Revisiting Where The Wild Things Are

Had a second viewing today. Much more aware of the sadness and anger in the film, made me aware for the first time of how often I was angry as a child, the kind of things that made me angry and/or upset. Also more aware than before of just how great Max Records is in this film. His performance is just so natural it doesn’t even feel like a performance. Couple that with Jonze’s handheld-almost-verité visual style and you got a pretty goddamn awesome piece of cinema. Tempted to write a new review and boost it to 5/5, but not sure yet.

David

Christmas and all that.

My brother always buys me Tarantino DVDs. So, this year, I got two copies of Inglourious Basterds, as my sister had also got me that. Ah, the eternal troubles of the middle-class film student.

David

REVIEW: Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes (dir. Guy Ritchie, 2009) ***

reviewed by David Sugarman

OK, confession time: I’ve never seen a Guy Ritchie film all the way through before. Nor have I ever watched a Sherlock Holmes adaptation, or read any of the books. Yes, I know. Ridiculous, but I’m going to pretend that this puts me at an advantage to view the oft-derided Ritchie’s latest movie with an unbiased eye.

The eponymous hero is played here by American actor Robert Downey, Jr., a Holmes of erudite speech, quick mind and a great talent for physical violence, as evinced in the film’s magnificently executed opening sequence and one entertaining but highly unnecessary shirtless bare-knuckle boxing fight. His more-than-able assistant Dr. Watson, typically portrayed as an overweight, bumbling comic figure, is here played by Jude Law, looking rather svelte in a grey suit and dapper moustache. The pre-title sequence involves Holmes and Watson interrupting a supposedly occult murder by Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), and the rest of the film is concerned with the fall-out of this arrest, as Blackwood is tried, convicted, executed- and apparently resurrected. The duo’s attempts to solve the mystery involve a masonic cult, the House of Lords, inept policemen, bald giants, ginger midgets and a foxy former squeeze of Sherlock’s, Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams).

The resulting film is more Bond than Holmes, but all the more entertaining for it. While one may argue that there is rather more violence than necessary, and that several of the fight scenes are somewhat annoyingly prolonged, the dynamism of the film is hard to resist. Ritchie and his screenwriters, Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg, both acknowledge their seemingly irreverent approach to the source material and strive to create a piece of narrative cinema of depth and importance. Despite their efforts, Sherlock Holmes rarely moves above being a highly enjoyable adventure movie. The characters are functional but never fully realised, and none of the supporting characters are particularly memorable. The film’s greatest success is possibly its biggest weakness; Robert Downey, Jr. is electric and charismatic as the troubled Holmes, but quite what these troubles are is a vague and unresolved question that the film either does not want to or forgets to answer. One suspects it may be the latter. Downey, Jr. is the best thing in the film, and with him it works- with a lesser actor, Sherlock Holmes could have been an admirable failure, rather than a very decent action-comedy.

REVIEW: District 9

District 9 (dir. Neill Blomkamp, 2009) *****

reviewed by Natasha Bullen

Not another extraterrestrial film. Surely all originality in the genre has been exhausted, we all know the basics: aliens come to earth; humans panic; humans see aliens as threat; aliens start attacking earth. Yet even from the trailers we can see District 9 is not your average alien story. For a start, deciding to house a mysterious alien community on our planet seems a risky plan from the offset. Not only that, they resemble hideously overgrown prawns, hence the term being used as a derogatory slur in the film to describe them. Whether you take their appearance as terrifying or downright ridiculous, it is difficult to see where first time writer-director Neill Blomkamp is taking this film.

The film opens with a series of interviews setting up the documentary style which will make the rest of the film so effective. It is twenty years after an alien spacecraft stopped over Johannesburg, South Africa, seemingly without motive. We discover that the government’s decision to house the aliens in a camp has led to massive overcrowding and a thriving black market, and public patience with the uncontrollable slum is at breaking point. This is where Blomkamp’s flawed protagonist comes in, Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), an MNU operative drafted in to handle the eviction and transferral of 1.8 million angry ‘prawns’ to a new secure camp, District 10. After a highly ill-fated freak incident, Wilkus is forced to rethink where his allegiances lie.

Many of the questions this film poses are never answered. The ambiguity verges on the edge of frustration, the open ending leaving obvious scope for a sequel. Yet while at the end of the film you may feel slightly antsy about Blomkamp’s secrecy, there is no doubt you will be blown away by his originality and contemporary handling. District 10 in the pipeline? I sincerely hope so.

REVIEW: Avatar

Avatar (dir. James Cameron, 2009) ***

reviewed by David Sugarman

For anyone who saw the trailers and press details of James Cameron’s first film since Titanic and said- as I did- that it just looked like a sci-fi remake of FernGully: The Last Rainforest: we were right. This is a big, huge, expensive, over-hyped and ultimately hollow film with no time for subtlety.

Avatar is narrated intermittently by Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic marine assigned (due to the death of his twin brother) to the military forces (never specifically, but implicitly, American) fighting against natives of the planet Pandora to get control of some fuel source named- with groan-inducing stupidity- ‘unobtainium’. Haha, I get it: America invaded Iraq for oil! Damn, this film sure is contemporary and insightful. The “avatars” of the title are odd genetically synthesised bodies that Jake and his companions (including Sigourney Weaver) inhabit temporarily in order to explore Pandora and observe the Na’vi people up close.

Bizarrely, however, Avatar‘s military parallels seem to be drawn as close to Vietnam as they are to Iraq, as the story turns into an inverse Apocalypse Now when Jake turns his back on his military leaders and falls in love with Na’vi culture and their princess Neytiri (Zoë Saldana). Hey, I get it! America (a democracy) is acting like an empire! Damn, this fi- OK, you get it. The observation that CGI is no replacement for story and character is one that is frequently made, and has rarely been more applicable than it is to Avatar. I saw this in 2D, and while I agree that this was not how Cameron intends the film to be experienced, I don’t think that the illusion of extra visual dimension can compensate for the lack of three-dimensional character. The motion-capture works just fine, but the problem is that none of the actors have anything much to work with: every character is an anonymous type that could be shuffled between the cast of almost any science fiction movie ever made. At times the plot vanishes entirely for over a half an hour at a go, as Cameron seems much more interested in showing off the world of Pandora than in giving the audience much in the way of sub-plot.

Having said all this, even at a running time of 161 minutes I was never really bored by the film. Avatar is pretty engaging and visually gorgeous, but as a whole somewhat underwhelming. It’s certainly not the revolutionary “game-changer” we were promised. It’s a textbook example of technique over content, and sadly no amount of impressive visual effects can ever cover adequately for such a simplistic story, paper-thin characterisation and some of the most clichéd dialogue I’ve ever heard; but credit where credit is due. In Pandora, Cameron has created a world wholly different from that of most films, as the laughably gung-ho military boss Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) informs Jake when he arrives: “You’re not in Kansas any more”.

… No, I’m not joking. He actually says this. It’s just one example of the awful lines that the film is filled with.

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True story. I didn’t want to get too bogged down in this review, but when I say “Cameron has created a world wholly different from that of most films”, the environment and its inhabitants will be pretty unremarkable to anyone who has played Metroid Prime or Halo, or any number of their myriad sequels and imitators. It’s a very classy cut-scene.

David

REVIEW: The Black Dahlia

The Black Dahlia (dir. Brian De Palma, 2006) either * or **

reviewed by David Sugarman

Based on legendary crime writer James Ellroy’s book, itself based on a real crime in mid-’40s LA, The Black Dahlia is a brilliantly shot noir pastiche by American director Brian De Palma. I cannot stress this enough: the cinematography of this film is just brilliant. Herein lies the problem with The Black Dahlia: when it works, it works well; but by the time I reached the end I found myself wondering if I even cared whether the good bits were any good. Because the bits that don’t work suck.

Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart are two former boxers on the LAPD, investigating the murder of a young wannabe-Hollywood starlet. Hartnett’s character is a kind of stoic non-entity, but that’s OK: we don’t expect to learn a huge amount about the detective in a noir. God knows, the audience barely learns anything about Marlowe in The Maltese Falcon. Eckhart’s officer is a tortured fella with an uninteresting past that is eventually revealed to highly melodramatic and largely irrelevant effect too late in the film to effect the audience’s opinion of him. To be honest, I should be praising Hartnett and Eckhart for being the only members of the cast to play the film straight; every other actor in the film goes at the hammy noir dialogue like it’s a jokeless parody.

For the first hour, I can forgive The Black Dahlia its faults. After that, its becomes a horrible, tangled mess of a movie that ends up being laughable in its attempts at shocking drama. De Palma is caught between making a modern movie and paying homage to the films of classic noir, a genre now largely relegated to independent productions.

I don’t want to say “You can’t have it both ways” in an attempt to modernise a dormant genre, because that’s exactly what Brick does so effectively. Maybe because Brick‘s genre-mash of the old school noir and modern high-school movie (see what I did there?) mutates the stylistic expectations of the genre, freeing writer-director Rian Johnson from the formal approach associated with classic noir, whereas De Palma sets out The Black Dahlia as a straight noir with no such conceit to free himself from the genre restraints. Consequently it frequently feels just as confused and brainless as any mainstream Hollywood crime movie. It’s not hard-boiled, it’s just over-cooked.

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Two stars if you think I should definitely take into account the film’s meagre successes.

One star if you think two implies that the film is in any way worth watching all the way through.

David

REVIEW: Me And Orson Welles

Me and Orson Welles (dir. Richard Linklater, 2009) ****

reviewed by Natasha Bullen

It is difficult to anticipate how a director whose past achievements range from the comedic School of Rock to the sharp animation A Scanner Darkly will handle an almost biographical insight into the volatile personality of the legendary Orson Welles. Cue the inclusion of Zac Efron, renowned all-singing, all-dancing teenage heartthrob, whose fame sprang from the undoubtedly cheesy High School Musical saga and we think we know what to expect from Linklater – the ‘Me’(Zac Efron) overshadowing the ‘Orson Welles’(Christian McKay), and let’s face it, we did not come to see another Efron show this time. What we actually came to see was if McKay could convincingly pull off a performance as one of the most talented actor/directors of all time.

Linklater sets the movie at a pivotal point in Welles’ career – it’s 1937 New York and Welles is adapting Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for the Mercury Theatre’s first production. We follow the story through young Richard Samuels (Efron), a budding actor with no real experience, who by chance stumbles upon the cast outside the theatre. He makes a good impression with director Orson Welles who spontaneously offers him the part of Lucius after playing a simple drum roll, much to the amazement of all present. What unfurls is an uncompromising tale of the struggles of working in the industry, its pressures and its excitements, its pitfalls and its betrayals.

McKay is excellently cast as the competitive and narcissistic Welles, and physically matches him almost perfectly. What Linklater does is take us literally behind the scenes of Welles’ success, and to what cost this type of success is achieved. Presenting it through Efron’s character does not single him out as the main protagonist as you might think, rather he becomes the focus of our sympathies especially in relation to his youthful devotion to Sonja Jones (Claire Danes), the beautiful production assistant whose ambition sees no bounds. Efron proves not only that his acting ability is greater than Disney teen franchises, but also his singing ability when his sole accompaniment to his ballad is the ukulele he plays.

This is a real beauty, from start to finish. While it heavily focuses on the makings of the production rather than the characters’ stories themselves, the most striking sequence in the film is the actual opening night performance. So while you may criticise this decision in theory, when you see it onscreen Linklater’s vision truly becomes clear.

REVIEW: A Serious Man

A Serious Man (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen, 2009) *****

reviewed by David Sugarman

After the riotously funny but messy-at-times Burn After Reading, it was impossible to judge what this newest film from the Coen brothers would be like. With no recognised screen actors in the film, A Serious Man takes a look at the kind of Jewish community of Minneapolis in the late 1960s in which Joel and Ethan grew up. Physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg)’s wife is leaving him, a student is trying to bribe him, and his older brother is still sleeping on the sofa. As things get progressively worse for Larry, he visits three rabbis in an attempt to make sense of the misery being heaped upon him. So is this a bleak film? Certainly. But it’s also as funny as anything they’ve ever done.

The Coens seem to have really hit their stride in possibly the most prolific streak of their 25-year career. Over the last 3 years, they have released the multiple Oscar-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, Burn After Reading (arguably their funniest comedy) and now A Serious Man, their most bizarre and mysterious film to date. If there’s a Coen film to compare A Serious Man with, it would probably be Barton Fink, though I would place it as part of a thematic trilogy alongside my other two favourite Coens: No Country For Old Men and their personal best, The Man Who Wasn’t There. These are films dominated by misunderstanding, spiritual emptiness and, crucially, uncertainty. The characters struggle to grapple with an absurdist universe of meaningless chaos.

If I’m making A Serious Man sound unappealing, then you’re probably not a fan of the Coens anyway. Regardless, it’s one of the year’s best films, and not only thoughtful but genuinely entertaining; I’ve never been in a film where the entire audience has been hysterics at a one-word title card before. It begins with an enigmatic and seemingly irrelevant prologue in which a Yiddish couple may or may not have a confrontation with a dybbuk (a malign spirit from Jewish folklore), and ends even more enigmatically.

Between the two lies some of the Coens’ best ever work. A sequence describing a dentist’s discovery is worth particular note, and summarises the film’s themes succinctly and with great humour. Larry’s brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is composing a “mathematical map of the universe” called The Mentaculus, which allows him to win at cards- though when Larry looks into the book, it appears to be filled with incomprehensible numbers and symbols. Although none of the main cast are Coen regulars, the contributions of the frequent collaborators are all worth noting: Carter Burwell’s score is brilliant, particularly over the film’s finale; Roger Deakins proves himself once more the absolute king of cinematography; and costume designer Mary Zophres pitches the characters’ wardrobes perfectly.

In summary: go see this film. See it in a cinema, on a big screen. See Joel and Ethan Coen working at the height of their powers.

REVIEW: Where The Wild Things Are

Where The Wild Things Are (dir. Spike Jonze, 2009) ****

reviewed by David Sugarman

When rumours began to surface last year that all was not well between Warner Bros. and Spike Jonze, regarding his long-planned and highly-anticipated adaptation of a classic children’s book, I worried. It was reported that Jonze and his co-writer, Dave Eggers, had written a dark, subversive take on the story, and that the studio were demanding reshoots.

Thankfully, the film that has finally hit release here in the UK today is the film that Jonze wanted us all to see. Previously award-nominated for directing the Charlie Kaufman scripts Being John Malkovich and Adaptation., Jonze may on the surface seem an odd choice to direct a “family movie” like Where The Wild Things Are- but both Malkovich and Adaptation. reveal Jonzes innate grasp of magical realism and fantasy. And boy, does that pay off wonderfully in Wild Things.

Lonely child Max (Max Records) throws a tantrum, biting his stressed mother (Catherine Keener) and running out of the house into the dark, while his mother’s boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo) watches lamely on. Max find himself in a strange world populated by the huge Jim Henson-created “Wild Things” of the title.

While the film is often piecemeal, and certain ideas are followed up vague blind paths or simply left unfulfilled entirely, I certainly left the cinema feeling there was more to it than I had been able to grasp from a single viewing. Young Max Records delivers a great performance, full of pathos; almost the opposite of Haley Joel Osment in A.I. Artificial Intelligence at the start of the decade, though equal in terms of adorable melancholy. However, whereas David in A.I. was a robot incapable of really understanding the emotions he has been programmed to feel, Max develops an intuition and a self-aware sadness. Visually the film is gorgeous, with wonderful photography by Lance Acord and the excellent Henson puppets giving a properly magical feel to the fantasy. The final touch is Karen O’s soundtrack, all ramshackle acoustics and a capella vocals.

I need to see this film again to do it full judgment, but initial impressions are overwhelmingly positive.

Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Black Swan’ will include an “angry” sex scene between Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis

Article title says it all.

From what little I have been able to find about the film, Black Swan seems to be about a ballerina (Portman) with a possibly-imaginary-friend (Kunis). Eh? The Red Shoes meets Fight Club, directed by the man who brought us Requiem For A Dream, π and The Fountain? Who else is in it? Winona Ryder? OK. Vincent Cassel?! The French actor probably best known for his terrifying rage-trip performances in Irreversible and La Haine?

Yes.

Yes, please.

Black Swan has already started shooting and appears to be set for a 2010 release.

David