Thor - Love And Thunder

From Her To Eternity

Thor - Love And Thunder
Australia/USA  2022
Directed by Taika Waititi
UK Cinema Release Print.

Warning: Electrifying spoilers within.

Right then. This is going to be a fairly short review, I think. Not because I didn’t like Thor - Love And Thunder... on the contrary, I loved it... but because it’s really hard, sometimes, to come up with things to say when the movie you’ve just watched is damn near perfect in every way. Now I know I’m in the minority here, judging by talk on the internet... and I know a lot of people didn’t like Eternals either (another truly great Marvel movie, which I reviewed here). I do find a lot of Marvel films a bit hit and miss, to be honest but, seriously, I think this new Thor may be the best movie from Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) as it stands so far. When Marvel get things right... they really get things right.

Okay, so this one is something you can watch without having seen any of the recent Marvel movies after Avengers Endgame. After a brilliant prologue, where we see the origins of the film’s main villain, Gorr The God Butcherer, played by Christian Bale, this one starts off properly as Endgame left things. We have Thor tagging along with the Guardians Of The Galaxy and a wonderful and very strong set up scene which sees Thor inheriting two, giant, screaming space goats. I kept thinking to myself... this is such a strong opening, it’s got to go down hill from here... but no. The movie just keeps going from strength to strength as we have two initial separate story strands starting off... one being Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Kevin (director Taika Waititi back as the comic relief rock creature) leaving the Guardians with the quest of finding the God killer, a trail that leads them back to new Asgard.

Meanwhile, Thor’s ex-girlfriend Jane Foster (played once again by Natalie Portman) is dying of stage four cancer. While trying to fight this, she is called by the shattered remains of Thor’s old hammer Mjonir, in New Asgard, which reassembles itself and turns her into a female version of Thor. But when she doesn’t have the hammer and she reverts back to her Jane Foster alter ego, she still finds herself dying of cancer. So, everybody suddenly finds themselves back at New Asgard on Earth, ruled over by Valkyrie (once again played by Tessa Thompson) when Gorr attacks but fails to kill them... he does, however, kidnap all the children as bait for Thor and his gang, so he can obtain Thor’s second hammer, Stormbreaker, which will allow him to gain access to the character of Eternity. Now, Eternity looks pretty much like he did in the comics but, Marvel are mixing thing up again since he was not originally a Thor character but a character from the original Doctor Strange strip... Eternity making his debut there in Strange Tales Issue 138.

And there you have it. There’s lots of good stuff happening in this and it’s mostly, pretty much, played as high comedy again, with even Matt Damon and Sam Neill returning as the Asgardian actors portraying Loki and Odin. That being said, there’s a warm beating heart at the film’s centre in the rekindled relationship building between Thor and Jane but, even a moment of high tragedy near the end of the movie, is still seen as pretty much upbeat the way it’s played here by the director. Although it’s simultaneously quite brutal and pulls the rug from under audience members like myself, who can see the solution to the big problem at the heart of the movie being put together piece by piece, only to have it taken away at the eleventh hour (but stay for the second of the post credits scenes to give a little more closure to the fate of one of the characters, for sure).

Another high comedy moment is when Thor and co go to Omnipotence City (where all the Gods hang out and plan for their big orgy)... in order to raise an army. I’m not exactly a fan of Russel Crowe but he does a pretty good, comical version of Zeus for this film, it has to be said.

And, yeah, that’s pretty much all I’ve got to say on this one, for the reasons explained in my opening paragraph (Katrin, if you’re reading this one backwards again, please jump to the beginning for closure on this sentence). Thor - Love And Thunder, like the previous Thor movie Ragnarok, wallows in its own levity and tears down the comic book gatekeepers of this world while still respecting the material on which it is based and managing to be completely entertaining in the process. It’s not hyperbole when I say that this is probably the best stand alone Thor movie yet... and I love the bit at the end which says, Thor will return... like he’s James Bond or Fu Manchu. Nice movie, not deserving of the critical drubbing it’s gotten in any way shape or form (indeed, I saw it at a screening with a fairly small audience but there was a round of applause when the credits started to role). Don't miss this one.

Vox Lux

A Vox Of Delights

Vox Lux
2018 USA
Directed by Brady Corbet
UK cinema release print.

Vox Lux is a film I wanted to see, primarily, because I’ve been following Natalie Portman’s career since I first saw her at the cinema back in 1994 in Luc Besson’s Leon (aka The Professional in the US). I remember singling her out as an astounding actress at the time, although I didn’t expect to see her in anything else because... you know... child actors. However, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw, years later, that she was given the part of Queen Amidala in Star Wars Episode I - The Phantom Menace (one of the best of the Star Wars films made outside of the original trilogy) and its subsequent sequels and, since then I’ve seen her in a fair few things. And she tends to knock things out of the park as an actress and you only have to see her in films like Closer, V For Vendetta and Jackie to realise just how brilliant she is. Her role in Vox Lux as pop music diva Celeste is another of those roles that gives her an opportunity to shine and her performance in this has received a lot of praise and, rightly so.

The other reason I was keen to see this, originally, is that I’d heard a lot of word of mouth on Twitter saying that Vox Lux is the Citizen Kane of this generation and singling out writer/director Brady Corbet as ‘the new Orson Welles’ in some respects. However, since this was only showing in a very few cinemas in London I was beginning to doubt the veracity of that claim especially when I got to the cinema and found myself almost but, not quite, alone in the auditorium. By the time the film began to play there was maybe 8 people in the cinema but, still, not the size of audience I would expect from an opening weekend... especially not with ‘review buzz’ like that.

As it happens, the film is utterly brilliant and, although I do have some problems with parts of it, which I’ll get to in a minute, I have to say I’m very glad I took some time out of my usual routine to track this down and see it on a large screen at a cinema because, frankly, it’s got a kind of power to it which I suspect may be diminished on various home viewing media. That being said, it’s no Citizen Kane either, although I can see how people might want to draw on that comparison on a purely superficial level.

The films tells the story of a meteoric rise to pop stardom of the central character Celeste and of her relationship with her sister, played by Stacy Martin and manager, played by Jude Law. However, it’s split into four sections (or three sections and a prelude) and Natalie Portman plays the Celeste character in her 30s. Celeste in her teenage years, as covered in the first two segments and taking up a sizeable part of the film, is Raffey Cassidy (who you might remember as the robot girl from Tomorrowland, reviewed here). Now, as bright as Natalie Portman is in this film... and that’s very bright... I’d have to say that Raffey Cassidy absolutely steals the movie, in a dual role too since, when she’s not playing young Celeste, she’s playing Celeste’s daughter Albertine for the final two chapters.

Another fantastic performance is Willem Dafoe as the off screen narrator of the piece, lending the film a documentary aspect and giving the story a sense of foreshadowing in a similar manner to the way Wes Anderson might use a narrator to comment on what you are about to see. Added to his performance, though, is a mixture of different styles of camerawork, movement, film speeds and aspect ratios which, coupled with a foreboding and quite striking score by Scott Walker (sadly only available as a stupid download as opposed to a proper CD, so I am doomed never to hear it away from the images) lends the film a certain sense of both gravitas and a very sinister quality. After the prelude, which I’ll get to in a moment, this narrative and mise en scene takes away any form of comfort blanket from the audience, who is now primed that absolutely anything could happen. So it would be true to say that, in the words of a young Martin Scorcese, the film is ‘fraught with peril’.

Okay, so, the prelude. Something happens here which was somehow telegraphed, I feel. I suspect I wasn’t supposed to be expecting anything from it and the naturalistic style of the acting and lack of scoring at these points maintains the sense of cinéma vérité. However, I kind of knew what was coming a good minute or three before it happened and, well, I hope it’s not giving anything away by saying that part of the exploration of this Celeste character is a way of looking at how violence and tragedy can affect the course of a life and pull and tear at it from different directions (including as a catalyst for success and inspiration) as that life plays out.

However, just because I was expecting certain things to happen doesn’t mean to say that the prelude isn’t effective. It is and, even though we’ve seen these kinds of scenes played out before (no, really, I’m not going to tell you what happens here, go see it yourself) the director manages to render it in such a way that you still feel a certain amount of tension and suspense as to how things are going to play out. The opening credits sequence which leads us out of the scene after this also, in a single moving camera shot with a little twist in the middle, somehow, seems to exert a certain pressure on the audience that similar sequences in other movies have not been able to achieve. It also starts a series of almost morbid obsessions from the director with point of view camera shots speeding down tunnels and, I have to say, even though they’re nothing like as long or daring, I can’t help but wonder if Corbet was somehow influenced by Andrei Tarkovsky’s version of Solaris and also whether these shots are standing in for something else... perhaps a metaphor for growth points in Celeste’s life? Possibly not but... I can wonder.

The pop songs in this film are not too shabby either... which helps maintain a sense of artistry behind the main character. The songs are actually provided by pop music artist Sia, who I only really know from her end credits song on the Wonder Woman soundtrack (that movie is reviewed by me here) and, again, they’d be pretty good as a stand alone listen if only they would release this thing on CD instead of their cheaply mixed electronic shenanigans (see my review of The New Analog here for more details on modern practices in regard to finance over quality of the art in terms of sound mixing for downloads).

Now, I did have one problem with what was, it has to be said, a very powerful and gripping movie and it was this... it doesn’t have an ending. It just kind of stops. Now, I’m pretty sure I know how this was supposed to end or, rather, how I would have ended it. I have to say I felt the whole film had been building to a certain point and that this expected conclusion, and narrative aftermath, would have been the best way to end the film and use that final moment as a call of judgement of the main protagonist. In fact, if I was to bet money on it, I’d say that the film may have had a different ending which was probably even shot but, out of sheer bloody mindedness, Corbet deliberately went for a lack of closure and culmination of the story arc, probably because he didn’t want audiences second guessing him. However, I did feel like this was a kind of ‘cop out’ in this respect and that it does damage the picture somewhat and make everything we’ve seen come before feel a little hollow.

So, no, it’s no modern Citizen Kane, that’s for sure. Having said that, though... I would urge anyone with a love of film to go and seek this out while it’s playing on a big screen because, frankly, slightly flawed as it might at first appear, it is a bit of a masterpiece and it does feel like one is watching something put together by a cinematic genius. Whether this label is maintained throughout this writer/director’s career (he’s already acted in a number of films too) is something which remains to be seen but I can’t wait until we can get a Blu Ray release of this thing so I can study just why the film, in an entirely unrelated genre, unsettled me a lot more than most modern horror films do. Make no mistake, Vox Lux is a great work of art with some truly arresting sequences and a sense of ‘reading between the frames’ level mystery which makes you want to come back to it again. Absolutely spectacular and something which I think a lot of budding young film makers might find themselves quite inspired by.

Annihilation

Arming Shimmer Man

Annihilation
UK/USA 2018
Directed by Alex Garland
Paramount Pictures

Warning: Very minor spoilers, I guess.

Annihilation is Alex Garland’s adaptation of the first novel in Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy.

Now, I tend to find Alex Garland one of those writers/directors who are a bit frustrating. I loved Dredd (reviewed here - it was recently made known on the internet that he was responsible for ghost-directing it) but I had real problems with Ex Machina (reviewed here) and I think it stems from the same issue. Something I believe he shares with Doctor Who writer Stephen Moffat. He tends to have great set ups which arouse the curiosity but the endings and most of the various revelations along the way tend to be more than just a little bit obvious and, alas, although it’s based on someone else’s source material, I think that this is very much the case here with Annihilation.

So we have the spectacular but, to be honest, extremely clichéd sci-fi concept inspired/borrowed from... and the writer himself denies this but it seems quite obvious to me... Boris Strugatsky and Arkady Strugatsky’s excellent science fiction novel Roadside Picnic, which was also made into a blisteringly cool science fiction movie called Stalker by one of my favourite directors, Andrei Tarkovsky. This is the concept of an area on Earth which has been rendered or declared off limits due to some kind of mysterious alien infestation. Films such as Monsters (reviewed here) have been using this as the starting blocks for their own tales for years and Annihilation does the same thing, I think, by taking this as an opening set up.

The film starts off with Natalie Portman’s ex-military biology specialist Lena returning from a mission into the forbidden zone of the tale, a place which is named The Shimmer. This scene, where she is interrogated by Benedict Wong (in some kind of bio protection suit) is the framing scene which we keep going back to while the tale unfolds... as the returning Lena tells her story of the days (while months pass outside) she has spent in The Shimmer.

We then cut to a flashback scene from before the main narrative (the main narrative is the flashback technically but it’s where we keep coming back to) of her husband, played by Oscar Isaac, filmed by him at the same time he was shooting scenes for Star Wars - The Last Jedi on the set very near to where this was shot. He has unexpectedly returned home, missing presumed dead, from his top secret military mission after being absent for a year. But something doesn’t seem right and when he starts to slowly, internally combust, the ambulance that Lena and he are riding in to get him to a hospital is intercepted by the military and she wakes up in 'Area X', where the slowly expanding Shimmer can be viewed from a, relatively, safe distance.

At this point, you probably have already figured out what the main end twist/scene of the movie is going to be but I won’t elaborate on it here since some people will enjoy the journey of getting there and might be put off if they realise the answer to things are that easy.

Anyway, after hearing that every other mission from The Shimmer has never returned and only her husband has come back from the last one, Lena realises the only way to help him is to go into whatever is in The Shimmer so she can figure out something to keep her husband alive. So she goes in with the tough cookie team leader of the project, played by Jennifer Jason-Leigh, plus three other military women played by Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez and Tuva Novotny. And the film follows the journey of these five women as they try to trek to the lighthouse where The Shimmer was first started.

On the way, of course, new perils await them and their slowly diminishing group try to survive both the strange things they see in The Shimmer comprising biological mutations and, also, each other... as paranoia and madness begin to creep in.

Well the five ladies are all great with their performances in this and the storyline is refreshingly surreal, in some ways. It doesn’t hurt that the cinematography and set design are never short of being, at the very least, visually interesting. I just wish this film could have got a cinema release in this country as opposed to me having to watch it on a television set, where I have to say the potential power of the movie seemed somewhat diminished.

For example, Garland seems to like using vertical lines to section off areas of the widescreen aspect ratio and use them to frame characters and objects... as a lot of the more interesting directors do, I've noticed in recent years (as global DVD and Blu Ray sales has made more international stuff in the correct aspect ratio readily available). I don’t know if this is a specific fingerprint of his visual signature or not but I did notice he had a particular leaning to crowd out or overfill one delineated section and leave the other remaining sections with hardly anything in them for quite a bit of the time. Which makes for an interesting watch as you try to figure out what part of the screen he was going to fill up next.

There is also a nice sequence with a genetically altered bear which is quite memorable. The girls have already suffered two attacks by a strange crocodile and fast moving bear in the course of the movie (and one of them certainly doesn’t survive one of these attacks). These were, it has to be said, less than surprising moments and very clumsily telegraphed by the director. However, in a sequence which is a little reminiscent of a scene in John Carpenter’s The Thing, where the most paranoid of the group has the others tied to chairs and is being particularly threatening to Natalie Portman’s character, another of the girls can be heard calling from off screen and... well I won’t give away what happens next but the juxtaposition of creature and sound emitting from its hungry maw is more than a little surreal and extremely attention grabbing. It could have gone completely the other way and been a really laugh-worthy moment but somehow the director manages to reign it all in and it’s ultimately a very effective scene.

The film is also helped by a score from Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, which sounds a bit like they are electronically trying to echo elements of György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna or Requiem For Soprano, Mezzo-Soprano, Two Mixed Choirs and Orchestra... which is fine by me because those are two of my favourite pieces of music by one of my favourite composers. I just wish someone would release a proper CD of this score instead of expecting people to download it as... I’d really like to hear it away from the movie.

Ultimately, the end of the movie after Lena reaches the lighthouse and discovers its secrets are... not much of a discovery by this point in the game if you have been paying attention and the set up for the final twist is, frankly, very obvious. You kind of hope they are going to veer into different territory but it stands as it is. We all, in the house I was watching this in, saw this ending more or less from the start and so, yeah, we all felt a little deflated by the end of it, to be honest.

That being said, Annihilation is not a bad movie and I’d certainly place it higher than Ex Machina in this director’s work. I might even go on to read the novels at some point too because, hopefully, there’s more to the story than just this exercise in the obvious. Maybe the good stuff coming from what is essentially an intriguing concept turns up later in the novels? Certainly, if you liked this wrier/director’s other work then you will probably get something out of this one. Not a terrible movie and quite entertaining but it's not going to be making any of my end of year lists, I suspect.

Jackie

JF’dK

Jackie
2016 USA
Directed by Pablo Larraín  
UK cinema release print.

My primary reason for wanting to see this new... I hesitate to call it biopic due to the timeframe... this new film about Jackie Kennedy in the week following the assassination of her husband is an old one which will possibly be a little familiar to some of my regular readers. Yeah, that’s right. I was there to hear the score. I loved Mica Levi’s compositions for Under The Skin (reviewed here) and I really wanted to know how her musical style would manifest itself and develop when writing a work for a more ‘real world’, grounded piece of art.

As it happens, I couldn’t see the film on the Saturday that I wanted to because, it transpires, even though this film has received various award nominations (including oscar noms), my local, 15 screen cinema deigned the film unfit for viewing at the weekend and, instead, decided to only show it on week days. Seriously Cineworld Enfield? So I went and saw it on the Tuesday night and, it has to be said, the audience was tiny. I could only think how packed out it might have been if it had been allowed to play on the weekend.

So, anyway, Jackie stars Natalie Portman as the aforementioned ex-Mrs. K, Jacqueline Kennedy, and it’s a performance which has to be seen to be believed. It’s an intense study and, not to downplay director Larrain’s excellent choices in terms of how he captures the various performances, Portman just pulls it right out of the bag and inhabits the character in ways that will make you even feel a little uncomfortably voyeuristic as you watch this woman interacting with the world around her at the height of her emotional grief. And she’s paired with some pretty amazing actors throughout, too.

The film is set in various different time frames from which the director cuts back and forth but all of these, strangely, apart from two sets of sequences being revisited throughout, are all from between JFK getting killed up to when Jackie is interviewed by a reporter a week later, after her husband has been buried. The film uses the reporter as bookends to the film but also a series of points to go to and from throughout the course of the narrative, as both he and the audience struggle to capture the essence of the turmoil she was going through.

One of the two major sequences which the director uses as a counterpoint to the misery of the main body of the film is a TV show about the Whitehouse which Mrs. Kennedy had starred in about a year or so before. This is something which, along with shots of the spectacular funeral she insisted on for her husband, is woven seamlessly into existing newsreel footage with the director going back to the same cameras used for the TV programme in order to splice Portman’s truly electrifying performance into context. In some ways, the constant flashes forward and back are a reminder of the kind of cinema wonderfully perpetrated by Nicolas Roeg although, whereas Mr. Roeg’s movies seem to deliberately use the technique in a brutal, bludgeonly manner to push a point or metaphor, Larrain has chosen far more subtle and seamless entry points in the execution of his reveals... and somehow he manages to get away with it pretty well, keying off relevant emotional peaks and troughs to introduce these excursions through time.

There’s a lot of hand held camera in this thing too... it’s mostly hand held, actually, and this adds to the sense of ‘fly on the wall’ documentary style of shooting... following the character around and catching things on the sly as Jackie tries to survive the death of her husband. It’s a method a lot of modern film-makers are adopting just lately, actually, and I first became aware of it, as I believe I’ve highlighted before, on TV shows like Firefly and the recent incarnation of Battlestar Galactica. In as much as the camera is being used to look at things and just ‘notice’ things rather than pre-empt the emphasis of a scene by dollying up to something in an ‘establishing shot’ mode... although there are a couple of moments when that kind of hypnotic style of shooting is also employed here.

And I don’t think there’s a single scene in this movie without Natalie Portman in it. Everything is seen with her as the main focal point and she does, as I’ve already said, an absolutely terrific job in carrying the film. Bearing in mind she’s going toe to toe with some great actors in this... none of them doing a bad job. Greta Gerwig as Nancy Tuckerman, Billy Crudup as the unnamed (in the movie) journalist and, especially, Peter Sarsgaard doing a terrific Bobby Kennedy... all absolutely marvellous but none of these giants any greater than Portman. It was sad, given his recent demise, but heartwarming to see acting legend John Hurt here, too, in a role which pitches him head to head with the title character and, frankly, Portman more than holds her own against this thespian giant, really proving to me that the actress who I first saw as a little girl/assassin in Leon, all those years ago, has gone from playing naively political royalty in the Star Wars movies to the equivalent political royalty of real life America 1963... and never given a bad performance... at least not any I’ve seen.

The presence she brings to the role here absolutely works with Larraín’s movie to provide an intense glimpse into one week of the life of an iconic public figure and this is beautifully accompanied by Mica Levi’s astonishing music. If accompany is the right word for a score this powerful, which gives me a little more of a clue into Levi’s stylistic tendencies, such as the use of powerful sliding note changes to, in this case, give a picture into the mental landscape of the title character as she pushes back against the absolute chaos and loss of control she must be feeling... as personified by the musical outbursts. You can bet this one was an instant purchase on CD for me (should be with me sometime next week) and I’ll be really upset if the score gets beaten by La La Land (reviewed here) at this year’s Oscars. It’s quite possibly the best score that 2017 (yeah, we get things late, sometimes, in the UK) is going to throw at me and the only score I can imagine equalling or surpassing this one may be Johnny Williams’ score for The Last Jedi when it comes out at the end of the year. But you never know... there have been some phenomenally good scores (some unreleased in an appropriate format) over the last half a decade.

Towards the end of the movie, Jackie Kennedy makes an observation to the journalist character interviewing her that the reason she has filled the White House with iconic, period pieces from prior residents or treasures authentic to the various periods of people in office, is because of the importance of history and being able to see and touch it. Artefacts are important because people can handle them and know the people who have previously handled these objects have faced adversity and had the courage to stand up to it... for example. Now, this really sparked something with me. The idea of the importance of material objects elevated by their associations is long something I have held in my heart but it also struck me as something very important to the format of the story too.

Here we have a movie which is, in itself, an artefact and, also, contains some footage, albeit morphed into a fictional content, from the actual time that these events were taking place (the White House TV show, the funeral parade). This film, like all others, will have meaning for future generations of viewers and the people who play the parts of the characters will be remembered through their work in these cinematic objects. Even as I was watching this on my first viewing, for example, I was remembering John Hurt and the body of his work leading up to this. I suspect that Jackie’s words here are something which may resonate with the director because films, in many different ways, are memory boxes filled with treasures for future generations who haven’t even been conceived yet. These are the ways, for better or worse, that our culture and era will be remembered. It’s not exactly an accurate legacy but it’s always going to contain, at the very least, the tone and idea of the truth of the culture that created it. So that’s something to remember in the quiet hours of the night when you’re next contemplating a movie, methinks.

Jackie is in cinemas now and, despite being nominated for the Oscars (I don’t subscribe to the idea of awards ceremonies), it’s a truly great little movie and deserves the attention of people who love the medium for what it is... the spectacle of life. Definitely worth seeing at the cinema and if you’re into music, definitely worth it for the score.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith

The Sith Element

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith
2005 USA 
Directed by George Lucas
20th Century Fox BluRay Region A/B 

Okay, so after being more than pleased with the first of the prequel films, The Phantom Menace (reviewed here) my faith in Lucas was shaken again, what with his continual meddling with the original trilogy prints and the nightmare when Attack Of The Clones was released into cinemas (my review of that one here). The sluggish pacing of the previous film meant that I wasn’t getting too excited about what we’d get in Revenge Of The Sith but I remember that I had a much better reaction to it at the time. There were some bits which didn’t quite make sense, and they still don’t (yeah, I’ll get to it later on in this review), but overall I originally had a good time with it.

Revisiting the movie now on blu ray, I have to say that my appreciation of this one has soured a little over the years and I’m not nearly as enthusiastic as I once was about this chapter in the Star Wars saga. The action sequences are spectacular, it has to be said, but also quite boring in their choreography and I did find myself slipping into lethargy this time around. The action sequences in Attack Of The Clones were much better but, having said that, the pacing in Revenge Of The Sith beats the prior episode hands down, so overall I’d have to say Attack Of The Clones is still my least favourite Star Wars movie, with this one running it a close second.

That being said, there are still some good things about it. Hayden Christensen, at least in the early scenes of the film, seems a lot more confident and really begins to inhabit the role of Anakin Skywalker, probably due to the fact that the dialogue seems less clumsy than it did in the previous movie. That being said, there still seems to be something a little bit “flipped switch” about Anakin’s fall to the dark side. I know George Lucas has been alluding to it and putting in necessary shading in the previous two films but somehow, even after the slaughter of the Tusken Raider colony in Attack Of The Clones, it still seems like a bit of a leap to me, when Anakin suddenly becomes Palpatine’s follower. Remember, he’d just got Samuel Jackson’s character Mace Windu involved to take care of Palpatine and then, all of a sudden, he’s slicing off Windu’s arm and letting Palpatine chuck the geezah out of a window. And then he’s off to slaughter Jedi.... it seems a bit much to me but, having said that, there could be good reasons for this.

Reason number 1 is... it’s hard to retrofit a series of movies to take place before a set of pre-existing movies and get them to match up (no matter how much you tinker with them and destroy everyone’s fondest childhood memories in the process) and get it absolutely perfect... even though Lucas had some elements of the basic plotline for the back story in place decades before. I know he did have at least some of it figured out because I can remember back as far as 1978, after the very first movie was released at the end of 1977 in the UK (when it was literally just called Star Wars), that I’d talk to my friends about the epic battle between Obi Wan Kenobi and his apprentice by the side of a volcanic pit, where Darth Vader fell in and had to be moved into some kind of iron lung. This movie pretty much has a variant of that scenario in it so, even then, he knew what he was doing. There’s always going to be some kind of inconsistency or lack of logic to it somewhere and, well, like I said... I’ll get to those in a while.

Reason number 2, from what I understand about this picture, is this. The first cut Lucas arrived at ran for four hours. Now, even with the initial rescue of Palpatine originally lasting for over an hour, apparently, that’s still a lot of extra on the 2 hours and 20 minutes running time that got excluded from the cinema and home video versions. This means that there could have been all kinds of subtle signals that Anakin was finally tipping over as a prelude to the actual act itself which may have been cut out. I say could, since I don’t actually know... but it might be that Lucas was trying to fix some other problems with the final cut and the elimination of those problems created the lack of subtlety we see in the final release prints. That kind of thing does tend to happen more and more in the editing room these days, from what I can see from a lot of modern cinema. Mistakes and so forth creep in due to decisions made in the edit. It happens. So I’m letting both George Lucas and Hayden Christensen off the hook on this one... Lucas may not have been standing far enough back from the last cut to be able to glean that he’d lost that element of subtlety.

Let’s balance that out with another plus, then. Ewan McGregor as a more mature Obi Wan Kenobi, 15-120 years before he turns into Alec Guinness, really goes for it with this one and succeeds perfectly. Each of his three performances have, of course, had shades of the Guinness personae in them but this one brings it up to near what Guinness was doing in the original trilogy. Perfect job here from McGregor, I have to say. In fact, most of the performances in this one are spot on. Threepio is also a lot less irritating here... so that’s a blessing.

The music is a lot less choppier too. There are, to be fair, a couple of moments when it sounds like stuff has just been tracked in from The Phantom Menace instead of being re-recorded but, mostly, the music is pretty solid. Not particularly as memorable as... well, any of the other Star Wars films, to be fair, but at least it holds its own against the intergalactic hubbub with a certain dignity and originality... so happy about that.

And there’s that great moment where we see Bail Organa, Yoda and Obi Wan walking the famous corridors that the rebels were defending at the start of the very first Star Wars movie, revised to A New Hope around about the 1978 re-release (contrary to popular belief) and which now, of course, chronologically follows on from the events of the first film. There’s also a nice shot where we see a younger version of Peter Cushing’s character from that same film, Grand Moff Tarkin... but, alas, that scene has problems all it’s own.

So let’s get to the problems with this one, shall we?

Well, asides from a clunky bit of dialogue which really needed the scene originally shot for it to be inserted either at the same point or, preferably, an earlier point in the movie, where Yoda tells Obi Wan that Qui Gon is back from the dead... most of the problems occur when trying to match this movie up to the next film and there are basically two main things I have a problem with here...

Number one is the scene with Grand Moff Tarkin in it. They are looking at the rough frame of their new construction project, the very first Death Star. This is the one that Luke destroys in the next/first movie which is said to be the first time the weapon is revealed and fully operational. Except... hold on a minute... we know from the chronology of the events in The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi that, after the destruction of the first Death Star, the second one could have only taken three and a half years to construct. Bearing in mind that Luke and Lei are somewhere between 16 and 20 years old in A New Hope, that means it takes 16-20 years to build the first Death Star? Even though they already have it half built at the end of Revenge Of The Sith? Seriously? C’mon guys. I mean, I know the first one would have taken a lot longer to build and, you know, to quote Kevin Smith “You think the average Stormtrooper knows how to install a toilet main? All they know is killing and white uniforms.” But, even so... 16 - 20 years. This stretches my ability to suspend my disbelief a little bit, to be honest.

The other problem I have is Luke’s “Uncle” Owen Lars and “Aunt Beru”. They look great in this and the previous movie as younger versions of the actors who played them in the original and, yes, I know Threepio’s memory is wiped so he doesn’t know them anymore but, honestly? You’d think after all the trouble they had when Darth Vader’s mum married Owen’s father and was killed by sandpeople, not to mention the fact that Threepio was Annakin’s droid and had been staying with them for, what, 15 years, that the minute these two saw Threepio again in A New Hope they would have junked him straight away and gone and hid somewhere. Not, presumably... “Oh, remember that robot who’s maker turned out to be the ruthless villain holding the galaxy in a stranglehold of terror... well he’s turned up in Luke's garage. Neat, huh? Better have it’s memory flushed, just in case.” I’m sorry but that’s just not appropriate. I know droids are seen as a lowly “life” form in the Star Wars universe but, seriously, this is basically Darth Vader’s other, mechanical, son. So I’m afraid this was a mistake I saw coming from a long way off, just after The Phantom Menace was released and, though I was trying to trust George Lucas on fixing this problem somehow... he just didn’t. Bit of a blow this one.

Still, an enjoyable film, if not a great one, albeit with some grizzly images which are maybe not totally appropriate for the rating, truth be told. A brave attempt but now with this trilogy back under my belt, it’s time to rewatch the original trilogy on blu ray. I’ll let you know how that goes real soon.

Star Wars at NUTS4R2

 Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 

Episode 2: Attack Of The Clones

Episode 3: Revenge Of The Sith 

Solo

Rogue One 

Episode 4: A New Hope

Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back

Episode 6: Return Of The Jedi 

Episode 7: The Force Awakens 

Episode 8:  The Last Jedi

Episode 9: The Rise Of Skywalker

Star Wars Episode II: Attack Of The Clones

Clone With The Windu

Star Wars Episode II: Attack Of The Clones
2002 USA 
Directed by George Lucas
20th Century Fox BluRay Region A/B 
Previous BBFC cuts waived

I have really mixed feelings about Star Wars Episode II: Attack Of The Clones. If you read my review of the The Phantom Menace (which I reviewed for the 3D cinematic re-release right here) you’ll know of the very strong bond I feel with the Star Wars universe since I first saw the very first movie play in the Dominion cinema in London at the tail end of 1977. You’ll also know from that review that, despite a lot of people being less impressed with Lucas’ first prequel, I actually rated it quite highly. I couldn’t understand why a film almost as dark as The Empire Strikes Back was not realised as such, just because it was wearing a happy face, so to speak. It wasn’t until I saw Revenge Of The Sith with some friends and had to explain it to them years later, that I realised a lot of people just didn’t have a very good idea of the back story to the original 1970s trilogy... so a lot of them didn’t realise just exactly what was going down in The Phantom Menace.

Now don’t get me wrong. I was losing a lot of love already for my childhood hero George Lucas, after the frankly disastrous “modifications” he made to the original trilogy on the late 1990s cinematic re-release of the movies... but The Phantom Menace was a triumph for me and I couldn’t wait to get to the next one. Well unfortunately, for me, Attack Of The Clones is the one Star Wars move I really don’t like all that much and it just doesn’t feel quite like a Star Wars movie to me. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some nice stuff in there... the asteroid depth charge sound and visual effects, for example... but to me it all just seems a little flat.

Now I’ve got absolutely nothing against Hayden Christensen as an actor. I especially liked him in Jumper, but I don’t think his on-screen chemistry with Natalie Portman is that great here. It’s not as emotionless or wooden as people said back when the first reviews of this came out in 2002... but it’s not all that great either. There are some parts where the actor is saying hugely romantic things and not really getting away with it and, other times, when his emotions seem to be quite a bit repressed or non-existent when they shouldn’t have been, perhaps. Now I’m not going to blame the actor for this stuff because I suspect at least some of the reasons why certain of the scenes don’t work is because he may have been directed to deliberately dial things down or up due to the ultimate fate the character is heading towards. Also, it has to be said, a lot of the romantic, character building stuff is overly long and slows things down... and also that brings me straight into what I personally feel is another bad thing about this movie.

Pretty much all the other Star Wars films in the original trilogy are very pacey and you’re not very far off from entering or leaving an action sequence throughout their running times. The Phantom Menace follows in the footsteps of this beautifully and, Kurosawa comparisons aside, these were kinda supposed to be the modern equivalent of an old Universal or Republic style film serial of times gone by. Now I really don’t mind slowly marinating plots and action alone doesn’t do it for me in a movie, unless it’s deliberately setting itself up to be that kind of thing, but Attack Of The Clones has a delayed action chase about ten minutes in (after two assassination attempts which don’t really count as action sequences) where we get to see Anakin Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi in pursuit of Zam The Assassin... and then the film just goes dead in terms of action, to be honest. Some wonderous sequences fill this gap, to be sure, but frankly, over 35 minutes without an action sequence in a Star Wars movie seems a bit of a mis-step to me. I maybe would have liked my Lucas a little more Corman in this particular movie, perhaps, but maybe the weight of the story just drags it down too much for added action? I don’t know... but I thought this was an uncharacteristically empty gap for a Star Wars movie.
And talking about pacing...

Now I know this film had some problems when the first cut was reviewed by the director and I understand that a lot of the Anakin/Padme romance scenes were either re-shot or beefed up to try to get them to work better (at least that’s what was reported at the time) but... the timeline taking place between the film’s two main male protagonists, Anakin and Obi Wan, and the cross cutting between their separate exploits... don’t quite make sense when you compare them. See if you agree with me on this one...

These are the two timelines which are equally cross cut together across the running time at a certain point in Attack Of The Clones:

Obi Wan, pops into a diner to get a quick bit of info, drops in on Yoda, goes to the planet where a Clone Army is being built (posing as a customer) and has a quick look at them, gets into a scrap and then goes to another planet where he sends a message and gets captured. That’s.... what? Two days at the most?

Meanwhile, cross cut with this is...

Annakin escorts Padme back to Naboo, they spend some days/nights romancing, then they hotfoot it to Tatooine, Anakin spends at least an evening, possibly a day, tracking down his dying mother, then he slaughters a whole tribe of Tusken Raiders and, only then, after all that, do we get the message cross cut into things.

So, what’s that? About a week? And these two timelines are simultaneously cross-cut to give them a sense of happening in the same time? It doesn’t quite gel with the way it’s been cut together I think.

So I’m guessing what’s happened here is they reshot and added some extra bits into the Annakin/Padme timeline but... there was nowhere else to insert them into the movie which made any sense unless you made the, aesthetically not great choice, of not continually cross cutting between Obi-Wan and Anakin’s timelines. Which must have been really irritating to the people sitting in the editing room, I’ll bet. Now, to be honest, what they’ve gone with in the finished product is probably the lesser of the two evils and I think they made the best choice they had... but it still leaves your mind playing catch up with the temporal space in a few areas during the course of the movie and it does pop you out of it a few times.

Okay... that’s most of the negative stuff. What about the good stuff?

Well, the fight between Obi Wan and Django Fett is pretty good and brutal (it was originally cut at both British cinemas and all British home release versions until a head butt cut was finally waived for this Blu Ray release... which meant I had to pay out for an import copy of the DVD when it was first released to get it the first time around). The idea of the poisonous centipedes which infiltrate Padme Amidala’s room at the start is something which reads straight out of a pulp Sherlock Holmes or Fu Manchu story and perfectly captures the tone of what this film series is about. The action sequence in the arena at the end is like it’s been plucked straight out of one of Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter novels... so that’s kinda cool (if a little plagiaristic, perhaps) and the incredibly hard to even imagine until you see it dual between Yoda and Count Dooku is pretty amazing. Oh, that reminds me... Sir Christopher Lee doesn’t have a huge amount of screen time in this film but what he does get he really makes count. He’s just really phenomenal in this movie and his screen presence uplifts certain scenes tremendously.

But... back to the negatives again, I’m afraid.

The conveyor belt battle looks and feels just like something out of a platform game... which makes me cynical about why it was even included in the movie... and the comedy shenanigans of C3PO are just beyond irritating in this one. Great gags in themselves but, seriously, inappropriate in the context of the scenes they are in, in my humble opinion. Also, there’s a real false note where Natalie Portman falls out of a transport and looks like she’s been really hurt and then, when someone asks if she’s okay, she just gets up and gets on with things... it doesn’t quite scan right. You have a watch and let me know if you agree with me please.

And then there’s the music. The beloved John Williams scores another epic Star Wars movie but... this one doesn’t seem quite right in a lot of places. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some memorable scoring in this one but, throughout the movie, it just felt like a load of action cues from The Phantom Menace were literally being chopped up and then just needle-dropped onto the soundtrack rather than have a new score composed in several places. I’m wondering if Williams wrote some stuff which was rejected and then replaced with temp or, possibly, if the action sequences in certain areas kept getting recut to buggery and he just didn’t have time to keep changing them. Either way, certain musical sequences just seem a bit choppy and clumsy to me. Still, you can’t top Johnny Williams scoring a Star Wars movie so maybe the story will come out on this one in a few decades... who knows?

And that’s about it for this one. There’s a certain something which really doesn’t make sense in the whole Star Wars timeline in this one, due to C3PO and R2D2 being present on Owen and Beru Lars moisture farm on Tatooine, but I’ll point that out in the next two reviews, when I rewatch them. For now, let me just say that, any Star Wars film is going to be something you’re probably going to get something out of. For me, Attack Of The Clones is my least favourite of the lot and I think newcomers to the trilogy should never try and start on this series with this as a jumping on point. Make sure you watch them in the chronological order on which they were released or, if you want to do it the other way round, make sure you start with The Phantom Menace first... just cut Attack Of The Clones some slack when you watch it. They’re not all like this one.

Star Wars at NUTS4R2

 Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 

Episode 2: Attack Of The Clones

Episode 3: Revenge Of The Sith 

Solo

Rogue One 

Episode 4: A New Hope

Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back

Episode 6: Return Of The Jedi 

Episode 7: The Force Awakens 

Episode 8:  The Last Jedi

Episode 9: The Rise Of Skywalker

Thor - The Dark World (aka Thor 3)

Thantastic Thor

Thor - The Dark World (aka Thor 3)
2013 USA
Directed by Alan Taylor
Playing at UK cinemas now.

I really liked the first Thor movie (my review here), despite not being as familiar with that particular comic book character as I might have been, or perhaps because of that fact. I quite liked his turn in The Avengers (aka Marvel Avengers Assemble... my review here) movie and so was hoping his third outing wouldn’t make the mistake that the numerologically challenged Iron Man 2 (reviewed here) made and let the first movie down a bit. However, I went in with a fairly open mind and saw what I saw and concluded what I concluded, which is this...

Thor - The Dark World is not a great movie. Having said that though, it’s certainly a quite good movie and absolutely a lot of fun but, most importantly of all, it doesn’t let the first movie down in any way in terms of maintaining the same blend of character chemistry, morality and paciness of the original. The first movie, directed by Kenneth Branagh, had a certain stylistic flair which reminded me of nothing less than the Errol Flynn swashbuckler The Adventures Of Robin Hood, which is a pretty good template for any swashbuckler as far as I’m concerned. This one didn’t quite tick those boxes for me, I have to say, but it did still manage to maintain a certain cavalier attitude in the attitudes of some of the characters which gave it an edge on some of the other Marvel Universe movies doing the rounds in the last year or so.

I liked the interplay between the characters quite a bit in this one. I even liked the normally insufferable Loki, played by Tom Hiddleston, on this occasion... a character I found to be sadly lacking in his first two Marvel Universe appearances but in this one I thought the chemistry between him and Chris Hemsworth’s Thor was pretty watchable, for once. Maybe the script was stronger at the dialogue level. The direction was quite nice in places too, with some really nice shot set ups in certain sequences where foreground and background people and objects created nice angles and relationships between each other (something I think will probably be even more noticeable when I watch a 2D version at some point, I suspect).

The performances were all as brilliant as you would expect from such a cast, with Kat Dennings’ uber intern character adding just the right touches of colour when bouncing off Natalie Portman and co, so that the movie, on many levels, is just a joy to watch. Unfortunately there were some big fails as far as I was concerned...

I didn’t, for instance, think a heck of a lot of the various action sequences which played away from Earth... in Asgard and The Dark World, for example and, considering at least two thirds of the action actually takes place in these environments, I did find my mind wandering at some points. Christopher Eccleston was pretty great as “bad guy of the moment” Malekith but he was under so much make up that if I hadn’t already had known he was in it, I wouldn’t have noticed it was Eccleston. So that’s a shame.

Another great performer, the distinguished actor Stellan Skarsgård, also returned for a third go at his Erik Selvig role, but he has been scripted totally as another “comic relief” ingredient in this movie and, although his performance was as phenomenal as it always is, I didn’t really enjoy the fact that, after his import in the last two movies, he’d been pretty much reduced to a mere running joke in this film.

That being said, there are some unprecedented moments of high silliness in Thor - The Dark World and that really does a lot to act as an antidote to alleviate the dullness of some of the grimmer scenes in Asgard and other alien landscapes and lift it back up to the realm of being a good movie rather than a bland affair. Thor’s encounter with the London Underground right in the middle of the big, final battle sequence, for example is priceless and I really welcomed the inclusion of the Charing Cross tube platform into the narrative... except, note to the writers, Charing Cross station is not three stops from Greenwich, which is on a different line and would require changing trains and be more like a half hour ride. This could not have happened in the context of the narrative people. How hard would that have been to sort out?

All in all, the special effects were competently handled (although I feel a lot of the scenes in this felt like a dry run for Guardians Of The Galaxy in some way, which doesn’t fill me with confidence for that movie when it comes out), the story was sound and, although the various character twists could be seen coming a mile off (the last shot before the end credits run, for example, wasn’t exactly revelatory), the scenes set in London and Greenwich more than compensated for some of the bits which dragged... although I’d have to say Idris Elba was sadly underused. He needs a bigger role fighting alongside Thor in the next one please guys. The pseudo-appearance of another Marvel Universe character halfway through the narrative was also a welcome inclusion, to be sure... Marvel really are applying their early to mid-sixties comic book modus operandi to their movies at this point, quite successfully too, so far.

As far as the music goes, Brian Tyler’s excellent score is great but not as good as his score for Iron Man Three (reviewed here) and, more importantly, not as cool as Patrick Doyle’s score for the first Thor movie. I’ve got nothing against Brian Tyler, I think his music is always good and I am looking forward to receiving this score for Christmas (fingers crossed) but seriously, when will Marvel stop playing musical chairs with their composers and obliterating any musical continuity within the series. To be fair to the always listenable Tyler, he does integrate another composer’s theme for one sequence in this movie, although I can’t tell you what scene and which composer because that will obviously spoil the surprise of that brief cameo for you... but I really think Marvel should start to treat their scores for their movies more seriously at this stage. They are doing so much right now with the scripting, casting and choice of directors that they should really get onto the case.

That aside, if you liked the previous two Thor movies then you really shouldn’t be too worried about this one as you’ll almost certainly have a fairly enjoyable time with it too. And I’ll tell you now, don’t be getting up to go once the end credits start rolling... this movie contains, not only a mid end credits epilogue sequence but also a post end credits epilogue sequence too, which gives a little bit more closure to the actual story on the second epilogue, while setting up the next story arc for at least one of the upcoming Marvel movies on the first of the epilogues.

So there you go. Good movie, not as great as the first one, still quite fun and worth paying out the money for, although I thought the 3D conversion on this one was quite poor, flat and lifeless... it has to be said. Definitely worth a watch for all you Marvel fans though.

The Swan Kiss Goodnight

Black Swan 2011 US

Directed by

Darren Aranofsky

Playing at

UK cinemas now.

Warning: There are, kind of, spoilers in here for the people who really can’t figure out how this movie will end after being given the story ten minutes into this film.

I’ve been putting off writing this movie up because, for one thing, I know my take on it will probably be quite unpopular and sometimes people take bad reviews as a personal insult against their favourite movies (something I discovered from comments left on this blog in the past ;-). But as someone pointed out to me on twitter... I have to be honest... so here I am and the part of this process which really upsets me, given my reaction to Black Swan, is that I’m actually, or have always considered myself to be, a big supporter of Darren Aranofsky’s work and three of his last four movies are always good for multiple and regular viewings (if I could just get rid of this DVD backlog quicker I’d probably be watching them now instead of writing this!).

I remember when Pi hit the cinemas towards the end of the 90s... it was just an amazing film and seemed to me to be an absolute masterpiece... a conclusion from which I’ve not strayed. I even loved the comic book spin-off from it, The Book Of Ants.

Then came Requiem For A Dream, which I saw premiered at the London Film Festival, and it had a similar, mind blowing effect on me. Memories of leaving the auditorium (a fair few people had already walked out halfway through from the sheer intensity of it) and being completely and totally depressed by it... just totally blew me away. And Clint Mansell’s amazing score... straight away I knew it was going to be one of those classic pieces of music that captures the attention of the world in much the same way as The James Bond Theme or The Pink Panther theme or the two-note repeat structure of Johnny William’s Jaws did. It didn’t take long for the rest of the world to prove me right on that one as the main theme from Requiem For A Dream has got to be one of the most over-used pieces of music on modern movie trailers since the films release... they even recorded a more appropriately re-orchestrated version of it to play out on the trailer to Peter Jackson’s less than stellar but hugely popular movie The Two Towers (aka Lord of the Rings Part 2). Believe me... the long wait between the November London Film Festival and the movie and score’s January release at the cinema and on CD shelves respectively was a long one for me.

Then came The Fountain and, although at first I was unsure of it as it wasn’t as intense or as frenetically paced a film as his previous two masterworks, it proved to have a deeply haunting and emotional intensity as one of the incarnations of the character played by Hugh Jackman battles to try to find a cure for his wifes terminal cancer. A very sad film which, like the two before it, bears up to multiple viewings.

And then there was The Wrestler... and it kind of felt a little bit like Aranofsky had “sold out to the man” and decided not to pursue his quirky and intense little world anymore. Don’t get me wrong... fine film, hard edged with fine performances and a solid, emotional heart (like all his films before) but it was also a little bit run-of-the-mill for Aranofsky, I thought. Not something I would ever bother to watch again so I could get dazzled by his marvellous technique.

And that’s where I am with Black Swan in a way... but maybe it’s not quite as good a film as even The Wrestler for me in that it lacks that emotional heartbeat that keeps all the previous films alive and vital.

I keep wondering if all the pre-release hype about Black Swan actually ramped up my expectations for it... but I don’t think that’s the case as I really didn’t know much of anything about it until I was siting there in the audience other than it was an “intense” drama about ballet dancers who turn into beasts... or some such.

And then there was the music...

Ever since the heady days of Pi and Requiem For A Dream I’ve been keeping an eye out for Clint Mansell’s scores because, for an ex-pop band member, he has done some truly amazing pieces of work. I may not have great memories of the Clive Cussler adaptation Sahara, for example, but Mansell’s score for it is amazing... it’s the greatest James Bond soundtrack ever written for a non-Bond film! Seriously... if David Arnold was ever going to retire from the Bond franchise then just a few minutes listening to Mansell’s Sahara should convince you that he should get the job next. Quite amazing.

So as soon as the physical CD of Mansell’s score for Black Swan hit the shops over here in the UK, about a week before the release of the movie, I rushed out to buy it and take a listen... that’s when I knew there might be something seriously wrong with this movie. What I got on the soundtrack CD was basically warmed up Swan Lake with the odd and not nearly frequent enough dissonance thrown over the top. My first reaction to this was... “Oh... so Clint Mansell likes James Horner’s score to Gorky Park too” because, seriously, this whole score is just like a long but not nearly as intense version of Horner’s Main Title music to that film. I just couldn’t believe it... and it seemed so pleasant in contrast to Horner’s more jarringly effective acoustic assault. In fact, given that Black Swan has only been on release over here for a couple of weeks, I find it more than suspect that a very limited edition of Horner’s Gorky Park has just been remastered and rereleased to a rabid fan base. Hmmm... wonder what prompted that then? Is it because both composers are doing “fucked up Tchaikovsky” as their modus operandi?

So yeah... was treading a little cautiously when I went to the cinema for Black Swan, but still really looking forward to it... until the minutes wore on and I found that... far from being the kind of intense hybrid of Dario Argento’s movies Suspiria and The Stendhal Syndrome that I’d been expecting (well it kinda was story-wise... just not nearly as intense), this reminded me of the old Fame TV show more than anything... but at least on Fame you felt there was more pain and suffering and intensity going on (and believe me, there’s nothing more intensely scary as seeing Leroy wear a leotard... avast!).

I don’t know really what the problem with this movie was for me, because the actors were all top notch talent and all gave a really good performance... I think I have to lay the blame at Aranofsky’s door on this, much to my regret (please... somebody tell me the producers took the film away from him and recut it). In the end, though, I just didn’t care really what happened to any of the characters, there were no real surprises in the movie that you don’t see coming a mile off and, ultimately... it just felt kinda... to abscond with a young persons phrase... well... meh!

And, of course, by having a summary of the story of Swan Lake at the start of the movie (a story I didn’t know until now)... well it kinda gives away the end of the movie and takes away what might have been a final surprise... if one had been snoozing through half the movie. We know the main female protagonist is going to die at the end of the ballet as the swan does in the ballet itself. And no amount of schizophrenic imagery on the part of Natalie Portman’s protagonist and half-hearted attempts to fool us with her distorted perception of events is going to fool us by this point.

Even the fairly well done and sparingly used swan transformation sequences seem a little lacking in energy and all the way through I kept thinking to myself... “Golly! If I didn’t know this was an Aranofsky film I would have never had pegged it to him.” It just seemed so pedestrian you see?

My one positive note on the whole proceedings, to a degree, was the fact that Clint Mansell’s score, in the context of the movie, seemed really appropriate to the on screen action... that is to say... a less than challenging score for a less than challenging film.

And I really wish I hadn’t had such a bad time at the cinema with this movie but there you have it. This will be the second Darren Aranofsky movie that I will fail to buy on DVD I’m afraid.