potential to be a cult classic. |
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Syndromes And A Century (Dir: Apichatpong Weerasethakul) 85/100
I suppose this film is something of a love it or loathe it proposition for most people. There is no narrative - the single biggest hurdle most people have to overcome when sitting down to watch a film like this. Also the sequence of events as presented is somewhat confusing even once you've accepted the fact there's no traditional plot. The film is divided into two parts - both of which show strong resemblences to each other. The first half is set in a medical centre, the second in a hospital. Most of what we see on screen are fictionalised memories of Weerasethakul's childhood much of which was spent hanging around medical centres and clinics as both his parents were scientists working in these institutions. We see various workers go about their jobs and interacting with people, and it's much more interesting to watch these people live their lives than you might think. There's something special about Weerasethakul's work - there's a supreme naturalism about the performances, combined with fantastic cinematography and an air of strangeness, mystery and fun that's just too hard to resist for the viewer who's looking for something different. Unknown to the average cinemagoer at the time of its release (and still, it has to be said for those same people today) this film has become the critics' darling, winning many international awards and popping up on lots of top ten films of the decade, and deservedly so. |
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United 93 (Dir: Paul Greengrass) 45/100
There's a major problem with this film as far as a record of the events aboard flight 93 on September 11th 2001 goes, and that is there are no eye-witness accounts of what occurred onboard at that time. There are no flight recorders in the body of a plane either, only in the cockpit, so what went on up there on that day is, by and large, anyone's guess. Having said that it really shouldn't matter whether or not the events on the plane are 'true' from the point of view of it being a good film. Which brings me to the crux of the matter: I feel most viewers are very much emotionally invested in the situation presented, but not because the film is a well-crafted piece of cinema, rather it's because they lived through 9/11 and already feel sympathy for the characters before they ever saw a foot of film. So the filmmakers can be lazy as far as character development, structure, narrative, and dialogue goes and that's what they did. Who were the people on flight 93? Why should we care about them other than the fact we know ahead of time they're all going to die? As for judging the film as a film without all the real-world 9/11 baggage we carry into it, the bottom line is this; aside from the faults already mentioned the acting is pretty ropey, the camera bobbing around incessantly cinema verite style is distracting and everyone shouts too much. United 93 is not a terrible film, but I think people are praising it because they feel it's the respectful thing to do, not because it's a good film - it's won plenty of awards already and it'll be nominated for some Oscars before we're done and it certainly doesn't deserve that kind of acclaim on the strength of its own merits. |
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World Trade Center (Dir: Oliver Stone) 40/100
Or, Two Guys Trapped In A Very Dark Place For A Very Long Time With Nothing Much To Talk About. And the bad news is that you have to watch this dark place and listen to those guys (actually mostly just one guy) talking about nothing much for two hours. Director Oliver Stone doesn't seem to have anything much to say about the 9/11 attacks, why they happened or who was responsible, which is a shame because you'd have thought that he would be the right man to address these issues in a film set during the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre. Instead we have a film which is confined to not much more than a darkened crawlspace for the majority of its running time, and a barely visible Nicolas Cage Head talking into the void. These scenes featuring Cage buried up to his neck in rubble - which is to say the majority of the film - range from quite clunky to pretty embarrassing, and that's all we have to work with. The main reason the film fails though, is that although you know the rubble these guys are buried under is what's left of the World Trade Centre buildings, if you'd walked into the film twenty minutes late you'd barely be aware of this - they could just as easily have been buried under some building in California that had collapsed because of an earthquake. Their ordeal just seems kind of disconnected to the whole 9/11 tragedy. There's no disputing that being trapped under a building for twenty four hours would be a harrowing ordeal, but it's lazy, presumptuous and somewhat cynical of Stone to rely on the audience's recollection of 9/11 to such an extent in order to generate the reactions he's looking for rather than working for them, and more importantly it's not entertaining to watch. |
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