Money Monster

Wacking The Bankers

Money Monster
2016 USA Directed by Jodie Foster
UK cinema release print.

Okay.... so Money Monster has got to be one of the worst movie titles to come along in quite some time. Absolutely not something which would tempt me to go and see it at the cinema and, when you put the names George Clooney and Julia Roberts in the mix, much as I do like both those actors, it sends out big ‘stay away’ signals to me because, as great as these two are (and they are great at what they do), they tend to not very often make the kind of movies I would go and see. At least, not when they are working on a project together.

If you further add in the ingredient “Directed by Jodie Foster”, then you have another negative point stacked up against it. Sure, I also appreciate the acting skills of Jodie Foster (ever since seeing her in Bugsy Malone and Taxi Driver) but seeing large scale actors take on directing duties always sounds, to me, like they’re fiddling around with an experimental vanity project. Yeah, I know. It’s a terrible prejudice to have, for sure, but that’s my thinking.

However, despite all these potential hurdles, what got me into the cinema to see this thing was one of the few things that studios often tend to rely on but which rarely, in my experience, seem to actually work, one way or another. I’m talking about the trailer here. It was a good trailer which seemed somewhat hard hitting and which harkened back to a 1970s style of movie making, as seen in films like Network, it seemed to me. It was intriguing and it felt like it was going to say something really sly about the way people are manipulated by big corporations and, in a way, I guess it does.

Therefore, I was more than delighted when I saw this picture because, although it doesn’t quite have that 1970s vibe I was hoping for, and might not be quite as hard hitting or satirical as I’d have liked, it is a solid piece of cinema and all the cast and crew, in front of and behind the cameras, deserve a big round of applause for this one. It takes a subject which could, quite easily, be over in three quarters of an hour and pushes the boundaries to places where it doesn’t take you in the trailer, and which leaves a surprising amount of the last half an hour out of the equation.

The film tells the story of a day in the life of Clooney’s character Lee Gates, a financial personality for a TV channel, and the last show with his producer Patty, played by Roberts. In the middle of a live show where they are investigating the crash of a big company and the ‘shareholder’s fallout’, losing 800 million dollars, a victim of said crash, Kyle (played by Jack O’ Connell), takes Clooney hostage and makes him wear a suicide vest until he can get some answers. As the film goes down a semi-predictable route, the actual details that begin to emerge as Roberts and her crew are forced to investigate what really happened, as opposed to the cover story of a computer glitch, becomes what the real story is about.

Now although, as I said, I tend to avoid Clooney and Roberts due to some of the parts they take on, you can’t argue that these two are absolute professionals and they do their job to perfection here. As does Jack O’Connell playing the reluctant but hot headed antagonist/victim in the picture. The performances of all three, plus their brilliant co-stars, turns a somewhat clichéd but ultimately sound story into riveting drama and, of course, Foster makes a really good job of things too...

The director perfectly captures the ensuing chaos of a live show about to go on the air, not to mention the shenanigans that happen once the ‘terrorist’ of the piece enters the story. It’s a polished, fluid kind of rawness she captures, to be sure, but it is well covered with a lot happening on screen a lot of the time. The fact that she makes it so easy for the audience to follow everything that goes on speaks volumes about her skill at helming such a production. There is an impending sense of doom that starts to take a hold of you as the film progresses and, while it might be fair to say that there’s a certain amount of inevitability in terms of the final ten minutes of the movie, the fact that Foster can keep such a tight reign on the suspense while still managing to make you laugh at certain scenes within the ‘heat of the moment’, proves she knows her stuff, as far as I’m concerned.

Another aspect of it is that the cops in the story, who are supposed to be the good guys, almost come acrosss as the bad guys in the film. They are generally portrayed as inept a lot of the time, making the wrong calls and, when it counts, adding as much tension to the final outcome as possible. The police do not come out looking good in this one and one wonders if this is one of the agendas of the writers or director here. Either way, as the tension mounts and the story takes the viewer out of the studio environment which it stays in for the majority of the film (with occasional cuts to other characters involved in the investigation outside), the one group of people you really wish weren’t on the scene is the local police force. In some ways they become as much of an antagonist in direct contrast to Jack O’ Connell’s character becoming less of one as the running time moves inexorably towards its final solution. .. which I’m certainly not going to spoil for you here.

There have been a few of these kind of movies over the years, when powerful organisations are investigated due to the aggressive intervention of ‘the little guy’ but, at the moment, it’s in a minority amidst all the other kinds of movies playing at cinemas at the moment. It’s a welcome alternative to, and distraction from, the various super heroes and orcs showing across the country at the moment and this alone makes it worth your time to buy a ticket. Not the best film you’ll see at the cinema this year but certainly a pretty interesting one and if you like the actors involved in this one and are interested in seeing something which is, at the moment, a little bit different to anything else you are going to see out there, then Money Monster is definitely one to go take a look at. The pacing is pretty fast and the dramatic situations unfold at a rate of knots without killing the credibility of the situation. Not a bad evening out, if you get a chance.

Hail, Caesar!

Hot Hail

Hail, Caesar!
2016 UK/USA/Japan
Directed by The Coen Brothers
UK cinema release print.

Ha! You know, when I first saw a trailer for this movie on the internet sometime last year, I thought the idea of this one looked promising but I was in no way expecting this to be a good movie. It looked like a whole bunch of actors and film-makers having a whale of a time and, quite often when this happens, you often find the people making the movie are going to have a far better time than the audience who are going to be watching this. I might cite the 1967 version of Casino Royale or 2015’s Mortdecai (reviewed here) as examples where this tactic seems to seriously backfire on the studio.

Another problem I have, and which made me fairly wary is that, much as I love some of the Coen’s movies dearly, I do find them a bit hit and miss and, over the last five or six years, I have found their movies definitely in the miss category, for me. I love the Coens of The Big Liebowski, Oh Brother Where Art Thou and The Man Who Wasn’t There but some of their other stuff seems to be less emotionally involving to me.

Well, I needn’t have worried on either count, as it happens, because although it took me 20 minutes or so to warm up to their latest opus, Hail, Caesar!, I absolutely loved it, once it got going. The film stars Josh Brolin as famous Hollywood ‘fixer’ Eddie Mannix, a fictional version of the real person who works here in a made up studio where thinly disguised ‘Coenised’ movies from Hollywoodland’s rich legacy are in production. When famous film star Baird Whitlock, played by George Clooney as a kind of Charlton Heston via Victor Mature type, is kidnapped from the set before the completion of his latest movie Hail, Caesar!, it’s up to Eddie to get him back while still trouble shooting other problems with various stars who work for the studio.

In a nice touch to the William Wyler version of Ben Hur, the fictional Hail, Caesar! shares the exact same subtitle of that movie, A Tale Of The Christ. There’s even a hilarious scene where Clooney is trying to channel the same look of reverence that Heston does in Ben Hur, when Christ gives him water on his journey to be a galley slave, although the roles are slightly twisted around here, just like a lot of other stuff in this movie is nicely subverted... such as the gay subtext highlighted with a joke in the sailor’s song and dance number performed by Channing Tatum as Burt Gurney, this film’s equivalent of Gene Kelley.

Other people who populate this film are Tilda Swinton in a kind of dual role playing a kind of ‘twins’ version of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, Ralph Fiennes as Laurence Laurentz and Scarlet Johannson doing a kind of earthy version of famous water dancer Esther Williams. The character which made it completely watchable for me though, is the role of Alden Ehrenreich as ‘singing cowboy’ sensation Hobie Doyle. I don’t know who this guy is but he’s phenomenal. Sure, he gets some good laughs in scenes with Ralph Fiennes character as the studio attempt to ‘change his image’ but it’s his other role in the film which really help bring this all to life.

Hobie is obviously a parody of the Roy Rogers/Gene Autrey cowboy stars of yesteryear and can perform some neat tricks as demonstrated here. He even has his very close parody of a Gabby Hayes style sidekick who, obviously, gets all the laughs from the fictional audience when he takes his date to see one of his films. And about that ‘date’. This movie is very much a film watcher’s movie... like a Quentin Tarantino piece, a lot of the pleasure in watching it is derived from how many famous movie references you can pick up on. A real movie spotter’s pursuit, is this. We only hear her name teased a few times in the movie, for a while, and as soon as I heard her name, Carlotta Valdez, my brain was on fire. I spent the next twenty minutes or so of the movie agonising where I’d heard it before until it finally kicked in and I realised that this was the name of the fictional, historical figure that Kim Novak is pretending to be channeling for the benefit of James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo. Oh my gosh, I thought to myself, are they going to go the whole hog and make her look like the ‘Portrait of Carlotta’ right down to the iconic hairstyle in the Hitchcock movie?

As the film wore on and I realised the Coens weren’t taking the strength of their parody too seriously (I’ll get to that in a minute) I then started thinking that maybe they were going to have Hobie dating a parody of the Mexican Spitfire, Lupe Velez, herself. As it happens, it turns out Hobie is dating a version of the famous actress Carmen Miranda and, it has to be said, Veronica Osorio, the wonderful actress playing her here, makes it more than apparent who she’s supposed to be in her very first scene. She is an absolute delight in the role and her scenes with Alden Ehrenreich, as Hobie entertains her with both a real lasso and, later, a spaghetti lasso, are just so charming they will probably win your heart right over. However, Hobie’s solo scenes as he goes after the kidnappers are equally great and... I’ll briefly mention those in a little while.

George Clooney, of course, is also brilliant in his role and when it turns out he’s kidnapped by communist writers, his scenes with them are pretty funny too. And it was nice to see Patrick Fischler as one of those writers... I always wondered what had happened to that guy who played the video store clerk in Ghost World and... here he is. He has a very distinctive face which makes him a good person if you want someone to stand out and add texture to a crowd. Clooney is marvellous, though, and the more stuff he makes these days which border on almost parodying himself, to an extent (with a little bit of stretch), forces me to admire him more and more as both an actor and a star as the years go by. Some people might be afraid to take on this kind of role but, as usual, Clooney gives it his all.

Now there are some problems with the parody in this movie, to be sure, and I’ll highlight those soon enough, but one of the things which made me stop worrying about the authenticity of a lot of the stuff on show in the movie is that, it soon becomes obvious that the Coen’s just don’t worry too much about making it all authentic. These are broad strokes which create a brief impression rather than full blown homage and, as such, it kinda works at its own level. Where it’s less satisfying is when some aspects of a parody are finely tuned to the smallest details but maybe slightly tarnished by another element being less so...

For example, the sailor’s song and dance number, headed up by Channing Tatum, is an incredible movie moment. It’s clear that the choreography and dialogue of those big MGM mid-fifties numbers have been studied here to the nth degree. And Tatum has obviously been looking at Gene Kelly and the way he moves, the way his face expresses (or doesn’t always) and the way he delivers his lines... it all works really well. As does the consistency of the simplicity of the colour scheme of the set being used. However, what doesn’t work about this scene is the veracity of those colours themselves. The MGM films used to be... well, over the top and almost over saturated beyond belief in those movies... the colours here, while simply wrought, have none of the luminosity of the hues used in the films the Coens are trying to emulate in this scene... which kind of spoiled the overall effect of it, for me.

Another example would be Carter Burwell's score throughout the movie. Now this must have been a dream job for a composer to work on as he has to cover a range of musical styles due to the nature of the content... but I noticed that he was more successful in some styles than others... although that might not have been his fault. For instance, the music he delivers for the Hail, Caesar! movie within a movie scenes are typical in structure and tone of the kinds of scores these films were getting by the likes of Dr. Miklos Rozsa but... well, they just don’t seem to have the same punch or over the top-ness, over scored quality of the originals. However, like I said, it might not be the composer’s fault, it might just be mixed too far back into the background compared to the way the music would have been mixed into a genuine Roman/Religious epic of the mid 1950s so... well I’ll find out once the CD arrives.

The composer does do some really great stuff here too though and, getting back to Hobie going after the kidnappers, the scenes where the Coen’s get almost metatextual and use the vernacular of the 1940s and 1950s film noirs to tell that part of Hobie’s story is faithfully backed up by Burwell with something which really does the trick in those sequences. So, yeah... looking forward to this score arriving in the post sometime soon.

And that’s what I thought of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Hail, Caesar! Once it starts coasting along the movie is a real breath of fresh, or maybe that should be reconditioned, air midst a cinematic climate where no other film is being made quite like this one at the moment. So as far as subject matter and approach are concerned, there’s nothing else like it out there currently... so if you want to see something different then check this one out. I, for one, had a great time with this movie and if you’re a fan of old school Hollywood movies then you’ll probably have a good evening with this one. Definitely a big thumbs up for this one... if I had a massive, giant thumb to do that with.

Tomorrowland

Hack To The Future

Tomorrowland
2015  USA
Directed by Brad Bird
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very slight spoiler on the content 
of one action scene in here towards the end.

Tomorrowland is a new movie by Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles (which I loved) and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (reviewed by me here). It’s based around, or at least inspired by, concepts and ideas from the long running Disneyland theme park attraction Tomorrowland. However...

First of all, I’ve never had the opportunity to go to Disneyland so I really can’t say how much of a good... um... adaptation (?) it is of the original attraction but, I suspect the “inspired by” I just tagged it with is probably closer to the truth than anything else you’d want to say because, it turns out, the place has gone through a lot of reinventions and reboots in its long history, since it first opened its doors in 1955.

Secondly... I wasn’t that sure of what to expect from a movie based on a theme park attraction. The only ones I can think of, off the top of my head, are the Disney Pirates Of The Caribbean movies and... well I figured that at least the first one was okay. Can’t say a lot for the three sequels but, using that twisted logic, I decided to give this movie a go because the trailer was kinda intriguing and with that kind of track record from the studio... well... as long as I steered clear of Tomorrowland 2: Dead Man’s Jetpack... I figured I should be fine.

Now, I was unaware, when I went into this movie, about the decidedly mixed reception this film had been getting with people but I’m happy to say I was pleasantly surprised by this one. The only thing I really knew about it going in was what I said in my first paragraph and what I’d seen on the trailer which has been playing at my local cinema for the last few weeks. But the film surprised me by being, a) quite good and b) not what I was expecting after seeing said preview.

Now I’m sure a fair amount of my readers will have seen the trailer in question, which includes footage of a girl touching a randomly found pin badge and being transported to a future world of wonder whenever she touches it, while simultaneously still existing in her own time and place... although she is blind to our own experienced reality while she’s touching the pin. Well, all I can say without giving away too much about the film, which I’m really not wanting to do here, is that the version of the future world she sees and as the audience perceives it is not the whole story and is a little misleading in its entrance into the main premise of the film. And so I have to congratulate the writers and directors in taking a page from their own screenplay when it comes to the nature of the trailer in regards to the actual end product but... again... I don’t want to elaborate that point too much for fear of spoiling some of the reveals in this to you.

What I will say is that the main protagonist who you see in the trailer, asides from a nice bookend, framing element coming in at various points in the movie, doesn’t really arrive in the film as a properly established character until at least 20 mins into the movie but... that doesn’t matter and it’s a nice surprise because the film does jump in time a little by starting out in 1964 and then shooting off to the present day. Of course, not all of it is set in the present day, due to the nature of the story. Regardless of this, though, it starts off running and continues with a helter skelter pacing that really doesn’t let you stop and breathe much before the next exciting spectacle is upon you... and this film is all about cinematic spectacle, that’s for sure.

Now, it’s a great film but it does have its issues... the excessively hasty pacing being one of them. I would have preferred a little more stillness in there, I think, but Brad Bird is especially well known for
his animated masterpieces and that kind of art form does tend to move things along faster. Also, I suspect this is Bird’s natural preference for movie making too so that’s fair enough. It’s a personal issue I have with the film and I think that might be more my problem than anybody else’s.

Another thing I found kinda hard to handle, and I suspect this is another aspect of Bird’s personality, which is probably why he melds so well with Disney, is that the film is extremely hopeful, naively so perhaps, and is all about believing people can make a positive difference to the world... which is great. However, I did find it a little bit preachy and way too overkill in a lot of places. To explain...

When I was a young ‘un, growing up in the 1970s, my mum and dad used to take me, pretty much every year, to see the pantomime version of Peter Pan on stage. More often than not it would have Ron Moody playing Captain Hook and usually, for some strange reason, a grown woman playing Peter Pan (which possibly confused a load of kids but who am I to judge?). I think I probably loved it but I remember one part of the show where audience participation was a must. Peter Pan’s trusted ally, the fairy Tinkerbell, would be half dead and on the ropes... her little light fading and about to be extinguished forever. That is, unless the audience, with the power of their combined voices, could yell at the stage that “We believe in faeries” really loudly. Then, of course, after much frenzied repeat yelling and much milking of the audience, Tinkerbell’s little light would return to full brightness and we could all carry on with the show. I’m pretty sure that this probably carried over into the classic Disney cartoon of this J. M Barrie property too... although it’s been so many decades since I’ve seen it that I can’t be absolutely sure if it did. The point is, the film Tomorrowland suffers, if you want to see it that way, with a manifestation of exactly the same thing. It’s all about people believing enough in the future so that their will power can change and fix it... and so this whole “Tinkerbell solution” is something the director here has in common with that and... well, even as a kid, I used to hate that bit of Peter Pan.

Other than this stuff, though, the movie is a really fun ride... if you’ll pardon the analogy. There’s conflict and chase scenes aplenty with a much more ruthless and deadly intent behind the group of henchmen sent to kill our three heroes than you may guess from the trailer. Bird is not afraid to show both people and “animatronics” dying in the movie, if it helps provide credibility to his fairytales... something of which I wholeheartedly approve when it comes to getting certain points across and maintaining a modus operandi which won’t upset the suspension of audience disbelief.

This film is, by nature, extremely CGI heavy but, even with that constant distraction, the three main protagonists played by George Clooney, Britt Robertson and Raffey Cassidy are all really excellent and Hugh Laurie as their main antagonist, of a sort, is a good balance to address the kinds of cynical audience issues (such as some of the ones I have) and then hold them up as a villanous response for the three heroes to punch against. It all works extremely well.

The film has some nicely designed frames, some good editing which rarely gets confusing during the intense action sequences and a brilliant score by one of the director's chief collaborators, Michael Giacchino, sounding a lot here like he’s channeling Philip Glass in a couple of sequences (and I really hope they decide to put those cues on the upcoming soundtrack album.. fingers crossed). Michael Giacchino rarely turns in a dull score and his work here is par for the course... that is to say, appropriate and wonderful.

The film includes a nice little nod to Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and Jules Verne but the best scene for me is when Britt Robertson’s character Casey is trying to track down information on the pin and she goes to a science fiction memorabilia store. Here you will see a whole range of cool stuff as set dressing... the store is amazing and I was all over spotting the many references which includes models of Robby The Robot, Robot B-9 from Lost In Space, Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still, a lifesize Han Solo in carbonite and a load of other cool stuff that will make collectors and fans alike wondering the prices of such things. A major action scene takes place in this store and, at one point during a chase, there is even a copy of the old Planet Of The Apes board game which I had as a kid and I recently mentioned in my review of Planet Of The Apes here. The only thing which was bugging me was... did they actually destroy any of these collectibles. Mr. Bird, for the record, a “no nerdy science fiction items of memorabilia were harmed during the making of this motion picture” during the end credits would have taken a weight off my mind.

Seriously though people, barring the caveats I mention elsewhere in this review, Tomorrowland is definitely worth some of your time. It’s a slick, action packed folly where all the main protagonists have their eyes on a prize of a hopeful  and positive future for the human race. It’s kinda like a mid-1980s sci-fi blockbuster but with more budget to bring some of the crazier concepts to life properly and with some really great actors in front of a crew and director who clearly know what they’re doing. Not a great movie but a really charming, good one which is definitely worth at least one watch... and I’m sure a whole bunch of you are going to dig it a lot more than I did so... you know... put it on your list and check it out sometime. And watch out for low flying jetpacks.

The Monuments Men

The Art Of War

The Monuments Men
2014 USA/Germany
Directed by George Clooney
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Very slight spoilers which, in no way, 
give away the course of the story.

There’s a scene about three quarters of the way or more through The Monuments Men which best demonstrates one of the things I found a little disappointing with this film overall. One of the lead protagonists has stepped on a landmine and cannot move for fear of blowing up himself and his colleagues. We’ve all seen this scene before in countless war movies, of course, and it’s a cheap but effective trick used by directors for decades to build up suspense, tension and force the audience to empathise with their characters even more... but this time it doesn’t quite work in it’s intent. At least that’s how it felt for me.

Instead of being played fully for tension, the director, as is his right, seems to want to play it for yet another in a series of “war romp” scenes. It’s not a funny situation but it’s played quite lightly and, for me, this really highlights the movie’s one, main flaw. There’s no edge to it and almost no consequence. It’s also dealt with in an unrealistic manner too... I thought the central characters were smarter than this.

Now my reaction to this might just be one of conditioning, to be honest. I’m really not one for watching too many war movies but we have been under fire in recent years from films like Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and The Pianist, which show the horrors of war and pull, relatively few, punches in showing the raw misery that conflict will always bring into being. The Monuments Men, on the other hand, seems to be of direct lineage from films such as Kelly’s Heros and The Dirty Dozen in it’s genetic make-up (two films, I hasten to add, that I’ve not yet seen... so if I’m wrong in this judgement, please feel free to take me to task over it in the comments section below) and, naturally, films like The Inglorious Bastards and Tarantino’s own war movie in this vein, Inglourious Basterds (not actually a remake or homage to the former, in fact)... the latter being perhaps the best of this lineage to combine the War Is Hell but also, the bizarre War Is Fun element of a conflict which has been the subject of so many hundreds of movies since the 1940s.

It’s a decision and Clooney goes with his gut and delivers a war romp which is, in all honesty, quite entertaining... but finds itself at odds with itself, I believe, because some of the scenes he’s written in to deliver “the dark edge” are perhaps played a little too lightly for their own good. And I’m not putting that down to the acting because everybody in this movie... Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Jean Dujardin, John Goodman, Hugh Bonneville, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban and even Clooney himself, are all absolutely brilliant in their performances and it doesn’t seem to be their tone which is the problem.

For instance, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, when it comes to a movie set during the Second World War, that some of the main protagonists are going to wind up dead at various points in the movie. However, I found that, even though I liked all these characters, I didn’t really feel much when they died. Don’t get me wrong, the other characters on screen did... but I, as the audience, didn’t feel much. Similarly, when a couple of characters realise the gold they’ve been running their hands through is comprised of the gold fillings of dead victims of the German concentration camps, although we are given time to dwell on this horror, along with the characters, we don’t really feel it as such. At least I didn’t and, believe me, I’m not taking the actual events any less seriously for it.

I think the “lightening” effect I’m talking about here is something which came in the struggle to find the perfect edit and sound mix from the film. And also perhaps from the baggage that some of the actors have brought with them from other roles. Many of these are noted for giving some great comic performances and maybe that’s thrown into the mix too. Perhaps some shots needed to be a little longer or maybe have a less beautiful score than the “classic war anthem” style of composition, with direct lineage from the scores of Ron Goodwin, that master composer Alexandre Desplat has delivered... much to my puzzlement as this score doesn’t seem to me to fit his usual modus operandi, although it’s still a score and a half, to be sure.

So yeah. The film does seem a little, “war light” in places. Especially after such a brilliant opening montage of static shots of works of art juxtaposed with the sounds of hammer blows. This short sequence was almost stomach turning, when seen on a big screen, in the way the sound and image worked together in rhythm and sets you on edge for an intense and dynamic darkness which never quite delivers, at least on that front.

Okay, so that’s a pretty negative view of the film so far so let me just temper that a little and tell you about the good way of looking at this...

It’s actually quite fun and it’s well acted, holds your attention and doesn’t, not even once, get boring.

It was possibly scripted so that certain scenes would go to the various “stars” in the movie to play to their strengths but, honestly, it doesn’t look or feel like it’s been tailored for specific performers in that way and it flows beautifully, not feeling like a series of separate incidents highlighting characters... even though it kinda is in many ways, as the lead protagonists work in smaller, separate units for the majority of the film and only come together for key scenes every once in a while. It’s a solid little story and although it certainly doesn’t drum home the horrors of war I was talking about earlier, they’ve not been forgotten or pushed to the background either (maybe tonally but not in terms of sweeping them under a rug or something like that).

What we have in The Monuments Men, I think, is one of those films which is going to play on television during seasonal holidays like Christmas and Easter for decades to come and will, in future years, be rightly identified as a classic. I know, for instance, that when future generations sit down and watch this, they’ll see a snappy and solid little war movie with a great cast of actors who all died many years ago and wonder why this didn’t make a bigger splash when it landed at the box office on its release. The haze of nostalgic rediscovery is as valid a process of receiving the art form as any other, it’s my belief, so I think this film will be remembered well when it starts to be included in text books of the history of war films in years to come. But don’t take my word for it... go and see this possible classic in cinemas now while you still can. It’s nothing like a perfect movie for us now... but it may well be a perfect movie in the future.

Gravity

LAUGHING GRAVitY

Gravity
2013 USA
Directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: This will have some big spoilers weighing down the end of the review but I need to talk about certain things leading to the conclusion of the movie so... you have been warned.

About halfway through the movie Gravity, I realised that, in a way, I was watching an old Laurel and Hardy comedy short... but I’m getting ahead of myself again. I’ll circle back to that in a while.

Gravity is the new film by Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón, who also directed another science-fiction film I liked called Children Of Men. It’s spectacular and spellbinding and, for sure, all the good things you’ve probably already heard about it. Not only that, it’s technically a great achievement when you look at what you’re presented with in terms of what’s actually up there on the screen as opposed to how much of that could have been achieved in real life instead of being done on a computer. The performances of the actors, of course, are real life but, well, I don’t think I’d be wrong in saying that, with the amount of CGI in this movie, it's essentially one big animated movie. In fact, there’s actually a scene a little way in which features another character from the same studio, Warner Brothers... that of Marvin The Martian, from various of their Looney Toons cartoons. A nice nod from the director, perhaps, in acknowledgement of the nature of the beast he’s created for us to watch here.

Marvin The Martian isn’t the only cinematic reference here either. There’s a shock moment involving a dead body that has the same visceral impact as a very similar scene in a moment in Jaws, this one coming fairly early on in the film with a floating body in a space ship. And another nice touch is a scene where Sandra Bullock, as the film's lead protagonist, is stripping out of the first of a few spacesuits she has to wear throughout the movie in zero gravity. I’m pretty sure that Cuaron and the rest of the crew must have at least been thinking about the opening sequence of Roger Vadim’s Barbarella when they filmed this, even if it wasn’t a direct homage to that movie (which, incidentally, I believe it was, it’s quite similar).

All in all, I have to say that I was surprisingly impressed with the film, both by the aforementioned CGI which I didn’t really find myself thinking about as much as I thought I was going to, and by the script, score and performances. But there was one thing I did find myself a little irritated by and that brings me back to my opening remarks.

Back when the BBC used to regularly show Laurel And Hardy comedy shorts on television in this country (alas, those days are long gone and future generations are suffering from the lack of these in their lives) there was often a moment when something would be wrecked with good old Ollie left in the ruins. Then stray bricks would start raining down on his head and Stan and Ollie’s facial expressions would do what they did best, make you laugh from even the thinnest of material. Then the bricks would slowly start falling again. Then they’d stop for a bit. Then another would fall, just to add insult to injury to Ollie’s predicament and fuel to your laughter. Then another one would fall and, eventually, you were always on the edge of your seat just waiting for that last brick to fall.

Cuarón’s Gravity is much the same. It’s not the one trick “something bad happened and now we have to solve that one problem and get back to Earth” pony that I'd expected it to be. In fact, the script is rather clever in managing to have an ongoing problem that constantly... um... cycles back to be a new threat again at regular intervals. And there are other problems our heroes have to face throughout the movie which occur as a “for want of a nail” cascade effect and the smallest of consequences of fall-out from that... and this is where I got just a little irritated at times.

On the edge of my seat, yes, but... well... I was always waiting for that one, last brick to fall. So to speak.

So much so that, in the final sequence when a door is opened and water comes flooding into a space capsule, threatening one of the characters with drowning, I was really finding myself thinking of Jaws again and waiting for the director to “send in the shark”. Possibly complete with an underwater zombie in tow like in Zombie Flesh Eaters but, well... my point is that by the time I’d seen the main protagonist survive so many “piled on” perils in one short movie... I was kinda expecting the absurd at this juncture.

Now then, that spoiler warning is going to drift into full effect right now so, if you don’t want to know stuff, stop reading now.

The film is essentially a two hander between Sandra Bullock and George Clooney but... not for long. Once Clooney’s seasoned astronaut character has done his bit to set Bullock onto a trajectory of survival, he cuts himself loose to save her and drifts back off into space to slowly die. However, there’s been reports that a lot of people have been complaining about the last twenty minutes or so and I’m guessing that it’s the scene where Clooney comes back into the narrative, ghost-like, to a dying Sandra Bullock and tells her how to survive the next bit of her journey back towards Earth that is giving some audience members problems. Some will see this sequence as a supernatural or even religious experience but... it really doesn’t have to be, if you don’t want it to be. Sandra’s character is already drifting out of consciousness by this point and she’s very much in a dream state, near death. Lots of people, myself included, can solve problems in their sleep with solutions which they just wouldn’t have thought of in a conscious state. So there’s the scientific grounding behind that scene if you are so inclined.

Personally, I think that the director, who is also one of the writers, is smarter than that and is fully aware that he’s given us a little scene which will happily fulfil both viewpoints. These narrative ambiguities are the stuff that stories are made of.

Also, there’s a nice scene I have to mention where the heroine is crying and we see a couple of her tears floating around the inside of a spaceship. Don’t think I’d seen that before, that I can remember, and it’s always the mark of a good director if he can show you something on film that you’ve never seen before. Usually it’s these simple ideas, overlooked by most and drifting into the subconscious, which are the most powerful cinematic moments and give the movies some heart. Think of the scene with the vibrating water in the glass in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being (parodied quite brilliantly again by Spielberg with tyrannosaur footprints made visible in Jurassic Park) or the scene in The Lost World: Jurassic Park 2 where the glass windscreen is slowly cracking under some of the main characters. This stuff is what really lingers in the 24 frames per second, beating heart of cinema... when the jumbled up heads of most of the the audience have forgotten them. This is what art is best at and it’s why Cuarón, in many ways, is very much a great artist.

Whether you agree with that statement, of course, is not important. What is important is that we have here a film that is unbelievably spectacular, quite suspenseful (you’ll be holding your breath like you do in a submarine movie) and, above all, an entertaining night out at the cinema. And seriously don’t wait for DVD or Blu Ray for this one. If you can see it on the big screen then it’s the kind of film you should make that trip for. The 3D is pretty good on this one too and greatly benefits the movie. Gravity has the gravitas of serious drama, the Newtonian weight of great art and the spectacle of popcorn sensibility entertainment... and that’s a good combination for cinema at its best.