Captain America: Civil War (2016)

Posted on May 13, 2016 by badblokebob

This review contains spoilers.
(because, at this point, I’m not sure there’d be much point writing about it otherwise)

We’re now on to the 13th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and while you don’t need to have seen all 12 preceding movies to follow the events of Civil War, you do need at least four — and, to get everything, a further four or five beyond that. (Don’t worry about the four TV series — it’s increasingly clear that they’re only notionally connected to the movies.) So the Marvel model for a “shared universe” is not discrete stories that take place in the same world, but a series of ever-more-connected narratives. It’s working for them, though, as the continually stellar box office totals prove.

Ostensibly the third Captain America movie, Civil War is as much a sequel to Avengers: Age of Ultron as it is to The Winter Soldier: it throws us straight in to action with the new Avengers line-up established at the end of Ultron, as they battle what turns out to be a villain from Winter Soldier. As I said, ever-more-connected. This particular mission goes disastrously wrong, bringing to a head plans that the governments of the world had been cooking up for a while: the Sokovia Accords, a way to control the Avengers and give them some accountability. Team leader Steve Rogers / Captain America (Chris Evans) isn’t keen — he’s worried political interests will conflict with the Avengers’ ability to do good. Bankroller Tony Stark / Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) is on board, however — spooked by having created Ultron, and after being confronted by the mother of an American lad who died in Sokovia (because the Sokovian deaths didn’t matter enough, I guess), he thinks the Avengers need reining in. The burgeoning conflict is clarified when Rogers’ childhood friend Bucky Barnes, aka Soviet agent the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), emerges from hiding to attack the signing of the Accords — Rogers wants to save him; Stark needs to bring him in, dead or alive. As most of the other heroes we’ve met in the preceding 12 movies (not to mention a couple of new ones) pick sides, battle lines are drawn for an almighty clash.

As complicated as the plot sounds once you start trying to succinctly summarise it, Civil War is easy to follow as it unfurls. In fact, it’s to its credit that it can’t be readily summarised in any more detail than “Cap and Iron Man disagree; fight” without really getting into it. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely have followed up the political thriller of Winter Soldier with another global thriller storyline, again bringing different genre textures to the superheroics that are nonetheless present and correct. The film’s style mixes in just the right amount of realism — no one’s pretending this isn’t a comic book movie, with some elements of comic book logic and a casual acceptance of people having world-changing powers; but if such people did exist, this is the kind of way they would be handled by the authorities.

So while Civil War does work as a popcorn-guzzling action spectacular, the themes it raises — primarily of how we oversee and control those who claim to protect us — are relevant to real life, if you want them to be. The film attempts to make it a genuine debate by placing Cap and Stark as the figureheads of each side. Sure, that’s borrowed from the original comic book storyline that inspired the film, but it works perfectly for the movies: Iron Man is the basis around which the whole MCU was originally built, while Captain America is almost its break out star, emerging from the mess of The First Avenger to become one of the shining lights of every film he’s starred in since, at least two of which commonly compete for the crown of the MCU’s best movie. So who better to place at the heart of the conflict? Who better to present viewers with a genuine choice?

Well, maybe. But the debate is partially stalled by the fact this is a Captain America movie rather than an Avengers one. Yeah, you can side with Tony Stark & co, but you know Cap’s going to come out to the good, one way or another. As it pans out, it’s not a total victory (Team Cap are all now fugitives, presumably until Infinity War), but, morally, Cap wins, and even Tony knows it. Would it have been better to frame the political/thematic issues in an Avengers movie, to make it a genuine contest? Maybe. It’s almost hard to imagine it divorced of this context now, and a lot of that context is Cap-based. The rest of the cast of The Avengers may be hanging around, but the narrative drive comes back to Steve and Bucky, a throughline that belongs to the Captain America trilogy. You can’t doubt that this is a Captain America film — tonally, it fits better with The Winter Soldier than Age of Ultron — even as it is, really, also an Avengers one.

If we’re talking about hero-vs-hero conflicts and movies that give you something to think about, it’s only fair that we drag this year’s other big silver screen superhero battle into the fray. There’s little doubt that Civil War is a more readily entertaining film than Batman v Superman, and clearly a more popular one, but it left me with less to think about. That’s not to say there isn’t thematic weight here — I’ve just spent a couple of paragraphs referring to its attempts to engage with such debates, after all — but I felt like the film kinda covers what there is to say. Maybe Batman v Superman leaves its issues more open; or maybe they’re less well conveyed; or maybe we struggle to read them into it because they’re not actually there. Whatever the truth, I came out of Zack Snyder’s movie with lots going on in my mind and wrote 2,500 words about it that contained half or less of my thoughts. I came out of Civil War thinking, “well that was fun.”

On that visceral level, there are a couple of stunning action sequences. The car/foot chase between Cap, Bucky and Black Panther is fantastic, casually throwing in cool moments like the way Bucky steals a motorbike. The climactic two-on-one fight is also a sight, throwing in strong choreography and seamless effects work to create a battle that has a real ebb and flow, a back and forth over who has the upper hand. And the centrepiece of it all, of course, is the two teams facing off at the airport. For fans of superheroes, this is pretty much the ultimate expression of the genre yet brought to live-action moviemaking. For my money, the antics of Ant-Man — and Giant-Man — are by and large (pun very much intended) the best bit of it, but maybe I’m just a little biased. Certainly, that everyone’s favourite webslinger is in the mix is the icing on the cake, and Tom Holland seems to have quickly nailed Spidey. Personally, I still find it a bit odd him turning up, especially in such a minor role. There’s still a slight sense that the MCU is made up of second/third-string heroes, who needed that shared universe to kickstart their big-screen life. Spidey most certainly does not need that… or didn’t before Sony effed it up with the last two movies, anyway. Maybe he does now.

And while I’m talking about Spider-Man, let’s talk about those post-credits scenes. Peter Parker is the star of the second one, and it’s Marvel Studio’s usual kind of tease, though perhaps less teasing than normal — “hey, remember that kid who was Spider-Man? He’s Spider-Man!” Thanks, guys. Before that, though, the mid-credits scene is a mid-credits scene for the sake of a mid-credits scene. By establishing where Bucky ends up, it’s surely an essential part of the overall narrative. Okay, it has the requisite teaser properties, hinting at where we might find Team Cap come the start of Avengers 3; and it teases Black Panther too, but only very, very mildly — like the Spidey scene, it’s basically saying, “hey, remember that foreign prince who was Black Panther? He lives in a foreign country… where he’s Black Panther!” Other than that, it’s kinda important to answer the question of “hey, what happened to Bucky?” next time Cap turns up. So why isn’t the scene just in the film? Well, it is in the film — just after a few of the credits — so what does it matter, right?

As I was saying — there’s plenty more action in the movie. Sadly, much of it falls foul of the dreaded ShakyCam. Watching Civil War just days after The Raid 2 made that especially frustrating. With all the time and effort they put into training actors these days, plus all the effects technology they have at their disposal to paint out wires or replace faces (something they’ve been able to do unnoticeably since Jurassic Park, for pity’s sake!), you’d think a $250 million movie could manage better. (If you’re wondering what they did spend $250 million on, it was stuff like, “eh, we may as well just use CGI for the close-ups, too”.)

One thing the film definitely gets right, in my view, is its villain. So central is the Cap/Iron Man conflict that it seemed any villain would be an afterthought, at best; and it doesn’t help that the MCU is renowned for having weak antagonists. Indeed, for most of the movie Zemo seems like the expected nonentity; a villain for the sake of a villain, who’s being seeded earlier in the film just so he doesn’t come completely out of nowhere at the climax. But then, when his whole story and plan is revealed, it turns out that all along he may have been one of the most interesting villains the MCU has yet offered. His motivation is simple but effective; his methodology cunning and almost successful — even after the heroes know what he was trying to get them to do, they do it anyway! His final scene with Black Panther may be the best part of the entire movie. Nice work, Daniel Brühl.

In the end, Civil War leaves plenty open for future Marvel movies. Well, of course it does — half the time MCU movies are feature-length trailers for the next MCU movie. Where Civil War is really clever, however, is that it does that stage-setting while also feeling conclusory. As the third part in the Captain America trilogy, it actually makes a pretty satisfying end to that narrative. As the third part in the “trilogy in five parts” that is The Avengers trilogy, well, it’s clearly not the end, but it’s a fairly discrete segment.

It may well also be the best MCU movie so far, too. There aren’t many 13th films that can say that.

Calvary (2014)

Posted on May 12, 2016 by badblokebob

From the director of In Bruges’ older brother (who, in fairness, made a name for himself with 2011 comedy The Guard, which I’ve still not got round to) comes this dark (very dark) comedy drama — with emphasis on the latter, I suppose, but it is very funny along the way.

Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges, The Guard) stars as Father James, a priest in a small Irish town. One day at confession he’s told he is going to be murdered. Not for anything he did wrong, but precisely the opposite — because he is a good priest. The mysterious threatener gives him a week to get his affairs in order. Over the next seven days, we follow James as he interacts with his characterful parishioners, and are led to ponder which of them might be the would-be assassin, especially as so many seem cynical and nasty. All the while, James struggles internally with what is the right thing to do.

That’s the story of Calvary, at any rate, but it’s fairly clear that it’s about something more. What exactly that is, however, is a matter of debate. Could it be an apologia for the church and the wrongs it has inflicted in living memory? It certainly leans into those issues: without spoiling anything, the inciting incident is related to historic abuse, but the film is showing that priests aren’t all like that — that some people in the church are actually good, or at least as good as any of the rest of us — which I should imagine is true. That doesn’t make the film an apology, nor an excuse, but does raise a point: should the innocent be blamed for the wrongdoings of the guilty just because they share a belief? I think most rational people would agree they should not. Nonetheless, I’ve read at least one commenter, who I’m presuming was a hardened atheist, castigate the film for daring to feature a good priest, as if the very concept of one existing was a heinous and offensive suggestion. Conversely, in the special features Chris O’Dowd speaks of his initial wariness that this was going to be another “bad priest” movie, and how that doesn’t align with his personal experience of the clergy.

So could it, instead, merely be a snapshot of Irish society, in particular its current relationship with the church? Surely that’s part of what’s in play, with the cynical, dismissive, teasing, sometimes hateful attitudes of the parishioners surely no coincidence. Some viewers have certainly taken this as the film’s primary talking point, and some have been less than impressed that it doesn’t align with their view of modern Ireland. (I’m in no position to comment.) Neither of these feel like they’re getting at the totality of what it’s saying, though.

Nonetheless, the way the film presents itself is not at fault. The acting is strong across the board, none more so than Gleeson. He brings all kinds of facets to a man who could’ve been a blank page on which to project the other colourful characters, and he truthfully conveys major character moments and changes of direction without the need for dialogue. O’Dowd surprises in a rare non-comedic role, while further able support comes from recognisable faces like Kelly Reilly (as James’ troubled daughter), Dylan Moran (as a nouveau riche dick) , Marie-Josée Croze (as a bereaved holidaymaker), M. Emmet Walsh (as an ageing author), and — for just one scene, but a good one — Domhnall Gleeson (you can discover what he is when you watch it). And no offence to Aidan Gillen, but his smarmy atheist doctor feels like the kind of part he always plays.

That’s not to exclude the less familiar names, some of whom deliver many of the biggest laughs, like Killian Scott (as a slightly worrying simpleton), David Wilmot (as James’ naïve fellow clergyman), and Owen Sharpe (as a Brooklyn-accented promiscuous gay) — though if you watch Ripper Street, you may have seen a couple of them in quite different guises. And though it may be a cliché, McDonagh has successfully made the location a character, too: the towering mountain, an accidental discovery once on location, adds the looming presence the director hoped it would.

Calvary may in fact be a great film, if only I could put my finger on what I think it’s really trying to get at, which remains frustratingly out of my reach, at least for now. However, I will say it’s a very good one, and anyone who likes a character-driven drama scattered with dark but hilarious humour would do well to seek it out.

Calvary is available on Amazon Prime Instant Video UK as of yesterday.

The Raid 2 (2014)

Posted on May 10, 2016 by badblokebob

aka The Raid 2: Berandal

I wasn’t as impressed as some were by The Raid when I finally got round to watching it two years ago — in my review I said its action was merely equal to other Asian fight flicks, asserted that Dredd had done the same story in a more rounded fashion, and compared the whole thing to Mamma Mia. To use a term that came up in my comments recently: where Mamma Mia is a chick flick, The Raid is definitely a dick flick. That’s probably why it’s taken me this long to get round to its sequel, which was at least as well-liked by the viewing public, if not more so (it has a higher rating on IMDb) — but I couldn’t trust that last time, so why this time? However, it turns out The Raid 2 is an entirely different kettle of fish.

That’s certainly true of the plot — this may be the least “just a rehash of the first film” sequel ever made. Starting mere hours after its predecessor finished, the sequel begins with good cop Rama (Iko Uwais) being co-opted into an anti-corruption internal affairs unit. It’s not just about doing the right thing, though: Rama wants a shot at Bejo (Alex Abbad), a rising criminal who murdered Rama’s brother. Rama is promptly asked to leave his wife and young son behind to go undercover in a prison with the aim of getting close to Uco (Arifin Putra), the son of powerful mob boss Bangun (Tio Pakusadewo). Unfortunately, instead of being sentenced to a couple of months as promised, Rama is given years in jail. Nonetheless, he manages to ingratiate himself with his target, and upon his eventual release is immediately granted a position in Bangun’s organisation. And, look, this is meant to be a review, not a plot summary — it all just spirals from there.

Where the first film was an efficient, simple thriller designed almost solely to link the startling action sequences, here writer-director Gareth Evans has created a sprawling crime epic. Anyone who’s seen the kind of gangster actioners Hong Kong cinema has produced since the ’80s or so will feel in familiar territory. That’s no bad thing, however, just a point of genre comparison. By expanding the world he’s created out in every direction, Evans has created a work that is not only bigger in a literal sense, but also deeper, more complex, and more interesting than the straightforward adrenaline rush of the movie that made his name.

That’s not to say The Raid 2 skimps on the action front, mind. Oh no. Far from it. If anything, the physical displays here are even greater, and certainly more varied. A free-for-all riot in a muddy prison yard brings to mind the church fight from Kingsman in its crazed frenzy; the first film’s Mad Dog, Yayan Ruhian, is back as a new character who gets a remarkable battle around a multi-level nightclub; the instantly iconic and aptly named Hammer Girl (Julie Estelle) gets a showcase on a subway car, and later double teams with her chum Baseball Bat Man (Very Tri Yulisman) to take on Rama; and that’s not even the climax, as our hero goes toe to toe with knife-wielding henchman The Assassin (Cecep Arief Rahman) in a kitchen-set rumble that has to be seen to be believed.

But as incredible as each of those are — and indeed they are — the highest of highlights is surely the car chase. There’s a chance you’ll have heard about this even if you’re not especially interested in the film: a bit of behind-the-scenes detail about how they achieved one particular shot went viral a couple of years ago. If you haven’t seen that, nor the film, then don’t seek it out — it actually kinda spoils it a little bit, knowing how it was done. (Without spoiling it, it was all done practically, whereas a Hollywood blockbuster would undoubtedly have done it with CGI — and spent as much on that one shot as Evans and co have on this entire movie.) The sequence is more than just one technically-impressive shot, however, but an exciting and innovative action scene all round, that definitely pushed the boundaries of the filmmakers’ capabilities (they had to get in a specialist outfit from overseas to help realise their ambitions).

Those are just the highlights — there are numerous smaller but no less accomplished sequences elsewhere, too. To be precise, there are 19 fight scenes, featuring more complex choreography than the first film — and it’s one of the fight choreographers who said that, so it must be true. The two-and-a-half hour running time may mean The Raid 2 isn’t the unrelenting action-fest that the first film was, but those memorable combats are just as much a part of the film’s DNA. I don’t think anyone’s going to feel shortchanged.

From a filmmaking point of view, it’s even more accomplished. Evans demonstrated he knew how to lens action in the first movie, but here the whole movie looks more polished and more expensive (even though it only cost $4.5 million). There’s greater ambition on display in every facet, including both the choreography and the camerawork. Most Hollywood blockbusters seem to push (or exceed) the two-and-a-half hour mark these days, and even when it fills that time, it feels like it’s partly because no one quite knew when to cut back. The Raid 2, however, feels suitably epic — just as you think a film that’s two-and-a-half hours long ought to feel, really.

For me, The Raid 2 outclasses its predecessor in every possible way, from the deeper and more involving story, to the jaw-dropping feats of choreography and performance, to the more assured and polished filmmaking. An instant action classic.

The Raid 2 will be available on Amazon Prime Instant Video UK from tomorrow.

It placed 2nd on my list of The 20 Best Films I Saw For the First Time in 2016, which can be read in full here.

* The MPAA insisted on 4½ seconds of cuts to get an R rating. The UK version is uncut. ^

The Hateful Eight (2015)

Posted on May 9, 2016 by badblokebob

Quentin Tarantino hadn’t made a film in the same genre as his preceding movie for almost 20 years when The Hateful Eight came out — his second go-round with the Western genre, after the Spaghetti-ish thrills of Django Unchained three years earlier. Aside from the setting and its accoutrements, however, The Hateful Eight has more in common with Tarantino’s debut feature, Reservoir Dogs.

Wyoming, sometime after the Civil War: bounty hunter Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) flags down a stagecoach driven by O.B. (James Parks), looking for transport to Red Rock. Inside is fellow bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) with his latest catch, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who’s worth $10,000 — naturally, Ruth is suspicious of Warren’s motives. Later, they pick up Chris Mannix (Walter Goggins), who claims he’s to be sworn in as the new sheriff of Red Rock — also of great suspicion to Ruth. As a blizzard chases them, the quintet seek shelter at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a rest spot Major Warren has clearly visited many times before. However, Minnie isn’t home, and care of her establishment has been left in the hands of Bob (Demián Bichir). Inside, they find fellow travellers Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), and General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern). Ruth doesn’t trust a’one of them — and as they settle down to ride out the blizzard, it turns out he’s right about someone…

I’m not the first to observe that The Hateful Eight actually functions like a murder mystery, Agatha Christie style. It might be easy to miss because the film doesn’t begin with a murder or feature a detective, but then neither do all of Christie’s stories. Instead, there’s a long period setting up all the players and suggesting their motivations, and then eventually the proverbial does hit the metaphorical fan, after which deductions must be made. And it’s all in a remote, isolated location which has been cut off by weather, and every character is hiding some nefarious past — so far, so And Then There Were None. All of this comes dressed in QT’s famed dialogue, unfurled at the somewhat languorous pace he’s gradually been cultivating for a few movies now, and topped off with a few doses of the old ultra-violence.

One reason the “whodunnit” label doesn’t really stick is that Tarantino doesn’t sit it out until the end. Without spoilers: there’s certainly mystery about who is and isn’t involved, but you can’t invest in that too much because the answer is a little bit Murder on the Orient Express. Not completely Orient Express (I said no spoilers!), but a bit. One factor he does handle well is that (again like And Then There Were None) you can never be quite sure whose side you should be on; who might turn out to be a villain. Even at the end, when all has been revealed, the heroes are hardly heroic.

More talked about than the film’s content has been the way it was made. Despite the confined setting, Tarantino chose to shoot it on 65mm film, using the Ultra Panavision 70 process (only the 11th film to do so) and lenses that hadn’t seen light in nearly five decades, all of which have produced incredible images. QT’s regular DP since Kill Bill (excepting Death Proof), Robert Richardson, has once again done sterling work, with beautiful shots of scenery near the start and a fantastic definition of space once we’re locked up in Minnie’s.

Ultra Panavision 70 produces an ultra-wide 2.76:1 frame (for those not in the know, your widescreen TV is only 1.78:1), which for such an intimate story has struck people as odd ever since it was announced. In fact, it pays off in (at least) two ways: firstly, all the scene-setting scenery looks magnificent; secondly, for a lot of the film there’s stuff going on in the background or at the edge of frame — it’s not just a series of close-ups or two-shots where the ancillary detail is either non-existent or doesn’t matter, but one where that ‘background’ detail is sometimes very instructive to what is going on. Tarantino also uses the full width a lot of the time, placing two figures at either edge of the image — this really isn’t a film you could crop (thank goodness it doesn’t exist in the pan & scan era!)

Richardson’s work was Oscar nominated but lost to The Revenant (which I’m now a little biased against, after it beat this, Fury Road, and handed Roger Deakins his 13th loss, but I’ll see what I think when it finally hits British home ent formats next month), but the film did triumph for Ennio Morricone’s score — and quite rightly so, too, because it’s incredibly atmospheric and effective. Tarantino has commented that it isn’t really a Western score (which you’d expect from Morricone, what with his famous ones), but more of a horror movie score, and that that’s appropriate for the film. And, y’know, that’s not pretentious director-speak — he’s right. Well, that the movie is a horror movie is debatable, but he is right that Morricone’s work sounds more like a horror score, and that that score is appropriate to this movie. It even recycles some of Morricone’s material from The Thing, as if to bring the point home (and that’s far from the only thing about The Hateful Eight that’s indebted to The Thing, but I’ll leave that for someone else to dig into another time). Even though this is the first time he’s had a full score composed for one of his films, Tarantino still sources a couple of well-selected songs from elsewhere, including a very apt credits track by Roy Orbison.

The Hateful Eight may have a deceptively simple story, with straightforward characters and — once they’re finally all revealed — straightforward motivations; and despite that running time, it’s not as grand or as epic as either Inglourious Basterds or Django Unchained; but I say “deceptively simple” because I feel that it’s the kind of film that might reward repeat viewings, to reveal depths of character as well as hints toward the ultimate reveals. Or maybe I’m being generous — maybe it is just a long-winded, verbose way of telling a slight tale. But if it is, it’s still a mighty entertaining one.

The Hateful Eight is released on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK today.

The Book of Life (2014)

Posted on May 5, 2016 by badblokebob

A myth-like animated musical adventure based around Mexico’s Day of the Dead, most notable for its unique art style that presents gorgeous visuals throughout.

Otherwise, it has the right ingredients but in disappointing proportions. The story is good, but too long in the telling. The humour isn’t consistently amusing. The songs are mostly re-appropriated pop tracks, plus two new compositions. The latter are more effective, though shoehorning a rendition of Radiohead’s Creep into a kids’ movie is memorable for the wrong reasons.

Some viewers may lose patience with it, but I thought enough was likeable to keep it ticking over.

For more quick reviews like this, look here.

Veronica Mars (2014)

Posted on April 23, 2016 by badblokebob

If you hadn’t heard of Veronica Mars before 13th March 2013, you almost certainly did soon after. That’s the date Rob Thomas, creator of the six-years-dead TV series of the same name, launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to pay for the long-mooted continuation movie. Aiming for a whopping $2 million, it raised that in just 11 hours, going on to bag $5.7 million by the end of its 30-day campaign. In the process it became the fastest Kickstarter project to reach $1 million (and $2 million), the highest-funded film project ever on the site, with the most number of backers for any campaign, and inspired countless think-pieces on how it was ruining/saving the movie industry, or at least completely changing it forever. In reality, very few (if any) big-name Kickstarter movies have come along since, and those that have haven’t inspired the same fervour as Veronica did three years ago.

The film itself picks up nine years after the end of the TV series. A quick opening montage reminds/informs us that Veronica (Kristen Bell) moonlighted as a private investigator while she was in high school, making plenty of enemies in the process and enduring more than a few tragedies, but she eventually managed to drag herself out of that life and start afresh. Just as she’s about to begin a career as a high-flying lawyer in New York, she sees on the news that her one-time on-off love interest Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring) has been arrested for murder. Then he phones asking for her help. Just when she thought she was out, etc. So Miss Mars heads back to little old Neptune, California, just in time for her ten-year high school reunion and a murder investigation involving all (well, most of) the familiar faces from the TV show.

There’s no denying that this is primarily a film for fans of the TV series — well, they did fund it, after all. The best way to get the most out of the film is to have watched all 64 episodes of the show first; preferably soon before, in fact, so you can remember who all the minor characters are. However, creator-cowriter-director Rob Thomas is no fool: you don’t produce a successful movie that continues a little-watched TV show by making it a requirement that you’ve watched 64 hours of TV first. (I mean, Joss Whedon knew that with Serenity, and there’s only 14 hours of Firefly.) So Veronica Mars: The Movie is accessible to neophyte viewers. You might sense there’s references and whatnot that are passing you by, but everything that’s relevant is explained.

The long gap between series and continuation actually works to the film’s advantage, too, because this plays as the story of someone revisiting an old life, in a place that’s in some ways different and in others exactly, depressingly the same. The hook here is of Veronica as a kind of addict, but instead of being addicted to booze or drugs, it’s private investigating — she may be nine years ‘sober’, but now she’s being tempted to indulge. Again, this makes even more sense if you’ve watched the TV show, where a subplot deals with Veronica’s mother’s alcoholism, but the general conceit works standalone.

Plus, this is a crime drama — there’s a case to be solved, and that’s self-contained within the film. Okay, most of the players are characters from the series, but everything is introduced and explained within the film. Heck, there are even characters Veronica knew in school who weren’t actually in the TV series, which might give you a flavour of how it works both for fans and newcomers. The case itself isn’t a bad mystery, but at the same time it’s a little subservient to the other goings-on. I suppose you could argue this is really a comedy-drama about a woman reconnecting with her past life and past friends, and she just happens to have a murder to investigate at the same time.

For fans (who will have watched this years ago, hence why I’m focusing on the newbie experience), the film is immensely rewarding. Obviously, because it finally gives some closure to the cancelled series’ dangling elements; but also, it feels like Veronica Mars, not like something from older people that’s only claiming to be what it once was. There’s the sparky characters, the funny repartee, the raft of neo-noir allusions. As cheesy as “teenage private eye” sounds, one of the reasons Veronica worked was because it really used those noir elements, just grafted on to the high school experience. The town of Neptune is practically a throwback in this regard, with rich kids and businessmen who can buy their way out of trouble thanks to a thoroughly corrupt police department, while the poor schmucks at the bottom of the pile get by as best they can, which often is not well. It didn’t even cave to the usual youthification of adding happy endings; in fact, more often than not, things didn’t end well. The movie isn’t quite as bleak as the TV series often was — there’s clearly an awareness this might be a one-time deal, so Thomas wants to leave things suitably wrapped up — but not everything comes up roses. (Where’s the sequel at?!) And to pay things off fully, there’s a tonne of fun references, not just to the show but also to real life (not least the Kickstarter campaign).

To bring up Firefly/Serenity again, I think there’s a reasonable parallel between how those relate to each other, and how they can work for newbies, and how Veronica Mars the TV series and Veronica Mars the movie relate. To wit: in an ideal world, you’d watch all of the series and then the film; but TV series can be long commitments, and for a spot of ‘dipping your toe in the water’, you can also start with the movie and go back to the series for the full picture. Sure, some things are going to be spoiled doing it that way round — but hey, not everyone who’s in the series but not the film ends up dead, I promise.

When I first watched the movie, it was at the end of a first-time binge through the TV series, where it sat very happily. To finally write this review, I watched the film again in isolation. I have a memory, so obviously I’m not coming at it from a totally fresh perspective, but it was as entertaining in isolation as it had been as “one more episode”. Fans will get the biggest kick out of seeing old characters resurface, out of learning what’s happened to them in the past decade, out of seeing big-name cameos alongside familiar faces, out of all the callbacks and nods, out of certain things finally being resolved. But that doesn’t mean newcomers can’t get joy from meeting these characters for the first time, from the self-contained mystery and storylines, from the fresh gags — indeed, from all the things that make the TV show entertaining if you started there. And then, if they like it, there’s the joy of there being 64 more instalments to discover.

More than just a nostalgia trip for people who were there first time round, the movie is a strong addition to the Veronica Mars canon — as someone who didn’t discover the series until the Kickstarter campaign, I thought the film was a heck of a lot of fun, and a wonderful capstone to a mostly-great series. That said, there’s plenty of room for further cases… someday… hopefully…

Veronica Mars is available on Amazon Prime Instant Video in the UK from tomorrow.

Maleficent (2014)

Posted on April 22, 2016 by badblokebob

Disney seem to be embarking on a project to remake all of their most beloved animated movies in live action,* with Cinderella being one of the highest grossing movies of last year, The Jungle Book currently doing gangbusters at the box office worldwide, an all-star Beauty and the Beast hotly anticipated for next year, and others in the pipeline that include Mulan, Pinocchio, The Sword in the Stone, both Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, another 101 Dalmatians, an Aladdin prequel, Winnie the Pooh, and Tim Burton’s Dumbo. (No, I did not make those last two up.)

But it all started… back in 2010, when Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland was an unexpectedly ginormous hit. But then there were a couple of years off, so you could argue the current wave started here: a revisionist re-telling of Sleeping Beauty from the point of view of its villainess. In this version, we meet Maleficent as a child, protector of some fairy kingdom that borders the human kingdom. One day she meets a trespassing human boy, Stefan; they fall in love; eventually, he stops visiting, set on making his fortune in the king’s castle. After Maleficent has grown up to be Angelina Jolie doing an English accent and Stefan has grown up to be Sharlto Copley doing a Scottish accent (goodness knows why), the human king decides to invade the fairy land. Maleficent repels his forces, and the dying king vows whoever can defeat her will be named heir. So power-hungry Stefan does something terrible, and we’re on the road to the story we know… more or less.

It’s an interesting idea to take an archetypal villain who’s evil for evil’s sake and try to give her motivation, to understand why she did terrible things. Maleficent makes a fair fist of this, beginning long before the familiar tale to establish a run of events that tip the titular character to the dark side. What Stefan does to her to win power is pretty dark, and a clear analogy to a real-world crime that you wouldn’t expect from a PG-rated Disney movie. Our sympathies, at this point, lie with Maleficent. Of course, then she goes and condemns an innocent child to eternal slumber, so that’s less nice.

However, this is a Disney movie — you don’t get to turn a villain into the central character and have her be evil throughout. This is where the film gets really revisionist, because Maleficent keeps an eye on cursed Princess Aurora (Elle Fanning) as she grows, doing more to keep her alive than the trio of fairies she’s supposedly in the care of, and her heart is gradually warmed to the girl. Unfortunately, Maleficent was too good at the cursing malarkey: unable to lift her own spell, it plays out regardless, and the film serves us new renditions of the impassable thorns, giant dragon, and true love’s first kiss. It’s in the last where Maleficent is thematically revisionist rather than just a massive rewrite. Your mileage may vary on whether this version is obvious and cheesy, or actually more meaningful and (for the primary audience of little kiddies) more thought-provoking than the original’s — I’d go with the latter.

So in some respects, Maleficent is a success. In others, it’s a bit of a mess. For all the additional character development given to Maleficent herself, the rest of the characters are two-dimensional at best. It’s ironic that, in a movie all about fleshing out and understanding the villain, the new villain (i.e. Stefan) is so flat. Other elements are just pointless or nonsensical, like the corridor of iron spikes Maleficent & co briefly have to squeeze along. It’s not a bad idea per se — it’s been established that iron hurts fairies (goodness knows why, but there you go), so it’s a reasonable concept for a physical obstacle — but it’s really poorly integrated into the story, and it’s bested by… walking through it carefully. Thrilling.

Parts of the film test-screened poorly — mainly the first act, with audiences wondering why it took so long for Jolie to turn up. Consequently, the whole thing was thrown out and reshot; in the process, Peter Capaldi and Miranda Richardson were deleted (and after they’d had to endure hours of transformative prosthetics for their roles, too), and Maleficent was given a new backstory. How far this extended into the rest of the movie, I’m not sure, but at times it feels like stuff has been cut or rearranged. Certainly the story flies past — if it wasn’t trimmed down in the edit, it needed expanding back at the screenplay stage.

Then there’s the uncanny-valley-tastic rendition of the three fairies, with mini plasticky-CGI versions of Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple and Lesley Manville floating around until they jarringly turn into live action; the unintentional hilarity of the Prince Charming-type apparently being from the kingdom of Ofsted (it’s actually Ulfstead, but still); and the original film’s famous song, Once Upon a Dream, being slowly murdered by Lana Del Rey. Perhaps surprisingly, the work of production-designer-turned-director Robert Stromberg is pretty decent, though over-fond of crash zooms during action sequences, and an overall visual style that’s reminiscent of the likes of Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful — both of which Stromberg designed, funnily enough.

For all its faults, Maleficent was still the fourth highest grossing movie of 2014 — though the top grosser was Transformers: Age of Extinction and second was The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, so that shows what quality matters to the box office. Nonetheless, it’s no wonder Disney have kicked into gear with the live-action remakes, and even a Maleficent sequel is in development. (No idea how that’ll work — Sleepier Beauty?) On the bright side, there is something more interesting going on here than just an animated film being re-done with real people (and copious CGI). Certainly, anyone interested in fairytales being deconstructed and/or reconstructed should be sure to check it out.

Maleficent is available on Netflix UK as of this week.

* At least they’re not trying to tie them together as another shared universe! ^

Locke (2013)

Posted on April 19, 2016 by badblokebob

“Tom Hardy goes for a drive and makes some phone calls” is the plot of this film, which is often mislabelled as a thriller. That’s not to degrade its thrillingness, but rather to say that if you’re expecting a single-location single-character phone-based thrill-ride like Phone Booth (which I love) or Buried (which I’ve still not seen), you’re not going to get it. In reality, Locke is a drama about a man dealing with some woes that are both everyday and life-changing, but as a film it’s been made in an unusual and interesting manner.

To be more specific, the story concerns Ivan Locke (Hardy), the foreman on a huge construction site in Birmingham, and the only character on screen for the film’s entire running time. As he leaves work one evening, he’s stopped at some traffic lights. He indicates left… but, given some time to think about it, turns right. (Shades of Doctor Who season four there, but I don’t think it’s deliberate!) As he drives down the motorway for the next couple of hours, he makes a series of phone calls that completely change his life.

I could give you some indication of what those calls are about, but I think the less you know, the more entertaining it will be. As writer-director Steven Knight (Eastern Promises, Hummingbird, Peaky Blinders) says in his audio commentary, part of the idea was to construct a movie where the lead character’s big decision — which usually comes near the end — actually occurs at the start, and the whole movie deals with the repercussions of that. Locke deciding to turn right rather than left isn’t just a decision about the quickest route to his destination, but about heading to a different destination, and in the process turning his life upside down. Another part was to tell a story about an ordinary guy dealing with events that aren’t going to change the world, aren’t even going to make the papers, but are a big deal in his life. Something like this could happen to any of us, and how would we deal with it?

I’d argue that Locke is Tom Hardy’s most unusual role to date: a total everyman. I mean, unusual for him. As such, it’s probably the best demonstration of his genuine acting ability: he’s got psychos and outré characters down pat, but playing an understated, fundamentally good, normal bloke? That’s a big change of pace. What’s so remarkable about Ivan Locke is his sheer unremarkableness. He’s a softly spoken guy, a friendly guy, a nice guy; as we learn at one point, he’s the only contractor who’s ever submitted paperwork to the council not just on time but early — he’s that kind of guy. And on this night, he’s decided to be completely honest with everyone; honest to a fault, in fact, because sometimes it just makes things worse. As Knight says in that commentary, what happens to Ivan is “an ordinary tragedy, and Ivan’s solution to the problem is the thing that makes him exceptional”.

Throughout this, however, is the issue of Hardy’s chosen accent… It’s Welsh, or meant to be Welsh, chosen to be working class but not harsh, with fewer preordained associations than some working class accents have. I thought it was… iffy, shall we say; and certainly people unfamiliar with the Welsh accent are all over the place in guessing where it’s from. However, looking on IMDb, Welsh people seem quite happy with it, so… Either way, you do get used to it (or I did, at least), so that as the film goes on it grates less often. Hardy’s too busy acting up a storm for it to matter, anyway. He’s a captivating performer when he’s given the space and character for it, and while I dispute the assertion (made in the special features) that he’s the only actor you could spend 80 minutes watching like this, it’s still a rare gift.

The rest of the cast appear as voices only on the other end of the phone, and in their own way are quite starry — faces that you may recognise, mainly from British TV, in even some of the smaller roles. Not that you see their faces, so, you know, you might have to look them up, or watch the making-of. Some of the performances err a little towards radio acting for me, which is kind of understandable seeing as how that’s basically how they were recorded, but there are particularly good turns from Andrew “Moriarty in Sherlock” Scott, as one of Locke’s underlings who has to step up to the plate while his boss is on the road, and Olivia Colman, who is always brilliant so that should be no surprise. Having just seen her play an ultra-capable woman recently in The Night Manager (which I’ll cover in my TV round-up this Thursday, incidentally), this is distinctly different. As if we needed to know she had range!

One of the people Locke talks to is his dad, which is noteworthy because his dad is dead. This isn’t a fantasy movie, and he isn’t having hallucinations either — he’s just imagining talking to him, for specific reasons that become apparent. These chats seem to be the film’s most divisive part for viewers: some people think it’s forced and terrible, others think it makes for great monologues. I hew towards the latter. Partly, it seems to stem from whether you believe people talk to themselves in the car or not. Here’s an apparently-uncomfortable truth for people who think no one does that: they do.

Other ridiculous criticisms include that it should only be a radio play, or a stage play, and that it’s completely uncinematic. It’s true that it could function on radio, but you’d lose an important aspect: that what we say with words isn’t always what we say with our face, which is particularly true when we’re on the telephone and the person we’re talking to can’t see our face. The film uses this contrast more than once. As for the stage, stage plays don’t allow for close-ups, and — voices aside — this is about what’s happening on Hardy’s face, not with his whole body. And in either form you’d lose all the photography of nighttime motorways, which have their own kind of hazy beauty. For a movie about someone making phone calls, it is intensely cinematic.

It’s also in real-time, more-or-less (it lasts 80 minutes, and near the end Locke says he’s been driving for a little over two hours — that’s near-as-damn-it, isn’t it?) I’ve discussed before how I like real-time narratives — it’s why I was initially attracted to 24, and why I’m very interested in forthcoming spin-off 24: Legacy while seemingly everyone else is busy stomping their feet and bawling like a baby because they want more Jack Bauer. I digress. Part of the beauty of Locke is that we’re locked in the car with this guy experiencing what he’s experiencing as it unfolds. There is no escaping it, only limited control over it. The fact he’s driving towards something is a very clear metaphor here, emphasised by occasional shots of his GPS showing the fixed track he’s on, and the fact he speaks to his dad — i.e. his past — in the rearview mirror. These could be heavy-handed metaphors, but they’re pitched about right in my opinion: you’ll probably spot them (which is always nicer than feeling you’ve missed stuff), but you’re not battered around the head with it.

It’s possible to make Locke sound like the most boring film ever — “a man drives home from work while talking on the phone, mostly about methods of pouring concrete”. Obviously, that undersells it massively. Hardy has never been more compelling, the supporting cast are so much more than “voices on the phone” (listen out, too, for Tom “Spider-Man” Holland and a midwife voiced by Alice “Sightseers” Lowe, who’s apparently Steven Spielberg’s favourite character), and the visuals are hypnotically compelling to boot. Even though it didn’t quite convince me to go the full 5-stars, I’d rate this one a must-see.

The UK network TV premiere of Locke is on Film4 tonight at 9pm.

Super 8 (2011)

Posted on April 18, 2016 by badblokebob

Before he started star warring and between bouts of star trekking, director J.J. Abrams teamed up with producer Steven Spielberg for this homage to the kind of movies Spielberg produced in the ’80s. Those films have endured down the decades; I’m not sure Super 8 endured as far as Abrams’ next ~~lens flare showcase~~ film. Which is a little bit of a shame because, by being Abrams’ most personal film, it may also be his best.

Set in the summer of 1979, the film follows a group of teenage boys making a zombie film, in particular Joe (Joel Courtney), whose mother died a couple of months earlier in an industrial accident. For their film’s love interest, the guys enlist Alice (Elle Fanning) and Joe begins to grow close to her, despite his dad (Kyle Chandler) blaming her dad for the death of Joe’s mother. While shooting a scene late at night, the kids witness a massive train crash, caused by their science teacher. With his dying words he warns them not to tell anyone what they witnessed. As the military descend on the wreckage and odd things begin to happen around the town, it becomes clear the train was transporting something very strange…

How much all this achieves Abrams’ goal of feeling like a genuine Amblin movie, I’m not sure. On the surface, not that much: the visual style is all too modern, not to mention the CGI. But, tonally, there is something there, which has somehow survived being filtered through the filmmaking process and made its way into the finished product — it’s a bit of that spirit of adventure; the kind of storyline and characters; and, actually, the way it holds back a little on the effects work. Several people cite The Goonies when talking about it, which just reminds me that I really ought to get round to seeing that. (The fact it’s absolutely loved by some, while increasingly I hear people bravely sticking their heads over the parapet to say, “it’s not really that good, you know”, intrigues me rather.)

Unfortunately, the longer the film goes on the more it runs away with itself, as characters dash back and forth all over the place, sometimes in credibility-stretching fashion (we never do see how a group of kids manage to escape a heavily-guarded military base and drive back to an evacuated and blockaded town). The adults stumble through the story to little dramatic effect; Joe’s dad even has to be secretly locked up for a good chunk of the film (with no other characters noticing his disappearance) so that his storyline can be paused until he’s wheeled out for his part in the climax. The grown-ups do serve a role — giving us a perspective on events that the kids lack, and being tied to the emotional arcs of the leads — but it wouldn’t have harmed anything to limit them to those functions, rather than trying to half-heartedly give them stories of their own.

The kids are quite likeable in their way, especially Courtney and Fanning, who have enough chemistry to keep their interactions the most engaging aspect of the film. In fact, if Abrams wasn’t the kind of filmmaker he is, an indie-ish real-world take on Super 8’s dramatic storyline (a bunch of friends making a short film over the summer holidays, also with all the other grounded emotional aspects of the movie) might’ve made for an even more effective, enjoyable film. (Somewhat ironically, it seems this was Abrams’ original intention: according to IMDb, his two ideas for a follow-up to Mission: Impossible III were a coming-of-age story or an alien-on-the-loose adventure. Presumably getting sidetracked into Star Trek gave him the time to decide to combine them.)

In some respects, the kids’ short film (which plays during the end credits) encapsulates the whole movie: a semi-thought-through SF/F plot, a tacked on emotional arc, the apexes of both tied together in the climax, and a couple of sometimes-shoehorned effects set pieces along the way. Yet for all that, it does enough right that I’d quite like to see Abrams attempt more work along these lines.

J.J. Abrams’ most recent film, a little movie you’ve probably not heard of about something-or-other waking up (I forget the details), is out on DVD & Blu-ray in the UK today.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014)

Posted on April 16, 2016 by badblokebob

The director of Not Quite Hollywood, a documentary on Ozploitation movies that I bought on DVD at some point and haven’t got round to watching (and which shares a “The Wild, Untold Story of __” subtitle), turns his attention to a similar kind of thing from a different continent: the output of Cannon Films, the studio renowned for producing a slew of cheap but surprisingly successful B-level genre movies throughout the ’80s.

My main takeaway from the film was a massive list of films I now want to see: Inga, Joe, The Apple, House of the Long Shadows (a PG horror movie!), The Last American Virgin, The Wicked Lady, Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja, Ninja III: The Domination, Sahara, Breakin’, Breakin’ 2, Bolero, Invasion U.S.A., Lifeforce… Even though the talking heads in the documentary keep saying how awful all of these movies are, the film makes them look awesome. I mean, not “award-winning” awesome, or even “genre classic” awesome, but like magnificently trashy fun.

As a film, Electric Boogaloo is relentlessly, insanely fast-paced to begin with, and though it does settle a smidge, it still rockets along, which keeps things engrossing and very watchable. There’s an excellent array of talking heads — not many you’ll’ve heard of (unless you’re a Cannon aficionado, perhaps), but they were there, they lived it, and they have first-rate insights into the craziness. Craziness like the story of the competing Lambada movies, which ended up being released on the exact same day. I mean, you’d think one Lambada movie would be more than enough, but two, competing… If you wrote it in a fiction, the audience would laugh at the ridiculous contrivance of it, but it happened. Elsewhere, there’s a chunk where they just slag off Michael Winner for a bit (awesome), and director Franco Zeffirelli describes them as the best producers he ever worked with and the only ones he ever liked. Like I say, you couldn’t make it up.

Documentaries can be hard films to assess from a “film criticism” perspective — you can get lost down lots of blind alleys about the merits of archive footage or talking heads or reconstructions or structure or whatever other variables there are. Some reviews of this film have done that, which I find a little inexplicable because I thought it was very well put together. Plus, generally speaking, if you’ve got a good story and you’ve told it well, I’m satisfied, and I think most viewers are too. This viewpoint means assessing the quality of a documentary becomes more concerned with the subject matter than the documentarian’s skill as a filmmaker, but unless you’re a student of the documentary as a genre, that story (and if it’s told effectively, rather than the issue of if its telling is effective) is all that really matters.

Which is a really roundabout, film-theory-ish way of saying that Electric Boogaloo has a bizarrely fascinating story to tell, and does so in an immensely entertaining manner. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually a lot better than the films it’s about.

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