Richard Curtis has a new film out and it’s very good. Yes, it is.Ron Swansonreports.
“Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past.” Domhnall Gleeson and Bill Nighy wrap their heads around a chronological paradox. With hilarious results.
It’s nicely in keeping with Richard Curtis’ films’ apologetically stylised view of England that I’m tempted to start this positive review of his new movie, About Time, with an apology, or more accurately, a justification. It’s tempting to put my emotional reaction to his film down to the fact that I’m a sucker for this kind of thing, or that I was having a bad week, or that the idea of time travel has always made me want to cry. If I knew how to winsomely stutter in print, I would totally give it a go.
As it is, no justification is needed. It may seem like trifling praise indeed, to claim that About Time is Curtis’ best film, but I like Four Weddings, Notting Hill and Love, Actually quite a lot, and this absolutely soars past them. While it may benefit from the lowered expectations caused by the clusterfuck that was The Boat that Rocked and an insipid and oddly charmless trailer, this is a film that makes me hope there’s more to come from Curtis. Continue reading Clock This!→
Emma Street is swept along by a crime epic in which nothing really happens
“Doesn’t this remind you just the tiniest bit of Badlands?” Rooney Mara and Casey Afflect share a quiet moment
The poster for Ain’t Them Bodies Saints has a quote on it saying “A Grand, Doomed Love Story” in massive letters. This would be a heck of a spoiler if it wasn’t clear from the start that things were never going to work out well for our two heroes.
Bob Muldoon and Ruth Guthrie (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara) are two lawbreakers, crazy in love with one another. The film starts with a shoot-out, there’s a prison breakout, some bounty hunters and a pretty high body count. It’s nothing like as action-packed as that makes it sound, though. Director David Lowery seems more interested in what happens in the spaces between the action. People have mumbly conversations, stare out of windows and Ruth plays with her daughter’s hair a lot. Continue reading Violent delights have violent ends→
The shower scene is when you know it’s all gone a bit wrong. About halfway into David Twohy and Vin Diesel’s agreeably disposable reboot of their SF microfranchise, Katee “Starbuck” Sackhoff’s lesbian bounty hunter character Dahl (which I heard as “Doll” right until the end credits rolled) strips to the waist to give herself a sponge bath, and to give the audience a gratuitous eyeful (sideboob, nipple). What gives? Until this point, Dahl has been portrayed as one of the most intelligent and capable characters in the film, as two rival bands of bounty hunters squabble over who gets to bring in the fugitive Richard B. Riddick, alive or dead. Her sexuality is dealt with by brusquely taking it off the table. “I don’t fuck guys. I fuck them up”, is all she says to the sleazy rival (Jordi Mollá) who pays her too much attention; and she’s his equal, so that’s all that needs to be said. But from this point on, the character is sidelined, told to wait here while the boys sort it out. When Riddick, captured and shackled by the bounty hunters shortly after this, predicts how the story ends, he finds the time to note that he intends to “go balls deep into” Dahl, “but only because you’re gonna ask me sweetly”. And; guess what happens at the end. Seriously, you guys? I was looking forward to this, and you’ve made me into a PC internet scold. Thanks a bunch.
There are different kinds of teen movie: the kind aimed at teenagers, and the kind that are about teenagers but aimed at adults. Then there’s the kind that fall somewhere between the two. The Way, Way Back is one of those.
The film stars Liam James as 14-year-old Duncan, reluctantly dragged on holiday for the summer with his mom (Toni Collette), his mom’s hectoring and unlikable new boyfriend Trent (Steve Carell), and Trent’s daughter. After spending some time moping around being miserable, Duncan chances across the Water Wizz amusement park, where the manager Owen (Sam Rockwell) takes him under his wing.
Miserable 14-year-olds are no fun to hang around with (even most miserable 14-year-olds would agree with that, if they ever spoke) and not much fun to watch on screen. So it takes a while to engage with the film’s protagonist, and the situation isn’t helped by the fact that we suspect we could be having more fun watching Collette, or Allison Janney who plays the oft-sozzled divorcee next door. Instead, we get to watch the adults through Duncan’s eyes, as they drink too much, and lie to themselves and each other – a narrative device also seen recently in What Maisie Knew. Fortunately, the film, like its lead, opens up and becomes somewhat less awkward once it spends more time at the Water Wizz with Rockwell, who naturally provides some helpful life lessons under his happy-go-lucky, man-child style of management. Naturally, this also helps him befriend the pretty girl next door (AnnaSophia Robb). Continue reading Sorted for Teens and Wizz→
Part of a series of Hannibal illustrations. Stephnie says: ‘Most of the art I’ve seen in connection with the show depicts young Hannibal in a variety of gruesome acts (eating family pets, etc.) but I thought it might be funnier to show him as a miniature version of the dandy we see on Bryan Fuller’s show. In this illustration he is somewhat disappointed with the juvenile fare his mother has presented him with, although it has got him to thinking …’
Niall Anderson sees Matt Damon scowl his way through Elysium
Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 was a punky man-in-jeopardy sci fi thing, with good effects and good performances. It had a hundred small ideas that it deployed to excellent if fleeting effect, and a single big idea (that racism is bad) delivered with enough heat that it powered the film without feeling cheap. Lots of people liked District 9. Unfortunately, one of those people was Neill Blomkamp, who has elected to remake it with a bigger budget and more Matt Damon and call it Elysium.
Once again, we’re in the near future (2154) in a racially divided cityscape (downtown LA). Our workaday hero is exposed to toxic materials (radiation here; mutating fluid in District 9) and must fight to save himself. His enemies take many forms – most of them shooting at him – but his biggest enemy is Prejudice. At this point some windswept music will play on the soundtrack, as if emotionally emptied out by the sheer thought of Prejudice. Continue reading District 10→
James Deen! Lindsay Lohan! Bret Easton Ellis! Paul Schrader! Yes, it’s The Canyons. What, wonders Niall Anderson, could possibly go wrong?
The Canyons begins with scenes of boarded-up cinemas in Hollywood. The historic home of movies is now inhospitable to them. A little later, a friend asks Lindsay Lohan’s Tara why she’s cooled off on a particular film project. ‘When was the last time you saw a movie that really meant something to you?’ she replies. The answer is a dodge for all sorts of reasons particular to Tara, but it nicely incarnates both the epic self-indulgence of The Canyons and its ambivalent sadness about the end of Hollywood as dream factory.
Most of the pre-release notices of The Canyons have focussed on its sensational behind-the-scenes aspects: the stunt casting (porn star James Deen; teen-starlet-turned-trainwreck Lindsay Lohan), the Kickstarter campaign to fund it (which didn’t actually kickstart anything), and the unholy alliance between nihilist author Bret Easton Ellis and moralist director Paul Schrader. The most sensational thing about the film turns out to be how exactly it maps to your expectations: The Canyons is, in several respects, a film you don’t need to see. Continue reading Dismay of the Locust→
The Lone Rangerwas a megaflop almost before it hit the screen, butGareth Negusstill lives in hope it might actually be good.
‘Why the long face?’
You can see how it must have looked like a good idea. Resurrect a semi-superheroic duo – The Lone Ranger and Tonto – familiar to a couple of generations. Get the team behind Pirates of the Caribbean to make it. Throw a ton of money at the screen.
But Disney’s reinvention of The Lone Ranger opened to disappointing ticket sales in North America, becoming almost as big a flop for the studio as John Carter last year. It’s perhaps the highest profile would-be tentpoles that have underperformed domestically this year, joining After Earth, White House Down, Pacific Rim and The Wolverine. It’s not unusual for one of the year’s megabudget productions to disappoint the studio accountants, but it’s less common for a whole string of them to meet with audience indifference, while more frugal productions like The Conjuring enjoy a healthy return. Some of these films may yet be saved by their international take, but until that happens there’s a temptation to think that audiences are finally tiring of formula filmmaking. It’s more likely, however, that there are just too many of these things being released in a short space of time . It’s hard to look like an event movie when you’re offering the same pleasures as three or four other things playing in the same multiplex.
The omens were there: westerns aren’t exactly big box office these days (but then, neither were pirates before Pirates). The Lone Ranger is a famous character, but does anyone much under 40 really know or care who he is? (A problem that also affected John Carter). And the idea of Johnny Depp playing Tonto did feel slightly odd, even if Depp is part Native American, sort of, possibly (in the film’s production notes, he hedges “I was told at a very young age that we have some Indian blood in our family… who knows how much — maybe very little, I don’t know.”). There was also a level of weariness at the prospect of another mannered, deliberately eccentric Depp performance, the freshness of his first appearance as Jack Sparrow having lost its shine after three dull sequels and the flop of Dark Shadows. But is The Lone Ranger just suffering from the competition, or is it actually a bad movie? Continue reading The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Ranger→
The Tramp looks at the apocalyptic conclusion of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s ‘Cornetto Trilogy’.
Why stop at one Cornetto?
In the USA everything is bigger. The landscape, the buildings, the food portions… I think the sheer size of everything in the USA creeps into the conception of Hollywood films. (Well, that and the deep pockets of the studios.) When zombies invade, they invade a shopping mall the size of a small town, or a lone house surrounded by cornfields so vast that they reach to both ends of the horizon. The police are always pitted against villains with more hardware than the army, while not being short of a rocket launcher or two themselves. When aliens land, they choose to dramatically level large national landmarks carved into mountain ranges or hide below ground in those vast cornfields I mentioned earlier, insidiously taking over townsfolk and rolling out their secret invasion via trucks large enough to make a Routemaster look tiny.
This sense of vastness somehow manages to cover up the inherent silliness of an awful lot of Hollywood movies. Or if not cover up precisely, at least provide some form of legitimacy to them. In scrunched-up old Blighty, however, big themes are more difficult to pull off – hence the risky tendency to come at these themes (and Hollywood plots in general) by means of send-up and leg-pull. But it’s in precisely this risky area that Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and director Edgar Wright have succeeded. It started in 2004 with Shaun of the Dead, in which a zombie apocalypse is experienced from Crouch End’s best pub. It was followed in 2007 by Hot Fuzz, in which a Big City cop blows shit up in a small sleepy village. Now, to complete the trilogy, comes The World’s End, in which aliens infiltrate the cultural wasteland of an English New Town. Continue reading Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline.→
Niall Anderson looks at smaller festivals and special screenings coming up this summer
‘It’s been seven hours and fifteen days since my last confession.’ Maria Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion Of Joan Of Arc
Film festival season begins every year in January with Sundance, proceeds to Berlin for February, and advances to Cannes in early May. Somewhere in the middle the Oscars happen, and then the heavy-hitters take a breather till August and Venice. In the meantime there are countless smaller festivals, special one-off screenings, and various blink-and-you’ll-miss-em appearances of directors and films you might like to see if only you knew they were happening. So welcome to the Mostly Film Blink-And-You’ll-Miss-Em round up for summer 2013.
First up, because it’s genuinely first up, is a special showing in London’s Union Chapel of Carl Dreyer’s 1928 silent masterpiece The Passion Of Joan Of Arc. A critical classic almost since it first appeared, and renowned for the savagely self-exposing turn of its star, Maria Falconetti, The Passion has inspired countless musical interpretations and post hoc soundtracks. The one you’ll hear at the Union Chapel is by Irish composer Irene Butler, scored for soprano, organ and electronics. Part of the Union Chapel’s Organ Project season, the piece will be performed on July 17th only. If you’d like free tickets, there will be a competition on MostlyFilm’s twitter account – starting NOW. Continue reading Come See The Paradise→
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