Matchstick Men (2003)

Posted on August 21, 2010 by badblokebob

2010 #84
Ridley Scott | 111 mins | TV (HD) | 12 / PG-13

Matchstick Men ends with a twist. One of those great big changes-everything-you’ve-just-seen numbers that have a habit of making a film notorious. Yet I’m almost loath to mention it, because I’ve never read a review, preview, summary or what-have-you of the film that mentions there’s a twist. Maybe I’ve just been reading the wrong pieces; maybe no one cares; maybe they’re all just playing along trying to keep it secret. But not me, because I bloody hated it.

The twist, that is. The rest of the film is pretty good, but the twist undermines it — and not just because I knew it was coming. I don’t wish to sound boastful, but I knew it was coming before I even started watching, guessed from the little I did know about the film from one or two reviews and (sort-of-spoiler warning!) that they’d cast a 24-year-old as a 14-year-old. I spent the whole film hoping that my predicted twist wouldn’t come to pass, but, with crushing inevitability, it did. I didn’t guess every element of it before I began, though I picked up most as the film went along, and those that I didn’t get weren’t surprising either.

Is it easily guessable? I don’t know. It was to me. Perhaps I’ve seen too many heist-type movies or TV shows (watching several seasons of Hustle covers that one easily), or perhaps just too many films with twists, or perhaps it’s just my writer’s brain at work — the latter does have a tendency to make many films guessable. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter, because a guessable twist can still work. This one doesn’t.

Twists are fine. Twists can be great. As I said, you can guess a twist is coming and it can still work. A really good twist works even when you know for certain it’s coming; its existence raises what you’ve seen, makes it all work even on repeated viewings when the element of surprise is obviously gone. Matchstick Men doesn’t have that kind of twist. It has the kind of twist that undermines everything you’ve just seen. Not because it’s illogical — it isn’t in the slightest — but because it tramples over the film’s emotional resonance, in my opinion.

I don’t want to give away the twist here because, even if it’s a rubbish one, that’s a bit unfair on the film. I’d encourage you to watch it anyway and see what you think. And there are reasons to watch it anyway, even if some of the best ones are at least partially tossed away at the end.

Good things, then. The performances. Nic Cage can be awfully mannered and OTT quite often, but here it works. His character is inherently implausible — an obsessive-compulsive agoraphobe who’s also a con artist — but he plays it well, replete with tics and habits. It could easily be a caricature or spoof of the afflictions, and at times it threatens to tip the balance — when we see him obsessively cleaning to a jaunty “isn’t this funny” score, for instance — but the line is successfully trod most of the time.

Alison Lohman is also exceptionally good as a 14-year-old girl. It took a scene or two to convince me, but after that I was plenty on board with it. It occasionally takes some effort to remind yourself she was 24. As the third lead, Sam Rockwell plays a typical Sam Rockwell part. He does it very well, naturally, and there’s nothing to fault him on, but he’s been better elsewhere. The rest of the cast are absolutely fine but not exactly called on much — this is Cage’s film, and to a lesser extent Lohman’s. They have the emotional journey, the film’s heart-and-soul around its long(-ish) con ‘plot’ (which could just be lifted from any episode of Hustle… except it’s not even that complex).

It’s also, as you may have noticed, A Ridley Scott Film. It doesn’t feel like one. It has a ’00s-US-indie aesthetic in every regard and consequently feels like the work of a first-or-second-time young-ish director. Perhaps this is to Scott’s credit, but on the downside it lacks any distinctive qualities. I suppose it’s not fully at odds with the rest of his career — even when you try to pick a genre Scott’s known for, you often find only two or three examples of it in his CV; and there are several genres you can do it with — but if you hadn’t told me it was a Ridley Scott film I’d never have guessed, and I’d wager no one else would either.

Matchstick Men was a lot better than I’d expected, because most of the coverage I remember shoved it aside as a middle-of-the-road side project for Scott. It’s definitely better than that, if still not the “sweep the Oscars” success Ebert seems to think. But I wish they’d stuck with the decision to cut out the twist, not because I object to how it leaves our hero (which was the reasoning, apparently), but because it undercuts an awful lot of what’s good in the film and consequently left a bad taste in my mouth, all for the sake of some aren’t-we-clever-ness.

Stop the film about when Roy wakes up in a hospital bed. Imagine they got away with it and he went to live happily with his daughter. It’s not just a nicer ending, it’s a more whole one too. And then imagine that film on my end-of-year Top 10, because this one won’t be.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Posted on August 19, 2010 by badblokebob

2009 #82
Quentin Tarantino | 153 mins | Blu-ray | 18 / R

Watching almost any film a second time can affect your opinion of it. It could reveal deeper levels of character or theme; it could allow you to see how the writer(s) subtly foreshadowed events, or built up to the big twist; it could be you spot jokes you were too busy laughing during last time; it could let you look at the imagery now you don’t have to concentrate so hard on the subtitles. Or it could reveal shallowness, that there’s nothing to be gleaned that you didn’t get the first time; or highlight the holes in a plot that seemed so well constructed before; or jokes that were hilarious fall flat when heard more than once; or the action sequences aren’t exciting when robbed of their freshness. A second viewing can reveal that you were too young to get it the first time, or that you’re now too grown up to enjoy it; it can reveal a bad movie isn’t so bad, or that without the hype it’s actually quite good; it can raise a favourite even higher in your estimations, or it can tear it down. And even if a second viewing just reaffirms exactly what you felt the first time, well, when there’s such a chance for change and it doesn’t occur, that’s an effect in itself.

This is why I try to post all my reviews after only seeing a film once. There’s nothing wrong with appraising a film after many viewings — far from it — but that’s not the point of this particular blog, focusing as it does on films I’ve never previously seen. (Whether a newcomer’s perspective is still worth anything once a film is months, years, or decades old is another matter, perhaps for another time.) Unfortunately, though rarely, a film slips through the cracks. As you’ve likely guessed, Inglourious Basterds is such a film: though I named it my favourite film I saw in 2009, I didn’t make any notes or write a review promptly. And so here I find myself, over eight months since I first watched it — and, today, a year since its UK release —, having watched it a second time to refresh my memory. But has it changed my opinion?

Inglourious Basterds is, in some respects, a law unto itself. That’s probably why it received such a mixed reaction at Cannes; one that, notably, settled down to generally praiseful by the time it was officially released a few months later. It wasn’t, as had been expected, the story of a group of American Jews dropped behind enemy lines to murder Nazis, thereby spreading terror through the enemy ranks. That’s part of the tale Tarantino eventually brought to the screen, but what you’d expect to make up the bulk of the movie — as Aldo Raine himself puts it, “killin’ Natzis” — is skipped over with a single cut. The film is divided up into five chapters; the second is the one most directly concerned with the Basterds, and it’s also the shortest.

And that’s not the only thing Tarantino does differently. The whole film is a grab-bag of filmmaking styles, techniques and modes, thrown together with a gleeful abandon. Tarantino uses what he wants when he wants it, sometimes for no reason at all, and with no eye to creating a stylistic whole. If he wants a character’s name to appear in huge letters over a freeze-frame of them, he will; that doesn’t mean he’ll use it for every character, or every major character, or for every other character on that one’s side — if he wants it just once, he’ll throw it in just once. It’s like that square Uma Thurman drew in Pulp Fiction, only instead of being one thing once he does it again and again, with any trick he fancies, throughout the film.

I’m tempted to list them, but that would remove some of the fun if you’re yet to see the film. My favourites, however, are the subtitles that don’t always translate things — e.g. when a French character says “oui”, so do the subtitles. It’s pointless really, but also kind of thought provoking too: if, as a non-French-speaker, we say “oui”, knowing what it means, then are we actually saying “yes” or are we saying “oui”? I’m certain, however, that Tarantino’s subtitling choices weren’t designed to elicit such thoughts and probably don’t stand up to the scrutiny they’d require (such as: if the rest of a Frenchman’s French is translated to English, why aren’t his “oui”s? (As it were.))

This is just one of the things that signals the truth of Inglourious Basterds: it’s not really about World War 2 — though you’d be forgiven for thinking it was, considering it’s all set during World War 2 and all the characters are soldiers, resistance fighters or politicians — but is in fact about film, or cinema, or the movies, or whichever name you want to use. It’s not just his mix and match of cinematic techniques that suggests this — though the much-heralded use of Spaghetti Western style on a World War 2 setting works as fabulously as you could hope — but it’s overt in the text too.

The ending (and skip this paragraph if you haven’t seen the film) is the key to that, as I’m sure you either noticed or have read in other coverage. The power of cinema literally destroys the Nazis, changing the course of the war. Killing Hitler — and the rest — is one of those barmy notions that at first seems wrong, and then seems completely right. “If my characters had existed, this is what would have happened” is one of those genius notions that seems so inescapably obvious you wonder why no one’s done it sooner. Why do you necessarily need to obey history if the rest of your story is fiction anyway?

Back to other matters. It’s interesting just how long the scenes are, and in so few locations. Chapter One takes place solely in a small farmhouse (except for a few minutes outside it); Chapter Four is almost entirely in the La Louisiane bar; Chapter Five almost entirely in Shosanna’s cinema. And while the other two use more locations, their number isn’t great: Chapter Three features the aforementioned cinema, a cafe and a restaurant; Chapter Two a briefing ground, Hitler’s war room, some derelict location, and a prison. This isn’t a full list of locations and scenes, but it’s most of them. Tarantino hasn’t created some writerly exercise — “you are only allowed five locations, one long scene in each” — but he has nonetheless crafted most of his films in long scenes in few locations. I imagine this, along with “all that reading” (I believe more of the film is subtitled than in English), did little to endear it to the complaining masses who thought they were getting “Kill Bill in WW2”.

The chapter-ified structure and constant introduction of new characters suggests a Pulp Fiction-ish ‘short story collection’ at first, but it becomes clear as the film moves on into its fourth and, certainly, fifth chapters that it actually all builds together as one whole story. The chapter headings serve their purpose, denoting the various stages of the tale and allowing Tarantino to jump around, rather than having to find a way to move more seamlessly from segment to segment or somehow intercut them all. Indeed, unlike the other Tarantino films the use of chapters evokes — i.e. Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill — Inglourious Basterds is quite solidly linear, at least as far as the progression through each chapter is concerned. (Chapter Two jumps about in time a bit, with a Nolan-esque stories-within-stories-within-stories structure, but even then does little to upset the linearity.)

And for all those constantly-introduced characters, the acting is top notch. Christoph Waltz easily deserved the huge pile of awards he garnered, his quirky persona following in a long tradition of calm psychopaths in movies. You always know his pleasantries hide something far nastier; every scene he appears in is instantly tense. Mélanie Laurent is an instant one-to-watch as the film’s real central character, Shosanna, though she seems to have been sadly sidelined by all the praise heaped on Waltz. It doesn’t hurt that she’s the kind of woman you’d happily decorate a whole review with pictures of (though you’ll note I resisted). Michael Fassbender is the very definition of Englishness, without quite slipping into an irritating stereotype. It’s difficult to imagine the originally-cast Simon Pegg in the role, though I’m sure he would’ve brought something… shall we say, different… to it. Brad Pitt’s much-criticised heavily-accented performance is fine. While not as memorable as the others mentioned, I don’t see why some have had such a problem with it.

Between Tarantino’s writing and more excellent performances, we’re also treated to a host of minor but memorable characters: Denis Menochet’s farmer, managing to equal Waltz in the long opening scene; Til Schweiger’s vicious German basterd; Diane Kruger’s glamorous, calm actress-spy; Daniel Brühl’s apparently sweet accidental hero and movie star-to-be; Martin Wuttke’s raving loony Hitler; and others too. Perhaps the only duff note for me was Mike Myers as an English General. I liked the Wayne’s Worlds and Austin Powerses (and haven’t subjected myself to The Love Guru for this reason), and he’s not exactly bad here, but there’s a part of me that couldn’t escape wondering exactly why he was cast in such a small and uncomedic role. A real Brit would’ve been more appropriate, I feel. Perhaps Simon Pegg.

Myers was one of the things I noticed more on my second viewing. So was that “care-free deployment of an abundance of film-specific techniques” — while they’re undoubtedly there, when one expects them they don’t seem nearly so surprising or all-pervading as they did at first. Clearly it’s the shock value: in the same way a jump scare or joke dependent on a surprise twist might only work once, so Tarantino’s occasional and somewhat incongruous flourishes don’t stick out as firmly when you know they’re coming. But that’s not a bad thing. There’s no joyous discovery of something new and slightly different exploding across the screen every once in a while, but it also proves they work, that he was right to employ them.

Some people hated Inglourious Basterds (though not enough to keep it out of the IMDb Top 100), be it for the unexpected nature of its story or for the long talky scenes with lots of reading. But that’s just another reason I love it — not to be awkward or Different, but because by being so much its Own Thing it can provoke such strong feelings, in either direction. It’s common for Hollywood to produce films so bland they evoke bags of apathy from those with enough brainpower to realise the film doesn’t have any, so it’s quite nice to have a film that has a brain — and, more importantly, a personality (several, even) — that it isn’t afraid to show off, and isn’t afraid for you to dislike if you want. Love it or hate it, it demands to be seen and judged on its own merits.

To be frank, I’m not sure I liked Inglourious Basterds as much my second time. I may well like it more again on my third, when there’s less personal hype involved. I’d still give it the same star rating though, so at least there’s no conflict there.

You might argue that Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs are better films, but — with its long idiosyncratic speeches and scenes, relatively extreme violence, use and re-appropriation of generic convention, care-free deployment of an abundance of film-specific techniques, and, both through this and also directly in its narrative, its love of film as a medium — Inglourious Basterds isn’t just “a Quentin Tarantino film”, it is Quentin Tarantino. His choice of final line — “You know something, Ultivich? I think this just might be my masterpiece” — is clearly about more than Aldo Raine’s swastika-carving abilities.

Inglourious Basterds is on Film4 tonight, Friday 24th October 2014, at 9pm.

It placed 1st on my list of The Ten Best Films I Saw For the First Time in 2009, which can be read in full here.

Kick-Ass (2010)

Posted on August 3, 2010 by badblokebob

2010 #39
Matthew Vaughn | 117 mins | cinema | 15 / R

This review contains spoilers.

If you happen to remember my (first) Watchmen review, you may recall that I asserted the following:

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen Film is not “the big screen equivalent of Alan Moore’s Watchmen” — that would be a movie, likely very different to the graphic novel, that examined and deconstructed representations of superheroes in cinema and television.

To cut to the chase, Kick-Ass is that film. Yes, it’s still adapted from a pre-existing comic book text, and it doesn’t “examine and deconstruct” quite as methodically — or, if you prefer, “as coldy” — as both Moore and Snyder did; but it still takes its cues as much, if not more, from fellow superhero films and TV series than directly from comics. Much as Watchmen offered variations of specific characters and situations in comics, so too does Kick-Ass from their film counterparts: Kick-Ass himself has the whole “awkward teenage experience” thing of Spider-Man, but fully updated to the era of internet social networking (even if it’s a behind-the-times use of MySpace over Facebook or Twitter); while Big Daddy is a clear Batman analogy, with elements of The Punisher thrown in for good measure.

Elements and moments in this vein permeate the film: Nic Cage employing an Adam West Batman voice for Big Daddy; the black eyeliner required to complete his mask; the Spider-Man plot structure (particularly early on) and numerous references (the opening voiceover, or when Kick-Ass considers jumping rooftops); the “chicks dig the car”-esque scenes with Red Mist — the list goes on, other sequences spoofing whole genre clichés (the “first night on the job”, for example) as well as such specific films.

The score is similarly perfect, mixing serious action queues with appropriately-placed fun songs (mainly during Hit Girl’s action sprees) and more knowing nods to other films — listen out for almost-note-perfect riffs on the famous Superman theme and Danny Elfman’s Batman work.

And, again like Watchmen, Kick-Ass takes all these familiar elements and clichés and attempts to place them in ‘the real world’ (though its real world is far closer to, um, the real real world than Watchmen’s alternate history). What this means, practically, is that Kick-Ass gets his ass kicked. Badly. And that his enemies aren’t cackling megalomaniacs who leave handy riddles around or plot to pollute the water supply, but everyday muggers and, at worst, crime kingpins. This, I suppose, could be seen as where it takes on Batman Begins; signs seem to suggest Kick-Ass 2 may follow The Dark Knight’s theory of supervillains following the superhero into existence.

But, to go back on myself, the most striking point here is the ass-kicking. Violence is bloody, brutal and realistic. Well, the actions themselves are all action movie choreography, but the results are realistic — bloody and brutally so. Kick-Ass gets broken his first time out… which, fortunately, and fully in-keeping with the superhero-origins story, leaves him with a half-metal skeleton and the ability to feel no pain. “Cool,” as he probably says.

This example characterises the film’s attempts to have its cake and eat it. While it does the whole “being a superhero would be a nightmare” thing early on, we then meet Big Daddy and Hit-Girl, who are unfeasible pros, and Kick-Ass himself improves too. It gets to criticise the unlikelihood of the premise and the extremity of the violence, before later revelling in it itself. On the other hand, it’s so much fun that maybe this doesn’t matter — director Matthew Vaughn certainly knows his way round an action sequence, and the humour keeps rolling too — so the (arguably) topsy-turvy themes of the tale ultimately serve as a “downbeat good-for-nothing makes good” story arc.

Not that the mass of negative reviews seem to notice this anyway — they’re too busy being outraged at the swearing uttered by and violence enacted on a young girl. I speak, of course, of the likes of Christopher Tookey (don’t worry if you haven’t heard of him — he writes in the Daily Mail) and Roger Ebert, both of whom lambasted the film for its moral vacuity. They’re not the only ones, just some of the most high-profile (on the other side of the fence, plenty of reviews didn’t miss the point, but they’re less interesting at the moment). Is it low to suggest Ebert & co are too old to ‘get’ Kick-Ass? Probably; especially as some of the other critics who hated it are suitably young. But I don’t think it’s wrong to suggest that not all their arguments hold weight; that some of their reactions were too simplistic.

Reviews like the Daily Mail’s would have us believe the film is all about the glorification of extreme violence and sexualisation of 11-year-old girls. Some have read this as Tookey being a paedophile — how else would he spot something others didn’t, unless he were aroused by it himself? Tookey, naturally, denies such things (he’s posted a long whiney “I’m being internet bullied!” article online, trying to lump himself in with those unfortunate souls who’ve suffered the emotional consequences of genuine internet bullying). I fall between the two camps on this one — that is to say, Tookey’s probably not a paedophile, but nor does the film set out to entice them. Vaughn said he cast Hit-Girl young to avoid sexualising her; if he’d cast a more physically developed 15-year-old, she would’ve been more suspect.

If anything, the film works to confront its audience with notions like this. Is Hit-Girl sexy? She’s 11, you perv! Is getting into fights fun? Not when you get the crap kicked out of you! Is being captured by the enemy, ready to be unmasked on the internet, just a chance for a cool escape? Not when you get burnt alive. Slowly. Is this highly-trained uber-assassin the Coolest Killer Ever? Not when a grown man is beating up a little girl. Vaughn & co (by which I mean original author Mark Miller and co-screenwriter Jane Goldman) start from a place of “this doesn’t work” (having their cake), then they do make it cool (eating it), but then they tear it back down again (I can’t think of a pleasant analogy now).

But, unlike their characters, they don’t tear it down with a baseball bat around the audiences’ head; by which I mean, they don’t spell it out in big idiot-friendly letters — “do you see why this is wrong? Do you see? Let me tell you again…” Instead, they let what occurs speak for itself. OK, the good guys do win in the end, and in a rather cool way — but would it be a more complete moral message if the grown man killed the little girl; if the hero got blown up by the bazooka? Perhaps it would; I don’t know; personally, I like it the way it is.

Am I saying experienced, respected critics like Ebert and Tookey (well, he’s experienced) are too thick to see subtext that I’ve noticed? For once, I suppose I am (though I certainly don’t claim to be alone in noticing it). Am I treating the filmmakers with more intelligence than they deserve? I don’t think so; I think Ebert, Tookey & co have assumed they’re dumber than they are, and in the process made themselves look a bit dimmer. I think they’ve been blinded by the comic-booky roots (their defence, “but I’ve liked some comic book films!”, is beside the point), the extreme situations the film presents — and there’s no doubt that the violence and swearing from such young characters are deliberately extreme and provocative (but for a reason) — and the potential for audiences to misread the whole thing as “just cool”, and so have misread it themselves, as “just perverse”. I think that does the film a disservice.

My initial reaction — besides “wow this is a fun watch!” — was that Kick-Ass walks a tightrope between its initial “what if someone really tried to be a superhero?” premise and the visceral pleasures of taking it to the level of “what if someone succeeded at being a superhero?” But the more I consider it, the more I think this is part of the point — it never, really, goes fully ‘right’. As I’ve said, the good guys win and the bad guys lose, but there are casualties and hard-fought battles along the way. Yes, it thoroughly abandons its “this is the real world” premise by the final act, but the film as a whole leads you there step by step. Is this a flaw, or sneaky filmmaking pulling (or attempting to pull) the wool over our eyes? Does it matter?

It’s an ideological minefield, that’s for sure, and perhaps some would rather it more blatantly faced up to this than it does. Others would clearly rather it didn’t ever raise such issues. Has it dodged them, or has it left them for the audience to consider? I think it’s clear I believe the latter; that most of the negative reviews are too busy being angry to notice they were made to think (or were meant to); sadly, some viewers will be too busy thinking “woah, cool” to have thought at all, which just vindicates those naysayers in their own mind. This latter group are clearly the ones the critics are worried about, but why should every film cater to the lowest common denominator of intellectual ability, or be wary that every viewer might be a paedophile or violent psycho?

And even leaving all that aside, even treating it as “just a comic book movie”, Kick-Ass has something significant to offer. By using various other superhero movies and TV series as its starting point, but grounding them in (a version of) the real world — with attendant debates about violence etc — Kick-Ass fills a void in need of filling. By which I mean: as Watchmen was to superhero comics, so Kick-Ass is to superhero films.

Kick-Ass is released on DVD & Blu-ray in the US today, and in the UK on 6th September.

It came 1st on my list of The Ten Best Films I Saw For the First Time in 2010, which can be read in full here.

Get Smart (2008)

Posted on July 30, 2010 by badblokebob

2010 #65
Peter Segal | 110 mins | Blu-ray | PG-13 / 12

Get Smart, as you likely know, was a TV series in the ’60s, which makes one wonder how it’s taken so long to get to the big screen. I guess it didn’t have the same fanbase or perceived relaunchability that led to an endless array of big-screen versions of ’60s/’70s series in the last decade or two — Mission: Impossible, Starsky & Hutch, Dukes of Hazzard — indeed, with the likes of Miami Vice and The A-Team, these big-screen-remakes are now moving on into the ’80s. Is Get Smart too late for the party?

Well, not really, because what does it matter which decade it came from — this isn’t a continuation, it’s a modern-day relaunch with current stars (or ‘stars’, if you prefer) and a modern sensibility. Though, in fact, Get Smart acknowledges its roots with a series of relatively low-key references that won’t bother anyone who’s never seen the series (like me) but I’m sure are pleasing for those who have. It also suggests it is a continuation of the series in some ways, despite the main character sharing a name with the series’ lead… but look, it’s just a comedy, let’s not think about that too much.

Get Smart, ’00s-style, is mostly quite good fun. Not all the jokes hit home, but enough do to keep it amusing — which is better than some comedies manage. Even after three Austin Powers films it seems there’s enough left to do with the spy genre to keep a comedy rolling along, even if Mike Myers’ once-popular efforts occasionally pop to mind while watching. And to make sure things don’t get dull, there’s a few action sequences that are surprisingly decent too, considering this is still primarily a comedy.

Some of this is powered by a talented cast: Carrell is Carrell, which is great if you like him, fine if you don’t mind him, and probably a problem if you dislike him; but Anne Hathaway and Alan Arkin manage to lift the material more than is necessarily necessary. Dwayne Johnson also shows he’s remarkably good at a humorous role, which is a little unexpected. How has a former WWE wrestler, whose first acting role had more screen time for his piss-poor CGI double than himself, turned out a half-decent career? The world is indeed full of wonders. As the villain, however, Terence Stamp is ineffectually wooden at every turn. Oh well.

What really makes the film inherently likeable, however, is how nice it is. You’d expect Carrell to be the looked-down-upon wannabe-agent bumbling loser, promoted when there’s literally no one else and still a constant failure, only succeeding (if he does) through fluke. But no — he passes the necessary tests, but isn’t promoted because he’s too good at his current job; when he does get the promotion, he shows an aptitude for spying, fighting, and all other skills, and the other characters acknowledge this. They respect him, in fact, both at the beginning and later as an agent — again, you’d expect Johnson’s character to be the smarmy big shot who either ignores or specifically brings down a character like Carrell’s, but instead he’s one of his biggest supporters. (That he turns out to have been A Bad Guy All Along, Gasp! is beside the point.) The office bullies don’t actually have any power at all and are frequently brought down to size. It makes a nice change from the stock sitcom clumsy-hero-who-eventually-comes-good with irritating-and-condescending-higher-ups on the side, the pedestrian and unenjoyable fallback of too many comedy writers.

Still, Get Smart isn’t without striking flaws. The subplot about a mole in CONTROL (alluded to above) is atrociously handled, not least the ultimate reveal. Perhaps director Peter Segal realised it was pretty easy to guess who it would be and just assumed the audience would be ahead of the story, but that ignores the fact that the other characters barely react to one of their best friends being unmasked as a traitor. It’s all a bit “curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal”, only without a smidgen of the humour that one-liner provided.

But the opening half-hour or so is the film’s biggest flaw. By the time the mole plot is resolved you can almost let it slide, but being faced with a weak opening is more of a problem. Some moments in it work, but there’s the odd jump in storytelling (Max comes across the destroyed CONTROL so suddenly I assumed we were about to discover it was a dream or simulation), or an extended period with either no or too-familiar gags. Once it gets properly underway things continually pick up, but it’s asking a little too much from not necessarily sympathetic viewers.

Still, despite early flaws and the occasional shortage of genuine laughs, Get Smart is redeemed by a proficient cast and generally likeable screenplay. It’s not exactly a great comedy, but it is a pretty good one. Comparing it to the scores I’ve given other comedies recently, that bumps it up to:

Mulan (1998)

Posted on July 28, 2010 by badblokebob

2010 #64
Tony Bancroft & Barry Cook | 84 mins | TV | U / G

I realised recently that I haven’t seen an animated Disney film produced after The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which I saw on rented video thinking I was probably getting too old for the Mouse House’s output. Now I’ve grown up, of course, I know you’re never too old for a good Disney. As Mulan seems to be one of their last to gather significant praise before they slipped into their ’00s rut, it seemed a good place to begin catching up on what I’d missed.

It’s easy to see what critics and/or audiences liked about Mulan. There’s a few good, catchy songs — though sadly no villain’s song, which is usually one of the highlights — and some lovely animation — though I feel it’s been rather outshone by the similarly-styled Kung Fu Panda in this regard. There are decent action sequences too, fast-paced and fluidly animated, which helps make what could’ve been a Girly Film into something palatable to both genders (I remember being distinctly unimpressed with Pocahontas when forced to see it in the cinema).

The other thing that stands out about Mulan, particularly now, is how very Americanised it is. That’s nothing new for Disney, of course, but it feels a little odd these days. When we’re so used to increased attempts at appropriate cultural reverence from Hollywood movies, it’s almost uncomfortable to hear such American accents from clearly Chinese characters. (It’s this kind of thing that has caused uproar for The Last Airbender in the US (quite aside from it supposedly being a load of cobblers). How times change.) Eddie Murphy’s Mushu (who now comes across a little like a proto-Donkey) is particularly incongruous in this regard. I suppose it’s no worse than, say, Aladdin, or The Jungle Book, or all the Euro-set films.

With a ‘princess’ overcoming her assigned place, a pair of cute/humorous animal sidekicks, a princely husband-to-be, and a vicious villain in need of defeating, the tale of Mulan has certainly been adapted into the Disney mould. It may not be their best effort, but it’s still a strong one.

Mulan is on Channel 5 today, Sunday 4th May 2014, at 5pm.

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Posted on July 25, 2010 by badblokebob

2010 #49
Guy Ritchie | 128 mins | Blu-ray | 12 / PG-13

“Oh my God, what have they done to Sherlock Holmes?!” Etc etc. By this point you’re likely to have heard the arguments that Guy Ritchie’s blockbuster re-imagining of the Great Detective is actually based on all sorts of references and allusions in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original works, so I won’t go over them again here. Indeed, I’m not even convinced they’re relevant in the first place.

You see, it’s true — Ritchie and co have turned grumpy old romance-free Holmes into a comedic action hero with a love interest. But he still has the brilliant mind, he still has a mystery to solve, and that love interest is Irene Adler, “the one that got away” from one of Conan Doyle’s earliest Holmes tales. Perhaps this isn’t such an unfaithful Holmes after all.

And actually, the mysteries Holmes solves make some of the film’s most interesting bits. Numerous murders and impossible escapes make up the narrative, slipping by almost unnoticed in the main plot; but, come the climax, in true detective story fashion Holmes has an explanation for how every one was done. There’s the equivalent of Poirot gathering all the suspects together to explain it to them, only in Ritchie’s blockbusterised version of a classic detective story this takes place atop a half-built Tower Bridge with the villain dangling precariously over his doom.

The way to this climax offers a good mix of detecting, action and humour. It’s not pure Holmes then, but it’s not pure blockbuster either. Downey Jr brings some of his Tony Stark magic, but his take on Holmes is still distinct, not just because of his faultless English accent. His madness, obsession and genius are all well portrayed, and Ritchie’s direction matches it beautifully.

Some of the early scenes make for the most perfect evocation of Holmes I’ve seen on screen, such as when he’s in a restaurant and the sheer volume of noise becomes too much, thankfully broken when his guests arrive; or the fight sequences, where we listen as he meticulously plans every last move in super-slow-mo — all shot for real in-camera, incidentally — before executing them in a matter of seconds. The Matrix-esque slow-mo punches and what have you may have looked derivative in the trailer, but in context they’re bang on.

Though this is Downey Jr’s film, most of the cast are up to the task. Even Jude Law, who I’m no fan of, makes for a decent sidekick of a Watson, his shoot-first characterisation contrasting with Holmes’ thoughtful care better than the regular question-asking audience-cypher. Mark Strong’s villain is suitably chilling, aided by the film’s irreverence: if they can make Holmes into a quip-dealing action man, maybe there really is something supernatural at work? To reveal the truth would spoil that proper climax. The closest to a weak link is Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler. I like McAdams well enough generally, and here too, but she may still be a little out of her depth — they’ve gone for a Pretty Young Thing when someone a little older may’ve suited better.

The closing moments set up a sequel in the most blatant way possible — if Batman Begins‘s Joker card is a brief, subtle indication, Sherlock Holmes‘s equivalent would be to have Batman and Gordon debating who this Joker feller might be and what he might want for a couple of minutes. It’s a bit too much, if you ask me, particularly as the Joker in question (oh, you all know who it is) isn’t actually seen — rumours of a famous cameo prove to be false.

And so what we find with this new Sherlock Holmes is an entertaining blockbuster, but with enough ‘proper Holmes’ laced underneath to make it feel different, unique even. Ritchie brings something special to the director’s chair too, believe it or not — you may think he’s sold out into blockbusterdom to revive his flagging and repetitive career, but the touches he brings suggest the mind of someone who has control of his material, his camera and his edit, and wants to use them all to try something a bit different, not just another hack-for-hire who could churn out any old template-hewn action/adventure flick.

Perhaps it’s a little long in places. That might be my only complaint. And yet, for that, I’m certainly looking forward to Sherlock Holmes 2.

Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ modern-day re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock, starts at 9pm tonight on BBC One.

Sherlock Holmes placed 8th on my list of The Ten Best Films I Saw For the First Time in 2010, which can be read in full here.

Sherlock Holmes (2010)

Posted on July 24, 2010 by badblokebob

2010 #45
Rachel Lee Goldenberg | 89 mins | DVD | 12 / PG-13

From the company that brought you such pinnacles of cinematic excellence as AVH: Alien vs. Hunter, Snakes on a Train and Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus comes the latest in a long line of cheaply-produced blockbuster cash-ins, this time tied to… well, I think you know. (While I’m at it, I encourage you to look at their website — the sheer volume of these ‘mockbusters’ they’ve produced now is almost impressive.)

You wait decades for a new Sherlock Holmes film and then two come along at once. One is the Guy Ritchie-directed Robert Downey Jr-starring genuine blockbuster moneymaker. The other is thankfully not the rumoured Sacha Baron Cohen/Seth Rogen/Judd Apatow/other faintly irritating people (I forget who was involved) comedy vehicle, but instead a direct-to-DVD cash-in from mockbuster kings The Asylum. Yes, I’d rather this version, thanks.

I’ve not seen an Asylum film before, but I hear this is one of their best. It’s not exactly “good” by any reasonable definition, but as “cable TV movie” quality goes I’d say it trumps the dull Case of Evil. And dull this certainly isn’t — sea monsters! dinosaurs! dragons! air battles! If you thought Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes looked disrespectfully blockbusterised, it seems positively Brettian by comparison.

But, in The Asylum’s favour, their Sherlock Holmes doesn’t hide what it is. Yes, it’s called simply Sherlock Holmes rather than Sherlock Holmes and the Implausible CGI Monsters, but at least said monsters are plastered all over the DVD cover (both US and UK). If you see that and still expect something faithful to Conan Doyle, more fool you. That said, at times it’s surprisingly faithful to Doyle’s spirit. There’s some decent-ish investigation and deduction, the story structured like a mystery rather than an action-adventure.

But you can’t escape the dinosaurs, sea monsters and dragons, or the various steampunk elements introduced towards the climax. And so your enjoyment probably depends on your expectations. Some of the acting’s poor — not least Ben Syder’s camp short-arse Holmes, sadly — and the CGI’s weak, looking like a ’90s syndicated TV series. The direction occasionally lacks competence and a couple of action sequences are pointlessly repetitive.

Anachronisms abound, the best being the first: the film opens in London, 1940, the middle of the Blitz, and the opening shot foregrounds the Millennium Bridge. I don’t think you have to be too familiar with London to know when that was built. Elsewhere we get intercoms on houses, incongruous light switches and period inaccurate telephones, just to mention a couple. It’s shoddy, yes, but almost part of the fun.

But, for all the faults, there are positives. It’s still not “good”, but it is often “quite fun”. Thoroughly daft, certainly, but — provided you don’t demand too much — quite entertaining because of it.

Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ modern-day re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock, starts at 9pm tomorrow on BBC One.

Tomorrow night, my review of the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes.

1945-1998 (2003)

Posted on July 20, 2010 by badblokebob

2010 #66a
Isao Hashimoto | 14 mins | streaming

Is 1945-1998 actually a film? Or is it a piece of video Art? Or just another online video?

Its setup is quite simple: it charts every nuclear explosion between the titular years; the total, by-the-way, is 2,053. These explosions play out as flashing dots on a world map; different colours indicate which country was responsible for the explosion, accompanied by running totals. You might note at the end that the US are solely responsible for over half.

The film begins with close-ups: the first test by the US; then the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II. Then it zooms out, to a map of the whole world (arranged differently to how we’re used to seeing it here, with the UK and Europe off to the far left and America on the right. I suppose this is neither here nor there, but it took me a bit to get my bearings on where the explosions were happening). From then it progresses through time at a precise rate of one month equalling one second. If that sounds quite reasonable, the maths holds that it’s 636 seconds, aka ten-and-a-half minutes; or, quite a long time to look at a static map with flashing lights.

There are long gaps between explosions to begin with, but as it heads into the ’60s things pick up (so to speak). As time wears on further, the initially lifeless map transforms into an almost hypnotic array of multi-coloured flashes and variously toned bleeps (provided your attention didn’t already wander, that is). There are ultimately so many flashes and bleeps, and the effect is so lulling, that I had to force myself to remember these represented Big Nasty Bombs that were Not A Good Thing. Perhaps something more aurally grating would’ve been appropriate; the counter argument going that this would cause even more viewers to abandon the work.

Sadly, it’s become outdated: the bleeps all but stop after 1993 but, as the webpage you can view it on notes, North Korea have since tested nuclear weapons several times. Perhaps Hashimoto needs to add another 2 minutes and 24 seconds, just to ram home that the issue of nuclear weapons is still depressingly relevant.

So is it a film, or video Art, or just another online video? It’s all of the above (of course). 1945-1998 isn’t exactly fun viewing — really speaking, it’s a kind of moving graph — but, if one sticks with it, and despite its outdatedness, Hashimoto makes his point reasonably well.

1945-1998 can be seen at CTBTO.org.

Is Anybody There? (2008)

Posted on July 18, 2010 by badblokebob

2010 #68
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.

Max Payne: Harder Cut (2008)

Posted on July 17, 2010 by badblokebob

2010 #57
John Moore | 103 mins | Blu-ray | 15

I was a bit of a gamer once. Not an especially hardcore one, but certainly a gamer. And I remember Max Payne, and I remember enjoying it, and I remember thinking it would make quite a good film, and I remember one of the biggest problems being that what made it so unique as a game was the bullet-time feature and what would make it so derivative as a film would be to use bullet-time. But it also had lots of other things going for it: the snow-bound nighttime New York setting, the dark revenge plot, the hard-boiled gravel-toned voiceover.

Luckily, director John Moore doesn’t use Matrix-derived bullet-time visuals, but, despite keeping a snow-bound New York and a revenge plot, he’s somehow managed to also throw out everything that made Max Payne: The Game good. Despite the similarities in plot and setting, this doesn’t feel at all like the game.

Max Payne: The Film, to put it simply, is a load of crap.

I’ll just reel off the bad points:

For something advertised as an action movie — at best, an action-thriller — there’s barely any action. Even the climax, where you might expect a fair bit, is virtually devoid of it. Moore exploits extreme slow motion to stand in for the game’s Matrix-esque combat. Unfortunately, he seems to be under the illusion that a couple of barely-moving slow-mo moments also stand in for a full action sequence. When an action movie can’t deliver any action, there’s a problem.

Instead, the budget seems to have been spent on some angel/demon CGI rubbish. Early on, one begins to wonder if the film’s headed toward Constantine-esque fantasy territory — it’s not in the game, but hey, that’s never bothered Uwe Boll. Eventually it becomes clear it isn’t, these are just some kind of junkie visions. At least, I’m sure they’re meant to be, but I’m not sure the film ever makes that explicit — I wouldn’t blame a casual viewer going away with the sense that these angel/demon/things are actually meant to be there and only the junkies can see them. Which would be just as irrelevant.

Despite this being the “Harder Cut”, it comes across as a PG-13 film playing at being an R. (Though the extended cut was released as ‘unrated’ in the US, the original MPAA rating was an R before a handful of changes needed to get it down to the more bankable PG-13.) It’s now around three minutes longer than the theatrical cut, but from what I can gather a significant chunk of that seems to be made up of people walking around longer. The ‘harder’ bit merely comes from a couple of frames (literally) of violence and the odd bit of CG blood. Presumably the extra walking around is to artificially lengthen the running time and persuade the more gullible that they’re getting a tougher experience.

Mark Wahlberg has all the charisma and emotion of a wooden plank. No one else in the cast can offer anything better, least of all a miscast Mila Kunis. In fairness, it’s not like any of them are given proper characters to work with: most display no kind of arc, and even those that have one — Kunis, for example — are ultimately ignored, the events that might affect them on an emotional level serving only to further what stands in for a plot. Only Max himself is allowed any genuine emotional connection. And by “genuine” I mean some supporting characters we never see again tell us it’s had a real impact on him. Wahlberg certainly doesn’t convey it.

Olga Kurylenko is also in this film. She tries to sleep with the hero and fails, as per usual.

At least some of it looks quite nice. The drifting snow-laden exterior shots are among the few bits of the film that might genuinely be considered good. But when you can get pretty images elsewhere, why suffer through this?

A short post-credits scene suggests a sequel. Why is this buried after the credits? Presumably so as the filmmakers didn’t embarrass themselves more widely by implying they thought this pathetic effort might earn itself a follow-up.

Uwe Boll wanted to get his hands on Max Payne. At times while watching this, I wished he had. You can’t get much more damning than that. Other than, maybe, something witty, like — “maximum pain is certainly what this film will cause you”.

Max Payne featured on my list of The Five Worst Films I Saw in 2010, which can be read in full here.

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