milofromtheblock Reviews

Moon (2009)

Moon

[8/10 · 27 July 2009]

It is a true marvel that Moon got made at all when it is so out of step with current film making trends and its all the more remarkable that it turned out to be an excellent film showcasing everything that can be good about low budget independent cinema and announces débutant director Duncan Jones as a real talent to watch in the future. The film stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, the one man crew of a mining station on the dark side of the moon on a three year contract with only an endlessly cheery computer GERTY, voiced with brilliantly creepy calm by Kevin Spacey, for company. While the base is mainly automated Sam is required for maintenance and monitoring. His live communication link to Earth is down and he relies on video messages from his wife and child for comfort as he comes up to the end of the contract and the limits of his sanity. Whilst on a routine repair mission to one of the base's remote harvesters he suffers a bad accident and well, to reveal further would ruin the movie.

Sam is one of Rockwell's best performances in a roller-coaster career, here he is able to constrain the 'zanier' aspects of his performances whilst still portraying someone on the ragged edge of their soul. His character wears the psychological scars of such extreme loneliness with such pitiable sadness that within minutes of the film's opening the audience has to question what kind of man would submit to these conditions, that reveal, when it comes, is a quite brilliant turn. Whilst praising Rockwell's performance I have to mention Spacey's voice acting that uses age old sci fi conventions about thinking computers to twist our expectations and encourages the audience to speculate ad constantly re-evaluate GERTY's motivations. GERTY'S design also evokes sci fi of old with his clunky panels and simple smiley face screen, a facet reflected in the base itself. A sparse and dirty environment, giving the impression of industrial space exploration, not the sleek lines and lens flares of the modern Star Trek but a vision of corporate exploitation. Everything about the base, from its single person crew to its basic food and living quarters and its clunky moon buggies reeks of a company spending as little money as possible for the biggest profit. The whole piece represents a throwback to the paranoia of the 1970's, sci fi's boom years, when space was seen as just another place ripe for exploitation by greedy corporations and authoritarian governments.

When sci fi was created it was typically used as a means with which to examine humanity in extreme circumstances and the universality of the human experience. That has become lost lately, and notably this summer, as it becomes a tool for Hollywood to create ever larger explosions and ever shallower characters. This summer has already seen Wolverine, Star Trek, Terminator: Salvation and Transformers 2 assault the senses to varying degrees of success but with hardly a moment for the audience to catch their breath between them they epitomise the ultra high tempo of modern sci fi film-making. In that context Moon slow, thoughtful approach comes as a real shock to the system, here characters engage and discuss, they contemplate in silence as they try to comprehend the enormity of their discoveries and when the twists come they are slow reveals that the audience are trusted to understand without a flip chart and diagrams. Moon is one of those interesting, neat films that come along every so often to show what sci fi can still achieve and is destined for a long life on DVD. A thoroughly recommend sci fi slow burner on the nature of identity, find it, watch it, discuss it.

Frost/Nixon (2008)

Oversimplified Retelling of a Defining Moment of Television

[6/10 · 21 July 2009]

The story of the Frost interviews of Richard Nixon has the raw materials to build a fascinating film but it's a fundamentally disappointing effort that fails to make best use of one of television's greatest moments. The script turns the interviews into a boxing contest, a comparison highlighted by various characters throughout the film, and makes it a battle of personality between two men desperate to get back into the mainstream American consciousness. However, real life never fits so easily around the stereotypes of film and the script and director sacrifice a lot of the real character of these two men to fit them into this structure. One half of this equation is fine, Michael Sheen has plenty ability to manoeuvre in his portrayal of David Frost because, as with all the great interviewers, we never really got a sense of his values and personality in real life.

Sheen's Frost is a chancer, desperate to get back into the big time of American television and more than willing to risk his career on doing so. Here Frost is so desperate for an interview that he believes will put him on the television map that he outbids the networks without any knowledge of how to earn the money back and places himself in a financial black hole. He has to spend so much of his time chasing advertisers and establishing his own network for a night that he cannot properly prepare for the interview. Here one of Britain's most established television personalities is reimagined as an out of his depth talk show host without any political opinion. Sheen provides a compelling character and wears the stress of the situation all over his face while maintaining a permanent fake cheery grin. Is a fantastic portrayal of a character so often portrayed in the sports movies this film draws its inspiration from, the lowly idealist with one chance of greatness.

The problems lie on the other side of the title, Richard Nixon may be one of the most psychoanalysed presidents in history and his personality is simply too famous to mould to a film script. Langella imitates the President rather than becoming him and the script bends him to fit a stereotype necessary for its morality play. Langella is unable to portray a consistent character as too often the script demands he veer from wild anger to detached cynicism. At one point showing him unable to tell anecdotes and small talk, about another showing him distracting Frost before a taping session with an easy chatty style of conversation. When Nixon doesn't feel like Nixon the interviews themselves get taken out of context and the film loses the moment when all the arrogance and paranoia the man was famous for slide away to reveal a broken human being. It's that moment which makes the interviews so famous and it's when the film quotes them word for word that it's at its best. Even a film that fails in so many regards as this cannot fail to showcase the sheer power of the interviews as a piece of political theatre, a moment in the maligned history of television news beyond compare.

The staging of the film is directly derived from sports movies, even as far as the "corner men" as they are referred to in the movie. Both Nixon and Frost have Teams of advisers that sit in rooms away from the interview and narrate the action like the omniscient commentators in every sports film from Rocky to Cool Runnings to Dodgeball. Ron Howard has always liked his control room yelling and cheering scenes, most notably in Apollo 13, and here is no exception. The characters themselves are wastes of fine acting talent, Kevin Bacon is reduced to playing the most stereotypical of Nixon advices to the point where he can barely open his mouth without accusing hippies of taking down his man, and Sam Rockwell is given barely anything to do as a passionate Nixon hater. Perhaps most laughable is the bureaucrat's bureaucrat John Birt being reinvented as a daring and commanding producer. Liberties are taken with the truth everywhere in an effort to fit this into a Hollywood model. In probably the film's lowest point a large part of the plot revolves around a completely fabricated phone call between Nixon and Frost, in fact the only reason the phone call exists is lazy scriptwriting. Peter Morgan is unable to communicate the shared paranoia that Nixon and Frost have about being shut out of their respective fields so simply has Nixon call Frost and tell him they have a shared paranoia. It's not just bad writing it also loses the authenticity needed for the film, and shows the lack of vision of those involved. They cannot see beyond the standard film plot so bend this amazing truth to be that much less interesting and that much more film like.

This is ultimately what makes the film such a disappointing exercise; it's too concerned with itself as a film and again proves that not every tale works in that context. The irritating this is, with a director with more ingenuity and a better actor portraying Nixon, this could have been an excellent film. The sheer magnetism of the interviews themselves and Nixon as a real life character should have made it an easy adaptation to write but instead we have a diverting but paper thin story of enigmatic charmer David Frost versus bruising old curmudgeon Richard Nixon.

Public Enemies (2009)

Good but nowhere near the epic it could be

[7/10 · 13 July 2009]

Michael Mann returns to the familiar territory of the American Crime drama to explore the life and times of John Dillinger, probably America's most famous bank robber and public enemy number 1. Mann models this as a conflict between the foundations of federal crime fighting and the burgeoning criminal network of the time. Representing the side of law and order is Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, one the FBI's most famous agents, whilst Johnny Depp plays Dillinger. Shooting in digital Mann brings his usual expertise at accuracy, authenticity and lends an epic scale to the story as well as creating a number of thrilling action sequences particularly an elongated shoot out at a country lodge. The acting is generally high calibre and both leads are excellent and Depp is admirably restrained as Dillinger when compared with his more recent wilder roles. He portrays him as a serious bank robber who knows how to foster his own mythology, one scene where Dillinger is questioned by the press allows Depp to loosen his control and play with his audience. However Dillinger's relationship to the press and the public's reaction to Dillinger is one of a number of interesting topics that the film sheds little light on rendering the near two and a half hour running time a little frustrating.

Mann reduces this story to a battle between two men and adds layers of stereotype and cliché where none were needed. Dillinger's romance with Billie Frechette, a solid if unremarkable turn by Marion Cotillard, is given undue focus and portrayed as the traditional doomed romance between gangster and moll. Mann continues to hint at the more interesting aspects of the story, the way Hoover manipulated the pursuit of Dillinger to get press coverage and support for the FBI, the evolution of crime and crime fighting, the public reaction to the criminals of the era. In one scene near the end of the film Dillinger enters a betting racket run by the mob and witnesses the vast sums they are taking the film briefly touches on the idea that this was the end of an era for bank robbery but, again, goes nowhere with the idea. Similarly on the FBI's side there is continued reference to the transition of tactics to a recognisably modern crime fighting outfit but it is never fully explored despite the length of the film. Purvis witnesses escalating police brutality in their attempts to capture Dillinger and is clearly affected by it but little reference is made to the impact it had on the FBI and on police behaviour in America.

Ultimately Mann has the characters, era and time to create a true classic of American crime but clings too close to the well worn confines of the genre and ultimately the film could really be about anyone and set anywhere and have a near identical plot. That is not to say it's a bad film, it's enjoyable and watchable but Mann had the scope and actors to aim so much higher that it is hard not to be disappointed and a little frustrated with the end result.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

The Bayhem brought to its illogical conclusion

[4/10 · 20 June 2009]

This film is a mess of ideas, explosions and shaky cam that fails to deliver anything near a coherent scene let alone a coherent plot. Bay tries far too hard, throwing so many ideas at the screen that none are given the opportunity to stick, let alone breathe. Over 40 robots appear over the 150 minute runtime of the film of which 1, Starscream, gets any kind of character development beyond the 3 set types, good, evil, or annoying.

The robots themselves are in dire need of some internal logic, what are their abilities? How are they made? Are their components sentient? As it is, the robots are so diverse as to defy any kind of movie logic explanation, some can disguise themselves, some are animalistic, some have opinions, some can break up into smaller pieces, some have apparent genitalia. The sheer number of them also cloud the issue, making it impossible to know, or recognise all the robots in the large fight scenes so that its very hard to tell whats going on and who's shooting who. Thats certainly not helped by the fact they all share the same shiny metal aesthetic and nearly everything is shot in close up shaky cam. Its symptomatic of a film that feels like it started with Michael Bay writing everything he thought was cool or funny on a sheet of paper and then trying to craft a script around it.

That might have worked better if Michael Bay had any kind of sense of humour. Dogs and robots hump each and people's legs furiously, LeBeouf mugs gamely but even his talents can't make up for the drivel he is given, but even he fares better than the awful material given to his screen parents. A special mention goes to the hip hop lingo spouting twin robots ruin every scene they are in. The biggest laugh in the screening I saw was for a man wearing a thong which says all you need to know.

The plot, such as it is, lacks coherence. I'm not asking for epic storytelling or multi-layered plots, I'm not even asking for emotional involvement, just a better explanation of what the evil guy's plan and why everyone is seemingly shooting everyone else in the desert. If I'm trying to snatch positives I could mention that Megan Fox is absurdly hot for the whole film, but thats partly because the camera ogles her curves at every opportunity, notably as shes bent over a motorcycle in the most gratuitous shot i've ever seen outside porn.

Overall its a bad, messy, dumb movie that I wouldn't recommend even for the unreconstructed action film fan in all of us.

RocknRolla (2008)

Ritchie's return to old form... and old characters and plots

[7/10 · 5 September 2008]

RocknRolla is a return to the familiar territory of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch for director Guy Ritchie and reminds us why he was hailed as such a talent at the time of their release. No one can write a sprawling tongue in cheek cockney gangland tale like Ritchie and his talent for writing ultra masculine, tough talking and worldly wise gangsters has always grabbed attention. That being said, Rocknrolla isn't up the heights of the his earlier efforts and finds the pace markedly slowed, not that it could be called slow by the measure of any other director. This time round Ritchie suffers from the sheer weight of a genre that he helped to create, with few of the characters going beyond the one note gangsters that populated a million poor attempts to copy the Lock, Stock magic.

As usual with Ritchie, the plot is too convoluted to really explain but essentially there is a classic old school London gangster (Tom Wilkinson), a Russian businessman with big money, a stolen lucky painting and a 7 million euro land deal that all contrive to revolve around our nominal heroes, low level criminals One Two (Gerard Butler) and Mumbles (Idris Elba). The plot is episodic and meandering but that's no bad thing as Ritchie has a talent for well written small roles that flesh out a vibrant underground world of chancers, junkies, dealers, record producers and... accountants.

This rigid structure of fleeting performances suggests that Ritchie is hiding as a filmmaker, throwing visual stunts and mockney dialogue at us in the hope we don't look too carefully at his characters. This is a shame because in this film he writes one of the best characters of his career, Johnny Quid, the Rocknrolla of the title. Played by Toby Kebbell, Johnny Quid is a junkie rock star full to the brim with charisma, talent and threat. Kebbell swings wildly from manically engaging, to terrifyingly threatening and back to philosophical and enigmatic. While a fantastic scene, in which he explains life through the medium of a cigarette packet, is cinematic posturing, at the scene's heart lies talented writing and a perfectly played junkie dreamer.

Overall the film has its moments but never attains the freshness and style that made Ritchie's debut and his follow up such fascinating films. The story itself starts off well but draws towards a disappointingly predictable denouement and perhaps demonstrates a filmmaker trying to recapture old magic rather than make a new unique movie.

The Duchess (2008)

Compelling and Layered Costume Drama

[7/10 · 5 September 2008]

The Duchess is a superior slice of costume drama which manages to craft interesting, multi dimensional characters and an involving storyline from the well worn confines of the genre.

Keira Knightley plays a very similar role to the one she played in Pride and Prejudice, a feisty, modern woman trapped in a male dominated society. However, whereas Lizzie Bennett's heart and character inspires affection, the Duchess of Devonshire's fosters only reproach and punishment from her traditional and patriarchal husband. Her performance is a standout and demonstrates why she is so highly rated in the face of many disappointing roles in other films. She brings both strength and weakness to the character. Able to deliver withering put downs at her husband and others, whilst showing the pain of her loveless marriage etched into her face.

If Knightley is the lynchpin of the piece then it is Ralph Fiennes that elevates it above a crowded genre. Resisting the temptation to play his character as evil, instead he simply plays him as a man of his times. In Fiennes' hands the Duke feels no need to win any bouts of verbal jousting with his wife as he is secure in the knowledge that, as a husband, he is in complete control of the relationship. The Duke also clearly sees very little wrong in his treatment of his wife and acts, as he sees it, in a logic manner making the whole film feel more believable and, as a result, tragic.

In terms of the cast the only misstep is Dominic Cooper as Charles Grey, who lends the wide eyes of a political dreamer but doesn't have convincing chemistry with Knightley and plays one of the more one dimensional characters in the piece. However Hayley Atwell impresses by playing her character so well it is possible to describe her as scheming, and manipulative as well as sympathetic and loyal without it seeming a contradiction.

The film is deliberately paced so as to give characters and events time to breathe, encouraging the mood that the marriage is a car crash in slow motion, inextricably drawing all the characters further into the muddled mess of their relationships. Overall it's a fully recommended slice of real life costume drama that draws a multi layered drama full of compellingly deep characters from what could easily have been a one note story.

Be Kind Rewind (2008)

Be Kind, Rewrite

[5/10 · 10 March 2008]

Michel Gondry's Be Kind, Rewind is an extremely uneven film based on a small video rental store's attempts to stay in business. Danny Glover plays Mr Fletcher, the kindly owner of the Be Kind, Rewind video rental store in Passaic, New Jersey, who makes the mistake of leaving Mike (Mos Def) in charge with one simple instruction: not to let his idiotic friend Jerry (Jack Black) into the store. Already under pressure from property developers, and the rise of soulless DVD stores the eponymous video store's future is endangered further when Jerry manages to wipe all the store's tapes after becoming magnetized trying to sabotage the local power station.

Panicked by this turn of events Mike and Jerry attempt to solve the crisis by filming their own versions of the store's library of videos and renting them to the local residents as "Sweded" films. If this all sounds utterly loopy and more than a little incoherent you'd be right. Not that the generally off kilter nature of the whole film is a bad thing, just that the laughs and characters never quite justify how bizarre the whole experience is.

The film's party pieces are the "Sweded" films that Mike and Jerry produce; however, they are as patchy and variable as the film itself. Ghostbusters and Rush Hour 2 are excellently spoofed and are the highlights of the film but after these initial two films the spoofs drift into montages and single sight gags which lack the breathless ingenuity of the night time sequence of Ghostbusters. Gondry seems to save most of his best tricks for the final life story of Fats Waller which forms the emotional, if not comedic heart of the film.

The film has an emotional weight to it as a heart warming story of community togetherness and the lovable losers Mike and Jerry are certainly sympathetic. However, too often curious decisions are made that highlight the oddball factor over story telling and weaken the audience's emotional involvement in the film. Starting the film with the Fats Waller biopic, allowing Jack Black to run out of control for too much of the film, and rushing through too many of the Sweded films all detract from the experience.

Ultimately Be Kind, Rewind needs to be a much tighter script with a lot less freedom given to both the leads. Far too often Mos Def and Jack Black drift into ad libbed comedy arguments that are neither funny nor important to the plot, and they very rarely hit their punch lines with the conviction that they are funny. The script never really balances the desire for weirdness with the need for real emotional connection with its characters: neither Mike nor Jerry ever really expand beyond their loser caricatures. (Similarly, Mr Fletcher is old and kindly from first scene to last without exhibiting any other motivations.) It's a shame because there are moments of real genius, from one early, brilliant camouflage sight gag, to the children's play mat doubling as the view of the ground from a skyscraper in the Rush Hour 2 parody, that suggest a tighter script could have created a real classic.

Cloverfield (2008)

Godzilla for the Youtube generation

[9/10 · 22 February 2008]

At one point in this film a single shot tells us all we need to know about what its all about. As the decapitated head of the statue of liberty lies in a street we see someone calmly walk up and take a photo on their mobile phone. Ignore the monster, the characters and the fake mystery of its promotion, this is a film about the hand-held video camera and the mobile phone video. If there is such a thing as the youtube generation this is their film.

The prevalence of hand-held video and photographic technology has made the grainy, and out of focus mobile phone video a part of our daily lives. Its also allowed news organisations to replace eyewitness accounts by shaken and upset individuals with videos of the actual events themselves without losing the human element of their story. In this way the film recalls the amateur videos and photos that appeared in the days after both the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington and the 7/7 attacks in London. This is not done in an allegorical manner but merely in a visual recall of how all major events will now be recorded.

The film begins with a going away party which serves a dual purpose, in introduces the characters briefly and also serves to ground the film in a reality. This is not an alternate version of New York when monsters attack on a regular basis, this is the plain old ordinary New York you've seen a thousand times before and these are ordinary people with their ordinary lives, no heroes here. This segment lasts long enough to make the initial arrival of the monster genuinely surprising whilst being kept short enough to get dull. Its at this point that the use of generally unknown actors really comes to the fore. You honestly believe that any of the people at the party could be the stars of the film and not only that but they can die or be separated from the group at any time. A point only emphasised further as the film progresses.

The film sets its stall out for the rest of the running time as the cast cower in fear in a convenience store as the monster apparently walks past, shaking the ground and blowing out windows. We know what role we are to play in this story, the cannon fodder. This is the disaster movie re-imagined from the perspective of those in danger, on the ground, and in need of rescue. The characters spend the film looking after themselves and hoping that someone else can solve crisis whilst they're still alive. Focussing on these people allows the film to stay clear of clunky exposition and fake science. We don't know where it came from and we don't care we just want to survive it.

All the while the director Matt Reeves assaults our senses with a perfectly paced series of breathless action sequences and momentary rests where our characters recuperate and count the cost the ordeal is having on them and their city. As with any good action film its the rest moments that define how attached we are to the characters and there is one genuinely heart breaking scene in a subway station that shows just how connected you have become without realising it.

The action sequences combine tension and action brilliantly and all showcase different aspects of the monsters' abilities well to keep the threat evolving and consistently scary. This also helps prevent the scream-and-wave-the-camera-around style of action sequence become to prevalent as would normally be a threat with a film shot in this manner. In all the only weak point in the action sequences is one supposedly roof top scene that looks far too much like a sound stage. Apart from that the feel of authenticity is kept ever present throughout these sequences.

Special mention has to made of how the film balances the need for believable hand held camera work with the need for proper cinematography. The film could easily have fallen into the same pitfall as other hand-held camera films, such as The Blair Witch Project, where shots can lack composition and framing to such an extent as to negate the film as a visual experience.

The film has generally been criticised for the almost traditional monster and disaster movie failings of a lack of plot and poor characterisation. While it is to an extent true that the film lacks a coherent plot and characterisation its also true that it benefits from its lack of both. The plot makes the audience feel as the characters do that we are being thrown around New York by forces far beyond our control and that we are constantly waiting for the next intervention from either the monster or the military to throw us off course again. Also the characters act believably in the sense that when a disaster of this scale occurs all people become pretty much equal, no one wants to be seen as a coward, every one wants to make sure those they care about are safe and no one wants to be alone. These are all the motivating factors the band of characters we follow are likely to have in such moments of extreme stress.

This is a massively entertaining, thoroughly enjoyable thrill ride that seeps innovation and free thinking from its every pore. One of those rare cinema event movies that make you feel you're a part of the film and a part of its events without ever forgetting to entertain. Cloverfield is a film I genuinely wanted to dislike due to the manner of its promotion and my dislike for monster films generally but it is an undeniable piece of cinematic brilliance and the first film I've seen in some time that feels genuinely new.