Their Finest

Writing Wrongs

Their Finest
UK 2017 Directed by Lone Scherfig
Lionsgate Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Mild spoilers

Their Finest is a movie I missed when it was released into cinemas earlier in the year due, mostly, to an overabundance of product competing for my attention at the cinema (to a certain extent). I wasn’t overstruck on seeing the movie anyway but I knew, judging from the trailer, that it would be one my mum would want to see at some point so it was one of the movies I bought her for Christmas this year, although I wasn’t expecting to have to watch it myself. However, it was plonked on this Boxing Day and so I finally got to see the film after all. Which meant, frankly, that for the last twenty minutes of the movie I was a blubbery, tear stained mess in front of my parents. Which is perhaps something best avoided, to be honest.

Based on the novel Their Finest Hour And A Half by Lissa Evans, Lone Scherfig’s film follows a few months in the life of main protagonist Catrin Cole, played by actress extraordinaire Gemma Arterton, as she is based in London during the Second World War. In dire need of money, a newspaper strip she had to write due to a lack of writing staff in the newspaper she works for catches the eye of one of a number of screenwriters working on films for the Ministry of Propaganda (I think) and she is hired into a male dominant environment to adapt and write the screenplay of the ‘true’ story of a pair of twin sisters who drove their ship to Dunkirk to bring back stranded soldiers.

While she is working for the Ministry’s film division she becomes a shining beacon of her craft, gets her heart broken twice, saves the day endless times with her knack for fashioning plot development and her skill at turning a good phrase and basically goes through her own personal hell waging a stealth war against the male dominated milieu she finds herself in. Not to mention becoming the motivating force behind diva-like, ageing actor Ambrose Hilliard, played wonderfully here by Bill Nighy.

The film is not particularly overtly ostentatious in terms of the way the shots are designed but it does have some nice compositions and it was way more controlled than the last film I saw at the cinema by this director, the 2000 production Italian For Beginners, which complied fairly rigidly with Lars Von Trier’s Dogme 95 rules for making movies at the time. So, obviously, that was a million miles away from this kind of film, which is obviously less naturalistic and more ‘studio stylised’ than the former (although, my one take away from Italian For Beginners when I saw it at cinemas 17 years ago was that it was an amazing film and I really should see it again... I guess I need to get around to doing that again now I write this blog).

The film is fairly pitch perfect, though, in the way it manipulates audience emotion and there are many accomplished elements to marvel at.

Arterton’s almost deadpan, emotionally confounding mask is quite hypnotic here, as she plays the role of a woman of the era in which this is set with the required amount of emotional neutrality shown to the outside world that summarises the British spirit of ‘make do and mend’ in a totally brilliant way. I’ve admired this actress since I first saw her as a Bond girl in Quantum Of Solace in 2008 and it seems to me she’s one of those people who can just knock it out of the park without trying every time I see her take on a role. I was very impressed, also, with her Welsh accent here.

Another interesting thing about the film is that it, in some ways, manages to have its cake and eat it by both romanticising the period and historical events depicted here without going as bleak and raw as you would expect but still managing to make the ugliness and futility of the situation even more potent by using it in a poetically visual way in contrast to the ‘1940s movie time’ it sometimes seems to take its cue from. For instance, there’s a lovely sequence where Arterton is trapped in the streets during an air raid in the Blitz. A bomb lands on a building behind her and she is thrown to the floor by the explosion. As she stands, dirt covered after the initial blast, she sees the dead bodies of people around he and reacts in horror. As she looks closer she realises that they are all mannequins from a shop window which was caught in the blast and starts laughing at her foolishness. This is then counterpointed by her turning the corner and coming across the mangled body of a real woman who was killed in the blast. And it’s little gems of moments like this one that make this movie one to take a look at.

Also, the chemistry between her and actors like the aforementioned Nighy and Sam Caflin is another thing which kept me hooked throughout the movie.

There’s a lot of humour too and one stand out moment for me was when the crew are shooting a Dunkirk beach scene and Bill Nighy comes rushing into the shot standing behind the glass matte painting which has been situated a few feet in front of the camera to add in all the people... completely ruining the effect but, at the same time, showing audience members who are unfamiliar with this technique the reality of one of the more effective of the non-CGI techniques which were being used in many films of the 20th Century (something that director Mario Bava was an absolute master of, by the way... he used to paint a lot of those matte shots in both his own and other director’s films himself).

The film is also blessed with a score by Rachel Portman which manages to capture and enhance the range of emotions from the broad comedy, through the subtle romantic beats and the underlying tragedies of the main protagonist’s life during this period. Which is useful because, although the film does tend to lull you into what you think might be a formulaic ride... the finished product proves to be anything but. There are some things I really didn’t see coming and that includes some sequences which kept the tear ducts flowing, it has to be said.

Not much else to say on this one other than, yeah, it’s one of those wonderful, historical pieces that British productions seem to do best. Their Finest is a film which tugs at the heart strings and... you know... insert your own, less jaded ‘emotional roller coaster ride’ metaphor here. Its glamorous facade does nothing to diminish the poignant, emotional punch it manages to deliver by the juxtaposition of sudden tragedy striking at the same time as some of the film’s more uplifting moments and it’s certainly one I’d recommend. One of the more interesting of recent films set in this period, I think and, as far as I’m concerned, a more engaging one than a certain other movie that depicted events at Dunkirk in the cinema this year.

The Girl With All The Gifts

Gift It Through The X-Shop

The Girl With All The Gifts
2016 UK/USA Directed by Colm McCarthy
UK cinema release print.

Wow. This is amazing. It’s rare that a movie quite lives up to the intrigue and power of the way the trailer for the release has been cut and, since The Girl With All The Gifts had such a wonderfully intriguing trailer, I was expecting something quite good from it, to be sure but... nowhere near the powerful cinematic experience that this film delivers on pretty much every level.

I’ll start of with what is becoming an increasingly frequent caveat in regards to a lot of book to film adaptations recently, to my shame. This film is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by M. R. Carey and, alas, it’s not one I’ve read. I can’t, therefore, tell you how successful it is in terms of translating the source but I do know that, despite the novel and the screenplay being written kind of simultaneously (is my understanding of it), there are some elements from the book which didn’t make it into the movie and, also, the physical descriptions of some of the characters are way off.

That being said, and as I’ve mentioned many times before on here, movies aren’t books and adaptation from one format or another means making artistic choices which can benefit one medium at the expense of elements of the other and... this one is no different, I’m guessing.

What I do know for sure, and without giving away any spoilers, is that we have a British zombie movie which, while the writer and director disown the term ‘zombies’, instead going for the term ‘hungries’, is one of the best post-Romero zombie movies around and stands head and shoulders with other modern classics of ‘infected, zombie like’ creatures as the films in the [oREC] and 28 Later series. Whether the humans have died and come back or, in the case of some of these pseudo-zombie films, had their humanity and higher intelligence killed off by the virus to effectively create the same thing, is kind of a moot point in terms of this cultural phenomenon which started, as far as I can remember, in the early 19th Century.

The film introduces us to Melanie (played by Sennia Nanua) and, indeed, takes her viewpoint during the whole running time. She is one of a bunch of children who share the same... shall we say ‘eating habits’... as the ‘hungries’ that the last pockets of humanity are trying to keep at bay and find a cure for. I won’t give you the full history of how and why these children exist because it’s got a classic horror twist and it’s a nice moment when Doctor Cladwell (played by Glenn Close) reveals this history to Melanie. The film centres around the child, her adoration for her teacher Miss Justineau (played by Gemma Arteton) and her role within a group of survivors of an attack on their base camp including Caldwell, Justineau, Sgt. Eddie Parks (played by Paddy Considine) and Dillon (played by Anthony Welsh).

It’s very much a road movie as the small group try to find their way to some kind of safety and, all the while, with the exception of Miss Justineau, they are as much afraid of Melanie, as they are of the ‘hungries’ who they spend so much of their time trying to avoid contact with. Like most good zombie movies, and I don’t know if this is also true of the book, we never really know the details of the apocalyptic virus and how it first started but, having plunged us right into this world, the Doctor (and the writer) does have a good idea of the life cycle of the virus and, by the time we get to the last third of the movie, it becomes a key thing to understand the way the story evolves... not necessarily taking you to the place you’re kind of expecting it to in the same way you thought it would. Not quite, anyway... although the ending is quite familiar but also so much more than you would normally get from this kind of movie. It’s a good ‘un but, again, in the interests of not spoiling this for anybody... I’ll keep that to myself. I think John Wyndham would have loved this movie, though.

As you would expect from a film with a cast like this, there is some absolutely powerhouse acting going on. I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for both Gemma Arterton and Paddy Considine and, as you would expect, they totally knock it out of the park and are ably supported by Anthony Welsh. Glenn Close, on the other hand, is an actress I’ve never really liked all that much. Don’t get me wrong, she’s an absolutely incredible performer and you can’t fault her work... but she’s never really appealed to me. However, having said that, I think she’s got a real great role here which is perfect for her as a kind of ‘almost but not quite, depending on your moral point of view villain’ in the form of Dr. Caldwell and, yeah, she owns the role totally.

And then we have Sennia Nanua’s central performance as Melanie.

What can I say? I don’t know where they get some of these child actors from but some of them are amazing and, surrounded by some interesting and incredible child co-stars for certain scenes, Nanau manages to deliver an absolutely gobsmacking performance filled with all the subtlety and nuance that you might expect from someone three times her age (whatever that is, there seems to be no information present about that at time of writing this). Given that it’s a movie that someone her age presumably wouldn’t be allowed to legally see in this country, she does wonders here eating and biting her bloody way through various life forms and I can only applaud her performance whole heartedly.

Saying that, it’s not a very scary movie, at least in terms of the expected jump scares that a modern ‘horror film’ might be expected to supply. As far as I’m concerned, however, that just cements the link between this movie and the wealth of zombie movies which have come before. Aside from, maybe, the [oREC] series, which is genuinely scary for the first two outings, this takes its cue from the traditional zombie ‘survival horror’ strand of cinema and it does it very well... with a visceral suspense that slowly builds throughout the movie to its, really very satisfying, conclusion.

And then there’s the music. Oh, I wish there was a CD release of this thing already because the score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer is almost overwhelming in its power and raw beauty and, for a change, it’s been mixed right into the foreground so the movie gets an amazing lift of emotional, brain churning intensity. The opening sequence, for example, is very good but it really gets a sense of rising dread infused into it by the slowly building chanting and humming that plays out throughout certain passages of the movie, sometimes with metallic percussion at points. It’s really a magnificent work and it would be a major crime against filmanity, not to mention musicology, if this remains unreleased on CD. Hopefully some smart record label will try and pick this one up.

And that’s about it as far as The Girl With All The Gifts is concerned. An all round major achievement of intense suspense, zombie mayhem, some very sly and dark humour (the audience I was with were very appreciative of a certain line about whether Melanie would like a cat) and, right near the end, a moral question about the nature of a life form which, when finally answered, seals the fate of the world. An absolutely blistering and brilliant piece of cinematic art and absolutely one to run to as quickly as you can if you’re a fan of zombie movies. A real gem which I will be telling everyone about.

Quantum Of Solace

Quantum Destruction

Quantum of Solace
2008 UK/USA/
Directed by Marc Forster
EON Blu Ray Region B

Quantum of Solace marks the last of the EON James Bond films I have to review for a while (I already reviewed the next in the series, Skyfall,  as my first Bond review here).

When I watched this movie again just recently, after five years had passed, I would have to say that it surprised me in that I realised it wasn’t quite as bad as Die Another Day or Octopussy. That being said, those two are the only Bond films I can think of that I’d rather be watching less than this one. Now I really liked World War Z by this same director, so I don’t know why I didn’t pick up on some of the negative things I’ll throw up here in that movie too... but I understand that the editing schedule on this Bond film was quite, let’s say, challenging and I’m guessing maybe some corners were cut where reshoots may have been better? I don’t know... purely speculating here.

There are some really good things in this movie but they are completely destroyed by the negative factors, as far as I’m concerned. Now, if you read my Casino Royale review, you’ll already know I don’t rate Craig as a credible Bond. He just doesn’t quite look or act the part... and that’s such a shame because he is a great actor and he does an excellent job as a toughie here in the Bond films. In fact, I would go so far as to say he plays an incredible modern action hero... just not a credible Bond. Which I think is a shame because I don’t think it’s even his fault. I’m guessing here that the style of the character is being moulded into something deliberately different by the producers? Who knows?

Anyhow, that aside, this movie suffers from a lot of problems. The plot, which picks up from the previous film, just seems generally thin nonsense all the way through. And Bond acts completely and utterly stupidly throughout the majority of the movie.

I find it a little bit of a strain on the credibility of the central protagonist, whether he’s a credible Bond or not, to be able to think a way out of some unbelievably tough traps but at the same time, is unable to keep himself reigned in so he kills every lead he has to the solving of the “spy mystery” element of the story without even stopping to ask them questions. Seriously, why bother to track your leads down if you’re just going to kill them and then, quite by accident, find another clue somewhere else. This seems to me to be really sloppy writing but... I don’t know what those big studio writers have to go through, so maybe this stuff gets re-shaped and gets away from them via studio intervention until the story kinda goes out the window? Again, I’m just guessing here.

And then there’s the editing thing again. I don’t know if it’s the lack of coverage of actual footage or a conscious decision to go with a tougher, more aggressive editing style but the action sequences in this film are confusing to the point where they become an incomprehensible mess for the most part. Peter Hunt was quite successful when he introduced a more aggressive style into the series back in the sixties Bond films but this is just a melange of half shots put together at a pace which seriously jeopardises your ability to read what is going on or, at least, make the metaphorical visual connections to take you into the next shot at the kind of level required to have a coherent reading.

And it’s not just the action scenes that do this in Quantum Of Solace either. There seems to be an abundance of the same sequence shot from multiple different angles and movement speeds in even some quite sedate scenes... to the point where your eye is just flicking around almost randomly on each cut to try to get your bearings in the piece. This is something I didn’t realise could even happen in a movie before but, yep, you can kind of shoot things as such a melange that basic slow shots just don’t work together when they are edited. It’s like the director or editor took the scene five different ways and instead of editing them into something which could easily be understood... just kinda threw everything into the mix and hoped for the best. Now I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings here and I’m guessing this stuff was happening purely because of the shortened editing schedule... but that’s how I perceived things anyway.

There are a few nice things about the movie, of course.

Thing one... it has one of the best Bond songs in a while. It’s different but it doesn’t push the envelope too far away from classic Bond like Madonna’s Die Another Day did... and neither is it so dreary that I couldn’t make it through even one playing of the single version like the Oscar winning Skyfall song was. This one is just a pretty good Bond song, Another Way To Die, and it’s just a shame, since this move actually does have a title that comes from an original Ian Fleming Bond story, that the lyricist couldn’t work in the movie title somewhere... even if it had just been a single mention like in the opening title song to The Spy Who Loved Me.

Arnold’s score tries hard but it doesn’t sparkle like his first two outings. It’s nothing special but it does provide a certain amount of musical continuity with Casino Royale and I’d like to see him have another crack at a Bond score sometime (whether that will happen again, I don’t know, but I’d like to think the producers will call on him again, much like they used to go back to John Barry once in a while).

The other good thing in this film is, simply, Gemma Arterton... in a small role in which she makes her presence truly felt before being wasted in a Goldfinger tribute where she is killed by being covered naked in oil (as opposed to gold). Such a shame because I believe she could have made a good recurring character for the series.

The other notable thing I can think of about this movie is that Jeffrey Wright becomes only the second actor in the series to play the Felix Leiter character for a second time. Wonderful performance but, alas, like Craig’s portrayal of Bond, this incarnation of Leiter is nothing like the one in the novels (I think Jack Lord’s performance in Dr. No kinda hit the nail on the head in that respect).

And that’s all I’ve got to say on this one, I’m afraid. Not a great movie but entertaining enough, if you just let it wash over you without trying to read too much into it.

I’m really glad this is my last Bond movie review for a while. Over the last year I’ve reviewed all the  EON Bonds and, I will get around to taking another look at the four non-EON Bond films sometime in the future for this Blog... but for now I’m done with Bond. But you can take a look at all my Bond reviews by clicking on the relevant titles here...



EON James Bond Movie Reviews on NUTS4R2

Dr. No
From Russia With Love
Goldfinger
Thunderball
You Only Live Twice  
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Diamonds Are Forever
Live And Let Die
The Man With The Golden Gun  
The Spy Who Loved Me
Moonraker
For Your Eyes Only
Octopussy
A View To A Kill 
The LIving Daylights 
Licence To Kill  
GoldenEye
Tomorrow Never Dies
The World Is Not Enough  
Die Another Day 
Casino Royale
Quantum Of Solace
Skyfall
S.P.E.C.T.R.E

Byzantium

Byzantium Endures

Byzantium
UK/USA/Ireland 2012 (released 2013)
Directed by Neil Jordan
Playing at cinemas now.

I don’t know much about director Neil Jordan, truth be told. I think I saw The Company Of Wolves once, many years/decades ago, but that was it. But I have seen a fair amount of vampire movies and I remember that last year I saw a really good one from Germany called We Are The Night (reviewed here). Since vampire films have become so clichéd again at this particular point in cinema history, I thought the odds of finding a really decent new one like that were pretty astronomical if I’m being honest with you. To discover two such films in such close proximity would, in all fairness, be fairly unlikely.

But, I’m happy to report that Byzantium is just such a film. A truly great vampire movie that people who are interested in this genre will want to see. We also have the invention of a new term for vampires which is pretty cool if you don’t want to just come out with "the V word" and keep a certain distance to a little of the previous genre baggage. In Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s “inspired by” movie “adaptation” of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Scott coined the term replicant to give what became his artificial humans an air of gravitas that the term android just didn’t carry anymore. Similarly, the screenplay to this film by Moira Buffini, based on her own play, comes up with the term “sucreant”... which I really like the sound of, to be honest. It sounds quite filthy, to be sure, and almost instantly conjures up the dark sexuality implicit in the kiss of a vampire.

The film seems to me to concern itself with three main themes, one of which is very typical of a vampire movie.

The first of these is, of course, the question of survival. Vampires survive, and make themselves villains in the eyes of the living, by drinking the blood of the living. Byzantium’s two main female protagonists are vampires sharing a certain relationship (I won’t spoil it by telling you right from the ‘bat’ what that relationship actually is) and managing to survive over the millennia by being ruthless and moving on from place to place when the going gets tough. These two central characters have been running for a long time... but I won’t tell you why, because it will become apparent as you watch.

The second of the themes this movie concerns itself with, it seems to me, is temporal displacement. The movie works on revelations through flashback and sometimes, often in fact, those flashbacks are cross cut with the “present” of the character’s timelines, mixed up in a ghostly fashion through both editing and shots where characters share screen time with other versions of themselves. It sounds clumsy, I know, but actually this director does this with a very nimble touch and the results are pure visual and audio poetry in the mode of some of the great European directors over the years, as opposed to what might have been less confidently handled scenes in the hands of another director.

On the first time I thought I was watching a flashback, for example, which was cross cut with one of the two protagonists talking about the past life of the other... it turned out I wasn’t watching a flashback at all but two separate incidents from the same story happening simultaneously. So the director not only dislocates the characters in time due to the way the narrative leads us in to expecting the possibility of flashback, he also dislocates the very audience who are watching the film. So when the film does go into flashback territory, very soon after, he has already set up the feeling that time is not something which vampires worry about or neccessarily perceive in the same way that we do, despite Gemma Arterton’s alpha female Clara constantly telling her companion not to “look back”. This is a brilliant approach to the telling of the story and it carries all the way through the movie until we get to a certain point near the films beautiful climax.

The third theme this movie is about is... the telling of a story. Now a lot of directors (more than I care for) hold dear the idea that their function as filmmakers is to tell a story. It’s always a statement which causes me to groan loudly because it denies the possibility of cinema to exist without narrative structure... which it clearly can. However, unlike many films, this one isn’t just about the telling of the main protagonist’s story... it’s also about the telling of that story and the consequences of its revelation. And that’s a very interesting thing and, because we have this kind of narrative displacement already in the way that this tale is approached... what could have been a very simple storyline is revealed in tiny pieces and it’s only right near the end that we get the whole truth of the history of the two characters. And it’s even much before then that the discovery and telling of that history becomes a prominent point in the story in and of itself.

And again, because of the juxtaposition of two linear timelines, with one going from A - Z but with the back story scrambled and scattered into a different order and then pitched against it, our sense of temporal structure is shifted in exactly the way that the younger of the two female vampires, Eleanor, played by Saoirse Ronan (perhaps best known for her superb portrayal of the title character in Hanna) experiences it. Time is turned somewhat topsy turvy in a sucreant’s world and this is implicit in the creation process of the species as shown in the place of each vampire’s creation. The very act of becoming a vampire is portrayed as a kind of temporal trick... so this temporal misalignment also becomes part of the narrative thrust which surrounds the world of our main characters. And, of course, because of the way the back story develops as one displaced fragment at a time, it’s sort of like watching a film directed by Nicholas Roeg in some ways, but slowed down to a more relaxed pace which lets itself unfold like the slow opening of a piece of paper with an important word of revelation on it.

The performances are incredible.

I would expect no less of Gemma Arterton now, to be honest. She’s proven herself to be one of the powerhouse actresses of her generation and I look forward to being completely immersed in her character whenever I see her plying her trade on screen. Absolutely amazing.

Brilliant, too, is Saoirse Ronan as the younger of the two vampires. She was brilliant in Hanna and proves here that the performance was no flash in the pan, playing a vulnerable but courageous soul who’s voice-over narrative helps imbibe the already beautiful visual imagery with a deeply poetic feel... and this film is truly a study in the cinema of poetry made flesh. Not quite in the same way as Andrei Tarkovsky or Ingmar Bergman might have achieved that kind of feel but certainly Jordan’s treatment of the text and his faith in his cast and crew delivers a beautiful piece of art that could have easily turned into true exploitation cinema if he and his dark practitioners in the art of collaborative cinema had proven to have a less deft touch. Add in cast members like the always watchable Daniel Mays and the ever changing chameleon actor Caleb Landry Jones and you have a movie which is, in fact, a true masterpiece.

It also, having said all that, doesn’t steer away from the graphic violence or the action set pieces either. A lot of the film is shot with beautifully slow moving camera which slowly reveals the way the actors are related to the space around them and changes your perceptions of that sometimes over the duration of the shot. But when an action piece is called for, Jordan has no problem adjusting the tempo and the editing style to hook us into the hard edged action mode and, similarly, when a piece of vampiric violence is called for, made novelty with a nice little substitute for fangs (which, again, I won’t spoil here) then he really delivers. There’s a decapitation scene at one point which really goes for it and treads the fine line between the poetry of violence and all out unpleasantness which really works well.

The film is not that predictable either, possibly due to the narrative structure, and that’s really something rare these days too. It will have you guessing right up until the end which heads are going to roll, so to speak, and you’ll definitely be rooting for people who may have been portrayed as less sympathetic in anyone else’s retelling of the story.

There’s some nice little shout out’s for vampire fans too, such as Clara going under the assumed name of Carmilla, in reference to Sheridan La Fanu’s short story of the Karnsteins (much filmed in many variations by various directors over the years) and the scene where Eleanour is watching Hammer’s Dracula Prince of Darkness in the hotel she is staying in. Alas, the hotel Byzantium in no way, it seems to me, parallels the hotel in Daughters Of Darkness... but one wonders if that was in the writer’s mind.

It’s also interesting in that, like a lot of modern vampire movies, it plays hard and fast with the “established” rules of the game and picks and chooses just which parts of the myth it wants to retain for the sake of convenience. So, for instance, the vampires in this story are fine hanging around in the sunlight (although they “prefer” the night) but they still need an invitation into somebody’s house to be able to gain entry. It’s always interesting to see which parts modern filmmakers will retain and which they will leave by the wayside... the choices made in this one are all pretty intelligent ones and don’t really hinder the story and it’s telling in any way. Nor set it apart from the established mythology too much either. It invents, adds and enriches without alienating itself too much from its cinematic and literary legacy.

What more can I say? Byzantium is just absolutely bloody brilliant... and I do mean bloody, at times. It’s an absolute must for all true lovers of the vampire genre (and is probably not for Twilight fans, I would guess) and even if you are not a follower of that particular vein of cinema, it’s certainly an intelligently crafted piece of celluloidal delight (as much as that can mean in the digital age) and would still be worth taking a look at whether you’re a fan of these kinds of films or not. An absolute full on recommendation from me. Miss it at your peril.

Hansel And Gretel: Witch Hunters 3D

Every Witchery Way

Hansel And Gretel: Witch Hunters 3D
Germany/USA 2013
Directed by Tommy Wirkola
Playing at cinemas now.

Alrighty.

So now we have the big gingerbread house of a movie that is Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. It’s an intriguing concept, in that it’s something I’ve not expected to see in terms of using a source material to inspire a gung-ho action flick and the writer/director’s certainly taken a good stab at doing something which is almost as irresistible as the succulent confection of a witches abode that features so heavily in the source fairy tale (and also at certain points in the movie). It’s certainly a lot of fun, that’s for sure.

There are also a few problems with it which I’ll also highlight a little as I go through my personal witch hunting experience.

If you don’t already know, this film is a kick-ass action movie in much the same camp as the badly received Stephen Sommers movie Van Helsing, from almost a decade ago. This may be, I suppose why a lot of people don't seem to be that turned on about going to see it... which is a shame because it’s got some nice things to offer. Now, I happen to have really loved the Van Helsing movie so, when I saw the trailers for this film featuring crossbows, gatling guns, flying witchery, Famke Jannsen, Jeremy Renner (who I like a lot as an action hero, ever since I first became aware of him in 28 Weeks Later) and, as the lovely icing on an already rich cake, the fantastic UK actress/glamour puss phenomenon who is Gemma Arterton... I was already kinda full on gagging to see this particular movie.

The film starts off with a pre-credits recap of the fairy tale version of the story (or “a” version of the story) for people who don’t know it, which neatly leads onto an ultimately expected but still nice little revelation about the main protagonists later on in the movie. It’s a pretty cool sequence and, the young girl in particular, looks very much like Gemma Arterton, who she grows up to be while the opening credits sequence plays out. This particular title sequence is a real masterpiece in itself (especially in 3D) with “newspaper” articles which trace the path of the two witch hunters as they grow up and make a name for themselves in the... ahem... “Witch Hunters For Hire” business. The nature of the illustrative drawings used and the way they are presented in 3D make them almost look like those old, Victorian, Pollock’s Toy Theatre cutouts (black and white for a penny, colour for tuppence) and this helps lend a certain sense of larger than life theatricality to the proceedings as we then plunge into a “witch trial” which is stopped by the title characters in their grown up form.

These characters are quick and easy to be established through some verbal and physical shorthand and then the basic plot (and it is pretty basic, it has to be said, though there’s nothing wrong with that) is out of the way and everyone can get on with the witch hunting and general “beating-upness” of the movie in some set pieces which are half way between dazzling and, unfortunately, bewildering. Yes, this movie suffers from some confusing editing during the action sequences, it’s true, but I’m hoping when (and that is a when, not an if) I watch this movie again, on DVD, some of the - fight/chase/run/fight a bit more - sequences will make more sense. To be fair, it might have been that my brain was trying to cope with all the 3D effects and, in tight juxtaposition with a fast action sequence, I was just not processing the information fast enough.

There are some nice supporting characters in the shape of Hansel’s red headed love interest played by the very beautiful Pihla Viitala and also “Hansel & Gretel’s biggest fan”, played by Thomas Mann (who turns in a really likeable performance and who is not to be confused with the German geezah who wrote Death In Venice). The film also features Peter Stormare in a minor villain role but, although he is more than worthy of the character, he never really gets the chance to let rip with his particular kind of craziness and I think this is a case of the specific casting choice raising this viewers expectations of the character via the baggage of his previous roles... which is a shame but, hey, he’s still excellent and credible in it, so I need to temper my expectations a little, maybe.

There’s some nice business with a troll character that I really liked and he really drives home one of the things that I’d kind of subconsciously noticed right from the outset but which was then pushed to the front of my mind when I watched the first big sequence with this character... this film is not for little kids. It’s violent, for sure, but I was kind of expecting it to be the Marvel comic book style of turning violence into a bloodless ballet, which the majority of large budget films over the last decade or so have been guilty of, primarily because of censorship issues and the fears said censorship would have on the box office. This, however, is quite gory all the way through, with loads of decapitation, head pulping, bodies torn apart, bodies exploding and, you know, all the gory stuff. It wasn’t until after I’d seen the movie, when I looked up the director to write this review, that I realised it was written and directed by the same guy who wrote and directed Dead Snow (aka Dod Sno), the excellent, tongue in cheek nazi-zombie movie which was on everyone’s radar a few years ago. This explains a lot. I certainly can’t say I prefer Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters over Dead Snow (which I loved) but now i understand why this movie was refreshingly, for the kind of movie it is, blessed with a penchant for gory bloodletting when it could so easily have bypassed that aspect of the production.

I also think there may have been script issues along the way too... which is a shame. There are some nice details and little character props put in the film and one of these is the fact that, due to Hansel’s childhood experience at the original witch’s gingerbread lair, he has to inject himself with a substance every couple of hours or die... which could have made for a suspenseful scene towards the end of the picture but, alas, all references to this facet of the character seem to fly out of the window by the end of the movie and he goes for long stretches of time without even once “pulling out his plunger” after a certain point. There’s one scene which may explain the reasons for this in terms of story logic, except if that is what was going on, it wasn’t made implicit enough, for me at least, to register. What I think, is more likely, is that the film was originally a much longer cut and the sequences explaining just what is going on in relation to this story element were lost in the edit somewhere along the line. Personally I’d like to see a longer version of this movie where stuff like this is addressed at some point in my near future. Oh well... maybe with the blu-ray.

Another script issue might be the language, which seemed a bit too modern in a lot of places... specifically when it came to the use of swear words in whatever the time period of this film is supposed to be covering. I remember reading an article when I was a kid about “controlled anachronism” in the context of fantasy fiction but, frankly, there’s a lot of reference to “those f*cking witches” throughout the film and this did seem to lessen the credibility of the central characters somewhat... I would have personally gone with a more antiquated set of swear words to run through the film but, all in all, it doesn’t really spoil the movie too much and the pacing is such that you never really have too much time to think about it before being yanked into the next set piece.

So, in essence, what we have here is a movie which is a rollicking action fest, if that’s your thing, and has some pretty cool actors playing some characters with a fair bit of heart and depth (although, it is a shorthand sketchy kind of depth, to be sure) tearing through an adult fairy tale at a fairly fast pace with a good amount of gore thrown into the mix. Some nice scoring, too, in the few places you can actually hear it properly (it does tend to get buried in the mix in places) which I’m looking forward to grabbing for a “stand alone” listen when it gets released towards the end of next month.

This is not the best action movie going, by a long shot, but it is trying something new and it is, by and large, a fairly enjoyable romp in the cinema if you’ve got nothing else to do one night. I’d recommend it to most people but don't go into it with really high expectations... this director is in better form with nazi zombies than he is with twisted fairy tales.

Wrath Of The Titans

Manic Minotaur

Wrath Of The Titans USA 2012

Directed by Jonathan Liebesman

Playing at UK cinemas now

Hmmm... you know I loved Ray Harryhausen films as a kid... loved ‘em... and still do. The original Clash Of The Titans, however, left me feeling a little chilly. I’m going to have to grab a copy of that last one at some point to see if I still feel as disappointed with it as I did when I was a kid or whether my tastes have mellowed over the years.

The remake from a couple of years ago, however, I really enjoyed.

I know I’m in a minority here but I felt it was one of those rare remakes which improve over the original material somewhat, although I have to admit I did miss Bubo the mechanical owl a tad... he was relegated to a joke for a few seconds in the remake (although I have to equally point out that it was a brilliant little reference for us “kids” who are old enough to have seen the original in the cinema). I even liked the ending to that last one... Andromeda was somewhat a non-character I felt, but the ethereal Gemma Arterton sacrifices her immortality (if i’m remembering this right) and comes to earth to “settle down” with Perseus at the end of the movie... and Gemma Arterton is clearly a foxy lady and deserved that ending with her character.

In the sequel, Wrath Of The Titans, Arterton was unavailable to take on the role due to scheduling conflicts and so, much to my disappointment, we join Perseus more than a decade later as he is just putting the last couple of stones on Arterton’s character’s grave. He is now bringing up his young son Helius (which actually does mean son in Greek, it turns out... Thanks, tonights episode of Eggheads!) on his own, after he has promised his dead wife to keep him out of trouble.

After refusing a request for help from his father Zeus on a flying visit, Perseus is forced to go to the aid of him anyway, in that roundabout gather and rescue quest kinda way, after his home village is invaded by some kind of giant, fire-breathing bird. Pegasus arrives to take Perseus to enlist the aid of Andromeda and the secret demi-God she has inadvertently imprisoned, and it’s off on a quest for “Weapons of the Gods” and business as usual.

Andromeda herself is a little more palatable this time around as she’s played by tough beauty Rosamund Pike, replacing Alexa Davalos. However, although she’s definitely got a little more to do this time, including a share of the fighting duties, it has to be said that she’s kind of wasted in this role. This really needed to be a much more meatier part for an experienced actress like Pike to get her teeth into. She does what she can in the role but the character is just not present enough for her to really do anything too interesting with it.

This film starts off quite well, though, and the first half an hour or so, which includes Perseus’ battle against the aforementioned giant, fire-breathing bird and a chase and bash sequence involving a few cyclops’ and their traps in the forest... although the cyclops here are just not as terrifying as the ones in The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad, I should point out.

After these initial sequences though, things do seem to go down hill a little, which is a shame because the director, Jonathan Liebesman, previously directed Battle: Los Angeles which I thought was a great movie. Alas, while this movie tries hard to keep the pace going... it does tend to get dull and lifeless towards the end... the new John Carter movie walks all over this film in terms of heroic-fantasy as an all encompassing genre umbrella which can include things like Greek mythology themed peplum such as this one.

I was told that Bubo was in this one more but it turned out to be a bit of a fake. He is in it for just a few more seconds than the last movie... but only as an inanimate object who is being deferred to in conversation. Frankly, this appearance in no way matches the charm of the previous movie and was a huge disappointment to me. Seriously, writers and directors of pseudo-Titanic movies... I want my R2D2 substitute, mechanical owl flapping around in the air and making funny noises please! Is that really too much to ask in these days of CGI? This is just not on!

This sequence is followed by a fight with a minotaur which is decidedly lacking in interest and was a character who was surprisingly easy to beat. And then we have a big battle at the end of the flick between hell’s armies lead by Chronos against the small, Greek armies. Now Chronos is a pretty good idea as volcanic inspired monsters go and looks quite impressive throwing all that lava around... but, again, like the infinitely more impressive and real life special effect that is Rosamund Pike, it gets kind of weighed down tonally against all the other stuff that’s going on and ends up looking a bit mediocre in comparison.

There’s no real problem with the editing on this one... it’s all fairly competently put together, especially during the action sequences which are all well handled in terms of being easy to understand. You won’t be inundated with edits which are too fast to figure out whats going on.I think sometimes that action directors/editors employ that tactic deliberately because they’ve not remembered to get all the footage they needed to make it understandable... Wrath Of The Titans suffers from no such trouble, I’m pleased to say.

Alas, although Wrath Of The Titans (and its poor 3D transfer which wasn’t as good as the previous movie either, in my humble opinion) is certainly a rip-roaring adventure, I’d have to conclude that there’s certainly a lot more roaring than ripping going on in this one... I did get really bored with it towards the end and almost nodded off in a couple of sections. I don’t think the directing’s to blame on this one either... I thought the scripting could have done with a little rewriting and tightening in places. It was like the movie was almost split into two halves by different writers and the second half got the short end of the trident. If you liked the previous movie you probably won’t hate Wrath Of The Titans and may be willing to forgive it a lot of things (including Perseus’ hair cut) but I suspect you won’t be singing its praises for long either. Despite it’s famous flying steed, bizarrely coloured black instead of white, this movie doesn’t really have the wings it needed.

The Sun’ll Come Out, Tamara!

Tamara Drewe 2010 US

Directed by Stephen Frears

Screening at UK cinemas now

Tamara Drewe is another in a long line of inaccurately credited (they just flat out lie to you) movies which claim to be based on a graphic novel. Anyone here know what a graphic novel is? Because it’s obvious that the people who do the credits of a lot of these comic strip based movies have no idea at all! Tamara Drewe is actually based on a comic strip which ran in The Guardian. It is not a graphic novel. A graphic novel is a totally original work which is written and drawn to be presented in a book format. Tamara Drewe was a strip which was later published as a trade paperback. A trade paperback is a reprinting of a comic strip which is shoehorned (quite badly sometimes when dealing with strips which weren’t designed to be read in that format) into a book format. First and foremost though, it’s a cartoon strip. Seriously, movie producers need to get into the habit of not calling everything with drawings and bubbles a graphic novel just because they think it’s a more sophisticated euphemism for comic book... it isn’t.

This film is actually a strange movie to get a handle on. I’m reliably informed that the comic is an updating of Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd, but since I’ve not actually read any of Hardy’s work I’ll have to pass on whether or not it’s a respectful take on his original. Trying to classify this movie as anything other than a stew of ingredients which hang together in a nicely British way might be a fools errand but I’ll give it a go. It doesn’t really have much of a storyline (not a problem, I love movies without stories or any kind of plot) and although the fly-on-the-wall views of the inhabitants of a small, rural English village which comprise the film may seem to be random and fleeting glances at best, there is a linear thread which ties it all together eventually... it’s just that the story just doesn’t have enough substance to actually bother tying it all up to be honest.

Tamara is a reporter who’s inherited a house in the village she grew up in from her dead parents and stays on a while to oversee repairs to get it on the market and possibly try to get together with her old flame who dumped her years before because of her unsightly nose. She’s had a nose job now (and afterwards, amazingly looks just like Gemma Arterton not wearing a prosthetic) but she kind of gets sidetracked on the “true love” end of things by having affairs with two of the other characters instead. One of these is the famous author husband of a woman who runs a writer’s retreat in the village and the sub-plot of this woman’s put upon life and the tentative steps towards pulling herself out of that life (and the agonising first steps towards love with her from one of her writer guests) is actually much more interesting than the main narrative thrust of the movie. It’s certainly where the heart of the audience lies anyway, judging from the reactions I observed in the crowd around me, which was a mostly female audience aged between 30-50 from what I could see (Note to self: future dating chances improve if you go to see more movies like Tamara Drewe... if you can figure out what a movie like Tamara Drewe actually is). Throw a couple of “meddling kids” into the mix to cause mayhem to everyones life because of a crush on a rock star Tamara is “seeing” for most of the movie, and that’s about all you have in the this cool collection of sketches of rural relations.

What I’ve not said here is that the movie has a lot of heart and some excellent performances, not least from Gemma Arterton playing the titular character (I’m resisting the urge, I promise). She’s been getting a lot of acting gigs lately and rightly so... she’s pretty good and could have carried the film really well if the emphasis of the script had been just a little more on her character.

I’m sad to say I don’t remember much about the score and was absolutely gobsmacked when I found out, via the end credits, that it was composed by Alexandre Desplat. He’s a composer I look forward to hearing but nothing about this particular score stood out enough to crack me over the head with a hefty, golden treble clef like his scores for The Girl With A Pearl Earring and Birth did. That being said I shall probably pick up the soundtrack anyway and explore the richness of Desplat’s smooth notes as a stand alone listen because there’s something about this French composer's scores that usually linger in the memory long after the film or CD has played out. Maybe I need to hear the mix of it on the album to get a better handle on it.

I think Tamara Drewe is actually only the second film I’ve seen directed by Stephen Frears, the other being his Dirty Pretty Things. Like Dirty Pretty Things, I really enjoyed this new movie but it has to be said that it’s not something I could really ever rewatch. Despite my own reluctance for repeat viewing, however, I would certainly recommend this one because it’s quite funny in places (gently so) and because British films need your support. Go catch it before it’s gone!