John Crowley | 91 mins | TV (HD) | 12 / PG-13
Is Anybody There? has been described as “lightweight” in some reviews. Tosh and piffle — I don’t think that’s true in the slightest, and it’s left this rather excellent film to be distinctly underrated.
Far from being “lightweight”, it’s a subtle tale that covers a lot of ground in an unshowy way. Aside from the main plot, which is very worthwhile in itself — about how a lonely, slightly odd 10-year-old boy and a lonely, stubborn old man accidentally wind up bringing out the best in each other and helping each other to move on from the troubles they’re stuck in — the supporting characters are used to paint succinct pictures of old age, abandonment and regret.
And so it’s actually about a lot of things: primarily loneliness, in all its forms, from a boy who can’t get on at school and is half ignored by his parents, to a strained marriage, to abandonment at old age; but it’s also about regret, for missed opportunities and for not setting things right; and that particular point in childhood when you’re obsessed with death and what lies beyond; and hope for the future, even when there’s not much future to be hopeful about; and how there’s happiness to be found even when it seems it’s too late for any. And it’s about all of these things in a much better way than it might sound — I’m hitting them on the nose here, something the film never does.
The cast are excellent, particularly the central pairing of Michael Caine and Bill Milner. Both give excellent, nuanced performances, and it’s credit to not only their skills but also those of writer Peter Harness and director John Crowley that the 
initially antagonistic relationship merges seamlessly into a deep friendship and respect; one that doesn’t go unchallenged, but survives it all to make them both better people.
Milner captures perfectly that almost-teenage state of naivety-and-knowledge; of extreme stomping anger and beautiful helpfulness, each just a flip of the coin away from the other; where a blazing row is followed by everything being fine just seconds later. And Caine, at the other end of life, is almost the same, in the way that youth and old age always seem to align so perfectly. He starts off grumpy and unappeasable, but places himself willingly into a grandfather-like role, teaching Milner the wonders of magic and trying to bring him out of his shell, to find friends his own age, to move on with his death-obsession, to not let his life disappear into regret; and, at the same time, coping with his own heavy burdens of a life thrown away, that unique type of regret when it’s far too late to ever possibly put it right.
While it is clearly Milner and Caine’s film, that doesn’t mean the supporting cast can’t excel also. In particular, Anne-Marie Duff as the snowed-under mother and manager, with her heart in the right place but a family life that’s severely suffering because of it, something she doesn’t even notice until it’s (almost) too late. It’s Duff, David Morrissey, and the rest of the elderly main cast, who round out the film’s themes with subplots and vignettes conveyed through understated, often dialogue-light/free, scenes and performances.
If this all sounds heavy going… well, some of it is, relatively, but there’s also plenty of comedy — much of it quite dark, true — to lighten the mood. 
It’s a well-balanced film that hits that genuinely realistic note: life is rarely all comedy or all tragedy, and more often than not the most hilarious moments are locked up inside the most unbearable. It’s a truth a few more drama writers could productively learn, instead of remaining so insufferably po-faced because they’re creating a Serious And Meaningful Dramatic Work.
Is Anybody There? seems to garner middling reviews most places, which I think is massively unfair. Perhaps it didn’t speak to those reviewers, for whatever reason, but it did to me and the person I watched it with. Perhaps if you’ve ever been that child who wondered and worried about what comes after death, or struggled to find your place in the world, or become stuck in a situation where you feel you may as just give up, or known people who’ve been abandoned as they grew old, or who have suffered that horrible, sometimes slow, sometimes all too fast, loss of their mental faculties, then this film will engage you too. It is, in three words, excellent, underrated, and affecting.
Is Anybody There? placed 9th on my list of The Ten Best Films I Saw For the First Time in 2010, which can be read in full here.
Pale Rider is, in many ways, a pretty stock Western. The plot is likely to be familiar even to those who haven’t seen a great deal of the genre: remote community, where some controlling business-type is making life hard for a bunch of everyday poor grafters; in rides a mysterious stranger, who sees the injustice of the situation; when peaceful methods don’t work, there’s the climactic shoot-out; and the mysterious stranger finally rides into the sunset/from whence he came/forever on.
but the person he has in mind is dead… and yet, when they come face to face, the marshall repeatedly utters, “it is you”.
the only particularly memorable role is Sydney Penny’s naïve young teenager, Megan. Her shifting emotions and variable actions are perhaps the only parts of the story one can’t necessarily see coming from the off.
In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a white girl falls in love with a black man and brings him home to meet the parents. You can almost imagine this premise still being launched today, as one of those dreadful ‘comedies’ Hollywood pumps out every year, in which the parents are outrageous racists — played by some ageing stars who should really know better — and one of the young couple is a bit accident-prone and played by someone like Ben Stiller or Adam Sandler.
It could easily have been a simplistic message movie — these people are liberal, these people are racist, etc — but instead there’s complexity at every turn. There’s the liberal white parents who never expected to find themselves in this situation, and suddenly are struggling with their own ideologies; or the black characters, who you might think would be eager to move ‘up in the world’ but actually react even worse to the idea; or the Catholic priest being one of the few characters unwaveringly in favour of the union. And even then, these characters could just become ciphers for the arguments and debates; but they’re not, they’re characters, having believable reactions, and from this comes the debate.
Ah, Rambo. Rambo Rambo Rambo. The only Rambo film I’ve seen is 
Stallone is perfect for the character: suitably calm and ‘everyman’ at the beginning; muscular and mostly silent as the trained assassin; and even an actor capable of pulling off the final breakdown, when the horrors of war spill over. It’s difficult to imagine most muscle-men action stars pulling off Rambo’s closing speech. Throughout, Rambo’s PTSD is made obvious without being overdone: brief flashbacks suggest all the horror we need to know, topped by his final outburst. Rambo isn’t the beast, the men who made him that way are, along with those he did it for who fail to appreciate what he’s been through.
Ah, the Coen Brothers! Those indie-mainstream praise-magnets that I’ve never particularly got on with. But then, perhaps I was just too young and under-read (or, rather, under-viewed) to get 
For the characters in the film, it’s a confusing mess of a situation they find themselves embroiled in — no one has the full picture, and most don’t properly comprehend the bit they do see. For the viewer, it’s a fun bit of nothing. Things have changed by the end, certainly — most notably, several people are dead — but the events that got us there are pretty quickly forgotten.
Public Enemies came out nearly a year ago now, and I remember two things about its release: firstly, that the first review I saw was Empire’s, which 
What it brings here is an unusual quality. It’s clearly fiction, of course, albeit fiction based on fact, and there are still plenty of extravagant angles and editing so that you’re never in danger of thinking Mann is trying to pass this off as a documentary. But couple the raw cinematography with a meticulous attention to period detail, with a sound mix that is consciously rough and real, and you get a sense that this is how it was — it’s not a glossified movie version, it’s a How It Was one. Public Enemies is to the old gangster film as 
The characters do and don’t lack depth. The relationship between Dillinger and Billie is a significant part of the film, receiving roughly equal attention to Dillinger’s criminal deeds — it’s his final words to her that close the film, not his death. Christian Bales’ G-man, Melvin Purvis, on the other hand, is less developed, but to say he lacks any character is to do Bale’s performance a disservice. Behind Purvis’ blunt dialogue and stolid manner, and in slight gaps and lapses around it, one gets a sense of the true man and his real thoughts. The postscript — that he resigned from the FBI a year later and ultimately took his own life — reinforces and confirms the subtleties Bale injects into the performance.
Mann does his best, cutting around Dillinger in the movie theatre, the bizarrely-apt film he’s watching (this isn’t dramatic licence — Dillinger really saw 
is largely well converted to a dramatic piece, if occasionally a little episodic (as is the way with all biopics) and overlong towards the end.
“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.”
A Good Script rather than A Series Of Scenes, I’m inclined towards the latter here, because of the comparison with Man On Fire.
but after half an hour spent setting things up, it’s like screenwriters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen felt they’d done their dramatic dues and just wanted to watch people get beaten up. Or shot. Or blown up. Or hit by trucks.
Despite all this, Taken’s an entertaining actioner. Unsurprisingly, there’s something satisfying about an apparently calm and controlled father being allowed to explode in precision violence against a bunch of scumbag white slavers. It’s wish fulfilment; proper justice finally being done. And, for extra gratification, he’s got the requisite spy skills — the bit with the radio and walkie-talkie, for example — and, even better, edge — perhaps the film’s most memorable moment (after that speech, anyway), when he shows the lengths he’ll go to when visiting a ‘friend’ for dinner.
Seraphim Falls sees Liam Neeson and a crew of hired hands chase Pierce Brosnan across every Old West landscape imaginable — from snow-topped mountains to bone-dry dustbowl — but why?
once most everyone else has fallen by the wayside. As the only constants, the various situations and their reactions allow the men to be slowly revealed. It’s not really a character piece, but they’re at least more complicated than your usual Good Guy vs Bad Guy setup — the story has you flip back and forth about which you think is which several times.
Whenever a star, director, writer, or other key creative dies during or around the production of a film, it’s apparently tempting to draw some kind of correlation between their death and the themes or content of their work. To force such a link between the murder of writer/director/co-star Adrienne Shelly and Waitress seems inappropriate, however, when the film is so much about life.
I know I 
Waitress is a “woman’s film”, but in a good way: written and directed from a female perspective, with its central roles being female, it doesn’t pander to a perceived female demographic and nor does it bellow “this is what we women think, and it’s so different to you damn men” — it’s more subtle than that.
Before 
The scene the day after Jack saves Rose — where they have a natter on deck and she looks at his art for the first time; aka the primary scene for their falling for each other — is particularly weakly written. “Oh Jack, the plot requires me to look at your drawings now, so please hand them over.” The dialogue’s not actually that bad, but it’s bloody close.
And Leo is pretty-boy Leo. I’m not saying he’s not a talented actor — that was something he’d shown before Titanic and has certainly proven since, though everyone seemed to forget it in the late ’90s — but Jack Dawson is hardly a tricky task for him. Clearly he looks beautiful, has the loveable rogue thing down, and that’s job done.
Indeed, Titanic’s literally phenomenal success, and the subsequent abundance of spoofs and homages across all media in the decade-and-a-bit since, is an obstacle for any new viewer. One can’t watch Jack declare “I’m the king of the world!” without thinking of Cameron’s much-derided Oscar speech; can’t watch Jack and Rose ‘flying’ without thinking of any number of piss-takes; and French and Saunders spring to mind quite all over the place.
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