reviewed by David Sugarman

Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut isn’t particularly notable for her direction – though I have no complaints in that department – but rather for two of the performances, one of which is the director’s supporting turn as roller derby captain Smashley Simpson. Barrymore has very few lines in the film, but she is hilarious as the dopey, yet surprisingly violent, team leader.

Whip It follows dissatisfied teenage beauty, Bliss (Ellen Page), as she discovers a love for the baffling sport roller derby. I’ll be honest, having sat through Whip It, I’m non the wiser as to how on Earth the sport works, though several attempts are made to explain it. Thankfully, that doesn’t detract from the enjoyability of the film, and indeed the film’s most memorable scenes are on the track. There’s also some predictable teen angst as Bliss confronts her stuffy, beauty pageant obsessed mother (Marcia Gay Harden), and a boring and frankly unconvincing romance subplot with rock star wannabe Oliver (Landon Pigg). Juliette Lewis is in there too, as the bitchy captain of a rival team. Essentially, the film is neither as funny, nor as charming as it would like to be, but it tries very hard, and Page’s performance brings some extra gravitas to an otherwise unremarkable script. Enjoyable, fun, but very lightweight.

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Pretty sure every scene with Barrymore ends with her punching someone. True story. Worth seeing to find out if you understand roller derby or not by the time the film ends.

David

reviewed by David Sugarman

There’s a twist towards the end of Shutter Island that I won’t spoil for you, but which seems to have spoiled the movie for some critics. To deride the twist as either nonsensical or predictable misses the point entirely; Shutter Island is a masterful film because it tells its story (twist and all) with such sureness, such aplomb, it’d be a shame to let something like that ruin one’s enjoyment and admiration of it.

Scorsese’s latest picture is a hybrid noir-horror B-movie homage that transcends its genre implications with a virtuosity of technique it is impossible not to enthuse over. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels, investigating the disappearance of a patient from the Ashecliff hospital for the criminally insane on the titular island, along with his partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) in the early 1950s. It quickly becomes apparent that the disappearance is a set up – this isn’t the twist – but the reason for such a conspiracy is unclear. What is clear is that Teddy has issues. Big ones: he is constantly haunted by dreams of his murdered wife (Michelle Williams) and memories of his part in the liberation of Dachau.

The film is full of notable performances – not least from DiCaprio himself as the troubled protagonist – including those Ruffalo’s blank-faced newbie, and Sir Ben Kingsley and Max Von Sydow as the chief psychiatrists of Ashecliff, but the film is very nearly stolen from under Leo’s nose by an electric one-scene cameo by Jackie Earle Haley (having previously stolen Watchmen as the psychopathic Rorschach) as one of the patients at Ashecliff.

Shutter Island may not be to everybody’s taste, but its visual power is undeniable, and the more thought I give to it, the more confident I am in calling it my favourite film by Scorsese. The film’s dramatic construction is flawless, and if the twist is predictable, that is to your credit, rather than the film’s detriment: the clues are there from the very start, and it’s up to you – as it is with Teddy – to work out what the hell is happening on Shutter Island.

reviewed by David Sugarman

All tabloid controversy over murderous, foul-mouthed children aside for a moment, I’ve been anticipating this film eagerly since I first saw the trailer a few months ago. Finally getting to see the murderous, foul-mouthed child in action, I was not disappointed.

Kick-Ass is a superhero movie without superheroes, but this is no Watchmen. Far from the humourless, foreboding darkness of Zack Snyder’s film, Kick-Ass‘s costumed figures are human, touching and most of all just downright hilarious. The title character is played with genuine pathos by Aaron Johnson, who some of you may have seen in the John Lennon biopic, Nowhere Boy, around Christmas. Kick-Ass – or Dave Lizewski, to give him his real name – is an ordinary teenager who wants to know why nobody has ever tried to be superhero before. So he tries it out, even without a superpower. Soon, he’s in way over his head, bringing him to the attention of the aforementioned killer-child her father.

The child in question is 11-year old Mindy Macready, alias Hit Girl, trained by her father, Damon Macready/Big Daddy (Nicholas Cage at his comedic best) to stab, slice, shoot and fight with the prowess of a career assassin. Though it’s Johnson, as Dave, who brings the real humanity to the film, managing to seem not just vulnerable but extra-vulnerable, it’s Chloe Moretz’s Hit Girl who steals the show. If Kick-Ass is remembered even half as fondly as it should be in 10 years, it’ll be Hit Girl that people quote; she’s a cinematic idol waiting to be discovered, to be placed on a plinth alongside Jules Winnfield and Keyser Soze.

What Kick-Ass does best, though, is action. Really, really great action sequences – the best of which invariable feature Hit Girl wreaking carnage on the unsuspecting goons of mobster Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong) and his son Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Last year I went to see J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek and was surprised to find it was one of the most enjoyable films of the year. This year, that surprise film is Kick-Ass, which I think is even better than Star Trek. It’s about as much fun as you’re legally allowed to have in the cinema.

reviewed by David Sugarman

France’s nominee for the 82nd Academy Awards is, simply put, one of the most brutal, visceral films I have ever laid my eyes on. It is also one of the most thrilling. Acclaimed director Jacques Audiard (The Beat That My Heart Skipped) delivers a hybrid prison-gangster film of incredible power, as young Arabic criminal Malick (Tahar Rahim) works his way up the ladder of power in a French prison, taken under the (often racially abusive) wing of the Corsican mafia who run the prison.

The title of the film suggests something hugely transcendental, and A Prophet is certainly that. Almost as soon as he arrives at the jail, Malick is co-opted into the murder of a fellow inmate by the Corsicans, and the messy, bloody, shocking violence rattles the youth and audience alike. It’s an act that will haunt Malick for the rest of the movie, but one that strengthens him and its the spectre of this assassination that gives the film that final edge to make it A Great Movie. The baseline of the film that allows it to work so effectively is Tahar Rahim’s fantastic performance as Malick, shifting from shuffling, meek subordinate to smooth, confident career criminal. The winner of last year’s Grand Prix at Cannes technically counts as a 2009 release, and thus deprives me of the pleasure of calling it the first perfect film of the new decade; instead, I’ll name it one of the last of the previous.

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I may post some more reviews soon. Shutter Island or Precious: Based on the novel “Push” by Sapphire will likely be next.

David

John “Ulysses” Ellis-Johnson President

Mark “Mark D. Taylor” Taylor Vice-President

Rhiannon “Rhino” Mason Secretary

David “Shug-Z” Sugarman Treasurer

Catherine “Any Variant on the name ‘Catherine’ will do” Gowers Social Secretary

Lauren “Iggsy” Jeffery Events Officer

Natasha “T-Bull” Bullen Publicity Officer

Ollie “Token First Year” Coleman 1st year representative

Ally “Original Sin” Sinyard 2nd year representative

… and of course, Verity “the Last Third Year” Scott will retain her position as third year rep until the end of the year.

I’ll try and badger the others into posting some ol’ bloggage soon, but that may not happen.

Cheers, y’all.

David

P.S. thank you to everybody who voted, and the biggest thank you of all to our former Pubs officer (and original Pres) Steff Mulrooney for counting the votes.

P.P.S. I made up several of these nick-names just now, so it would be unwise to assume they are for general use.

David

reviewed by David Sugarman

An early tip for award success that has since somewhat dropped off the radar, this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s (author of No Country For Old Men) Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Road is a post-apocalyptic tale of a man (Viggo Mortensen) travelling south with his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee).

Director John Hillcoat does well to retain a constant level of danger, so that even the moments of relief from the oppressively empty landscape seem temporary and ill-advised, and screenwriter Joe Penhall gets the most out of the book’s few dialogue exchanges, plus a few great moments of voiceover by Viggo Mortensen (“If he is not the word of God, then God never spoke” was one particularly memorable line for me). Every actor puts in a stunning performance, and occasionally the film manages to hint at hope and redemption, though these are only the briefest of spark in such a dark tale. The Road is an excellent film, though (predictably) does not manage to capture the lightning of  McCarthy’s book. As is often the case with adaptations of great novels, the film conveys the drama excellently, but the story is not what makes The Road a great novel. It is McCarthy’s lyrical prose and radical formal style that sets it apart; The Road is not a formally radical film. Just a very good one.

Here are the first two still images released from the movie, which stars Michael Cera as the title character, battling his girlfriend Ramona’s (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) Seven Evil Ex-boyfriends, in order to continue dating her. Among the actors playing the Evil Exes are Chris Evans, Jason Schwartzman and Brandon fuckin’ Routh. Yeah, that’s right. They’ve got friggin’ Superman in a supporting role.

I cannot express how excited I am for this movie in words. So here’s an illustrative image of my anticipation.

David

reviewed by David Sugarman

Director Jason Reitman reportedly began adapting Walter Kirn’s novel Up in the Air back in 2002; since then, the son of Ghostbusters director Ivan has achieved huge critical acclaim, particularly for his second film, the Oscar nominated Juno. This, Reitman’s third feature, has more in common with his criminally under-seen debut, Thank You For Smoking, a satire in which Aaron Eckhart played a smooth-talking tobacco lobbyist. Eckhart’s character in that earlier film is a sort of exaggerated, rough sketch of the subtler, nicer, more human protagonist of Up in the Air, played by George Clooney.

Clooney’s Ryan Bingham is a man employed to fire other people. He works for a company hired by other companies to do their dirty work for them. Ryan likes to think of himself as a humanitarian of sorts, and enjoys his work and the travel that comes with it. Of course, the production of the film could not help but be influenced by the economic crisis of the last couple of years, and Reitman uses actual laid off workers to play the unfortunates here, a tact that adds an extra layer of poignancy to these sequences. However, what with the cost of travel, even Ryan’s world is in danger; young corporate hotshot Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick, familiar to some form her supporting role in the Twilight movies) has devised a method of firing people over webcam, rendering Ryan obsolete.

As Ryan takes Natalie across America collecting airmiles, his approach to life is gradually undermined by his sister’s impending marriage, Natalie’s youthful enthusiasm, and Alex (Vera Farmiga of The Departed), Ryan’s female equivalent (“Think of me as you, but with a vagina,” she tells him). So far, so standard? Reitman’s directorial flourishes and the excellent standard of every aspect of production from script to performance to photography to editing raise this into an award contender, even if it lacks some of the cutting edge to really take the big ones. Having said that, just when I felt the film was headed for a predictably safe ending, an unexpected change of direction left me satisfied with ambiguity. Clooney, Kendrick and Farmiga are all exceptional, and this is really a very good film that will certainly warrant repeat viewings.

David