Film review - The Social Network

The Social Network is a very exciting and funny film about computer programming. That may seem like an oxymoron, but when the programme in question is one of the most significant websites in history, one that changes people’s lives on a daily basis and is worth billions, it perhaps isn’t that surprising.

The film tells the (possibly quite apocryphal) story of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), the founder of Facebook, from the creation of the website until he settles the various lawsuits it in turn created. After his girlfriend dumps him, Mark gets drunk and creates a website in a night so that people can rate the hotness of female students. This gets him a lot of attention, including from the Winklevoss twins, giant blond rowers who have plans to build a dating website exclusively for Harvard students. Mark agrees to help them while at the same time building thefacebook.com. We all know which site came out on top.

It is quite unusual to have a main character of a film that is so unlikable. Mark is like Sheldon Cooper with a sex drive and without the charm – selfish, terrible in social situations and with a fragile ego. Eisenberg doesn’t try to make him sympathetic and turns out a very good performance. Mark may be the brains of the operation, but his business partner and best friend Eduardo Saverin is the heart. Played by the lovely Andrew Garfield (last seen in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus), his betrayal is very sad to watch. Justin Timberlake also gives a fine performance as the founder of Napster. Refreshingly, he plays a prat rather than a cool guy.

The journey from college dorm room to Silicon Valley is fast-paced and hilarious, thanks mainly to the script by The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin. It’s full of lines perhaps even too clever to be spoken by a load of Harvard smart alecs. The direction by David Fincher is as cool, swish and grubby as you would expect.

Despite all the quality on screen, what perhaps is most striking about the film is how recent the events depicted are. Facebook was founded in early 2004 but a world without it already seems unthinkable for many. Perhaps it is too recent, both for the filmmakers to understand the impact of the website and for the real people portrayed in the film. However, it’s hard to quibble when seeing the film is such an enjoyable experience. Roll on Wikipedia: The Movie, I say.

London Film Festival Review - Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

I’m half Finnish, and I’m always telling people that Father Christmas lives in Mount Korvatunturi in Finnish Lapland. No-one ever believes me! They think he lives at the North Pole. Like that’s even possible.

It was therefore exciting to see that a film confirming the real origins of Father Christmas was showing at the London Film Festival. Little did I know that I had a lot to learn about Santa Claus myself. You see, the cuddly figure we’ve been brought up with was just the creation of Coca Cola. In reality, he is deadly.

Rare Exports follows Pieteri, a little boy living in the shade of Korvatunturi with his father. An American mining company has been digging deep into the mountain looking for the real Father Christmas. When children start going missing, Pieteri begins to suspect that something evil has been unleashed.

On the surface this should be a children’s film – the main character is a classic lonely child who is not taken seriously by adults, and it’s about Santa Claus. However, it is much too scary for children. The monsters evoke a strong sense of menace and are just real enough to be believable. Though perhaps not an out-and-out horror, most adults should be at least creeped out by it. British and American parents may also feel that the more relaxed attitude to nakedness shown, though typical of the Nordic countries, is not suitable for their offspring.

Rare Exports is based on two short films made in 2003 and 2005 by director Jalmeri Helander. Like District 9 before it, one interesting idea has been successfully developed and expanded into a feature. Funny, shocking and sweet, this film is very different from your usual Hollywood holiday fare, and all the better for it. I don’t think I’m ever going to look at Father Christmas the same way again.

London Film Festival Review - The Parking Lot Movie

I love slackers and slacker culture. I would like to be a slacker myself (I certainly watch enough television), but my work ethic and drive have always been just strong enough to get in the way. Spiritually, though, I am at one with these people. The Parking Lot Movie is a portrait of a slacker paradise that has been lovingly cultivated in Charlottesville, Virginia, for over 20 years. Like a documentary version of Clerks, it shows the titanic struggles and absurdities of the service industry through the eyes of these outsiders.

The Corner Parking Lot is a little car park situated opposite the University of Virginia owned by Chris Farina – a very relaxed guy who likes to wear shorts, and who also happens to be a documentary film maker himself. Chris only lets friends work in the car park, or friends of friends. This policy has meant that all his employees have been intelligent slackers – philosophy graduate students, musicians, dreamers. Director Meghan Eckman spent three years filming the goings on at the car park, and interviewing current and past attendants. The results are hilarious, moving and fascinating.

Working at the parking lot involves mostly just sitting alone in the ramshackle booth and taking money from customers. Eckman allows her subjects to go through the minutiae of all the tasks, the little rituals that have developed in this strange island of space-time. The job gives plenty of scope for these underachievers to analyse their lives, themselves, and the nature of the car park, producing many of the best lines. For example, one describes the role of the parking lot attendant as that of a “creator-destroyer god”.

Unfortunately the attendants’ philophising and mucking around has to be interrupted by those who want to use the car park. In the words of Randal Graves: “This job would be great if it wasn’t for the customers.” The interviewees do not prescribe to the maxim that “the customer is always right”. It’s more a case of “the customer is always a douche”. When you realise they deal with a lot of SUV-driving frat boys, it’s not surprising that they are cynical.

There is a sense of desolation running between the laughs, of course – no one dreams of being a car park attendant. However, for many it seems the job gave them time to find out what they wanted to do, and to grow as a human being while they did it.

Slacker culture held the Zeitgeist during the 90s, and so the The Parking Lot Movie seems to come from that decade – it’s so lo-fi that it should be soundtracked by Pavement. The low budget feel is charming, however, and doesn’t detract from the subject at all.

Eckman has found a wonderful bit of weirdness to focus her camera on, filled with droll and witty people. This documentary has everything from the sublime to the ridiculous, the mundane to the profound, the pitiful to the inspirational. And it has all been found in one little patch of concrete.

Film review - The Town

When Gone Baby Gone was released, it became easy to say that Ben Affleck is a better director than actor – his directorial debut had an assured quality to it, and at that time the roles really weren’t coming his way. His follow up, The Town, is another serious look at working-class Boston, but this time he is directing and starring. It turns out he’s good at both.

The story follows Doug Macray (Affleck), a man from the Charlestown district of Boston who has followed his father into the profession of bank robbing. Apparently, this is not an uncommon line of work in Charlestown. After a successful job, Doug and his gang discover that the woman they took hostage (Rebecca Hall) lives in the area. Worried that she may be able to identify them, he decides to find out how much she knows.

Then things start to turn romantic, and his life spirals out of control.

Affleck has produced a very tense thriller from Chuck Hogan’s source novel, full of twists, suspense and drama. There’s a lot of action, with brutal robbery scenes and a good old-fashioned car chase. The love story is particularly well handled thanks to Hall’s performance. Her character feels very real – an understated young woman who’s been through trauma and finds comfort in Doug.

The rest of the performances are also excellent, and a special mention must go to Jeremy Renner (last seen in The Hurt Locker) as Doug’s partner in crime. It’s also lovely to see Jon Hamm as an FBI agent, but fans of Mad Men will find it strange to see him in the modern world (at one particularly disturbing point he mentions Skype).

The lead performance from Affleck is by no means stunning, but shows the natural charm that got him noticed by Hollywood in the first place (before it got him noticed by the paparazzi). His character is much like Will from Good Will Hunting: a guy who should be doing great things but sticks around his neighbourhood out of misplaced loyalty. This film shows that when given interesting parts, he isn’t so bad after all.

There are a few negatives to the film – the final shootout goes on a bit, and the criminal fraternity of Charlestown is not paricularly well defined (making the role of Pete Postlethwaite’s boss in the whole affair as hard to understand as the thick Bostonian accents everyone has).

It is likely that The Town will be compared to The Departed. While it seems run of the mill next to Scorsese’s stab at a Boston-set crime film, it is certainly an enjoyable ride and another quality film from Mr Affleck.

Film review - Toy Story 3

Toy Story was the first computer-animated feature, and its second sequel may just be the best. This film about a group of toys is a heartbreaking study of change and loss, but also an accomplished prison escape movie. It’s a comedy, but will make you cry.

Woody, Buzz and the gang have resigned themselves to a quiet life in the attic when they see their owner Andy start packing for college. But when they accidently get donated to a daycare centre, they enter a toy’s paradise full of children to play with and new toys to befriend. However, all is not what it seems at Sunnyside daycare, and they realise they have to get back to Andy.

Every frame of Toy Story 3 is full of invention, and every character a delight (except Jessie, who is as annoying as ever). It is this attention to detail that lifts Pixar films above all others aimed at children. The tight plot is expertly crafted, using genre clichés from horror and thrillers that keep the adults’ attention too. A hilarious script is performed by a wonderful cast, but Ned Beatty needs a special mention for the voice of strawberry-scented Lotso, one of the great film villains of all time.

As well as all the excitement in the story, there is also a lot of sadness. Ultimately this is a tale about growing up and leaving your childhood behind, which means it will probably have more effect on adults than children – they won’t know what they’ve got until it's gone. Only Professor Coldheart wouldn’t be blubbing by the end.

Review - Four Lions

Christopher Morris isn’t exactly a stranger to controversy. His red hot satire seems to have upset as many people as it has made laugh. The Daily Mail set were flabbergasted at Brass Eye as they were told it was making light of paedophiles. Actually, it was making fun of Daily Mail readers. His comedy has always veered between disturbing (like Jam) and supremely silly (The Day Today). Four Lions, his first feature film, deals with serious subjects but is actually one of his silliest pieces of work.

The film follows the most useless group of terrorists since the People’s Front of Judea. Omar (the excellent Riz Ahmed) is a young man who wants to make his mark on the world by blowing himself up. After a disasterous stint at a training camp in Pakistan with friend Waj (Kayvan Novak), Omar and his cell decide to go it alone and organise their own attack on London. Unfortunately for Omar, the idiocy of Waj, Barry (Nigel Lindsay), Hassan (Arsher Ali) and Fessal (Adeel Akhtar) complicate matters at every turn.

The earlier Monty Python reference is very apt, as there is something very Pythonesque about the humour here. The characters are extremely stupid, almost to a surreal level. Even Omar, the brains of the outfit, is stupid by definition – he has a nice life in the Britain with a beautiful wife and son, yet he wants to destroy it. This was Morris’s intention, to show how muddled your thinking must be believe being a suicide bomber is a good idea.

I suppose Daily Mail readers will say that the film is making light of terrorism, of showing suicide bombers being nice people. It is true that by using the template of a heist movie, Morris does make the audience (the real target of the bombs) root for the bombers at some points in the film. This is because the characters are engaging and, yes, not wholly evil. However, they aren’t brain washed – they are aware that what they are doing will lead to mass slaughter. The fact that these “normal” people could be capable of this is perhaps more terrifying than portraying them as classic baddies, and certainly more realistic.

This is a truly hilarious film, but the jokes do not detract from how upsetting much of it is or how tragic for all concerned. Morris has pitched the whole thing about as well as you could have hoped for, walking an extremely thin tightrope the whole way. Like his old mucker Armando Iannucci (co-writer of the In the Loop) he is making comedy that gets to the heart of matters.

Review - Sex and the City 2

The first Sex and the City film was a big disappointment. Most of it was just fashion porn, with some truly hideous mawkish moments (more often than not starring poor Jennifer Hudson). A few genuinely touching bits were cancelled out by the extended wedding fashion shoot cringing.

Now that I have accepted that SATC on the big screen will always be a horrible version of the TV series, I could enjoy the second outing as a mildly amusing romp. The faux-seriousness of their supposed problems aside (you do have it tough, girls – having the children you so desperately craved, the love of your life that eluded you so long, or a demanding job), the film is an enjoyable trip with your four favourite girlfriends, even if they are bastardised versions of people you once loved.

The plot, as it goes, concerns Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte worrying about their lives and going on an all expenses paid trip to Abu Dhabi. Compared with the first film, fewer moments stuck in my proverbial craw. Those that did were:

1. The wedding. Given the history of the two characters it felt deeply wrong, even if the ceremony was fabulous.
2. Why did Penelope Cruz have a cameo? What did that bring to the film?
3. What was going on with the accent of Samantha’s “Danish” guy? He sounded like he was from Rotherham.
4. Many outfits were just ludicrous - taffeta and souks do not mix.

Kim Cattrall and Cynthia Nixon are great comedic actresses, outshining their co-stars in a way that wasn’t noticeable in the TV show. Working with a so-so script, they deliver some great lines. Sarah Jessica Parker and Kristin Davis’s characters are often just annoying.

Generally this is funnier and ten times stupider than the first film. Which means it is a hundred times stupider than the original series. Let it wash over you and, whatever you do, don’t analyse it.

Review - Hot Tub Time Machine

This film follows three 40-somethings and a 20-something as they travel to the 80s in a magic hot tub at a skiing resort. Gritty realism isn’t really what the director Steve Pink is going for. Instead it is very, very stupid and very funny.

The three old friends (John Cusack, Craig Robinson and Rob Corddry) leap into their own teenage bodies and must relive an eventful weekend from their past. The results are very rude and crude, with lots of retro references and general making fun of the past. Everyone apparently had day-glo clothes and very bad hair back then.

This is obviously riding the coat tails of The Hangover, and it just isn’t up to that standard – because it isn’t as funny, but also because it doesn’t have a nugget of sweetness at its centre. It is also a bit smuttier than many “gross-out” comedies of late. As long as you aren’t a prude, it should give you an evening of laughs if nothing else.

Film review - Kick-Ass

This film has predictably caused a tabloid frenzy, but really it is no more violent than many aimed at adults. The only difference is that a little girl takes part in said violence and swears a lot – which sensible people know is hilarious and awesome.

Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is a geeky high school student who decides to follow in the footsteps of Peter Parker and be a superhero. Unfortunately, he hasn’t been bitten by a handy radioactive spider, and so is just an ordinary teenager wearing a customised wetsuit. Even more unfortunately, the fake superhero gets mixed up with some real criminals.

Superficially, Kick-Ass deals with similar issues to Alan Moore’s Watchmen, but does not take seriously the question of what would happen if superheroes were real. This is more in the Mystery Men mould of films about stupid superheroes.

Johnson is too bland for the role – not nerdy enough to convincingly play the character or with enough spark to make you care very much. He is out-shone by the supporting players, particularly Christopher Mintz-Plasse as rival fake superhero, the Red Mist, and Nicolas Cage as the real deal, Big Daddy. But it is Chloe Moretz as Hit-Girl who really steals the show. Cute and with killer delivery, she is a little star in the making and what the film will be remembered for.

Written by Jane Goldman and the director Matthew Vaughn, the English roots can be seen in the casting (Dexter Fletcher!) and the liberal sprinkling of art from the YBAs in the rich baddie’s house. The film has pretensions of following Tarantino, but despite the Kill Bill-style violence they don’t quite pull off.

Instead they have crafted a violent thrill-ride which is light on plot, but heavy with laughs. It’s not big, and it’s not clever, but Kick-Ass is a whole lot of fun.

Film review - I Love You Phillip Morris

They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and this certainly applies to the life and times of Steven Russell (here played by Jim Carrey). Once a happily married policeman, he came out and became a conman with a knack for escaping from prison.

His story is portrayed with a light, playful touch by writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who previously brought us Bad Santa (2003). There is something about the film which feels unoriginal – perhaps the wacky tone, hyper-real production design and Texas setting makes it too Coen Brothers-esque – but it is still a hilarious and fascinating tale.

Carrey is brilliant as the audacious protagonist, walking the thin line between his comic and serious acting personas. There are moments of pathos amongst the scams, which he pulls off with aplomb, but he is also happy to partake in a little slapstick. Ewan McGregor seems a little old to be playing Steven’s titular lover – the character is supposed to be an ingénue. However, he gives a very sweet performance.

It is unusual to have a gay romance portrayed in a mainstream film, but this is not a romantic comedy. The focus is on plot, and what a plot it is. See it and be amazed at what one guy got away with.

Film review - Green Zone

It’s not surprising that a war film is depressing, but Green Zone isn’t depressing because of the loss of life on screen; our hero doesn’t have to comfort a dying friend or reflect on what it means to kill a man like usual. Instead what is depressing is the politics behind the war itself. The situations depicted here are exasperating and all too close to the truth for comfort.

Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) has the pointless task of searching Baghdad for weapons of mass destruction in the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq invasion. When a CIA agent points out just how pointless it is, he starts to investigate the evidence for the war itself.

This is a taut, tense thriller, full of fast-paced intrigue. Paul Greengrass has combined his talents for message films with the Bourne side here, and it is an assured take on a difficult subject. Damon is impressive in the lead role, and it is lovely to see the Wire’s Amy Ryan on the big screen as a journalist. Greg Kinnear portrays the spineless suit charged with covering up the government’s tracks very well indeed.

As I’ve said, this is an enjoyable, pacey film about intelligence briefings – you should by now have smelled a rat. This is not All the President’s Men, but a fictionalised and much simplified version of what actually happened. Unsurprisingly, this retelling is also not particularly kind to the Americans. As an enjoyable night out at the cinema, Green Zone works really well. The danger is that people will think these events actually happened in this way. If only it were that simple.

Film review - Shutter Island

This 50s-set thriller is a bit of a disappointment – especially as it comes from Martin Scorsese. US Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner (Mark Ruffalo) arrive on the 100-per-cent spooky titular island to find an escaped mental patient. As a storm hits, Daniels starts to believe that there is more going on at this hospital than there first seems.

It is obvious right from the get-go that Scorsese is paying homage to his favourite B-movies of the 40s and 50. In the opening scene the score is full of orchestral crashity-crashity boom-ba-boom, when all we’re looking at is Leo on a boat. The melodramatic score and ominous shots of the island as it comes into view seem totally over the top to a modern audience – instead of building tension it makes everything seem quite humorous.

There’s no let-up in the hokum when we reach the island – the mental institution is run by everyone’s favourite screen baddy (Ben Kingsley) and an archetypal creepy German (Max von Sydow), and of course “there’s only one way off the island”. Once the massive storm comes, there is no way off the island, and we follow Leo as he runs around the forest, soaked to the skin and desperately trying to find the truth.

In the end this is just a lot of noise and driving rain signifying very little. There’s nothing wrong with the performances – DiCaprio is fine in the leading role, Ruffalo gives a quality performance and Kingsley is everything you expect – and there are some creepy moments, but the slow pace and unintentionally hilarious flashbacks will leave most feeling cold. The film just doesn’t sweep you along like it should.

As a silly thriller, it works well enough. If you want some deeper meaning, it is best to look elsewhere.

Review - Up in the Air

Jason Reitman’s follow-up to the much-loved Juno is another bittersweet film, but one much less arch and more true to life. Up in the Air tells the story of Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a man with one of the worst jobs you can imagine – he is hired by companies to fire people for them. Yet he loves his job because it allows him to travel across America, collecting airmiles and avoiding any meaningful relationships with others. When he finds his perfect mate (Vera Farmiga), and his own job is threatened by a fresh-faced graduate (Anna Kendrick) and her downsizing plans, Ryan starts to evaluate his life.

Clooney makes Ryan suave and sophisticated (let’s face it, it is hard for Clooney to be anything else), but at the same time he is one of the saddest characters to have ever been put on celluloid. Estranged from his family, he is someone with no home and no love who preaches this as a successful way to live at self-help conferences. It would have been easy for him to be incredibly unlikeable, like Tom Cruise in Magnolia, but the way he carries out his despicable job with such decency means you can see there’s a heart of gold in there somewhere.

Although Clooney’s performance is excellent, the two women are outstanding. Kendrick’s character is so realistic, and not the sort of female character you often see on screen. Bright and ambitious, her relentlessly business-like surface hides a naive young woman who is very hard on herself. Farmiga plays an older career woman who knows what she wants and goes out and gets it. The character’s relationship with Ryan feels very real, making this film anything but a fairytale romance. These are two star-making performances from actresses who haven’t been given a chance to shine before (they were last in the Twilight saga and The Orphan respectively).

The screenplay, based on the novel by Walter Kirn, is funny and touching in equal measure. This is perhaps the first movie to deal with the current recession, and one of the few to examine corporate America and business culture. Reitman uses real people who have lost their jobs to talk about what it feels like to be made redundant, which is heartbreaking and brings a universality to the film that would otherwise be missing. Up in the Air is a wonderful character study and truly a film for our times.

Review - Avatar

I am very proud to say that I have never seen Titanic. I was 14 when it came out and everyone at school was obsessed, particularly with Leonardo DiCaprio. We went on a French exchange trip and the situation was even worse over there. Celine Dion echoed round the country and I vowed never to see the watery epic. I was therefore not particularly inclined to see another film by James Cameron, and helpfully he decided not to make any for ten years. But then I saw the trailer for Avatar, and knew I had to see the CGI in 3D even if it was put together by the bombastic self-proclaimed king of the world.

Avatar is set on a planet called Pandora, home to a tall, blue, humanoid species called the Na’vi that live in a lush forest at one with nature. Although the atmosphere is toxic to humans, we earthlings have travelled there to mine a valuable mineral called unobtanium (a groan-inducing name), putting us at war with the Na’vi over land. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a paraplegic ex-marine brought in to work on a special project in place of his dead twin brother. Sully’s brain is connected up to an ‘avatar’, a half-Na’vi, half-human creature grown especially for the purpose so that he can safely go amongst the Na’vi and negotiate. As he learns the way of the Na’vi and falls for a beautiful Na'vi called Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), he realises that what the humans are doing is wrong.

Cameron has created a story full of high-concept conceits, but that is still paper thin. The environmental and historical allegories involved stick out more obviously than any of the 3D graphics, and the message behind it is as deep as a puddle. It’s just FernGully: The Last Rainforest in space.

The situation is not helped by the choice of leading man. Worthington is hunky, but lacks charisma. And when James Cameron has defined your character only as ‘not as bright as your dead twin brother’, and ‘quite a good marine’, you need all the charisma you can get. Sigourney Weaver brings sparkle to the screen as a scientist, Zoe Saldana is appealing as Neytiri, and it is nice to see Giovanni Ribisi in an atypical role, but generally there is little space in the dumb plot for you to get involved with any characters.

Now that I have established that Avatar is a mediocre film, I can now discuss the reason why everyone will still see it: the CGI. Using new techniques specially developed for the film, the 3D computer graphics are the finest ever made. A sequence where Sully’s avatar is shown the forest at night by Neytiri is breathtaking in a way perhaps only comparable to the first sight of the diplodoci in Jurassic Park (even if it looks suspiciously like the early levels of Rayman). The Na’vi characters are rendered very well, with realistic facial expressions. Cameron’s intention was to get rid of the creepiness of CGI humanoids, and though creepiness remains it is at a far lower level than usual. The 3D is integrated and realistic, not gimmicky with things flying at your face.

Most people will feel that it is worth sitting through the slow opening act and drawn-out final battle for the truly cinematic experience of this middle section. But few will be moved by this technological marvel, something which Titanic (however much I detest everything it stands for) managed to do to millions.