Review - Iron Man

One of the lesser-known Marvel superheroes, Iron Man has potentially one of the hardest origin stories to translate into the present day. In most of the other recent film adaptations, “genetic engineering” has been used in place of ‘radiation’ (the science buzzword of the 1960s when these characters were created) as the catch-all cause of superpowers. Iron Man, on the other hand, came into being trying to stop a warlord in Vietnam, and is definitely a product of Cold War concerns.

Under these circumstances, the writing team and director Jon Favreau have done a great job of translating the story to the modern day, although thanks must also go to the Bush administration for giving him another unwinnable guerrilla conflict to substitute for Southeast Asia.

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is an uber-wealthy international playboy and genius-level engineer who runs his family weapons company. While demonstrating his latest product to the army in Afghanistan, he is captured by rebels and ordered to make them one of his efficient killing machines. Tony instead builds a robotic suit of armour and escapes the rebels’ clutches, vowing to stop making guns and to start helping people by using his new creation.

Unusually for this genre, the tidy storyline makes complete sense (barring, of course, the technology involved), and allows plenty of time for the performances from Downey and Gwyneth Paltrow to shine through. He is charisma personified and brings warmth and pathos to the role. Paltrow’s Pepper Potts (Stark’s Miss Moneypenny) is upright, organised, strawberry blond and everything you’d want in a secretary.

The effects are excellent, with the Iron Man suit always looking real and never like it’s been stuck on in Photoshop. Action sequences here may not be as exciting as those in Spider-Man, but this is a function of Iron Man’s power being slightly less cool, rather than anything the film-makers have done wrong; fights between robots easily become swirling chunks of metal and can be confusing to follow, as previously seen in Transformers. The rest of the film more than makes up for this, however, satisfying with genuinely charming characters and loads of funny moments.

Review - The Cottage

British film comedy at the moment owes a lot to Shaun of the Dead, which whisked away the cobwebs of soppy Richard Curtis rom-coms and allowed us to show the world that we too are part of the slacker generation and can be geeky and funny at once. The Cottage may not be quite as good as Shaun, but it is certainly up there with its successor Hot Fuzz when it comes to silly spoofery.

The simple plot follows two inept brothers who have kidnapped a rich girl and are holding her to ransom in the middle of nowhere. Andy Serkis (Gollum from Lord of the Rings, here without the motion capture suit) plays David, the hardened criminal mastermind of the pair who unfortunately puts his trust in Peter (Reece Shearsmith, the normal-looking one from the League of Gentleman, but confusingly the one with the least normal name), a snivelling, cowardly family man. After their plan goes wrong, things get very much worse very rapidly, as there is someone else out there in the woods.

Lots of gruesome fun ensues as the characters realise they have stepped straight into a Sussex Chainsaw Massacre. This film has obviously been made on a small budget, but they’ve kept cast and sets to a minimum and concentrated where it matters, on blood and guts. Serkis and Shearsmith make a good double act (although their accents make believing they are brothers difficult), and Jennifer Ellison is wonderful as Tracey, the crotch-kicking, mouthy Scouser who isn’t easy to hold captive. A nice little send up of the horror genre, The Cottage has enough sick belly laughs to leave you smiling on the way out of the cinema.

Review - There Will Be Blood

I am not sure what to say about There Will Be Blood. On the one hand, it is a very beautiful, somewhat disturbing, and certainly epic film with a truly outstanding lead performance by Daniel Day Lewis. On the other, it left me confused, annoyed by that confusion, and having little idea what it was actually about.

Daniel Plainview (Day Lewis) is an oil prospector in the first years of the 20th Century, taking on the dangerous but necessary job of finding wells in California. An intense orator, he easily gets his way, buying up people’s land throughout the state. In one area, however, a young, and similarly intense, preacher called Eli (Paul Dano, the silent teenager in Little Miss Sunshine) makes his life difficult, and Plainview begins to lose his grip.

The scenes of digging for oil are electrifying. It is just so interesting to see it bubble up from ground like that, but the hideous, skull-smashing danger of the process means it is hard to even look at the screen. The film takes its time with such scenes, using long silences and Jonny Greenwood’s brooding, whirring score very effectively.

There is an immense sense of foreboding throughout the whole film, a fearfulness that stems from our fear of Plainview. Day Lewis is a boiling cauldron of violence and ferocity, producing a monumental performance that will surely go down as one of his best; he is an epic character creating an epic story around him from very little. Plainview’s son (Dillon Freasier) is an unnerving silent presence, and Dano’s Eli is an unnerving loud one.

Although I did enjoy my journey through the film, I was interrupted at various intervals as I realised I did not know what was going on. There is an issue surrounding Eli and his brother which, whilst I won’t go into it here so as not to give anything away, is very confusing, and I have still not resolved it in my own mind. It is galling because it is not really an important issue, and one that could have been easily remedied. The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, is obviously not careless, so I suppose this ambiguity must have been intentional, but the bewilderment it produced was very distracting, and I know I am not alone in feeling it.

I am also not sure about the meaning behind the film, apart from that Plainview was a bit of a loony and that greed is bad. Anderson’s previous works like Boogie Nights and Magnolia made instant emotional connections with audiences, but this film’s feelings are hidden behind a veil of both bombast and intense quiet. An outstanding mood-piece, There Will Be Blood is certainly masterful, if not quite a masterpiece.

Review - Cloverfield

The Blair Witch Project was rubbish, and unfortunately for a horror film, it wasn’t even scary rubbish. The producer J.J Abrams took a risk, then, in reusing the ‘found videotape’ device for this film, although as the creator of Lost, he knows he can make low-brow, high-concept stuff work (at least for a while). The risk paid off, for Cloverfield is one of the most enjoyable films I have seen for a long time.

The story follows a group of young, beautiful yuppie-types as they video a leaving party for one of their number, who is moving from New York to Japan. The party is interrupted by a monster attack on the city, and they continue to tape the consequential running, screaming and toppling of buildings as they try to rescue a friend. When the attack begins, it definitely makes for uncomfortable viewing, as it seems eerily close to the events of 2001. Luckily, the monster element comes to the forefront, and the emotional and physical rollercoaster the characters are going through takes your mind off it. This is a genuinely scary film; the use of a hand-held camera throughout makes it seem very real for our YouTube-dominated culture, and means that the much is left unseen and unexplained. When you do see things, they are made using good CGI.

The only problems with it are the characters. Young, happy and successful Americans are very annoying; frat boys don’t suddenly become less heinous just because they get jobs. The only ugly person in this film (excluding the giant amphibious monster) was carefully placed behind the camera, out of sight. As is traditional for horror films, the cast is made up of unknowns. They do their best with what they are working with, but the bland glossiness of the people somewhat detracts from the rest of this otherwise ground-breaking monster movie. This is the same problem I have with Lost, but luckily this film lasts only 85 minutes, rather than years and years, so it’s hardly noticeable. A terrifying tale of survival that puts you right in the action, Cloverfield is a taut thriller that deserves to be seen on the big screen by every horror fan.

Review - No Country for Old Men

This adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel contains the familiar Coen Brothers’ elements of quiet men and crimes gone wrong, but takes them to a much darker place than ever before; there are few of their trademark comic grotesques to offer relief in the unforgiving gloom of the film’s Texas landscape.

Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) disobeys Movie Rule Number One when he takes a suitcase of money that doesn’t belong to him. The resulting game of cat and mouse moves slowly, but is carried along by sudden bursts of violence. The Coens build squirm-inducing tension from the start, so it is a pity that the audience is betrayed by a low-key ending that means less than it thinks it does.

Uniformly excellent performances from the large cast make up for the few narrative faults, however. Brolin impresses as the principled-yet-greedy protagonist, and Scottish Kelly McDonald manages a flawless Texan drawl whilst sweetly playing his young wife, in what will surely be breakthrough roles for both. Tommy Lee Jones and Woody Harrelson ably fill parts made for them, but it is Javier Bardem who will live long in the memory as the psychopath on Brolin’s trail, with a terrifying method of killing his victims and an even scarier haircut.

Review - The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

This film tells true story of an event that became legendary in the annals of the Old West. It is 1881 and Jesse James (Brad Pitt), the brutal outlaw and folk hero, has become older, tired and paranoid. Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) has idolised him since he was a child, and desperately tries to join his gang. Director Andrew Dominik explores how fate intertwines these two men’s lives, producing a dream-like and haunting viewing experience.

Casey Affleck (who doesn’t look that much like his brother, but sounds so much like him that it freaks me out) is brilliant as the titular coward. Shifty, constantly mumbling and weasely, but also intelligent and hot-headed, the Robert Ford shown here was an ambitious misfit who yearned for fame, and unfortunately got what he wanted. Pitt’s Jesse James is a malevolent presence in every scene. Apparently bi-polar towards the end of his life, he is at once both charming and dangerously unpredictable. If one actually looks at photos of Jesse James, however, one will see that he actually looked a lot more like a weedy version of Affleck than Brad Pitt. I suppose it is inevitable that everyone is beefed-up to match the Hollywood aesthetic.

As a mood-piece this contemplative film works very well. The cinematography is wonderful; grand vistas, farmhouses, towns, everything is shown through a grey-brown haze (at one point, Ford states that both he and James have blue eyes, but you really can’t tell due to the colour cast). Everything takes place very slowly in this world (except gunshot deaths, of course), allowing us to be transported back to another time.

Given the space in this film for pause and reflection, it is surprising that the story is actually quite hard to follow. There are lots of mangy, foul-speaking men who bear grudges against Jesse James and vice versa, but it is rarely made clear who they are and why the friction exists between them. Everything is very vague and unspoken, which certainly adds to the barren beauty of the piece, but produces a confused audience enjoying a less than compelling experience. Nevertheless, this is a lovely piece of work to see on the big screen, with a dream-like atmosphere that will stay with you for days.

Review - Sicko

Many people felt, like I did, that Michael Moore took a wrong turning with Fahrenheit 9/11; it all went a bit too far. The searing and sensitive examination of desolation in his home town in Roger & Me, and the masterful patchwork of Bowling for Columbine (which both mainly focused on the predicaments and foibles of ordinary Americans) seemed to be replaced with self-serving bombast. Although a persuasive and moving piece of work, Fahrenheit left a bad taste in my mouth, perhaps because Moore had left any pretence of balance and fairness behind when he stated that the purpose of the film was to get Bush out of the White House. It left an even worse taste when it failed.

With Sicko, his examination of the American medical system (or lack thereof), he has gone back to basics, producing another heartbreaking, heart-warming, and totally engrossing film. This is a subject he covered often in his TV series, TV Nation and The Awful Truth, but demands to be covered again. The stories he shows of people suffering and dying needlessly in the richest country in the World, all because of the greed of the insurance companies, are (excuse the pun) completely sickening. Now, Michael Moore may always approach a topic with an agenda, but his agenda here is to give poor people decent medical care. He may select facts carefully, but the fact that the denial of treatment is company policy in these organisations, and that this is sanctioned by the government, obliterates any arguments for keeping the status quo.

Sicko made me proud to be British (or, less specifically and more accurately, European), and so grateful for our National Health Service (NHS). Now, granted, it is a far from perfect system (hospital-borne infection rates and the treatment of the elderly are national scandals, and that’s just for starters), but for most of the people, most of the time it works at least adequately and it is free. It seems completely anathema to me, or to any European, to have to pay for treatment; we would see it as going against our human rights. We take it for granted that we can visit the GP if we get a sniffle, go to casualty if we cut ourselves, and that the cost of asthma medication won’t force us to keep working into our 80s. Moore shows ex-pat Americans crying with guilt about the ‘luxuries’ they receive, when their parents, who worked hard all their lives, have to struggle.

When it comes to the passionate polemic, the call to arms of downtrodden Americans, the highlighting of crippling unfairness, none can beat Moore; his work makes you laugh out loud one minute, and cry the next. Some may say he is a cynical manipulator of emotions, and even if that is the case, with Sicko his view is so morally correct that I applaud the manipulation, as it might make people angry enough to do something about it. I really believe that if Americans adopted socialised healthcare (as the rest of the Developed World has), then almost instantaneously they would never imagine going back to the old system: a system that dumps people without insurance outside homeless shelters in the dead of night. That refuses care to dying children. That bankrupts decent, hardworking families. That makes billions of dollars every year.