Flatliners (2017)

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Flatliners (2017)
2017 USA Directed by Niels Arden Oplev
UK cinema release print.

Warning: One mild spoiler in here.

Well, my first reaction to hearing that there was a remake of Flatliners was... why?

The original 1990 movie starring Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts and Kevin Bacon was a bit of a classic for my generation... although I honestly can’t remember too much about it now (might have to pick up a Blu Ray at some point so I can rewatch and review it here). I know I was fairly passionate about it, like a lot of people I knew and... I think I went to see it about three times at the cinema on its initial release. That being said, after one more watch a few years later on VHS (the cinema to home video release delay in those days was somewhere between 3-5 years... youngsters don’t  realise how lucky they are right now) I kind of forgot about it until, pretty much, I heard the news of the remake/reboot/sequel. And even after seeing it I’m still not quite sure which of those it is... pick one.

I wasn’t rushing out to see this but I did quite like the trailer for the new one and I always quite enjoy Ellen Page as an actress so... I thought I might as well give it a go. I’ve got nothing much against remakes... after all, some of the, arguably,  best versions of films are remakes (such as the Humphrey Bogart remake of The Maltese Falcon or the Charlton Heston remake of Ben Hur - reviewed here). I decided to go and enjoy it for what it was and not be too judgemental. I wasn’t sure how different it could be, though, being as the plot on the trailer looked like it was following the original movie fairly closely, aside from character names and a more equal mix of male and female characters.

It has to be said that this new version of Flatliners is actually pretty good although, to be honest, there really isn’t a heck of a lot that’s been changed from the original story. It’s still about a bunch of med students, one of whom craves to see what happens on ‘the other side’ in the afterlife. In this case, it’s Ellen Page’s character Courtney who instigates things, pulling together a small team to help her chart her brain while she’s ‘flatlining’ and making sure someone qualified enough is there to restart her heart after she’s been dead for a minute. In this case the character is motivated by guilt over something that’s happened to her in her past and she wants to see someone again.

Like the original film, once she’s flatlined and walked about in an eerily shot dream world, the majority of the others want to have a go too... especially when they see Courtney’s brain power increase to enable her to do way more than you would imagine she could in such a short space of time. However, like the original, their journeys into another realm within themselves starts to bring ‘anomolies’ to  haunt their waking hours and try to kill them unless a certain set of conditions relating to shady secrets from their past are fulfilled. From then on the film becomes more of a horror film for the remainder of the time... or at least as much as it can be for a kid friendly movie (I’m amazed this got a 15 rating in the UK... this is PG material, surely?).

And, surprisingly, I actually found myself liking it a heck of a lot more than I thought I would. The ensemble of actors are pretty good, especially Page and Diego Luna, who does a pretty good job in the only movie I’ve seen him in other than Rogue One (reviewed here). Give this man some solid lead roles! I also thought the set dressing and choice of compositions around these, quite detailed atmospheres created for the story were all pretty good too. Perhaps more so than the original in some ways although, as I mentioned above, this film sticks to that template very closely, with most of the broad strokes being a repeat performance and mainly just the details of the ‘misdeeds’ of the various protagonists being changed this time around.

Having said that... and this was a bit of a surprise moment for me, hence the spoiler warning... one of the five does die in the film and the rest of the gang doesn’t manage to bring said character back from the dead. This leads, of course, to that character’s inevitable return appearance on ‘the other side’ near the end but that’s okay, it’s a logical progression and it helps move the story forward when this happens. Another difference is that one of the five, the more responsible one of the group, doesn’t flatline at all in this version... which I thought was kinda odd but also interesting.

Now there seems to have been some confusion around whether this is a remake of... or a sequel to... the original Flatliners. Not least confused by this, it seems to me, was Kiefer Sutherland who told interviewers that he would be reprising his role from the first one in this film. Sutherland is in two scenes in this and, although the character name is different, it does seem a natural progression of the character (including a prop I noticed which rang a vague bell... but I’d have to look at the original again before I can confirm that particular something). My understanding is that there was a scene shot for this which revealed that, despite the name change, Sutherland was indeed revealed to be playing the same character and I’ve read that this scene might resurface in a slightly longer cut when it gets released on DVD and Blu Ray. Which will be interesting if it does because, frankly, the fact that a group of medical students playing God in the same way that another group of students did decades before is an interesting touch (I also liked that they got the famous line from the original... “Today is a good day to die.” into the screenplay, this time said by James Norton).

One of the things I do remember about the first version of Flatliners was that it kinda peaked about three quarters of the way through the movie and didn’t really recover after the point where it turned into more of a horror movie. Although this new one is only five minutes shorter than the 1990 one, I did think the pacing and interest on this was a lot tighter... it never gets dull and that can only be a good thing. The ending of this is a little better too. Where the first film ended, if memory serves, with a last minute rescue of one of the five from the jaws of death, this movie ends with a much more haunting epilogue involving a specific tune played on a piano which is a little memento of one of the characters thrown from the spirit world... which slightly contradicts any possibility that the way the brain is changed by death is the key to the various phenomena the group are experiencing but it is kind of a fun nod, it has to be said.

All in all, I wouldn’t say the new Flatliners is any better than the 1990 classic but, then again, I wouldn’t say it’s any worse either and there are some definite improvements to the pacing which counts for a lot. Not a film I feel I could revisit that often but certainly nowhere near the disappointment I was expecting from it. Maybe give it a go if you are not too particularly attached to the first movie and, even then, you might still find that you can appreciate this one.

X-Men - Days Of Future Past

Future, Past Caring

X-Men - Days OF Future Past
2014 USA/UK
Directed by Bryan Singer
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Big spoilers in this one and I’m not even going to apologise for them... this is no more than this dreadful movie deserves to “call it out” to people.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” It’s strange but, I’ve only ever heard that quoted, usually incorrectly (from people who have remembered it wrong), by film-makers trying to defend the outrageous continuity errors evident in their films which their audience has had to point out to them. I have to say that, in terms of the context within which people quote this about their big screen stories, I have to disagree and bring my own inner hobgoblin to the table, in this case.

I believe that a film franchise succeeds or fails on a lot of different factors on a film by film basis but, one of the things which is really important, and which can kill a whole franchise if you let it, is consistency... in this case, the consistency of continuity. And, unfortunately, the X-Men franchise has now, as far as I’m concerned, sacrificed itself for a quick buck on the altar of the hobgoblins who were really only interested in having a good time at the movies but, instead, are forced to hold a mirror up to the movie and say... “Seriously? You think your audience are all this stupid?”

Before I rip into this awful mess properly, I just want you to know how I stand on the previous films in the franchise, so you can see where I’m coming from and judge my thoughts on X-Men: Days Of Future Past (or X-Men: Days Of Screwing The Continuity Even Further While Pretending To Solve It And Hoping Your Audience Doesn’t Think About The Movie For Too Long, as I now call it) so you can either agree or disagree with my thoughts in terms of this movie’s place compared to the others.

X-Men: Bryan Singer’s first movie was pretty much the first movie based on a Marvel comics property that was actually any good. Not just good, pretty damned brilliant, as it happens. It almost made up for not having the proper characters from the 1960s in it and changing the costume design... well... yeah, almost makes up for it. Something to note: Professor X and Magneto built Cerebro together, when they were friends, in this continuity.

X2: X-Men 2: This was at least as good as the first movie. Another brilliant piece of modern fantasy action from Bryan Singer with a strong opening and a strong ending leading into something very dark and with a consistent tone throughout. Basically, an epic feeling movie to set up the Dark Phoenix character arc.

X-Men: The Last Stand: This was awful. Brett Ratner took over the franchise and basically used every great set up from the previous films and managed to make them pretty boring and unwatchable for, pretty much, most of the film. A lot of people haven’t forgiven this movie for being so bad, as far as I can see. Something to note: Young “bald” Professor X and his friend, Young Magneto, go to recruit Jean Grey together. Professor X can both walk and simultaneously use his mutant powers. In this movie, Charles Xavier is killed/disintegrated, although his mind seems to have jumped into a “different” human being... if the post credits sting is anything to go by.

X-Men Origins - Wolverine: A lot of people didn’t dig this movie but I thought it was okay. A lot of fun and very much like an old 1980s or 1990s “straight to video” kind of B Movie.... but with an A Movie budget to play around with. Thought this was much better than the reaction it got. Things to note: Professor X is in this one too, at the end. My review is here.

X-Men: First Class: Absolutely brilliant. Had a lot of continuity errors which could not be explained as a hangover from the previous films but since it was technically a reboot of the franchise, I was happy with this when treated as a stand alone sequence of movies. Things to note: In this timeline, Magneto and Professor X did not build Cerebro. Professor X is crippled by the end of their first big adventure and way after he and Magneto were still friends, confounding the opening of X-Men: The Last Stand totally. My review is here.

The Wolverine: Nice little movie. Not as fun as the last one but different and kinda interesting. Things to note: Wolverine's adamantium claws are severed and are no longer something he has in this “continuity”. Instead, he has reverted back to the bone claws he was born with as a result of the events depicted in this film. Jean Grey haunts his dreams after he killed her in X-Men: The Last Stand. Also, Professor X and Magneto confront Wolverine in an airport in the post credits sting of the movie. Wolverine looks shocked because, obviously, Professor X is dead, isn’t he? At least, his body was destroyed. My review of this one is here.

Okay. Recap over.

So here we have X-Men: Days Of Future Past. And all I wanted from this movie right now is for it to fix all those stupid continuity holes from the clashes between the awful X-Men: The Last Stand and the amazingly cool X-Men: First Class... and in a fairly fun manner, if possible. And, if only the writers would have thought about it a little more, maybe they would even have nailed that because, frankly, while a bit silly, the central premise they use to wipe out the history of the characters in this one really works well... except it fails before they even start using it.

I can see how the idea here was maybe “borrowed” from the rebooted Star Trek films from a couple of years ago. In the first one (reviewed here), the Spock of the regular timeline is catapulted back into his past, which then changes the future of the younger versions of himself and his friends... thus giving the franchise new life to go back to the days of Kirk, Spock and McCoy in their prime for a movie series without having to worry about contradicting anything that came before. Revelling in that, in fact, by having a half remake of Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan for their sequel (reviewed here) and totally having their cake and eating it at the same time. And why the older version of Spock didn’t just wink out of existence because his timeline didn’t actually happen anymore, I’ll never know. Oh, yes I do... because they don’t care about the logic at the heart of the theory of time travel. Okay, whatever.

Singer’s approach in X-Men: Days Of Future Past is to have Wolverine’s “mind” sent back to his younger body in 1973 and get him to change the past then, to split everything off into a new timeline which doesn’t result in the death of mutant kind... and you know what? That could have worked out really well, and the film-makers obviously seem to think it did.. or they never would have released this shambles into cinemas in this form. But the thing is, to have someone sent back from the future to change that timeline... you need to have that future actually be a possibility in the first place. That reality has to have existed before you go back and change it... and there’s no way the point in time that Wolverine is sent back from could actually have happened within the continuity of the previous films without a lot of explaining away of certain things... and there’s absolutely no concession to this, nor concession to audience intelligence, in the movie.

It starts off well enough with concentration camp imagery of imprisoned and dead mutants (and potential mutants) and this is, of course, a nice echo of the World War II Nazi concentration camp sequences which open both the original X-Men and X-Men: First Class. So a really nice idea there from the director. Then we have a fairly cool fight which is basically just a set up to explain the major time travel element  in the film. And then we see the last surviving mutants holed up together, awaiting the coming of the deadly Sentinels. Among these mutants are Kitty Pride, Ice Man, Professor X, Magneto, Storm and Wolverine. They are, of course, the X-Men... well... err... X-Men and X-Women... except... woah... hold on a minute... who’s in that line up again?

I got really excited by the post-credit sting at the end of The Wolverine because the story confronted us with something that was just so impossible within the actual X-Men timeline... Professor X and Wolverine existing in the same continuity after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand... that I figured they must be really confident about undoing the mess they’d made of the consistency between the movies. If they could throw something like that in to be explained away in the next film then... hey... they could do anything.

But that’s the thing, guys and gals. This opening set up is why the whole premise of this movie fails totally. Not only don’t they explain it... they don’t even refer to the events depicted at the end of The Wolverine in any way, shape or form. They just act like the third film didn’t even happen... kinda. Stay with me here because it’s an important concept to get over. Wolverine’s claws in this version of the timeline are back to being adamantium claws. Yep... that’s right... it’s like the events of The Wolverine, released only last year, didn’t even happen. Except... here’s the rub... The Wolverine refers all the way through to Logan’s guilt at having to kill his beloved Jean Grey to save humanity and... err... mutantanity from certain doom. So we know that happened in that continuity. However, in this film, Wolverine also has painful memories of killing Jean Grey (or Dark Phoenix or even, my favourite, Marvel Girl) in that third movie... they actually use clips from it as flashbacks in this one. So then... Professor X is dead isn’t he? This makes no sense. And you can’t try to justify/explain this version as being a version in which the events of the third movie never took place, because they refer to that movie a number of times.

And that’s basically why this movie is screwed before it’s even started. Because the point in time from which our intrepid hero is travelling back from in his mind is absolutely not a reality which could have happened and no attempt is made to explain this. What, they thought we were going to be all overjoyed that most of the old crew were back that we wouldn’t notice the thing has no logic or reason to it at all?

Not only that but, at the end, Wolverine’s mind snaps back to the version of himself fifty years later in a timeline we haven’t seen and all his memories of those fifty years are replaced by his old ones (which is why he’s astonished to see people like Jean Grey and Cyclops back in his timeline). This also makes no sense... his mind didn’t have anywhere else to snap back to... his timeline was destroyed. Serious clangers all round here folks.

Okay, so now I’ve reiterated why the film just totally falls apart and screws the entire franchise sideways into a cocked, adamantium hat... what’s the movie like apart form the huge plot holes?

Well... it’s kinda okayish, in some ways. It’s got a good buzz about it early on but, ultimately, it all just felt a bit “by the numbers”. Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry and Ellen Page were all fine... but that was it for them. They were all just fine... and who can blame them in some ways. Their dialogue wasn’t exactly special. Ditto for most of the First Class team. Michael Fassbender is always damned watchable but he honestly didn’t seem to be present in most of his scenes, apart from when he loses it at Charles Xavier on the plane... that was pretty good. Jennifer Lawrence’s take on Raven/Mystique was okay too but she’s flying more or less solo in this one and, although she’s a bit of a stand out character, she’s mostly just seen beating people up.

James MacAvoy is fantastic and just like his Xavier character in X-Men: First Class. Absolutely a consistent and brilliant performance. However, asides from the cool acting, theres another basic continuity problem with this one. We saw him crippled at the end of the last movie but, in this one, Hank/The Beast has made him a serum which gives him his legs back every time he has his fix. However, this also has the side effect of relieving him of his mutant powers... further highlighting the absolute impossibility of the opening sequence of X-Men: The Last Stand as a path from this reality... except we know all that must have happened because Wolverine’s mind was just sent back from that future reality. Not very well thought out, is it? It’s like the writers kept painting themselves into a corner and then were trying to distract you with things to cover up the fact that they couldn’t address the issues this throws up. But hey, who cares, the audience won’t be paying attention will they? Um, whatever dudes.

There were some other nice things about the movie. The idea that Magneto was implicated in the murder of JFK but was actually trying to save him because he was a fellow mutant was nice. Some, not all, of the action sequences were nicely handled too, the really good ones being the opening fight scene and the sequence where Quicksilver saves them all in the Pentagon jailbreak scene. Which is a pretty great scene... except... oops. Now that’s another confusing thing for audiences who don’t understand that the rights to certain Marvel characters reside with more than one company...

So here you have Quicksilver who is played by Evan Peters in X-Men: Days Of Future Past.... which is a Marvel/20th Century Fox picture. However, we just saw him portrayed by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the first mid-credits sting at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (reviewed here), made by Marvel/Disney, and will see him portraying that character again in The Avengers: Age Of Ultron next year, also for Marvel/Disney. What’s worse is, the 20th Century Fox version of the character and the Marvel/Disney version of the character are not allowed to share the same history, The ones locked into the S.H.I.E.L.D timeline is not even allowed to mention “mutation” apparently. This is going to confuse a hell of a lot of audience members who don’t know the ins and outs of the situation, folks. All they’re going to know is you’ve got the same character played by two different actors with contradicting histories co-existing at the same time in cinema history. Probably not a great idea guys.

Okay, what else. Well, the music is okay. This one marks the first time that an X-Men movie has had the same composer twice and John Ottman’s score here reuses the X-Men theme he used for X-Men 2. Wait, what? Yeah, you can see the problem here, right? Even the music is, for one of the few rare times in a Marvel movie, insisting on a continuity which is already shot to hell. Which is a shame because Ottman’s score does the job here. It’s not as cool as his earlier X-Men 2 score, or even his two Fantastic Four scores, but it does it’s job and I’ll be grabbing a copy when the CD comes out in a couple of weeks.

And... what else? Um... the special effects are okay, if you like that kind of thing, and the film is competently shot and edited. So, some nice work there... but none of this goes anywhere near making up for the fact that this movie screws up the continuity even worse than X-Men: First Class did.

When the four sequels to Universal’s The Mummy were released in the 1940s, these sequels formed what was supposed to be a single continuity. However, some of the films took place decades after the previous one and in all that time, they were all set in contemporary America, give or take a few years. Worse, in one film, Kharis The Mummy gets buried in a swamp in one country and, when he rises from the swamp to live again in the next movie, it’s somehow relocated to another country. Now, it’s my belief that the majority of those 1940s audiences didn’t question these huge plot holes because, frankly, these were the decades well before anything like commercial home video viewing could even be imagined and re-release cinema screenings were less of a thing then. The movie played, you saw it, and it wasn’t until commercial television started out in the 1950s that these movies would get shown enough again to be able to spot stuff like this. However, note to people in Hollywoodland expecting a gullible audience to swallow the scripts they turn out with more holes in them than a Swiss cheese... your audience is no longer living in the 1940s. It’s not like somebody isn’t going to notice all this stuff somewhere along the line. You need to write smarter than this!

When I went to buy a ticket for X-Men: Days Of Future Past, for a performance a few hours later, there were a lot of firemen in the cinema and when I got to the front of the queue I was told that they were only giving out refunds. It turns out the cinema in question had been struck by lightning less than ten minutes before I’d arrived and it had knocked all the projection rooms out. When I tried again a few hours later, they’d literally just managed to get the cinema rebooted up and were selling tickets again. All I can say is... I should have taken this as some kind of omen, maybe? X-Men: Days Of Future Past is my joint, least favourite X-Men movie, tying with X-Men: The Last Stand in last place. This was not how I was hoping the latest film in a, mostly, fairly strong film series would play out and the only audience I could possibly recommend this to is an audience who haven’t seen any of the previous movies in the franchise because, honestly, this one just makes no sense. And it’s such a shame. It feels like Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (reviewed here) all over again. It just didn’t address the issues it needed to address... and these directors/writers/producers need to make a smarter product to keep the percentage of their audience interested in these things satisified, I’m afraid to say. The hobgoblins are loose... and their small minds are out to tear apart your inconsistencies.

The East

Eastern Promise

The East
2013 USA/UK
Directed by Zal Batmanglij
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: Light spoilers in this one.

Okay. So I’m gonna find it hard going constructing a review for this particular film because The East, as it turns out, is almost a perfect movie going experience. A film of some small but not insubstantial power and put together with a kind of European sensitivity, applied to an almost Hollywood package.

Now I’ve seen this movie described as a thriller or an eco thriller by a number of people but, to be honest, although there are a few sequences of tension scattered throughout the whole shenanigans, it has to be said that it’s more of an environmental awareness and bonding movie which just happens to use some of the trappings of the post-forties thriller movie within its chemical make-up, to hang a narrative around the central idea of a main protagonist whose world view changes when she comes into close contact with, for want of a better terminology, a bunch of eco terrorists.

The main protagonist, Sarah (played by Brit Marling), is an undercover spy for a big private security firm (the type of firm who are kind of on a level with the FBI etc) and her job is to find a new eco terrorist threat group called The East and penetrate them to a level where she can gain intelligence (and possibly avert disaster) for some of her boss’ high level clients. As such, all the common spy gimmicks like false cover phone numbers, hidden shoe phones and the like are employed, quite neatly and pretty much unobtrusively, as it happens, throughout the main narrative thrust of the movie. I can see why these kinds of tropes were used, to be honest. Modern audiences are more likely to go see a movie which claims to be a thriller rather than a huggy, clean environment cult movie... so that kind of misdirection gets my vote. I only saw the movie, to be honest, because I’d actually seen the trailer for it (for once) and I loved what I was seeing... though again, the trailer is pretty much mostly culled from the first five minutes of the movie and makes it look much more of a documentary than it actually is.

The direction is assured and the editing superb. Combining a variety of styles to give it the cinema verite feel it lacks in actual content, ranging from slow but hand held camera work to fast cuts and a series of montage sequences comprising still photographs taking relevant points to tell its... well story is probably not the right word here, but certainly it gives you a sense of what the director wants you to get into your head.

The performances are also absolutely amazing, with Brit Marling being outstanding and ably backed up by Alexander Skarsgard (who really is becoming as much of a name as his famous dad), Ellen Page, Toby Kebbell and, my real main reason for seeing this film, Patricia Clarkson, who does an excellent job in, sadly, only a few scenes scattered throughout the movie, as Sarah’s unflinching boss.

My two slight criticisms are as follows.

The movie at one point plays out the old “Parable Of The Long Spoons”... that’s the one where the people in Hell starve because they can’t work out what the people in Heaven, in exactly the same circumstances, have worked out... you can feed each other and get to the food. I’d be really surprised in this day and age if people are not familiar with this old story, which used to do the rounds everywhere, and so I found it odd that the drawn out sequence (which is a kind of task set as an initial indoctrination into The East) is kinda played for tension and surprise... when the solution is so obvious. Also, since the solution is so obvious, one wonders why a sophisticated employee of a security firm such as Sarah would not already know the solution to her predicament. This kind of stretched the plausibility of the character a little for me, it has to be said.

My only other gripe is with the narrative element of the film. It uses this thriller narrative to hook people into the real issues and that’s fair enough... but did it have to be so obvious a narrative? Honestly, as soon as the leader of the cult said that their would be three jams (aka terrorist hits) involving big companies, it seemed pretty obvious to me what the identity of the third company would turn out to be and the moral dilemma it would place on one of the central characters in the movie. However, the nice thing about the ending of the movie... the very ending after the leader of The East has fled the clutches of the FBI, is that the main protagonist presents you with a third narrative option that I didn’t really figure out. Don’t get me wrong, it’s no mind blowing twist or reveal... that’s not what this movie is about. But it is a nice option and makes for a slightly under-the-radar ending and certainly it helps elevate the movie to something I found really solid as opposed to relying on yet another structural cliché.

The East is a youth movie about the kinds of concerns that probably should be important to people. It’s message is sound and, if the character dynamics are a bit hackneyed, it doesn’t really matter because the execution of these clichés is, for the most part, impeccable. Definitely a solid watch and a strong recommendation from me. Head east if you want a slice of morality served up with your entertainment.

To Rome With Love

Rome, Sweet Rome

To Rome With Love
USA/Italy/Spain 2012
Written & Directed by Woody Allen
Playing at UK cinemas now

Well I’ve been watching this writer/director/performer’s work for most of my life now and I’d have to say that, although I’ve had some bumpy times with a few of his movies over the last couple of decades, this gentleman never fails to make interesting, quirky and quality works of art. Last year’s Midnight In Paris (reviewed here) was an absolutely brilliant film and To Rome With Love is no less an absorbing, and sometimes funny, experience... especially if you’re willing to accept the film on its own terms.

By that I mean it’s Woody being more experimental with his writing again. He’s always had quite strong flashes of surrealism throughout his work, starting with his early stand-up routines and then progressing into plays and films, but lately he seems to be much better about letting these elements of his work, when he chooses to go down this kind of route, creep up more subtly on the viewer and take the audience by stealth. The writing techniques he uses to do this are quite masterful and one wonders why a few more “Hollywood”, or at least “US” directors can’t study this man’s works more and understand how to misdirect the audience with a bit of style... rather than just hit them around the face with a big wet fish of obvious intentions.

I’m trying to write this review fairly spoiler free but there are two kinds of surrealism going on in this movie. One is the quirky dream-like surrealism of films like Play It Again, Sam and Annie Hall, and a similar kind of objective narrative stance from a major character on the actions of the past is visited directly in one of the story threads of To Rome With Love... which are woven in parallel, rather than together, to give the audience a sense of the city (although, I’m not sure a love letter to Rome would be so narrative heavy). The other, more dominant but less easy to detect strand of distinct surrealism is woven into the fabric of the movie itself and is presented in the way the different narrative sections fail to interact with each other.

To explain the first... when Alec Baldwin, who plays a famous architect by the name of John, leaves his friends for the afternoon to explore where he used to live in Rome back in the 80s, he can’t find his old place. But a teenager called Jack, played by Jesse Eisenberg, recognises him as he’s a fan of his work and offers to take him back to his place which is near where the architect used to live. However, as a short period of time passes with these characters and Jack’s girlfriend, it becomes obvious that there’s something else happening here. Because of the way it was written, though, the initial encounter between these two characters, to me at least, was of a completely different nature and it’s set up by the script, beautifully acted of course, to sucker punch you five or ten minutes later.

Other flights of fancy are similar to the Robin Williams character in Deconstructing Harry (a man who suddenly becomes out of focus) and start from similarly absurd premises which are then explored on their own terms. These include Roberto Benigni as an average man who suddenly achieves an instant fame for no apparent reason... and this is obviously a platform to explore both the effects of fame and success on the average man and, also, the effects of the loss of fame in someone’s life. This is, presumably, Woody’s exploration of the real trials of fame which I guess he knows very well, transplanted onto the life of someone who has done nothing to provoke that kind of attention.

Another similarly surreal story thread tells of Woody Allen’s character’s discovery that his daughter’s new fiance’s father has a strong opera voice and Woody’s attempts to market this in the classical music industry. Of course, the ultimate starting point for this thread is that people sound better singing in the shower than they do in real life... however, once Woody’s character realises this, the boundaries of credibility are slowly stretched as we are presented with a full-on solution to this most basic of dilemmas.

As for the second, less noticeable surrealistic device showcased througout the film... Well, for a while there you are expecting all the threads to weave themselves together and culminate in a series of scenes where all the myriad characters connect in some way, but this is not the case. A beautiful lady I was talking to on twitter about the movie the other night (@LauraFigas follow her here) said that the tone of the film seemed uneven to her and there were indeed some instances where my mind was grappling to tie the story strands together in a linear narrative due to expectations of the same. However, I’ve now remembered/realised that the time streams between each of the many intercut stories are inhabiting their own, individual time scales and Allen uses the fact that one story which may be set over a number of hours is being intercut with several stories which transpire over a much greater length of time, to dislocate our engagement with the temporal mechanics of the piece, which in one story inhabits two different points in time simultaneously anyway, and allows the audience to stop trying to decode the stories as one, unifying, single unit... which it certainly isn’t. For me it worked fine and my brain decided to accept that the juxtaposition of certain scenes weren’t making sense, which allowed me to enjoy the absurdity of many of the situations arising in the movie. For the lady I talked to on twitter, this manifested itself in a less satisfying manner but I can see how this movie could maintain a sense of unease within the viewer.

As usual for Mr. Allen’s movies, there’s a strong cast on hand to really make the dialogue and situations sing... including the great modern actress Penelope Cruz (glad her career has survived the fourth Pirates Of The Caribbean movie) who has less to do in this movie than she did in, say, Allen’s extraordinary work Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but who certainly has great presence playing a prostitute clothed in red (hey, I’m a red blooded male... so cut me some slack here) and gets some of the best comic lines in the movie.

And also, as you’d expect, the movie is well shot and edited and really rolls along quite quickly, even though this is one of Woody Allen’s longer movies, clocking in at almost 2 hours. The vague experimental nature of the format isn’t something you should let put you off, unless you really are somebody who prefers the closure of several cross-cut stories to be tied up in a neat, little bow. The stories each have their own, individual conclusions and this works for me, at least. My one grumble, if I had to have one, would be that the Penelope Cruz character leaves the story without any warning while all the other characters have their own ending scenes. Then again, her character is the one in the film who has less at stake, so maybe that’s why Allen chose not to leave us with one final scene of her to remember the character by (and at this point I can only hope that Mr. Allen gets hit with some kind of Fellini complex and goes the way of The White Sheik... towards his own Nights Of Cabiria project with Ms. Cruz).

To Rome With Love is another great triumph from everyone’s favourite Brooklyn neurotic... and if you are a fan of this director, you won’t want to miss out on another of his masterworks. Enjoy it for what it is... and on its own terms.

Super

Panel Vision

Super US 2010

Directed by James Gunn

G2 Pictures Region 2

Warning: There’s a couple of superpowered

spoilers in here somewhere.

Hmmmm... how to review a film like Super.

Not too sure about where to begin on this one because, although it’s riding the wave of “real vigilante super heroes” movies in the wake of more prominent movies like Kick Ass... it’s also very different in both its intent and its tone.

The movie is of interest because, although the main protagonist Frank D’Arbo, played by Rainn Wilson, decides to “shut up crime” and becomes The Crimson Bolt... he does so without any real knowledge of, or emotional investment in, the four colour heroes that might be expected to have inspired him in the first place. This dysfunctional character, though, has suffered from strange visions all his life and after he loses his wife to a drug dealer... his motivation is to get her back. This is filtered by an overtly and humorously extreme Christian superhero on television (played by Nathan Fillion, no less) whose messages of over zealous purity strike a chord with Frank and soon he is down to the local comic shop and seeking “superhero origin” advice and research material from the owner, Libby (played by Ellen Page).

Libby does her best to point him to the right back issues and he returns, after his first failure at fighting crime, to check out non-super powered heroes and the weapons they use (Batman etc). He becomes The Crimson Bolt and his new weapon is a wrench with which he bops people over the head, usually leaving them half crippled or unconscious and covered in blood...

And here’s the thing...

Although the movie is very much played for laughs, it’s certainly a very black strand of humour and it’s also shot through with the hard question of whether masked vigilantes should be allowed to exist and what the consequences of using violence as a weapon against crime are. And, like the best movies of this kind, it certainly doesn’t pull any super powered punches in this department.

Things start to escalate (or should that be descend) rather quickly when Libby figures out the true identity of The Crimson Bolt and begs Frank to be his sidekick. She eventually wears him down but it’s obvious she is sexually attracted to Frank (who has no interest in this and has a very violent body reaction when she, kind of, rapes him in a fit of lust) and also much more interest with the violent side of the costumed shenanigans as a revenge against the unjust as opposed to attempting to tackle the issue in a more level headed manner. In her first outing as The Crimson Bolt’s sidekick “Boltie”, for instance, she nearly kills someone because she suspects he’s the guy who keyed her friends car. We’re way out of sight of “the punishment fits the crime” here people!

And that’s kinda the point.

Frank is certainly no better. Seriously hospitalising a man and woman because they pushed into a cinema queue instead of going to the back and when “Boltie” saves his life by driving into a man and crushing his legs against a wall with her car (laughing in his face gleefully after the act), he immediately forgives her and they become a team once more.

The violence is harsh, as is Frank’s bad moral judgement when he and Boltie go on their final mission together and he allows her to go with him. It’s then that he learns the responsibility and consequences of taking a teenage girl into the heat of battle with him... and in a way that he finds emotionally devastating, even as he rescues his wife (Liv Tyler) from the clutches of the evil drug dealer (Kevin Bacon) and his friends.

By the end of the movie Frank is pretty much in the same boat he was somewhere soon after the start of the movie... except he now has a pet rabbit and a lot of “proud memory moments” as symbolised by the amount of sketches he’s covered his wall with. He goes unpunished by the law (and seems to have recovered from the amount of bullet hits he took during the course of his short-lived career as The Crimson Bolt) but at the same time you kinda feel that, while he’s probably not learnt much, he has at least rescued and liberated and truly saved the person he most loved in the world (although I don’t want to give away too much about how their relationship continues after that... please watch the movie) and there is a certain sense of redemption by the last few moments of the movie, even if that redemption cost more lives than it was possibly worth.

Super is a film which asks us to consider issues. The film poses these kinds of questions about “at what point the self proclaimed good guy fighting for justice becomes far worse than the criminals he is trying to punish”, without trying to force feed us answers or buy into a certain morality. It’s job is just to ask these things and leave you something to ponder once the movie is done... not ram solutions down our throats. As such, I found Super to be a quite refreshing antidote to many of the bona-fide superhero movies which have played on our screens over the last ten years or so and would definitely point this one out, for the same kinds of audience who are attracted to that kind of product, to add to their viewing list. This one’s definitely worth a look.

Hard Candy

Candy Coloured Page Turner

Hi everybody. I’d like to welcome back my scholarly, writerly friend and guest blogger Sandy, who has reviewed a film that I’m guessing will someday be considered a bit of a classic for future generations. I think this review is great... hope you do too.

Hard Candy USA 2005

Directed by David Slade

Lion’s Gate Region 2

I had a look at this film at Nuts4r2’s recommendation as he’d been fed up with my negative responses to quite a few films recently. That was until Juno, which I loved. He suggested I watched something else with Ellen Page in, so Hard Candy it was.

I’m not so good with horror or gory, so I was a little apprehensive when the cover advised me that I would be ‘absolutely terrified’. However, I was so pleased to have risked it.

What I really enjoyed in Hard Candy was that there were three stars in what was ostensibly a two-hander - the two main actors and the camerawork. I knew right away that I was in for some discomfort as the jangly camera moved in for uncomfortable close-ups right from the off and set the psychological tone to the impending claustrophobic nature of this film. And I wasn’t let down as it definitely challenged some ingrained assumptions.

Of course I knew the older man who seemed plausible and attractive through 14 year old’s eyes was grooming her, and of course I knew the 14 year old didn’t understand the power of her provocative exploration of the relationship. But what I didn’t know, because generally we just don’t like to explore these things so much, or at all, is the potential power we all hold despite age, gender or any other factor that can serve to disempower. Hard Candy put that right.

So I felt apprehensive even before our assumptions were turned on their heads, and suffocated and invaded after. Those relentless close ups even had my hands waving around my head at one point as, like Jeff, I tried to push this damn thing away from me. In my case, the in-your-face camera shots, and in Jeff’s case his restraining ropes. We both needed space and perspective but neither of us got it. Unlike the character Jeff, I could breath again when the end titles rolled and make myself a well earned cuppa to wash this film out of my throat, where it had lodged itself. Jeff’s throat didn’t fare so well!

These performances were so emotionally fraught that at one point I wondered whether the actor’s actually might need therapy after. They took the characters’ emotions, or dissociation from emotions, to the edge. Page is so skilled at micro expressions - just the tiniest change moves us into a new territory, and Patrick Wilson convincingly conveys the disintegration of a human being outplayed by another who was oh so much better at chilling to the core.

I enjoyed how this film covered so many moral questions without pointing all of them out. At one time I even felt sorry for Jeff’s pitiful plight at the hands of the 14 year old psychopath - or was she? - despite his so-called paedophilic tendencies. We were invited to ponder the nature/nurture question posed by Hayley in relation to her own behaviour but also Jeff’s, when he offered a childhood incident as a possible explanation for his sexual preferences. My favourite implicit moral question was how the neighbour’s insistence that she was always looking for baby sitters sounded so innocent... yet just think of all those parents just wanting their nights out, leaving their kids with an unknown sitter, where anything could happen... but that’s another film altogether!

Although the dialogue was clear, purposeful and Hayley was unforgiving, I also felt this film was making suggestions that left the powerful human imagination and the primitive fears of the collective unconscious to do the rest. Power, retribution. Who were we rooting for? Or do we need to root for anyone? Is that just another human cover up for not being able to manage overwhelming, primitive feelings.

So... uneasy, invasive, triumphantly vengeful, this film ultimately left me with that beautiful question of Edmund Burke’s in my mind about being a bystander as it didn’t matter one jot to Hayley whether Jeff had murdered or just watched a murder: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Edmund Burke)

Sandy Hamilton

Is all that we see or seem...

Inception 2010 US

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Screening now

I really don’t know where to begin with this one. If you’re reading this and you’ve been following me on Twitter you’ll know that I’ve been putting off writing this review since seeing the movie on Saturday. Why? Because I don’t want to annoy the bizarrely large number of people who actually liked this film.

I could warn you of possible spoilers which come up as I’m writing this but, to be honest, the opening title at the top of this page is a spoiler if you know your Edgar Allan Poe... and if you don’t know Edgar Allan Poe and you want to know a spoiler which, to be fair to me, is pretty obvious from the start of the movie, then don’t look to the right and down of this page where the rest of that verse is always prominently displayed near my user profile.

I’m not a big Christopher Nolan fan. The only movie I really enjoyed by him was the second of his Batman movies (The Dark Knight)... while nowhere near as dark or sophisticated as key issues of the Batman comics... it’s certainly the closest anyone’s come yet to capturing something close to Batman in a feature length film.

Another one of his I found entertaining but mostly dissapointing (every twist was telegraphed to you way before hand... sometimes over an hour beforehand) was The Prestige. In fact, I’m going to have to read the source novel on that one because I understand there’s an extra layer of revelation which didn't make it into the movie and maybe the exclusion of that last reveal is what could have given that movie some edge (still, it’s got David Bowie playing Tesla... so it’s not all bad).

Oh rats... you can tell I’m stalling here can’t you.

Ok. Let me give it to you straight. I don't have a clue why so many people liked Inception because, frankly, it was very much a dumbed down attempt at doing something which was probably ransacked from an old 50s sci-fi short story and would probably have best been served as a ten minute short... not a two and a half hour movie which, in the end, says “Hey! Make your mind up audience. Is he dreaming or isn’t he? You decide.” I knew he was going to truncate the last, all important shot of the movie like that... it’s similar to the serendipity moment Hal Hartley had in the editing room when he was working on Henry Fool and realised that by cuting a shot down early he could leave a completely ambiguous ending. In Inception’s case though... doesn’t work if you can see it coming. To be fair to Nolan though, he's effectively written himself into a corner at this point and a reveal to either one of the two possible endings would have divided the audience.

What more to say?

The special effects were nice... or perhaps that would be better phrased as... the imagination behind some of the efffects was okay. I especially liked the part where the dream architect is folding up bits of the city as she walks about it.

And the acting was okay too. I’m really not that familiar with DiCaprio (seen very few of his movies although I liked him in Shutter Island) but he seemed competent enough. Ditto Ellen Page who was absolutely amazing in both Hard Candy and Juno. And, of course, Marion Cottilard and the rest of them were all fine too.

And a servicable score by Hans Zimmer although I liked the last three albums I bought of his a lot more than this one.

So... nice effects, great performances, not so bad score... but to me it really means nothing unless you have a good solid idea which hasn’t been done to death before (in many ways this is almost a remake of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ... but instead of having virtual layers of reality within a game you have them within dreams). And although I believe that a movie is at least trying if it shows you something you’ve never seen on screen before (as this one does in a few places) I’m afraid that the most this one was doing was trying my patience.

I guess for me the true test of a film is whether it's got repeat viewing potential. I can repeat watch films like Blade Runner and The Third Man forever. I certainly don't think I could sit through Inception ever again.

Should you go and see it though? Yes. Absolutely. I’m one dissenting voice where thousands of others are shouting the absolute opposite. Go see it for yourself and make your own mind up. I didn’t like Avatar either... so what do I know?