There aren’t many lightweight comedies about the psychological techniques employed by the American military in wartime, but in a way that is surprising. The Men Who Stare at Goats combines many of society’s favourite things: conspiracy theories, the paranormal, and the ancient conventions of the buddy road movie. Add to that George Clooney using his considerable comedic skills, and you’ve got a sure-fire hit.
This fictionalised account of true events follows a journalist (Ewan McGregor) trying to become embedded with troops at the beginning of the Iraq War and failing miserably. Then he meets Lyn Cassady (Clooney) a loopy salesman who says that he was part of a secret government programme to create soldiers with superpowers, so as to better beat the Russians. The two embark on a mission into Iraq.
Screenwriter Peter Straughan has done a wonderful job of creating a story out of Jon Ronson’s book, tying the whole thing up in a neat little bow. The farcical nature of the stranger-than-fiction truth is played up and the joke quotient is high, with a dash of slapstick thrown in for good measure. A serious message about recent military tactics slips by almost unnoticed. Both Straughan and Ronson are British, which you can tell from the use of Alright by Supergrass over the beginning titles.
It’s lovely to see Clooney getting to be funny in a non-Coen Brother’s film for once, and he plays crazy expertly (the moustache helps). Jeff Bridges reprises his delightful Dude persona as the strung-out founder of the psychic army, and Kevin Spacey hams it up as an evil psychic soldier who never fitted in with the others. Only McGregor fails to really sparkle in his straight man role. It is easy to see why he was cast (they get a lot of mileage from Jedi jokes), but his American accent isn’t really up to par.
At the beginning of the film a title card reads: “More of this is true than you would think.” By the end you will be googling to find out the real story behind this highly enjoyable exercise in silliness.
Tuesday, 20 October 2009
Sunday, 11 October 2009
Review - Dorian Gray
It is perhaps fitting that the only good thing about this adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is its beautiful shell. Bright and buxom costuming cannot disguise that it is a deeply tedious film with a running time of less than two hours that feels more like three and a half.
The concept of the story, if not its details, is well known. Dorian (Ben Barnes) is a handsome and innocent young man who sells his soul so that he will never age. Instead, his portrait grows old and ugly, showing how his many sins leave their marks on his soul.
Barnes has a pretty face, but a pretty face cannot lift such an uninteresting script. Not even the presence of Colin Firth and Ben Chaplin can raise the viewers’ spirits when confronted with the same scene of gothic debauchery repeated ad infinitum. It is hard work to make opium-infused orgies boring, but director Oliver Parker has managed it. Rebecca Hall (who seems to be in everything) turns up near the end as your typical feisty suffragette type, but by this point the audience has been anaesthetised into a cosy half-nap and will hardly notice as the slow narrative trundles on to its final destination.
The concept of the story, if not its details, is well known. Dorian (Ben Barnes) is a handsome and innocent young man who sells his soul so that he will never age. Instead, his portrait grows old and ugly, showing how his many sins leave their marks on his soul.
Barnes has a pretty face, but a pretty face cannot lift such an uninteresting script. Not even the presence of Colin Firth and Ben Chaplin can raise the viewers’ spirits when confronted with the same scene of gothic debauchery repeated ad infinitum. It is hard work to make opium-infused orgies boring, but director Oliver Parker has managed it. Rebecca Hall (who seems to be in everything) turns up near the end as your typical feisty suffragette type, but by this point the audience has been anaesthetised into a cosy half-nap and will hardly notice as the slow narrative trundles on to its final destination.
Monday, 5 October 2009
Review - Sin Nombre
This film follows a young girl, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), on the treacherous journey from Honduras, to Mexico and on to America, one of the thousands of illegal immigrants that sneak into Texas each year. It also offers an insight into the gangs that run the slums and prey on the immigrants. As you might expect, it isn’t exactly a laugh riot.
It is, however, extraordinarily gripping and tense. El Casper (Édgar Flores), a young gang member, knows that his whole life is one big catch 22. As his destiny mixes with Sayra’s, the only choices he can make are bad ones, and the audience is along for the ride on the ancient train heading for the border.
Writer and director Cary Fukunaga has obviously done his homework, and has rendered this violent and hopeless world beautifully. The gang, all full-face tattoos and homemade guns, feels particularly real. Cinematographer Adriano Goldman does a wonderful job, making yellows and oranges leap out of the screen as the camera passes through the landscape with the characters in a semi-documentary style. Low-key performances also add to the drama – Gaitan and Flores seem to show all the tragedy behind the statistics in their big brown eyes.
Slumdog Millionaire showed that films about poverty can be big hits, but only if the main character wins a gameshow at the end. Sin Nombre is by far the better film, but only offers its characters a ticket to live undercover in a Walmart- and Home Depot-laden wilderness for the rest of their lives. Depressing, then, but worth it.
It is, however, extraordinarily gripping and tense. El Casper (Édgar Flores), a young gang member, knows that his whole life is one big catch 22. As his destiny mixes with Sayra’s, the only choices he can make are bad ones, and the audience is along for the ride on the ancient train heading for the border.
Writer and director Cary Fukunaga has obviously done his homework, and has rendered this violent and hopeless world beautifully. The gang, all full-face tattoos and homemade guns, feels particularly real. Cinematographer Adriano Goldman does a wonderful job, making yellows and oranges leap out of the screen as the camera passes through the landscape with the characters in a semi-documentary style. Low-key performances also add to the drama – Gaitan and Flores seem to show all the tragedy behind the statistics in their big brown eyes.
Slumdog Millionaire showed that films about poverty can be big hits, but only if the main character wins a gameshow at the end. Sin Nombre is by far the better film, but only offers its characters a ticket to live undercover in a Walmart- and Home Depot-laden wilderness for the rest of their lives. Depressing, then, but worth it.
Saturday, 3 October 2009
Review - Inglourious Basterds
As I may have already mentioned, I am the World’s Biggest Tarantino Fan (TM). I was very upset, therefore, when I saw the trailer for his latest film. It looked like a joke, and not a funny one. Brad Pitt with a comedy accent, Hitler having a tantrum, silly explosions – it was hideous. “Why?” I thought. “Why has this had to happen? What has got into my Quentin? It isn’t even cool. How could Tarantino make a film for which the trailer isn’t cool? You’re telling me you can’t cut together two cool minutes from the whole film?”
Well, whoever made that trailer did the film a disservice. No, it isn’t perfect. And yes, Brad Pitt and Hitler are ridiculous in it. But there are cool bits, tense bits and moving bits that certainly make it worth seeing, even if it still isn’t the sum of these good parts. I’m saying this now because I am going to be doing a lot of complaining in this review and I don’t want you to think I am just a ‘hater’, as they say in hip hop parlance. So I reiterate: do see it because you will enjoy it.
Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino’s first period piece, but as you would expect, it isn’t exactly Merchant Ivory. The Germans have occupied most of mainland Europe, and America has decided to send an elite killing squad of Jewish soldiers into enemy territory to wreak their revenge on the Nazis. They are led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a shouty redneck, and prove very successful at scalping Nazis. The band of misfits becomes involved in a joint British and American plan to assassinate Hitler. Parallel to this, the film follows Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a young Jewish woman living in Paris under an assumed name who also gets a chance to kill the Führer and end the war.
It seems silly to criticize the film for being historically inaccurate, as its premise and the outcome are obviously based on fantasy and not fact. However, Tarantino could have made a much better film by making the whole thing slightly more realistic. There are really two films here: one is serious, tense, moving and superbly acted (Shosanna’s story), and the other could be called Carry On Follow that Panzer.
Laurent has an inner strength and quiet beauty as Shosanna. Her unwanted love interest, a young German war hero, is played by the adorable Daniel Brühl, who gives a pitch-perfect little performance. The best part of her story, however, is of course Christoph Waltz as Colonel Hans Landa. His stunningly evil and multi-lingual performance as the Nazi ‘Jew Hunter’ deserves an Oscar. Creepy, clever and charismatic, he reminded me of an Austrian John Malkovitch. Waltz has created one of the all-time great film villains.
The story following Brad Pitt’s ‘bastards’ has its moments (special mention goes to Diane Kruger and Gedeon Burkhard) but all the truly awful bits happen in these passages. Firstly, Mike Myers’s cameo as a British general is so bad that it almost ruins the whole film. I know his parents are from Liverpool, but that doesn’t automatically mean he can do an upper-class English accent. His pronunciation of the word ‘basket’ is particularly painful. And the weird thing is that the part isn’t even written with any jokes in it, so it’s not like his comedy skills are required. Unfathomable.
Secondly, Eli Roth appears as one of the bastards and I really object to this. The guy can’t act. Here he is too scrawny for the part of ‘the Bear Jew’ and his whiny voice is annoying. I’m still upset that his incomprehensible speech at the bar in Death Proof ended up on the soundtrack album when it is the worst bit of that film. I’m sure he and Quentin are great friends, but how many brilliant bits of dialogue are spoken by women in that film and didn’t make it onto the album? Is he now going to be in every Tarantino film? Are they another Scorsese and DiCaprio pairing we will have to endure?
And now on to my third problem with this film: the music. There is no great Tarantino Music Moment here, and this is the first time this has happened in his career. Even Four Rooms had that scatty theme from Combustible Edison. This situation is truly disappointing, because along with that bit at the beginning of James Bond movies where he shoots the camera to John Barry’s score, when Tarantino uses a song correctly it is the coolest thing you can see in a cinema. But I have a bigger problem with the use of music in Inglourious Basterds than mere disappointment.
In the first flush of his career in the early nineties, Tarantino gave many interviews talking about his use of music, and in all of them he made the same point: when a movie uses a song, it owns it forever and it shouldn’t be used again. He always used the same example, that Dirty Dancing should not have used the Ronettes’s Be My Baby because the song already belonged to Scorsese’s Mean Streets. His use of old film scores in the Kill Bill films and Death Proof therefore riled me, but I’m a forgiving sort of girl and convinced myself that it was ok because the music he was using was from quite obscure films. Inglourious Basterd’s soundtrack is again mostly made up of old Ennio Morricone scores, but some of them were also reused in Kill Bill! His only (failed) attempt at a Tarantino Music Moment is with David Bowie’s Cat People (Putting Out the Fire), a song specially written for the quite well-known film Cat People! Tarantino has certainly gone against his own rules with this double-reusing and there is no excuse for such lazy behaviour for such meagre results. Why can’t he just employ a composer to write a score for him like a grown up?
Perhaps because he isn’t a grown up. This film could only have been made by someone who has been given free rein to do whatever he wants, because it really is quite mad. Tarantino shows that he can do great work (the opening scene is tremendous), but also that his ability to self-edit has shrunk with the growth of his ego over the years. Inglourious Basterds is certainly an interesting film with a well structured (if silly) story and some wonderful performances. It deserves to be seen and enjoyed for its many pleasures. However, some may find it easier to ignore its failings than others.
Well, whoever made that trailer did the film a disservice. No, it isn’t perfect. And yes, Brad Pitt and Hitler are ridiculous in it. But there are cool bits, tense bits and moving bits that certainly make it worth seeing, even if it still isn’t the sum of these good parts. I’m saying this now because I am going to be doing a lot of complaining in this review and I don’t want you to think I am just a ‘hater’, as they say in hip hop parlance. So I reiterate: do see it because you will enjoy it.
Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino’s first period piece, but as you would expect, it isn’t exactly Merchant Ivory. The Germans have occupied most of mainland Europe, and America has decided to send an elite killing squad of Jewish soldiers into enemy territory to wreak their revenge on the Nazis. They are led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a shouty redneck, and prove very successful at scalping Nazis. The band of misfits becomes involved in a joint British and American plan to assassinate Hitler. Parallel to this, the film follows Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a young Jewish woman living in Paris under an assumed name who also gets a chance to kill the Führer and end the war.
It seems silly to criticize the film for being historically inaccurate, as its premise and the outcome are obviously based on fantasy and not fact. However, Tarantino could have made a much better film by making the whole thing slightly more realistic. There are really two films here: one is serious, tense, moving and superbly acted (Shosanna’s story), and the other could be called Carry On Follow that Panzer.
Laurent has an inner strength and quiet beauty as Shosanna. Her unwanted love interest, a young German war hero, is played by the adorable Daniel Brühl, who gives a pitch-perfect little performance. The best part of her story, however, is of course Christoph Waltz as Colonel Hans Landa. His stunningly evil and multi-lingual performance as the Nazi ‘Jew Hunter’ deserves an Oscar. Creepy, clever and charismatic, he reminded me of an Austrian John Malkovitch. Waltz has created one of the all-time great film villains.
The story following Brad Pitt’s ‘bastards’ has its moments (special mention goes to Diane Kruger and Gedeon Burkhard) but all the truly awful bits happen in these passages. Firstly, Mike Myers’s cameo as a British general is so bad that it almost ruins the whole film. I know his parents are from Liverpool, but that doesn’t automatically mean he can do an upper-class English accent. His pronunciation of the word ‘basket’ is particularly painful. And the weird thing is that the part isn’t even written with any jokes in it, so it’s not like his comedy skills are required. Unfathomable.
Secondly, Eli Roth appears as one of the bastards and I really object to this. The guy can’t act. Here he is too scrawny for the part of ‘the Bear Jew’ and his whiny voice is annoying. I’m still upset that his incomprehensible speech at the bar in Death Proof ended up on the soundtrack album when it is the worst bit of that film. I’m sure he and Quentin are great friends, but how many brilliant bits of dialogue are spoken by women in that film and didn’t make it onto the album? Is he now going to be in every Tarantino film? Are they another Scorsese and DiCaprio pairing we will have to endure?
And now on to my third problem with this film: the music. There is no great Tarantino Music Moment here, and this is the first time this has happened in his career. Even Four Rooms had that scatty theme from Combustible Edison. This situation is truly disappointing, because along with that bit at the beginning of James Bond movies where he shoots the camera to John Barry’s score, when Tarantino uses a song correctly it is the coolest thing you can see in a cinema. But I have a bigger problem with the use of music in Inglourious Basterds than mere disappointment.
In the first flush of his career in the early nineties, Tarantino gave many interviews talking about his use of music, and in all of them he made the same point: when a movie uses a song, it owns it forever and it shouldn’t be used again. He always used the same example, that Dirty Dancing should not have used the Ronettes’s Be My Baby because the song already belonged to Scorsese’s Mean Streets. His use of old film scores in the Kill Bill films and Death Proof therefore riled me, but I’m a forgiving sort of girl and convinced myself that it was ok because the music he was using was from quite obscure films. Inglourious Basterd’s soundtrack is again mostly made up of old Ennio Morricone scores, but some of them were also reused in Kill Bill! His only (failed) attempt at a Tarantino Music Moment is with David Bowie’s Cat People (Putting Out the Fire), a song specially written for the quite well-known film Cat People! Tarantino has certainly gone against his own rules with this double-reusing and there is no excuse for such lazy behaviour for such meagre results. Why can’t he just employ a composer to write a score for him like a grown up?
Perhaps because he isn’t a grown up. This film could only have been made by someone who has been given free rein to do whatever he wants, because it really is quite mad. Tarantino shows that he can do great work (the opening scene is tremendous), but also that his ability to self-edit has shrunk with the growth of his ego over the years. Inglourious Basterds is certainly an interesting film with a well structured (if silly) story and some wonderful performances. It deserves to be seen and enjoyed for its many pleasures. However, some may find it easier to ignore its failings than others.
Monday, 20 July 2009
Review - Brüno
This must be a worrying time for Sacha Baron Cohen. He has run out of characters. Here he revisits Brüno, the first of his triumvirate of creations that were followed by Ali G and Borat. Using the same format as 2006’s über-hilarious Borat, the film follows the gay, Austrian fashion journalist as he tries to become a superstar in America, freaking out the Bible Belt as he goes.
Turns out it is quite easy to shock the Bible Best by being very camp. Who knew? As with his other characters, Baron Cohen is playing on people’s stereotypes whilst putting them into embarrassing situations. He is an extremely intelligent and funny man, so of course these outrageous situations make you laugh, but a few of them go a bit too far and make you squirm (cf. the scene where Brüno comes on to Republican Congressman Ron Paul).
Sometimes he does highlight the huge amount of homophobia in society (he is actually attacked a few times), which has worth in and of itself, but equally gay people may be upset because a lot of the humour is really about Brüno’s unusual dress sense and sex life.
The trouble is, the original idea behind Brüno was not to make people feel uncomfortable about his sexuality, but to show how stupid people in fashion are. He used to go to fashion shows and make people say the most ridiculous, grandiose statements about the importance of their clothes and generally showed them to be awful human beings. The most successful bits of the film stick with this and deal with the crazy world of fashion and celebrity (the twin charity consultants spring to mind; what planet are they from?).
It may have been too big a leap to make such a stupid character from such a stupid world do something profound, but this film is still stupidly funny. Not as successful as Borat, then, but definitely worth seeing. The question is: what will Sacha do next?
Turns out it is quite easy to shock the Bible Best by being very camp. Who knew? As with his other characters, Baron Cohen is playing on people’s stereotypes whilst putting them into embarrassing situations. He is an extremely intelligent and funny man, so of course these outrageous situations make you laugh, but a few of them go a bit too far and make you squirm (cf. the scene where Brüno comes on to Republican Congressman Ron Paul).
Sometimes he does highlight the huge amount of homophobia in society (he is actually attacked a few times), which has worth in and of itself, but equally gay people may be upset because a lot of the humour is really about Brüno’s unusual dress sense and sex life.
The trouble is, the original idea behind Brüno was not to make people feel uncomfortable about his sexuality, but to show how stupid people in fashion are. He used to go to fashion shows and make people say the most ridiculous, grandiose statements about the importance of their clothes and generally showed them to be awful human beings. The most successful bits of the film stick with this and deal with the crazy world of fashion and celebrity (the twin charity consultants spring to mind; what planet are they from?).
It may have been too big a leap to make such a stupid character from such a stupid world do something profound, but this film is still stupidly funny. Not as successful as Borat, then, but definitely worth seeing. The question is: what will Sacha do next?
Saturday, 11 July 2009
Review - Telstar
I should probably start this review by stating that Johnny Remember Me by John Leyton is one of my favourite songs. Music producer Joe Meek, the subject of this biopic and the British answer to Phil Spector, was undoubtedly a genius. But, like Spector, he was also crazy and a murderer. His story of hidden homosexuality, egomania and echo chambers takes place during the embryonic stages of the British music scene. Making a name for himself before the Beatles arrived (Telstar was the first British record to reach number one in America), he stubbornly continued to tread his own path and paid the price.
Based on the play by James Hicks, this film version of Meek’s life is quite a claustrophobic affair, taking place almost exclusively in the little house above a shop that he turned into his studio. I hope this is to show Meek’s growing isolation and paranoia, and not because they could only afford one set. Director Nick Moran (of Lock Stock fame) does a good job of handling a necessarily bitty storyline (real lives rarely fit the traditional three-act structure very well), keeping things interesting and funny.
Com O’Neill is terrific as Meek, reprising his stage role. He is scary, charming, damaged and has perfected the funny voice (Meek was from Gloucestershire) that made Meek hard to take seriously and all the more tragic. O’Neill works hard, running around the studio, twiddling with knobs and throwing tantrums. The effect is quite spellbinding.
The only problem is that this sort of production has become the bread and butter of BBC4. They seem to churn out high-quality, low-cost examinations of interesting British figures’ lives set against the backdrop of Swinging London. Having TV favourites Ralf Little and James Cordon in the cast does little to distance the film from this school of TV drama. The presence of Kevin Spacey as Meek’s business partner, though wholly unnecessary, does make it feel a bit more like a film, I suppose.
This is still a very interesting tale set in an interesting time and surrounded by great music that too few people know about. All in all, a well-told version of Meek’s tragic story with a wonderful central performance.
Based on the play by James Hicks, this film version of Meek’s life is quite a claustrophobic affair, taking place almost exclusively in the little house above a shop that he turned into his studio. I hope this is to show Meek’s growing isolation and paranoia, and not because they could only afford one set. Director Nick Moran (of Lock Stock fame) does a good job of handling a necessarily bitty storyline (real lives rarely fit the traditional three-act structure very well), keeping things interesting and funny.
Com O’Neill is terrific as Meek, reprising his stage role. He is scary, charming, damaged and has perfected the funny voice (Meek was from Gloucestershire) that made Meek hard to take seriously and all the more tragic. O’Neill works hard, running around the studio, twiddling with knobs and throwing tantrums. The effect is quite spellbinding.
The only problem is that this sort of production has become the bread and butter of BBC4. They seem to churn out high-quality, low-cost examinations of interesting British figures’ lives set against the backdrop of Swinging London. Having TV favourites Ralf Little and James Cordon in the cast does little to distance the film from this school of TV drama. The presence of Kevin Spacey as Meek’s business partner, though wholly unnecessary, does make it feel a bit more like a film, I suppose.
This is still a very interesting tale set in an interesting time and surrounded by great music that too few people know about. All in all, a well-told version of Meek’s tragic story with a wonderful central performance.
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