The videogame action movie tends to get a lot of crap it doesn't entirely deserve. No, none of them are ever going to be perfect icons of the genre. But as perfectly satisfactory entertainment, I quite enjoy most of the Resident Evil franchise, for example. The best have trashy pleasure and don't get too dragged down by complex backstory that drags over awkwardly from the games. The worst ... well, they're Assassin's Creed.
"Tomb Raider" has the double-distinction of being both video game based and a reboot (it's based on a reboot in the games) - whereas the early 2000s films with Angelina Jolie had a certain high camp, ludicrously convoluted mythologies and some gratuitous ogling of the man-meat put alongside Angelina (Daniel Craig in the first one, Gerard Butler in the second), this one takes things a tad more seriously. The plot is fairly standard action-adventure shenanigans (woman discovers her father disappeared in search of a lost secret island, she goes and finds an evil conspiracy and a buried secret that only she can reveal) - but it makes a pretty good fist of it. Probably there's about 20 minutes in the middle as Lara flees from peril-to-peril-to-peril in which the film is at its flat-out-best, and on either side when we're given space to think it rounds back down to "pretty reasonable", but this never gets too ludicrous for words. I can't say this is the most awesome movie about raiding of tombs ever because "Raiders" still exists but it's a pretty reasonable effort.
Thursday 29 March 2018
Saturday 24 March 2018
In the Fade
This is in structure a fairly pulpy revenge tale. Katja has her husband and son stolen from her when a nail bombing destroys his office. She discovers who is responsible, sits through their trial at which justice is not done, and she tracks down the perpetrators afterwards to exact her revenge.
But the difference here is in execution and performance. Giving equal time to the grieving, the trial and to the revenge means this becomes a far more personal tale, told continuiously through the eyes of Diane Kruger's Katja. Kruger's often been a performer who I've dismissed as merely a screen beauty - in films like "Troy" and "National Treasure", she didn't get a chance to offer much more than simple surface charms. Here she gets a lot more meat to get into (and she's acting in her native German), and the consequences are something a lot more meaningful. Writer/Director Fatih Akin gives the film depth and strength - whether trawling in the depths of Katja's grief, in the brutally sterile battles of the courtroom, or in the combination of beautiful scenery and dark motives in a seaside Greek town for the finale. This understands the feeling and emotion that lives behind the pulpy surface, and serves it well. Recommended.
But the difference here is in execution and performance. Giving equal time to the grieving, the trial and to the revenge means this becomes a far more personal tale, told continuiously through the eyes of Diane Kruger's Katja. Kruger's often been a performer who I've dismissed as merely a screen beauty - in films like "Troy" and "National Treasure", she didn't get a chance to offer much more than simple surface charms. Here she gets a lot more meat to get into (and she's acting in her native German), and the consequences are something a lot more meaningful. Writer/Director Fatih Akin gives the film depth and strength - whether trawling in the depths of Katja's grief, in the brutally sterile battles of the courtroom, or in the combination of beautiful scenery and dark motives in a seaside Greek town for the finale. This understands the feeling and emotion that lives behind the pulpy surface, and serves it well. Recommended.
Sunday 11 March 2018
Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
This is a gentle story of the relationship between a young working-class actor and film star Gloria Graeme in her declining years. I've got to admit this never quite captured me - despite their best efforts, neither Jamie Bell or Annette Bening quite come into focus - Bening's Graeme is too much the dopey former sexpot in a way that I think diminishes her, and Bell's Peter Turner is a little too vaguely defined -he's clearly young and northern, but the various elements of his character never quite turn into something solid and clearly expressing why he's so interested in this woman - perhaps because it's so based on Turner's book, the film's never really able to give him any possible darker motives (like enjoying the proximity to fame) that might have made this more interesting.
I was also slightly more amused than I probably should be at the way the film goes out of its way to avoid mentioning the title and topic of the play Turner is performing (clearly it's "Having a Ball", Alan Bleasdale's play about a vasectomy clinic - they liked the prestige of Bleasdale but didn't want to admit the subject matter!). Turner's home life with his mum (Julie Waters) and his brother (Stephen Graeme) is out of the working-class cliche book. All in all, this is pretty clunky material.
I was also slightly more amused than I probably should be at the way the film goes out of its way to avoid mentioning the title and topic of the play Turner is performing (clearly it's "Having a Ball", Alan Bleasdale's play about a vasectomy clinic - they liked the prestige of Bleasdale but didn't want to admit the subject matter!). Turner's home life with his mum (Julie Waters) and his brother (Stephen Graeme) is out of the working-class cliche book. All in all, this is pretty clunky material.
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable: Chapter One
The extremely Japanese story of a guy who uses his superpower of having an invisible fighting-creature to beat the snot out of anybody who makes fun of his hair, (and how he moves onto fighting other people instead) this is an entertaining live-action manga adaptation, with all the fun design (his hair is indeed very spectacular), strange action and plot developments (the opening narration includes the line "our town has been voted most-liveable twice. We probably won't win this year due to all the recent serial-killings") and the occasional chunk of high-school melodrama. While, yes, this is a chapter one (and it's an adaptation of the fourth book of the ongoing "Jojo's Bizarre Adventure" saga, an epic that involves multiple generations of the same family, all of whom have the prefix "Jo" in their names), it's mostly pretty self contained, while leaving definite openings for future films.
Set in a fake Japan that's partially filmed on location at Stiges, adding to the oddball disorientation factor, this has high-school melodrama, fierce battles, surprising revelations and a reasonable level of intrigue. The last ten minutes or so perhaps do bog down a little bit with the melodrama, and this is entirely surface-level pleasure, there's nothing particularly deep or thinky here. But it is a whole lot of fun.
Set in a fake Japan that's partially filmed on location at Stiges, adding to the oddball disorientation factor, this has high-school melodrama, fierce battles, surprising revelations and a reasonable level of intrigue. The last ten minutes or so perhaps do bog down a little bit with the melodrama, and this is entirely surface-level pleasure, there's nothing particularly deep or thinky here. But it is a whole lot of fun.
Friday 9 March 2018
Red Sparrow
A Russian ballet dancer finds her career ended after injury, and unable to look after her mother in their Bolshoi-funded apartment, goes to her intelligence-officer uncle for help. He involves her in a mission to investigate a colleague, but after that mission doesn't go as expected, she gets sent to a school to learn more about the arts of seduction and manipulation, and eventually out into the field to seduce a top American agent to reveal a traitor at the heart of the russian government.
If that sounds like a Cold War era relic, congratulations, that's exactly the vibe this film has. Except it's clearly meant to be set during the modern world, judging by the mobile phones being used by everybody. And yes, countries still investigate each other and play spy games even now, but still...
This is a real misstep for Jennifer Lawrence - her character has none of the everywoman personality that epitomized Katniss in the Hunger games and most of her best roles (even her character in "Mother!" is the everyday-woman forming the befuddled centre of the overwhelming weirdness). Early events that are presumably meant to prove, despite upcoming events, that she is a strong woman just makes her seem mildly psychotic. And the film is punishingly long at 140 minutes for what is, in the end, the same old spy games with a not particularly fresh lick of paint. Joel Edgerton continues his run of ending up in kinda lousy films. There's an interesting five minute stretch of Mary Louise Parker as a drunken American secretary, but this is mostly a messy slog of a film.
If that sounds like a Cold War era relic, congratulations, that's exactly the vibe this film has. Except it's clearly meant to be set during the modern world, judging by the mobile phones being used by everybody. And yes, countries still investigate each other and play spy games even now, but still...
This is a real misstep for Jennifer Lawrence - her character has none of the everywoman personality that epitomized Katniss in the Hunger games and most of her best roles (even her character in "Mother!" is the everyday-woman forming the befuddled centre of the overwhelming weirdness). Early events that are presumably meant to prove, despite upcoming events, that she is a strong woman just makes her seem mildly psychotic. And the film is punishingly long at 140 minutes for what is, in the end, the same old spy games with a not particularly fresh lick of paint. Joel Edgerton continues his run of ending up in kinda lousy films. There's an interesting five minute stretch of Mary Louise Parker as a drunken American secretary, but this is mostly a messy slog of a film.
The Square
In Stockholm, the X-Royal is a modern art gallery, formerly the royal palace, now home to conceptual works like the installation "Mirrors and Piles of Gravel" - stuff at that cutting edge of modern art which is on the knife's edge between self-parody and solemnity. The curator is Christian, a guy who proclaims the social importance of art. But over the following weeks, he repeatedly gets involved in situations that suggest his social conscience may be no more than skin deep.
In some ways this feels almost like a sketch movie - it's a film that works in fits and starts rather than necessarily building up momentum throughout. Claes Bang as Christian is a solid mildly bewildered lead, taking the situations as they come. Elizabeth Moss as the journalist who interviews him and who drifts into a brief fling with him is perfectly fine, though her scenes feel peculiarly detached from the rest of the film. Indeed, the entire film suffers a bit from improvised-itis, where everything is just that little too loose and undirected - while there are standout moments, there's a lot of repetition of points and wandering about in the mix as well.
The standout scene that is highlighted on the poster and features motion-capture performer Terry Notary, is indeed rather spectacular,but it's also another dead end. It's usually pretty watchable dead ends but ... as a social satire on the smugness of the art world and those who participate in it, it lacks precision. And satire, for me, needs to work like a scalpel - precise, fast and effective - not loose and vague.
In some ways this feels almost like a sketch movie - it's a film that works in fits and starts rather than necessarily building up momentum throughout. Claes Bang as Christian is a solid mildly bewildered lead, taking the situations as they come. Elizabeth Moss as the journalist who interviews him and who drifts into a brief fling with him is perfectly fine, though her scenes feel peculiarly detached from the rest of the film. Indeed, the entire film suffers a bit from improvised-itis, where everything is just that little too loose and undirected - while there are standout moments, there's a lot of repetition of points and wandering about in the mix as well.
The standout scene that is highlighted on the poster and features motion-capture performer Terry Notary, is indeed rather spectacular,but it's also another dead end. It's usually pretty watchable dead ends but ... as a social satire on the smugness of the art world and those who participate in it, it lacks precision. And satire, for me, needs to work like a scalpel - precise, fast and effective - not loose and vague.
Friday 2 March 2018
Winchester
"Winchester" feels like it should be perfectly timed. A ghost movie with a not-so-subtle anti-gun message showing up just as the tide appears to be turing in the US with gun control? With prestigious stateswoman of the screen Helen Mirren in the leading role? Based on a true story of one of the oddest buildings ever made?
Well, unfortunately this doesn't quite cut it. For a start, Mirren is a great presence when she's on screen, but she isn't on screen nearly enough. Our central character instead is Jason Clarke, a doctor brought in to assess the sanity of Mirren's Sarah Winchester (heir to the revolver company's fortune, and builder of an extrordinarily excessive mansion). Given we've shown up for a ghost movie, there's not a lot of suspense about whether he's going to find her belief in ghosts abnormal or not, and Clarke doesn't really give his protagonist a particularly large chunk of charisma to carry him over. Sarah Snook as Winchester's daughter in law holds her own admirably (although she and her kid are virtually shuffled off into a side plot with little impact on the rest of the film). Alas most of the scares are strictly of the "boo" variety, and while the house itself looks nice, it never really becomes a separate menacing figure like other great locations in horror cinema have been able to become.
Instead, this is largely a generic misfire from the formerly solid Spherig brothers.
Well, unfortunately this doesn't quite cut it. For a start, Mirren is a great presence when she's on screen, but she isn't on screen nearly enough. Our central character instead is Jason Clarke, a doctor brought in to assess the sanity of Mirren's Sarah Winchester (heir to the revolver company's fortune, and builder of an extrordinarily excessive mansion). Given we've shown up for a ghost movie, there's not a lot of suspense about whether he's going to find her belief in ghosts abnormal or not, and Clarke doesn't really give his protagonist a particularly large chunk of charisma to carry him over. Sarah Snook as Winchester's daughter in law holds her own admirably (although she and her kid are virtually shuffled off into a side plot with little impact on the rest of the film). Alas most of the scares are strictly of the "boo" variety, and while the house itself looks nice, it never really becomes a separate menacing figure like other great locations in horror cinema have been able to become.
Instead, this is largely a generic misfire from the formerly solid Spherig brothers.
A Fantastic Woman
A Chilean film about the events after a trans woman's partner dies, told from her perspective, this is a film that grows on you as it goes along. Some of the early scene-setting material (in particular the death of the partner) is a little clunky - we're kept a little at a distance from Marina as she experiences the loss. But the events afterwards - as she experiences small indignities and larger ones from both the family of her lover and from the police - start to expand the character as we see that stoic facade stretched further and further, as her desire to assert herself and her love for him become more and more apparent.
Daniel Vega is in pretty much every shot, and she's a fascinating performer. Not the purely perfect victim, she's a complicated, angry, possibly even sullen woman, trying to retain her dignity in circumstances that make that almost impossible .There's moments of beauty to go with the moments of pain, and the relationship she had with the deceased is not purely romanticised - there's a sense of a lot of history that's gone on here, not all of it quite as clean as we might hope. It's a tale of survival in rough emotional circumstances and about taking solace where you can, and about asserting yourself in a place that may not welcome you.
Daniel Vega is in pretty much every shot, and she's a fascinating performer. Not the purely perfect victim, she's a complicated, angry, possibly even sullen woman, trying to retain her dignity in circumstances that make that almost impossible .There's moments of beauty to go with the moments of pain, and the relationship she had with the deceased is not purely romanticised - there's a sense of a lot of history that's gone on here, not all of it quite as clean as we might hope. It's a tale of survival in rough emotional circumstances and about taking solace where you can, and about asserting yourself in a place that may not welcome you.
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