The Phoenician Scheme

Phoenician Blind

The Phoenician Scheme
Directed by Wes Anderson
Germany/USA 2025
Indian Paintbrush
UK Cinema Release Print

Well, you know more or less what you are getting when you go to see a Wes Anderson movie and I’m very happy to report back that, yes, it’s yet another masterpiece which, in a few moments, actually had me laughing out loud... which I don’t usually do, even with comedies. It just happens that in this case, The Phoenician Scheme has a gradual build up where the absurdist situations and dead pan delivery of the various characters becomes suddenly joyful in the manner of the director’s previous movies.

Some of the usual suspects make up the cast (and some newcomers) with the main protagonists of this being the fantastic Benicio Del Toro as wealthy businessman Zsa-Zsa Korda (obviously derived from Zsa-Zsa Gabor and Alexander Korda, I would say), his almost a nun, possible daughter and heir Liesl (played brilliantly by Mia Threapleton) and new tutor Bjorn, played by Michael Cera. Other big names include Hope Davis, Jeffrey Wright, Willem Dafoe, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Benedict Cumberbatch and, in the role of God, Bill Murray.

Now, I probably didn’t completely understand the plot because I don’t have a financial brain but it involves Korda, Liesl and Bjorn globetrotting to procure funding for Korda’s latest series of profitable building investments while trying to escape industrial espionage and almost daily assassination attempts. Korda has a reputation for being killed a lot and, in the few minutes he spends dead between each horrendous injury, he goes into monochrome visions of a trial in heaven... where information is sometimes imparted to him.

The film probably shouldn’t work as well as it does and, I’m sure for those people who are not an admirer of the directors rigidly controlled compositions (in this movie they’re in pretty much a locked in 1.33:1 aspect ratio throughout) and comedic literal dialogue exchanges, this would probably seem like an interminable experience. I absolutely loved it though and people who are into this director’s meticulous take on the details and minutia of various characters should have a blast with this one too.

Backed up by Alexandre Desplat’s wonderful score (which is outrageously not on a CD soundtrack album at time of writing), the film is fast paced and starts off literally with a bang, during the first of many assassination attempts made throughout the movie. Indeed the incredibly violent thing which happens in the top right corner of the screen in a shot in an aircraft, deliberately signalled to the audience by a sound that seems to come from the left, is a great tool for future scenes set in an identical aircraft (of which there are many as the characters travel from country to country)... as the audience will no doubt be worrying about just what is about to happen every time they hear that first sound when the composition of the shot is, more or less, the same.

The film has a pretty good ending too... I’m not sure if it completely ties into the biblical imagery littered throughout the movie but there’s certainly a form of redemption for one of the characters in this, it seemed to me. But, either way, The Phoenician Scheme sings along at around 100 minutes and, frankly, I would have liked to have been watching it for another couple of hours more. I’ll certainly be scooping up the Blu Ray of this one as soon as it gets a release and would wholeheartedly recommend it to fans of cinema. Wes Anderson makes such good movies. Bring on the next one.

Asteroid City

Casual Encounters
Of The Third Kind

Asteroid City
Directed by Wes Anderson
USA  2023 Indian Paintbrush
UK cinema release print

Warning: Light spoilers.

Asteroid City is the latest movie from Wes Anderson (co-written by Roman Coppola, the genius behind CQ) and, yeah, it’s certainly the best movie I’ve seen at the cinema so far this year. If you’re a lover of Wes Anderson’s exquisitely composed and controlled cinema, dealing with suppressed emotions and quirky themes in a lightly comedic but sometimes melancholic manner then, yeah, you’ll certainly know what to expect. Don’t particularly expect a story because, if there is one, it’s not immediately apparent and notions of what an individual may think of as the elements of a story would have to be brought into play and, you know, maybe argued about.

This film takes the form of documentary sections, filmed in black and white, of a performance of a playwright’s new play, Asteroid City. Most of the film is that play in full colour widescreen in an actual desert location that stands in for Asteroid City (not as a play, as such but, certainly being the play). This stuff makes up most of the footage with punctuations between acts and so on as the documentary footage in the form of... a play of the documentary footage... pops up to deliver narrative on events. However, sometimes the two formats bleed into each other, such as when the narrator played by Brian Cranston accidentally turns up on location and realises he’s not supposed to be here.

The film focuses... if a Wes Anderson film could be said to focus on any one character for any amount of time... on  Augie Steenbeck played by Jason Schwartzman, He hasn’t yet told his accompanying kids, who have arrived with him in Asteroid City so his son can receive a prize (being among some child inventors also receiving prizes for their startling achievements), that thier mother has recently died and is also accompanying them in the form of ashes in a Tupperware box. When his car breaks down, stranding them in the small town, along with various other characters played by the usual troop of people who want to work with Wes Anderson... such as Scarlet Johansson, Jeffrey Wright and Liev Schreiber... he calls his father-in-law, played by Tom Hanks, to come and collect the three daughters.

Soon after Hanks arrives, the small town has a ‘close encounter’ when an alien comes to borrow the asteroid which landed there millions of years ago and whisks it away in his spaceship. Naturally, the people in town are further delayed as the place is quarantined and the FBI move in to interrogate the many witnesses. And so on...

And it’s great. Some may find it a bit indulgent but, you know, that’s why you have auteur directors with very specific styles like Wes Anderson... if you like their work you want them to indulge and fully invest in their own quirkiness and that’s exactly what happens here. No Bill Murray in this one (he had Covid and had to be quickly replaced by Steve Carell) but most of the big stars you would expect to appear in a Wes Anderson movie... Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum etc etc... are all present and correct and all are absolutely marvellous, as you would expect with these kinds of highly stylised, somewhat deliberately muffled performances of dialogue. I shouldn’t have been surprised that ‘new to the Andersonville camp’ Tom Hanks was able to adjust his style of delivery to be absolutely perfect in this either... you get good actors and they deliver, simple as that.

And everything seems to be absolutely what you would expect from an Anderson movie, bordering on  cliché, almost. For example, Alexandre Desplat’s score for the film (which should be on a CD already... what’s wrong with you people?) is mixed heavily into the foreground and does exactly what you would expect from a score from this composer/director collaboration. Although the needle drop songs seemed to be more on point on this one rather than from very different styles. As such, however, there are no real surprises in the film other than the little moments (like Cranston’s character accidentally entering the wrong part of the movie). So, I knew that alien would be back to do one final thing and, yeah, it’s for the most Wes Andersonny purpose that the asteroid was temporarily absconded with.

All in all, I don’t understand some of the criticisms of this movie but, hey, I’m glad everyone is different. All I can say is, I loved Asteroid City and had a big smile on my face all the way through. Another masterpiece by one of my favourite living directors, for sure. 

PS. This 'city' is only a few structures and has a population of 87. Not sure why it's classified as a city.

Mazes And Monsters

Only When I LARP

Mazes And Monsters
USA 1982
Directed by Steven Hilliard Stern
Plumeria Pictures Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Before I get to any negative stuff about this movie in the following review, which I suspect will mostly take the form of my personal recollected history of the title in question, I’d like to genuinely thank the newish UK label Plumeria Pictures for putting this one out. It’s like visiting a very old friend I’d not seen in a long while... only to find that friend had aged rather badly and gone a little senile in the intervening years. However, I have a lot of fondness in my heart for this movie, despite how much it seems to creak nowadays and I certainly didn’t think I’d ever see a home video version of the film, especially in a high quality Blu Ray presentation.

Okay, so Mazes And Monsters is a TV movie based on a novel by Rona Jaffe, itself inspired by a real life, long running suicide case which I won’t go into here, read the liner notes on the accompanying booklet to the Blu Ray if you want to know more. Plumeria pictures Blu Ray is a 40th anniversary edition, the film originally aired at the end of December 1982 in the US but, I’m pretty sure we didn’t see it on our TV stations in the UK until at least the following year. I remember I saw it more than once because our family had just bought our first video cassette recorder and so, as I was trying out this new and, frankly, miraculous (as it seemed then) technology, I was always on the look out for interesting films to record (in fact, owning a VCR started me on my path to loving the films of The Marx Brothers, looking for something to test it on).

I’d seen it in the listings and figured this film was obviously something to do with the playing of the game Dungeons And Dragons (really, what about the subtly copyright evading title made me imagine that?) and that was something I loved doing when I was a kid... looking through my dad’s D n’ D manuals from the early 1970s. So I watched it and, at that time, I thought it was great. I loved the actors playing the gamers... Wendy Crewson, David Wysocki, Chris Makepeace... and especially liked the performance of the fourth player in the film, one who I raved to my friends about when I sat them down one by one to watch my VCR recording... a young Tom Hanks in his first starring role. That actor’s going to go real far, I told them, one year before I got to say “Ha! Told you so!” when Splash was released into cinemas. Although, watching the film now... I don’t know why I felt that strongly about him at the time, in all honesty.

Okay, so the film tells the story of a gamer, Hanks, who goes off the rails and starts believing he is the character he plays in Dungeon’s And... urm... Mazes And Monsters, going on a quest to find The Two Towers (an obvious Tolkien reference for the time) which turns out to translate to going to the top of the World Trade Centre (aka The Twin Towers) and throwing himself off the roof. Can his friends find him and stop him in time or will he become a splash of red on the New York side walk? Well, without giving too many spoilers, there’s a third option which plays out which, is actually a quite negative and poignant takeaway from the film/novel... which kind of saves the movie, somewhat, with a definite ‘not in Hollywoodland’ ending.

That’s as much as I’m saying about the film but I will say that, back in 1983, I loved this movie so much (before recording over it to make way for Work Is A Four Letter Word... another movie I’ve lost to time) that I even managed to find a second hand copy of Rona Jaffe’s paperback novel, with a wildly innapropriate photographic cover of a blonde model, if memory serves (pictured above)... and looking straight out of the Mills And Boon school of cover design. And it was a fantastic book which I also have no memory of now, save for one scene which sticks in my mind in which two of the characters are listening to Miklos Roza’s score for Spellbound in their car and talking about film music being the ‘classical music of tomorrow’. For reasons obvious to regular readers of this blog, that statement struck a cord with me as it helped legitimise, in my mind, my own love of film scores.

Watching it now, the film is dated and, honestly, nothing remarkable. It seems it had a very short turnaround time and that would excuse it a bit, I guess. Bearing in mind it aired in 1982, for example... one of the characters has a poster of Blade Runner in his college dormitory room, which itself didn’t get released until that same year. Yeah, it’s clunky and schmaltzy by today's standards but, back then it was an absolute classic.

The quality of the thing, though, both technically and in execution, leaves a lot to be desired. Plumeria Pictures, who I suddenly have a lot of time for (and will be keeping an eye out for their future releases, which are sadly few and far between), have done their absolute best to bring a beautiful transfer of the film into our homes. Alas, the quality of the thing looks just as bad as my old home video recording back in 1983... something less than sharp and with occasional visual stutters like the film has been broken and been repaired, just slightly wrongly. Plumeria obviously did their best with this though and must have realised the problems with their source material because... and I quote from the back of the box... it’s ‘restored from the best available source’. Unfortunately, not even a small company treating this picture like a labour of love can change the fact that I got up from my seat once to brush a fly off my television, only to realise it was actually a recording of a fly crawling on the camera lens at one point. There was also at least one moment in the movie when I was fearing that one of the actors might be damaged by the bits of sound equipment suddenly hanging down into shot.

One thing which I did feel was a bit over the top in terms of Plumeria was the marketing of the film, in terms of its rather attractive cover art. This comprises a slip case (which is a limited edition part of the deal so, if you want one, hurry up and order from their site at https://plumeriapics.co.uk/ already... it may be gone by the time this review sees the light of day) featuring five Dungeons And Dragons dice in a pool of blood and a passing quote from the movie talking about the more sensationalist and exploitative elements of the game. It’s a nice thing, actually but, it has to be said, in no way evokes the spirit of the film residing within its slipcase.

But that’s that. I’ve been reunited with an old friend and, even if I was somewhat disappointed with the movie now, I shall be forever greatful for Plumeria stepping in and allowing me (and hopefully many young fans... I hope this sells well for them) the chance to own a film I never thought would see the light of day ever again. I’m not going to recommend Mazes And Monsters as such because, yeah, it is a bit of a clunker of a movie when viewed through a contemporary lens but, I’m sure an audience such as myself exists for this movie and I sincerely hope they make thier money back on this one. As for me... well... goodbye old friend.

The Post

Haste

The Post
2017 USA Directed by Steven Spielberg
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very light spoilers, of a sort, in here if you are not familiar with the subject matter.

I quite like Steven Spielberg.

Pretty much since seeing his TV movie Duel on an old black and white set back in the early 70s.

I think he’s a director who, for the most part, makes consistently good films, sometimes great films and whose star status behind the camera dwarfs most actors and celebrities he works with. I’ve not seen all of his work but I’ve seen the large majority of it (barring a few films) and, asides from stuff which were real clunkers and which I could never quite bring myself to watch again (like E.T - The Extra Terrestrial and A.I) then you are usually on to a winner if you take a trip to the cinema to see one of his movies. He’ll also, usually, get to show you a moment or two of things which are unique or inventive.

Now, The Post, is a pretty good movie. It’s not a great movie but it is, at the very least, entertaining. I thought it was less gripping than a more recent cinematic outing into investigative journalism from a couple of years ago - Spotlight (reviewed by me here) but this is still genuinely compelling in places... especially if, like me, you have absolutely no first hand (or even any second hand) knowledge of the real life events that are being depicted in the movie.

The film opens strongly as we follow a soldier called Daniel Ellsberg, played by Matthew Rhys, on a stint in the Vietnam war. As his patrol is ambushed and all hell breaks loose we have a nice transition where the footage is revealed to be him flashing back to this chapter of his life as he rides a presidential plane in his current job. We then see him, a few years later, start to abscond with... and then have photocopied... various documents which show a history of American presidential regimes have been lying about the success and expectations of that particular war.

We then meet some of the other key characters in the film, the main two being Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee, an editor or head of department for The Washington Post (someone who I believe both Hanks and Spielberg knew socially at some point in their lives) and Meryl Streep as Kay Graham, the owner of the family business that The Washington Post was. Now, we have a few things going on at the start of the film... declining sales, Kay Graham’s decision to launch the newspaper on the stock market and, amongst all this, Bradlee’s hunch that a crack writer at one of their rivals, The New York Times, has been silent lately and so must be working on something really important. These threads are followed and pulled together as we flit between the team of reporters working on their assignments and Kay’s social circle, where it’s highlighted that she knows some of the players about to be embroiled in what happens when, as Bradlee gets wind of, The New York Times are going to publish Ellsberg’s 'Pentagon Papers' and reveal the dark underbelly and legacy of the US politics.

When The New York Times are threatened with a cease and desist document from the American government while they seek to sue them, one of Bradlee’s people find the source (Ellsberg), gets the photocopies of the documents from him - which are almost to hot to handle (as it happens, the real ones from the actual incident were used in all the scenes where they are seen in the film, it seems) - and the film then becomes about whether Kay should greenlight printing them in this manner and, very briefly, the outcome of the court case in light of her decision.

It’s good stuff and, as you would expect from Spielberg and the team of craftsmen he surrounds himself with, it’s all put together pretty well including, of course, the excellent performances from a wealth of great actors. Of special note, naturally, are Streep and Hanks and, since I don’t have too much to say about the way the movie has been put together, let me just focus on these two giants of modern acting for a moment.

Streep is someone who I haven’t seen that much but she’s always struck me as being completely convincing in any role I’ve seen her in (starting for me, I think, with her role as Woody Allen’s lesbian ex-wife in his classic Manhattan). Now, I have to say, I found her character a little infuriating here... because she seems so, how do I put this... measured here, in her delivery. It’s like the character takes time to process every thought and sentence and I had a real desire to just shake her and tell her to get her words out quicker. Which tells me two things... one, the real life person she’s playing must have had some element of that inherent in her personality (or there was a good reason for playing it like this) and, two, she must be a bloody good actress (which I think enough people know by now).

Hanks surprised me a little. I’ve always liked him since I started pointing him out to people as some one who may go far after seeing him in a TV movie called Mazes And Monsters when it was broadcast in the UK in the early 1980s. I was thrilled when he got a big feature film role in Splash and, yeah, I guess the rest is history... and he’s always been an actor I’ve liked but he’s also someone who I equate with being a ‘movie star’. That is to say, he plays more or less the same type of person in every film and he’s generally someone you wouldn’t mind hanging out with in a bar. So I was astonished at just how different the character he inhabited here seemed. I mean, yes, it’s still Hanks and he feels all Hanks-ike as usual but, there’s something extra here somehow. An edge to the character where he would say and do things and I would think... I wouldn’t expect Tom Hanks to say or do that in quite that way so... yeah, there you go again. Another great actor and also a joy to watch.

Now, Spielberg is someone whose films I have mostly enjoyed (as I mentioned earlier) but he’s one of those rare director’s who I’ve never really been able to identify as having a discernable signature style in his work. Other than always being amazingly competent and providing nice compositions which don’t call attention to themselves. Now I’m sure he wouldn’t have it any other way either but... looking at this... I kinda noticed something which I think may actually be something he does in other films... I just can’t think of a single example off the top of my head right now. However, in The Post, I caught him doing this...

He will switch out from a general shot of lot of hubbub where a fair few people are doing things which are fairly distracting (almost like a mini version of a Robert Altman movie but... not quite that distracting and disorganised) and then one character, often not the main character, will be given a task which becomes his or her purpose for the rest of the shot and quite possibly the next scene. And then the camera will filter everything else out and go hell bent for leather with that person as he or she completes her task to fill in, usually, an important plot point. So, for instance, Hanks character might grab an intern and tell him to do some stuff over the background miasma of a noisy office and then, suddenly, we follow that intern with a certain speed and purpose which dominates the scene for the next minute or two... I dunno. I just go the feeling that it’s a genuine Spielbergism and I’m going to be watching a few more of his movies this year (hopefully) and see if it’s a common factor. This idea of splitting away from a general ensemble atmosphere and then suddenly intensifying the focus onto just one character for a minute at the exclusion of all else.

The other big star and character in this, if you will, is the wonderful score by Spielberg’s regular musical collaborator, composer John Williams. Now, I have been a big admirer of this composer and have been following his career and going to concerts by him since the 1970s. When he scored Star Wars - The Force Awakens a couple of years ago, I thought it was one of the best things he’d written in many years and he really would have deserved the Oscar for that one (alas, I believe Oscar politics may have gotten in the way of things that year). Even my friend who is a big Williams devotee and who used to even travel to Boston in the United States to see him in concert too, agrees with me that his music for The Last Jedi was a real patchwork of a score and a bit of a career lowlight.

However, having now seen this movie, I’m baffled as to why he got an Oscar nomination for his new Star Wars score when, frankly, his score for The Post is way more deserving. I think, of many Spielberg films, this really does need the supporting score to drive home its points. It’s not particularly subtle but it really helps the film that it isn’t, I think. I said last year that Zimmer’s score for Dunkirk was the only thing which provided the underlying tension of that film and, if you took it away, the movie would fall flat. I think the same thing applies to The Post. There were sequences here where Williams is using... well not exactly 1950s B-movie stingers but certainly a close cousin as he highlights conversations and sequences with a building menace which, frankly, I would not have realised were supposed to be in any way suspenseful without the score there to spell it out for me. It’s probably because I don’t understand and don’t really care about anything political, in terms of not knowing I was supposed to be feeling lurking dread but, thankfully, Williams provides it all here and this is a real example of a score doing more than just supporting the film, I think.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about this one. The Post closes out with, more or less, a reconstruction of the opening sequence of the classic film All The President’s Men and, I’d have to say, although I don’t think this movie is quite as powerful as that one, it would make one hell of a good double bill playing before it at cinemas. So there you have it, Spielberg gives us, not a great film but a fairly good one and, with his track record, that’s really not bad. If you enjoy movies of this ilk then you’ll no doubt like this one too so... catch it at the cinema to get the best of that Johnny Williams score, is my advice.

Inferno (2016)

Inferno, Rest, Trains

Inferno (2016)
2016  USA/Japan/Turkey/Hungary
Directed by Ron Howard
UK cinema release print.

Not to be confused with the amazing Dario Argento movie of the same name, Inferno is the third of the big screen adaptations of Dan Brown’s popular Professor Robert Langdon series, this one being based on the fourth book... which is kinda strange but then the series started off with the second book, The Da Vinci Code and then made a sequel out of the first book, Angels And Demons (the movie of which I reviewed here). So why they’ve missed out The Lost Symbol I don’t know but I’m sure, if this series of movies continues to make as much money as the novels have done, they’ll get to it.

Like the first two movies, this one is once again directed by Ron Howard (who played Richie Cunningham in the TV show Happy Days back in the 1970s) and all I can say is, I still can’t figure out what his directorial signature is. Other than, for the most part, making some pretty entertaining and, usually, quite popular movies. My experience with the series thus far is... The Da Vinci Code was an okayish movie (and it had Audrey Tautou in it, so that helped) and Angels And Demons was an outstanding modern action thriller. This third one is incredibly entertaining too but, I think it also has some problems... just not quite enough to outweigh its sense of fun.

The movie, once again, stars the always watchable Tom Hanks as Professor Langdon (an actor I first saw in a TV movie called Mazes and Monsters and liked him in that so, you know, it’s good that he’s made a but of a name for himself now) and he is aided and abetted (character wise) by a very strong cast including Felicity Jones, who played Mrs. Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (read my review here) and who is about to become very famous heading up the release, in September, of Star Wars: Rogue One. The film also stars Sidse Babett Knudsen (who I last saw in The Duke Of Burgundy (reviewed here), Ben Foster, Irrfan Khan, Omar Sy, Ana Ularu and... oh yeah, they’re all amazing. You will believe in these characters and the unusual things they say and do for sure... you will have no problem suspending your disbelief here, that’s for sure. So that’s one of the huge plusses that the movie has.

The film starts off in the midst of an ongoing story and we're catapulted right into the heart of things as we have a completely discombobulated Professor Langdon suffering from hellish hallucinations based on a famous illustration of Dante’s Inferno from The Divine Comedy. The pace is, beyond anything the second movie threw at the audience, quite blistering. However, for the movie as a whole that’s a bit of a double edged sword because, although you won’t get bored here and the action will whizz by at a rate which will leave you wanting to catch your breath maybe just a little more than the director and editors allow that to happen here... you will also be as discombobulated as Professor Langdon from the outset of the film. Although things make more sense as the film speeds on, you will find yourself just wishing it will all calm down at some point.

That is to say... it’s a movie made up of mostly short sharp shots. The modus operandi here seems to be why listen to a line of expositional dialogue in a master shot when you can split it up into three totally different angles of a character when they are delivering a line. I guess it makes the dialogue more interesting but it's usually also punctuated, very quickly, by another dose of action/suspense as Hanks and Jones are hunted by pretty much every authority on the planet... as Professor Langdon tries to stop a virus which promises to unleash death on over half the world very quickly (people who are familiar with the story as it’s represented in the book, which I’ve not read myself, should be aware that this movie has a quite different ending to the original novel). As a consequence, however, it’s all very choppy and there are some points, even in scenes where nothing much is happening, where you just wish everything would slow down and go back to a single master shot at some point.

I’m guessing one of the other reasons the people who made this have decided to subject this movie to a ferociously intimidating piece of editing (although it's never dull) is because there is a so called twist about two thirds into the movie and they're maybe trying to distract you from it but, honestly, if you haven’t worked out what that twist will be within five minutes of the film's opening sequence starting you’ve not been paying attention because, honestly, Howard pretty much telegraphs this not so revealing reveal quite a lot throughout the movie. I was kinda disappointed, actually, when it happened because... well, who wasn’t expecting that? Obviously, I won’t give that twist away here but it’s exactly what most people, I suspect, are thinking throughout the movie and saying to themselves... “C’mon Professor Langdon, when’s the penny going to drop?”.

So there’s that.

However, like I said above, although there are a lot of problems with the story... or at least with the way the story is presented in this medium here, there are enough plus points to kinda outweigh it and still give you a good time at the movies.  And one of those plus points, of course, is Hans Zimmer’s amazing score.

I kinda liked Zimmer’s score to the first movie in the series but wasn’t completely crazy about it. His second score, though, to Angels And Demons, was simply a fantastic modern work and certain tracks from that are never off my iPod or CD player for very long. This third score is better than the first and certainly holds it’s own with the second... although I need to hear it as a stand alone performance before I can decide whether I like it better than the second or not. The music obviously uses Zimmer’s already established Robert Langdon theme but, also, it seems to use a lot of references to the action themes from Angels And Demons in some of its slower passages too... especially through the first third of the movie, which surprised me because that means I’ve now got absolutely no idea how the leitmotif works with this set of films. Why the heck was that in here? I haven’t got a clue but I do know a good soundtrack when I hear it and this one is pretty cool. As to be expected from the pacing on the movie, there’s a lot of action music and percussion so it should be quite a ‘rocking’ listen when I finally get the CD to this one. I’ve come to respect Zimmer a lot over the last decade or so, after initially dismissing him at the early stages of his career. He also knows how to rock a concert venue as you can read in my review of his London concert from earlier in the year here. 

All in all, although Inferno is quite predictable, a bit choppy and aggressively edited (not to mention quite noisy for a lot of the time), it’s also got some beautiful visuals (when you get time to focus on them), some great acting, an amazing score and, frankly, there are a lot worse big budget type popcorn movies you could be spending your cinema cash on at the moment. I’m not hearing a great critical reaction to it at the moment but I’m hoping that it will do enough at the box office so that Ron Howard and Tom Hanks will reunite for a fourth one (and preferably with Hans Zimmer in tow). Hopefully they’ll sink their teeth into The Lost Symbol next.

Bridge Of Spies

Spy Society

Bridge Of Spies
2015 USA
Directed by Steven Spielberg
UK cinema release print.

So once again we have a Steven Spielberg movie which stars someone who I believe is fast becoming a frequent collaborator of his, Tom Hanks. Hanks is one of those rare cases, for me, when I actually spotted him as a talent to be watched way before he ever got famous. Back in 1982, which is the last time I saw it (and I wish it wasn’t), I watched a TV movie called Mazes And Monsters which starred young Tom as a man whose Dungeons And Dragons gaming had caused a malfunction in his brain. He started confusing the game for real life... or something like that. Forgive me, it’s been a long time. I remember liking it so much that I read the source novel it was based on and also told my friends to look out for this guy called Tom Hanks because he could really act. Two years later he made Splash and it didn’t take long before his name was synonymous with quality acting and, due to some sound career decisions, quality movies.

I’m not the best lover of some of the material he’s been in but I still, to this day, think Hanks is an incredible performer and, whether I like his films or not, I always find that his presence lifts whatever he’s in. A truly great actor and, to boot, with a public persona that makes him someone you really wouldn’t mind hanging out with at a pub on a Saturday night, perhaps.

Bridge Of Spies is no exception but it also, of course, comes with the seal of competence that Spielberg, again... whether I agree with his choice of subject matter or not... brings to all of his work as a director and producer. He makes films which are so well put together that you know that, whether you are going to have a really great time with his movie or not, that the very least you will get is something compelling in the way it is shot. Something which isn’t dull.

Bridge Of Spies is certainly never dull and, since Spielberg knows how to use his toolbox of cinematic syntax so well, it turns out to be an extremely entertaining movie. It’s not exactly a dynamic movie, although it does start off with a very gripping sequence which is like a toned down version of something you might expect to see in The Quiller Memorandum (reviewed by me here). That is to say, it starts off with a classic set of sequences featuring a spy and the people trailing him before he makes his escape and is then raided at home, quietly destroying as much evidence as he can right under the noses of the people sent to arrest him.

So, yeah. Maybe not dynamic but certainly very interestingok and Spielberg’s use of some amazing compositions, many of which section various characters off into their own little compartments in the way the frames are split by scenery and objects, is brilliant throughout the running time of the movie. The shots are leisurely and slow for the most part but, because Spielberg is so gifted with making things look perfect visually, well... like I implied earlier... you’re certainly not going to get bored with this one. The film is almost two and a half hours long but you probably won’t feel that it is.

This ‘inspired by a true story’ tale is fantastically put together as we see Tom Hanks character defend a real life Russian spy with a Scottish accent (which is apparently as it was in the real circumstances) and also negotiate an exchange for the Russian for two US prisoners or varying interest to the US government. As you would expect, you get as fine a performance from Tom Hanks and his co-stars in this picture as you would expect and special mention must go to Mark Rylance playing the ‘unworried by possible death’, laid back spy whom Tom Hanks develops a friendship with. It’s good stuff and, though it’s not an action movie it's... well, like I said before in reference to Spielberg’s movies... it’s compelling. It also helps that, while it’s a dialogue heavy movie, Spielberg is one of those few directors who understands that silence is golden and will leave a character to contemplate things in a way which almost allows the audience to pick up on their thought processes without having to have it spoon fed in the narrative. It harkens back to the days of silent cinema to an extent and with someone like Hanks at the helm in terms of the acting stakes... you know you are going to get something very crystal clear coming through to your spectators. There’s a wonderful shot near the end of the movie where Hanks sees some kids climbing fences from the train he’s on and you realise just what he’s thinking about due to the visual metaphor of the shot echoing something far more dramatic you see earlier in the movie. No words are used to bolster or spell out this moment... most people will surely ‘get it’ though.

One slight criticism I have with the movie is Thomas Newman’s score. Now this is one of the very few times that Spielberg has not teamed up with John Williams to provide music for his art. My understanding is that Williams was fitted with a pacemaker this year and couldn’t keep up with scoring both this movie and the new Star Wars movie (reviewed by me here) and so was forced to drop this one. Newman’s score is certainly serviceable and kinda appropriate in the places it’s used but... I dunno, maybe I’m just being biased here but I didn’t feel it was anything more than appropriate. It didn’t feel out of place but it didn’t feel to me like it was adding any lift to the movie either. As a stand alone listen it’s probably pretty cool but it just felt a little ‘off’ to me, I would say. There’s actually very little music in the movie, it has to be said. The way the thing is spotted is such that there are lots of long passages, it seemed to me, with no score in it whatsoever... so I wonder if that would have been the case if Williams was involved or not. I guess well never know and Newman certainly doesn’t let the film down too much, I think... I just didn’t experience the emotional pull I was expecting in some scenes... at least not from the music.

All that being said though... Bridge Of Spies is a very fine film. It’s not something I could watch again anytime soon but it’s a quality product and I think it deserves to be seen as much as anything else out there at the moment. Spielberg and Hanks are both masters of their art and this film is absolutely no exception. If you’re a fan of cinema, you really should go and see this one if you get the opportunity. Not the best film from either Hanks or Spielberg but certainly something which will probably linger with you a while after you leave the cinema. Don’t let this one pass you by.

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Control

Cloud Atlas
2012 Germany/USA/Hong Kong/Singapore
Directed by Tom Tykwer & The Wachowski Siblings
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Region B

I remember wanting to see this, kind of, at the cinema when it came out in the UK in February of 2103 but there were too many demands being made on my time around then so I was forced to give it a miss. That’s okay though... this is why we have Computer Exchange stores across the land. So we can buy Blu Rays of the movies we missed at dirt cheap prices many months after the initial home video release has passed us by.

Cloud Atlas is one of those movies that is extremely impressive and full of mystery when you watch it. It’s a long film, nearly three hours, and it managed to hold my interest throughout the running time in a way which subsequent viewings possibly wouldn’t. That is to say that the intrigue generated from the initial conceptual set up is the driving force behind the narrative path, if it can be said to indeed have a narrative path, and once the intricacies of the connective tissue turn out to be, maybe, a little bit like the Emporer’s New Clothes in terms of its ultimate message... the film ends up being a little flat and without any real meaning to it by the finish of things.

On the other hand, a similar case could be made for such masterpieces as Citizen Kane, among others, so let’s not count this one out of the running either.

The film walks a very delicate and difficult path in that it maintains a cross cutting narrative that spans at least five, by my count, separate time zones in Earth’s history... past, present and future. How it does this is a remarkable achievement in terms of allowing the audience to keep everything in their heads without losing the plot and the film makers should be congratulated in this task. This couldn’t have been an easy film to shoot and, frankly, probably even less easy to edit.

It helps though that the colour palette on each segment is just a little different without being too at odds with the prevailing style (there’s a heck of a lot of deep focus photography in this thing) and the various directors use every visual and aural trick in the book to guide the audience into a cross cut jump from one time zone to another while trying to assure said audience don't, at first, notice that transition.

One of the most helpful things is that the ridiculous idea of having a heck of a lot of characters with several members of the cast playing several roles in different time zones, helps with familiarity through the actors, becoming a kind of visual cement to enhance the idea that life is all about ripples in time and connections between eras.

It helps the various directors in their visual chicanery quite well, in fact. For example, the director might use a cut on a shot, bringing to the main part of the screen a specific visual key point like an actress’ hand, with the camera panning around and holding it at the centre of one’s focus. The following shot might, for instance, mirror the speed and direction of the shot and continue with highlighting the same thing, sometimes with even the same actor, but after a while your brain catches up and you realise the transition has gone from the hand belonging to one character in the future to the same artist portraying someone in the past. It’s disorienting but, because there’s a lot of detail and visual indicators kicking in as a kind of aftershock on the consciousness, the transitions become seamless while your head catches up to the on screen action.

Similarly, the sound design is used in a manner which will help the brain cope with the various interpenetrating story transitions, such as the sound of horses hooves pounding against the ground metamorphosing into the rhythmic rumble of a steam train as it continues on its journey in a different chronological setting. These are all good tricks to use and the technical aspects of the film are all pulled off brilliantly.

What this does, of course, is allow the viewer to seamlessly cut between, not just different scenarios in time but, also, different shifts in tone. For instance, while most of the stories that play out in this movie are all quite serious and, for the most part, quite downbeat, the screenplay manages to juggle a kind of modern comedy routine of a setting and integrate it into the rest of the scenarios without shifting the tone of the various individual narrative threads, perhaps even enhancing those by contrast and their place within the overall structure of the film.

Asides from the tremendous acting performances and the amazing editing which often cuts on movement, the set design and overall art direction is absolutely brilliant. I found this especially noticeable in one of the “realms” dealing with earth in the future, where animated, interactive, desktop-style background wallpapers are used in the interior of buildings on the walls and floors. Animated fish can swim under foot, for example, and when a foot is put down a virtual splash of water accompanies this action. This is all great stuff and another impressive layer to the movie.

What wasn’t so impressive to me, in the context of the film itself, was the score by Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek and Tom Tykwer... at least not as it is used and lost in the mix. And while the score is probably stronger than I at first perceived, from what I hear of the on-line samples, it seems a pity to me that, for a film where a specific musical piece is used as a major thematic and transitional glue, the score should be so buried under the sound mix for a lot of the time. So that’s a bit of a shame (I'm actually listening to the freshly arrived CD soundtrack as I ready this review and can confirm that the score works very well as a stand alone listen).

My other main problem with the film, and I touched upon this in my opening remarks, is that it doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere. Okay, so we’re hooked in on the fact that various characters from different time zones are played by the same actors from the other parts of the movie and that certainly gets one’s attention. Similarly the concept of a running, comet shaped birth mark through the decades is also an interesting hook. However, at the end, there’s no prevailing explanation as to why any of these things are actually put in place in the first place. Some characters do share a certain connection but not enough to warrant the exploration of these ideas in the first place, it seems to me. The film doesn’t seem to have any real, underlying, central idea it’s trying to convey other than, maybe, everybody should love each other and all start trying to get along. There’s no attempt at anything like closure in the movie in terms of anything other than the conclusion of each, individual story within the narrative... no real effort is made to tie everything in other than by the use of random chance... at least that’s the way it seemed to me.

As an answer to that particular expectation of mine, which was the reason for my investment in the narrative in the first place, you might want to take the tack that a big screen entertainment is just that.. a big screen entertainment. I couldn’t really argue about that myself, other than to recall that the movie had maybe set up my expectations to expect something which had a specific point to make by the end of it. Now I’ve not read the original novel on which this movie was based (as yet), so I’ve no idea if the source story had a more concrete narrative goal and this maybe got lost in translation when it came to the movie adaptation of it. However, in terms of investing my time for almost three hours... I felt the film was a little flat and unsatisfying towards the end. Again, though, whether a movie is required to give this level of closure or whether it should be merely an empty spectacle is an argument for another time. I think there’s room in the world for both types, personally.

So there you have it. Cloud Atlas is a spectacular, attention grabbing film which manages to give a great deal of emotional empathy to the various characters and their situations, while still seeming a little bereft of anything really concrete to say about any of the issues it brings up, it seems to me. That being said, it is a great movie and if you can forget about the “puzzle solving” and reward aspect of the particular journey the filmmakers lead you on with, it’s a stunning piece of cinematic art, worthy of your time.  One thing’s for sure... you won’t find it boring.

Angels and Demons

Pipped At The Pope!

Angels and Demons US 2009

Directed by Ron Hoard

Columbia Region 1

I remember that when The Da Vinci Code came out in the cinemas I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to see this movie. I’d... well not exactly read the book... but I had listened to the “talking books” style CD of the novel being read to me in the car on the way to a holiday destination one year and, quite honestly, couldn’t see what the fuss was about. I remembered buying my mother the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail for a birthday present when I was about 11 years old and I thought to myself, as I listened to Dan Brown’s huge bestseller being read to me, that this was all just the same old Knights Templar stuff rehashed all over again... and that as a rule I found the Blind Dead movies a lot more fun.

But the main thing which stuck out to me about the novel was how uncinematic it was. I knew, by this point, that they were making a movie out of it and my impressions of the novel were that there was far too much exposition and people standing around in the same rooms talking for lengthy periods of time to make a decent visual narrative. So I was more than a little wary when I was dragged along to see the first movie, grudgingly letting myself be lead along to see it because Audrey Tautou and Jean Reno were in it. However, it has to be said that The DaVinci Code, all in all, made for a dull movie even with the presence of these two icons of cinema and, of course, the presence of the consummate professional Tom Hanks as the main protagonist, symbologist Robert Langdon.

My girlfriend at the time was besotted with the score and I certainly didn’t mind it, but I was not as much into Zimmer as I am now... I think the work he’s been doing since then is a vast improvement. But it wasn’t exactly a terrible score either and it was absolutely appropriate for the movie it was supporting.

The other thing I remember thinking was... well, why the heck were they adapting the second book in the series first? I’d not read the original first book in the series, Angels and Demons, but doing a movie adaptation of The DaVinci Code first seemed to me to make about as much sense as starting off the Bond series of movies with Dr. No. That is to say, totally illogical.

So, as you can imagine, when the sequel (and it is treated as a sequel rather than a prequel in the movie, with references to the first movie thrown in although the fictionalised events in that movie actually took place after the events in the sequel) came out I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to see it. Especially after finding that the BBFC had got it sliced for various sequences (the first movie also suffers from serious censorship issues in this country, with the sound being dialled down in certain areas to reduce the intensity of events on screen).

However I remember being completely bowled over by this one so I finally git around to tracking down the US extended edition of the movie (so I could see it totally uncut this time) and I have to say the sheer watchability of the film is not in any way diminished on subsequent viewings (I think I saw that one twice at the cinema anyway as I recall).

Angels and Demons is a totally different animal to the previous movie and while there are certainly moments of protracted exposition within the film, it rushes along at a heady pace and that’s quite a necessary response to the timeline of events in the novel (even though, as I confessed earlier, I haven’t read this one) as those events all take place within the space of just a few hours. Langdon has been called in by the Vatican police to help work out where the antimatter "God Particle" created by the Large Hadron Collider, but then stolen, has been put before it goes off after four kidnapped candidates to be the Pope are summarily executed, one hour after each other, by the Illuminati (gosh, it’s been a while since The Eye In The Pyramid!). As part of the ritualistic trappings of the killing, the assassin is having to leave cryptic clues about where the next death will take place and its these clues which Robert Langdon can puzzle out, and then hopefully dash to where things are about to happen and save lives.

What this means in practice is you get a kick ass movie which resembles nothing other than one of those old 70s cop TV shows where, inevitably, you will have an episode where the main protagonist has to run around the city from phone booth to phone booth by a certain time limit in order to stop a bomb going off somewhere. The last time I saw this plot approached in a fairly modern movie was when the villain used it as a distraction for the police in the third Die Hard movie, Die Hard With A Vengeance.

Here the plot is pretty much played straight, though, but coupled with some pseudo-religious trappings, some shoot-outs and daring escapes and two large dollops of intrigue and humour (in equal measure), you end up with something which is actually quite gripping and intriguing... and all with an absolute masterpiece of a score by the aforementioned Zimmer, which includes some of his most exciting compositions to date (you should all go listen to the track 160 BPM).

True, the few twists and turns there are in this movie are ones which you will see coming a mile off, but there’s really no substitute, is there, for a really well made, action thriller, and that’s exactly what Angels and Demons is. Of course, it also has some great actors in it with the likes of Ewan McGregor and Stellan Skarsgard lending their formidable talents to the proceedings. Also, as you would perhaps expect from a director who used to be Opie Taylor in The Andy Griffith Show and then Richie Cunningham in Happy Days (that is to say, someone who’s been around long enough to know the difference), the framing of the beautifully lit shots and the editing all make for a movie which makes the sum of its parts add up to a marvellously quasi-ancient atmosphere filled package... this is a classy action movie if ever there was one.

This one is certainly recommended for a viewing and all I can say to those of you who, like me, were spectacularly unimpressed with the previous movie in the series, is to not judge this movie by its predecessor and take a look at this one. You might just find your faith rewarded with a great little future DVD for your shelf.