An arthouse inspection of the beauty industry, with the thin lines that separate appreciation and exploitation hopscotched over, "Neon Demon" is one of those films that is fascinating to look at even as you are somewhat bewildered by the thinking that went on behind it. For the first hour and a half or so, this is a reasonably standard story as Elle Fanning's Jesse wanders though the fashion industry, rising from photo shoots to catwalk and arousing the envy of some of her compeitotors, the admiration of designers, photographers and makeup artists, and the somewhat creepy attentions of her hotel landlord (Keanu Reeves).
Then for the last twenty-thirty minutes, the film goes notably insane in a grand-guignol kinda way. Much of the film beforehand does feel like a prelude to the violence to come - some of the photoshoots see Jesse manhandled and objectified in ways that feel viscerally unpleasant - but still, this isn't a film where logic is necessarily going to lead the way. It is glossy throughout, highly styalised both in look and performance.
I didn't love this - there isn't quite enough going on for the eyes or the brain that you can ignore that there isn't really a lot of empathy for anybody being shown here, But it's not utterly dismissable either - the last portion offers a couple of sights that you probably won't see many other places and a glorious lack of tastefulless.
Sunday 30 October 2016
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
The first "Jack Reacher" was perfectly well done nonsensical pulp. The character of Jack Reacher, as I gathered from that film and from a little bit of info about Lee Child's numerous novels, is a macho paladin, an ex-army Major who now wanders the US with little cash and few possessions, doing heroic deeds just because of the pure awesomeness of his nature. The fact that in the books he's ridiculously tall and in the films he's played by the not-quite-as-tall Tom Cruise doesn't particularly matter, in every other way Cruise epitomised the "I'm right and everybody else is wrong" arrogance of a pup-fiction protagonist.
"Never Go Back" softens this a bit (possibly because it can't quite go to the almost self-parodistic lengths of the first one), introducing Major Turner (Cobie Smulders), who's inherited Reacher's old job and has a phone correspondence with him. When he eventually shows up to meet her in Washington, she turns out to have been accused of treason - and Reacher therefore is compelled to clear her name, via the ever popular "beating up a whole lot of goons" method.
A scrappier, more down-and-dirty franchise than the glossy "Mission Impossible" series, this one does attempt to soften the edges a tad - by allowing Smulders to be right about things occasionally, and by introducing a 15 year old who could possibly be Reacher's daughter as a tag-along-cum-occasional-hostage. It putters along reasonably (although this also lacks the iconic villainy that Werner Herzog gave the first film), with a lot of quality punching people in the head, but this is pretty much an airport novel of a film - you're unlikely to remember much of this after you left the cinema but you may enjoy it while you're there.
"Never Go Back" softens this a bit (possibly because it can't quite go to the almost self-parodistic lengths of the first one), introducing Major Turner (Cobie Smulders), who's inherited Reacher's old job and has a phone correspondence with him. When he eventually shows up to meet her in Washington, she turns out to have been accused of treason - and Reacher therefore is compelled to clear her name, via the ever popular "beating up a whole lot of goons" method.
A scrappier, more down-and-dirty franchise than the glossy "Mission Impossible" series, this one does attempt to soften the edges a tad - by allowing Smulders to be right about things occasionally, and by introducing a 15 year old who could possibly be Reacher's daughter as a tag-along-cum-occasional-hostage. It putters along reasonably (although this also lacks the iconic villainy that Werner Herzog gave the first film), with a lot of quality punching people in the head, but this is pretty much an airport novel of a film - you're unlikely to remember much of this after you left the cinema but you may enjoy it while you're there.
Sunday 23 October 2016
Cafe Society
From I Daniel Blake to Cafe Society may seem a long way, but there are similarities ... Primarily that Loach and Allen are filmmakers with long resumes, and both turned 80 this year.
That's about where the resemblance stops, though. Allen has been massively uneven most of this millennium, with his dialogue increasingly feeling tired and like nothing any human has ever said, with the talented cast and crew doing their best to prop up an uninspired story that meanders and never really comes to a satisfactory conclusion. As a comedy it's not funny enough, and as a study of morality it's not penetrating enough. It's a well-decorated piece of nothing that means you're left to concentrate on the set-dressing and period costumes all too frequently. While there is theoretically a certain amount of plot going on screen (as Jesse Eisenberg's young Woody-surrogate visits LA to seek his fortune, is taken under the wing of his uncle, Steve Carell, and finds romance with his uncle's secretary, Kirsten Stewart), we're never really emotionally drawn in by any of this - Stewart is doing quite a lot of good work but still, it's difficult to accept she's particularly drawn to the dull, plodding, navel-gazing Eisenberg (as he's rather charmless, despite regular dialogue insistence that he's somehow very charming).
It does still have all the externals of a Woody Allen movie - the credits, the music, even the narration is by Allen. But there's nothing going on inside this, nothing compelling to tie the film together, apart from nice decor and cinematography. So it's a rather big miss.
That's about where the resemblance stops, though. Allen has been massively uneven most of this millennium, with his dialogue increasingly feeling tired and like nothing any human has ever said, with the talented cast and crew doing their best to prop up an uninspired story that meanders and never really comes to a satisfactory conclusion. As a comedy it's not funny enough, and as a study of morality it's not penetrating enough. It's a well-decorated piece of nothing that means you're left to concentrate on the set-dressing and period costumes all too frequently. While there is theoretically a certain amount of plot going on screen (as Jesse Eisenberg's young Woody-surrogate visits LA to seek his fortune, is taken under the wing of his uncle, Steve Carell, and finds romance with his uncle's secretary, Kirsten Stewart), we're never really emotionally drawn in by any of this - Stewart is doing quite a lot of good work but still, it's difficult to accept she's particularly drawn to the dull, plodding, navel-gazing Eisenberg (as he's rather charmless, despite regular dialogue insistence that he's somehow very charming).
It does still have all the externals of a Woody Allen movie - the credits, the music, even the narration is by Allen. But there's nothing going on inside this, nothing compelling to tie the film together, apart from nice decor and cinematography. So it's a rather big miss.
I Daniel Blake
Ken Loach is one of the stalwarts of the British film industry. And at age 80, he's made one of his best films, a worthy Palm D'Or winner, a scathing portrait of the modern English welfare state that keeps its characters human and engaging, simultaneously strongly political and specifically personal. It's as much about the decency of people as it is about the indecency of the systems that are meant to protect them but instead antagonise them.
The story is pretty simple: Daniel is a widower and a carpenter, but his recent heart attack means he can't work. But when his application for health benefits is knocked back, he's required to sign on as a job-seeker, even though he medically can't take any jobs that he's offered. While he waits for his appeal to be heard, he befriends a single mother whose state housing is on the other side of the country to any of her family, and helps her look after the kids as she tries to keep their family going.
Surprisingly, this isn't a miserable slog - this is a constantly lively story. Daniel himself is a pragmatic, practical, striving figure of great compassion and soul, and the characters are given their dignity even in the most trying of circumstances. We are engaged, enthralled, heartbroken and enraged. This is a masterwork from a director at the top of his game. Don't miss it.
The story is pretty simple: Daniel is a widower and a carpenter, but his recent heart attack means he can't work. But when his application for health benefits is knocked back, he's required to sign on as a job-seeker, even though he medically can't take any jobs that he's offered. While he waits for his appeal to be heard, he befriends a single mother whose state housing is on the other side of the country to any of her family, and helps her look after the kids as she tries to keep their family going.
Surprisingly, this isn't a miserable slog - this is a constantly lively story. Daniel himself is a pragmatic, practical, striving figure of great compassion and soul, and the characters are given their dignity even in the most trying of circumstances. We are engaged, enthralled, heartbroken and enraged. This is a masterwork from a director at the top of his game. Don't miss it.
Thursday 20 October 2016
Julieta
Pedro Almodavar is one of the world's most distinctive auteurs - a lot of his films are female-centred melodramas with a rich colour scheme and deeply emotional content. "Julieta" follows the trend, and centres on a woman in her early 50s who seems to have a fine house and a loving partner, and is preparing to head with him to Portugal. But a sudden encounter with a friend of her daughter sees her suddenly calling things off with the partner and moving to a cheaper apartment to write the story of her past - of how she met a man, had her daughter and what happened between them to bring her to this point.
This is really visually rich, romantic, old-school cinema. It's a pleasurable emotional indulgence. If I have a mild criticism, it's that this doesn't seem to cut as deep as some of Almodovar's work does - that you don't quite get that moment where you're caught between laughing at the hysterics and weeping at the emotional wreckage. It's a very beautiful film that didn't quite capture me by the heart, but did at least give my brains a few things to do. So that's almost enough.
This is really visually rich, romantic, old-school cinema. It's a pleasurable emotional indulgence. If I have a mild criticism, it's that this doesn't seem to cut as deep as some of Almodovar's work does - that you don't quite get that moment where you're caught between laughing at the hysterics and weeping at the emotional wreckage. It's a very beautiful film that didn't quite capture me by the heart, but did at least give my brains a few things to do. So that's almost enough.
Wednesday 19 October 2016
Inferno
No. Just ... no.
Look, I'm sure someone out there enjoys Dan Brown's weird little angle of regurgitated cultural history with a bit of conspiracy thread tying through. But really, these are very silly stories. Admittedly, the last film, "Angels and Demons", kinda had a bit of fun with it (including killing off a few cardinals in grand guignol ways and having a climax that involved anti-matter) but this is back to something largely dull. Ron Howard attempts to liven things up a bit by giving the hero demonic visions but ... it's Ron Howard doing demonic visions, it doesn't exactly startle anybody. There is no pretense that Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones are at all age-appropriate for a romance plot, which helps slightly, and Iffran Khan shows up as a shadowy fixer with a nicely sarcastic lot of dialogue, but all in all, this is a fairly dull retread in which people run around very pretty European locations to spout exposition to each other but rarely to actually do anything interesting.
Skip it.
Look, I'm sure someone out there enjoys Dan Brown's weird little angle of regurgitated cultural history with a bit of conspiracy thread tying through. But really, these are very silly stories. Admittedly, the last film, "Angels and Demons", kinda had a bit of fun with it (including killing off a few cardinals in grand guignol ways and having a climax that involved anti-matter) but this is back to something largely dull. Ron Howard attempts to liven things up a bit by giving the hero demonic visions but ... it's Ron Howard doing demonic visions, it doesn't exactly startle anybody. There is no pretense that Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones are at all age-appropriate for a romance plot, which helps slightly, and Iffran Khan shows up as a shadowy fixer with a nicely sarcastic lot of dialogue, but all in all, this is a fairly dull retread in which people run around very pretty European locations to spout exposition to each other but rarely to actually do anything interesting.
Skip it.
Shin Godzilla
Godzilla as a cinematic franchise has been around for a bit over 60 years and 31 films. So you'd think there's very little new to be said abut the creature. Shows up, stomps Tokyo, battles something, stomps off again til the next sequel.
But Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi's film is a little different. For a start, it ignores most of that 60 years of history and starts all over again with the Japanese government facing an apparently brand new strange radioactive creature which changes forms repeatedly over the course of the film. And gosh does the Japanese Government have a lot of meetings. It's pretty much "The West Wing" meets Godzilla, with lots of fast-paced discussion scenes, including a fair bit of bureaucratic ineptness going on before we get the right number of heroic scientists working together to try to crack what the hell this thing is and how on earth it can be stopped.
Yes, the humans are less interesting than the monster but they're never particularly dull and the film does ratchet along rather well. It's intriguing that there's some distinct anti-Americanism going on here with suspicions about how they may be involved, although this does also give rise to the one big flaw- the mainly subtitled film goes non-subtitled when the characters speak English, and by far the worst English is spoken by a character who's meant to be an American representative.
Obviously if you're looking for something with a particular amount of depth ... no, this is still a Godzilla movie, go elsewhere. But if you're okay with just going along with the destruction and conspiracy, this is quite an enjoyable flick.
Thursday 13 October 2016
Deepwater Horizon
In 2010 the Deepwater Horizon oil rig malfunctioned causing a vast oil leak in the gulf of Mexico which was covered by the media for months. The malfunction also killed 11 people,
The film version focuses on the second fact, not on the first, and turns this story into a somewhat conventional disaster movie, complete with heroic working-class engineers (played by Mark Wahlberg and Kurt Russell), weaselly corporate higher ups (embodied principally by John Malkovich, relishing an extreme Texas accent), And as a big-budget disaster movie, it works effectively enough - the heroics are suitably heroic, the disaster suitably disastrous and the panic and tension in the moment grips effecively.
It's in the bigger picture where things don't work as well. Kate Hudson gets the usual part of the wife-at-home-who-wonders-what's-happened-to-her-man and does nothing more with this part than generations of actresses have done with the nothing role that it continues to be. There is a nice moment near the end where it appears pretty clear Wahlberg is going through PTSD, but it goes by so fast it can only be a gesture rather than something dwelling. And it's in the conflict between wanting rah-rah triumph and wanting to tell a somewhat more serious story about an actual event that had consequences that this doesn't quite satisfy. It isn't deep enough to really tell the serious story, but it keeps enough of the serious elements that it doesn't quite work as rah-rah triumph either.
Saturday 8 October 2016
The Girl on the Train
Another best-selling-novel turned movie, "Girl on the Train" has a couple of challenges that means that it remains a servicable thriller rather than an excellent one.The titular girl, played by Emily Blunt, is a depressed woman who watches her ex-husband and his new wife as she regularly catches the train into New York and back home again, and also their young neighbor and her husband (and the young neighbour's possible lover/shrink) - so depressed by her contrasting lonliness that she's a regular drinker and suffers from occasional blackouts. One night she sees the neighbor out and about and then blacks out ... and the next day, discovers the young neighbour has gone missing. And the police know that she was nearby and she doesn't know what she might have done...
The most recent model of this kinda thriller is Gone Girl, but that had a grand guignol glee that is sorely lacking here. This treats its situations fairly straight - while Blunt is a solid actresss (as are most of the supporting cast, including Alison Janney as the disbelieving detective, Rebecca Ferguson as the new wife and Laura Prepon as her flatmate), her character's moroseness does tend to drag a lot of the action of the film down for the first two-thirds or so. There's also a little bit of a perfuctoryness about how the plot resolves - Lisa Kudrow is literally cast as a minor character early on so she can return and be instantly recognisable when she provides exposition that resolves much of the plot; and once the audince has worked out who-dun-it, we then have to get a laborious flashback that shows what-they-did, which most of the audience should be ahead of already.
THere is some intriguing stuff in the setup (particularly the storytelling from three different women's perspectives) but that tends to boil away as the plot continues. So this has to be a "just okay" experience.
The most recent model of this kinda thriller is Gone Girl, but that had a grand guignol glee that is sorely lacking here. This treats its situations fairly straight - while Blunt is a solid actresss (as are most of the supporting cast, including Alison Janney as the disbelieving detective, Rebecca Ferguson as the new wife and Laura Prepon as her flatmate), her character's moroseness does tend to drag a lot of the action of the film down for the first two-thirds or so. There's also a little bit of a perfuctoryness about how the plot resolves - Lisa Kudrow is literally cast as a minor character early on so she can return and be instantly recognisable when she provides exposition that resolves much of the plot; and once the audince has worked out who-dun-it, we then have to get a laborious flashback that shows what-they-did, which most of the audience should be ahead of already.
THere is some intriguing stuff in the setup (particularly the storytelling from three different women's perspectives) but that tends to boil away as the plot continues. So this has to be a "just okay" experience.
Friday 7 October 2016
The Red Turtle
A distinctly artsy animation about a man who washes up on a desert island and his (largely dialogue-less) adventures, this is a case of a PG-rated animation that really isn't for kids. While it's only 80 minutes, this is a film that relishes simplicity and quietude above plot and incident, meaning this is more for the arty-kinda-filmgoer. And a key incident in what plot there is falls into the "magic realism" camp, meaning you do have to just go with the film's own priorities and pacing.
Having said that, there's distinct enjoyment to be had here. The film is, no doubt about it, beautiful to look at, and has moments of tension, sensitivity and the occasional laugh. There's also a lush orchestral score to accompany the events on screen.
In the end, I'm reluctant to wholeheartedly reccomend this because, well, it's not very plotty (and I do like plots) and I can easily see this kinda boring a fair number of people. It's in the "I liked rather than loved this" category.
Tuesday 4 October 2016
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Tim Burton is a filmmaker whose reputation has slipped a bit over the years. His arrival with Beetlejuice and Pee Wees Big Adventure saw a particular creative vision, with lightness of touch, eccentricity, and the best animator-sensibility-turned-to-live-action since Frank Tashlin. But he's been slipping by in recent years, and hasn't had what I'd call a good movie in almost a decade (I liked 2007's "Sweeney Todd"), and has regularly had problems with middling or inept scripts, an overindulgence towards Johnny Depp and a general sense that he was more into style over substance.
Alas, for me, anyway, "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" isn't really a return to form - except that in this case, Burton feels peculiarly trapped by his screenplay and by some of his casting. THere are a couple of sequences near the end where the impulsive whimsical Burton breaks free, and they're fine, but for a lot of its length there's quite laborious exposition and a framing device seeing a character from "The Real World" entering into a fantastic world of strange children with powers and magic and wonder. And for me, the film really didn't need all the fart-arsing around with a real world, which never got particularly engaging.
A lot of very good actors are quite under-used - Eva Green as the titular Miss Peregrine spends a lot of time expositioning, quite charmingly but with no real active characterisation until suddenly the plot kicks in and she's marginalised, Judi Dench similarly gets marginalised very quickly, as do Alison Janney and Rupert Everett. Chris O'Dowd is completely wasted as the lead's very dull father. Samuel L. Jackson gets a bit more to play with as the bad guy (although he still takes until two thirds of the movie to enter) - still, he eats scenery nicely.
All in all, it's a bit of a disappointment.
Alas, for me, anyway, "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" isn't really a return to form - except that in this case, Burton feels peculiarly trapped by his screenplay and by some of his casting. THere are a couple of sequences near the end where the impulsive whimsical Burton breaks free, and they're fine, but for a lot of its length there's quite laborious exposition and a framing device seeing a character from "The Real World" entering into a fantastic world of strange children with powers and magic and wonder. And for me, the film really didn't need all the fart-arsing around with a real world, which never got particularly engaging.
A lot of very good actors are quite under-used - Eva Green as the titular Miss Peregrine spends a lot of time expositioning, quite charmingly but with no real active characterisation until suddenly the plot kicks in and she's marginalised, Judi Dench similarly gets marginalised very quickly, as do Alison Janney and Rupert Everett. Chris O'Dowd is completely wasted as the lead's very dull father. Samuel L. Jackson gets a bit more to play with as the bad guy (although he still takes until two thirds of the movie to enter) - still, he eats scenery nicely.
All in all, it's a bit of a disappointment.
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