Glasgow Film Festival 2013 Review: WELCOME TO THE PUNCH

Executive producer Ridley Scott’s presence is immediately felt with an opening credits title reveal which instantly recalls that of Alien. Unfortunately that is about the only place it is felt in director Eran Creevy’s follow up to impressive lo-fi geezer drama Shifty. The canvas is broader and it certainly makes headway towards rivalling its American counterparts, but Welcome to the Punch is a glossy British crime thriller that feels like Michael Mann's Heat turned down to Gas Mark 3.

Where Creevy must be applauded is in crafting a relatively lean thriller that not only looks stylish with its depiction of London bathed in a steel blue neon glow, but has its fair share of nicely handled action set pieces. There is a finely tuned sense of what makes an image dynamic and it plays with visual motifs throughout.

Lacking the profundity and underlying depth of other underworld dramas, everything here is surface level. It isn’t always a problem when that surface is so highly polished but it is missing a vital ingredient: characters we can invest in and get behind. With a slick running time of just over ninety minutes, there is never time to delve into what drives our lead characters. It keeps feeling pressured to hit that next action beat.

The full review is continued over at STV's website.

★★★★★

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Glasgow Film Festival 2013 Review: THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES

The weight of expectation lies heavily on The Place Beyond the Pines. Not only is it co-writer and director Derek Cianfrance’s follow up to 2010’s lauded anti-love story Blue Valentine, it also marks his reteaming with that film’s breakout star, Ryan Gosling.

It transcends easy genre classification as it surges from frenetic crime thriller, to the bridled passions of a savage love story, to family drama about paternal expectation and the sins of the father.

It marks Cianfrance out as a major new force in American cinema and proves the masterful handling of the potentially depressing plot of his last film was not a fluke. He is just as adept handling even broader, less intimate themes here but manages to ground them in a film that, for the most part, doesn’t feel overblown. The energy and rawness in the action scenes is matched in every respect by the way he handles smaller emotional scenes.

The full review is continued over at STV's website.

★★★★★

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Glasgow Film Festival 2013 Review: JOHN DIES AT THE END

With a title which might sound like the ultimate in movie spoilers, John Dies at the End is so consistent in its attempts to uproot viewing preconceptions at every turn that this potential warning klaxon is of no concern.

To begin to explain what it is about is both a futile task and nigh-on impossible. Don Coscarelli, the maestro behind horror-comedy classics Phantasm and Bubba Ho-Tep, has constructed something so multi-layered and ambitious that it would be easier to list the things the film doesn’t touch upon. It is a clear cut case of chucking anything and everything at the screen and seeing what sticks. As is always the case with this scattershot approach much doesn’t work but, as is pleasingly the case here, much does.

It pitches itself somewhere between the cult movie conundrum of Donnie Darko and the freewheeling inanity of Dude, Where’s My Car?

The full review is continued over at STV's website.

★★★★★

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Glasgow Film Festival 2013 Review: STOKER

The latest in a long line of successful directors from around to world to make their way to the US film industry is respected South Korean director Park Chan-wook, who directed the hugely respected Oldboy. Stoker, his English language debut, sees him working with an A-list cast and crafting an indie thriller which treads on hallowed Hitchcockian ground.

As an exercise in creating an atmosphere of tension it is an unrivalled success but it ultimately leads to nothing.

The full review is continued over at STV's website.

★★★★★

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Glasgow Film Festival 2013 Review: THE LOOK OF LOVE

Changing attitudes to permissiveness in British society since the 1950s are marginally shown through the prism of Soho property entrepreneur and mucky mag magnate Paul Raymond (Steve Coogan) in this biopic. Or, as he succinctly puts it in his pre-credits introduction, “Welcome to my world of erotica.” Sadly this transgressive address direct to camera is one of the few moments which display the same irreverent verve as Coogan and director Michael Winterbottom’s last biopic together, 2002’s 24 Hour Party People.

Halfway between a British Boogie Nights and Carry On Titillating.

The full review is continued over at STV's website.

★★★★★

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Today's Viewing & Reviews: The Crazies + Whip It + [●REC]2

Whip It

For a concept which sounds shaky at best, Whip It garnered good word of mouth when it opened in the US last year, with Kevin Smith even hailing it his favourite film of 2009. The idea of a Drew Barrymore-directed (leftfield) sports movie with elements of coming of age drama isn’t the most inspiring of genre-hybrids. After an inauspicious first five minutes I was unimpressed, failing to see why such praise was being bestowed on it. That was until I realised I was criticising it because it wasn’t Juno, which isn’t really fair.

What it does share with Juno is a lead actress in Ellen Page. Here she plays Bliss Cavendar, an indie-spirited teen adrift in small town Texas, forced to compete in beauty pageants to appease her overbearing mother (Marcia Gay Harden). When she discovers the world of roller derby, filled with riot grrls and camaraderie, she’s instantly hooked - but what will her mother say?

While Whip It isn’t going to win any awards for breaking new ground, what it does have in spades is warmth and heart. The script is funny without being forced. The humour is natural and flows well, only falling flat when it does attempt to paint with broad strokes (particularly in any scene featuring Jimmy Fallon’s derby announcer).

For anyone unfamiliar, roller derby is a full contact, high-speed sport played, unsurprisingly, on roller skates. The punky competitors have their own unique identities and witty nicknames (Bloody Holly, Eva Destruction, Rosa Sparks) and don’t hold back when it comes to laying-out an opponent.

The plight of Page’s Bliss comes across as slightly heavy-handed and I’m not sure the extreme dichotomy of pageants vs punch-ups was entirely necessary. Surely it’s sufficient that her character is railing against the small town mentality without having the character forced into pretty dresses and speechmaking.

If you’re willing to suspend your cynicism and go along with it, it’s wonderfully retro with an almost Karate Kid-like vibe. It rattles through sports movie clichés at a rate of noughts, from the team of underdogs to the mid-section training montage but the focus on characterisation keeps it from floundering. By the point when grievances are being aired by the medium of a food fight, it’s so infectious that I was completely sold.

The roller derby scenes themselves are hugely enjoyable to watch. There’s a visceral energy to them compounded by the fact the sport is relatively unfamiliar. The badinage among team-mates (including director Drew Barrymore, Kristen Wiig and the amazing Zoë Bell) seems genuine and heartfelt, without losing anything in sass. Even the adversity Bliss faces in the derby world (from Juliette Lewis) has a psychological grounding beyond that of most other films of the genre.

It’s aided by a great soundtrack showcasing the best of post-millennial indie and even the scenes that cry out ‘only in movies’ are beautifully shot and innovative, particularly an underwater coupling.

From a simple premise, it’s helped along by a warm script and great cast. The central core of competing with maternal aspirations and finding something in your life has resonance beyond strapping on skates and, as a whole, the film is far more touching and entertaining than it really deserves to be.

Hands-down, the most flat-out enjoyable film I’ve seen in ages. As Devo once sang, “Whip It good”.

5/5

Read my tweaked review of Whip It over at www.reelscotland.com/?p=842

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Today's Viewing & Review: The Bad Lieutenant - Port Of Call: New Orleans

The Bad Lieutenant – Port Of Call: New Orleans

This isn’t a sequel and it isn’t a remake but it’s thematically similar to Abel Ferrara’s 1992 dirty cop drama. Stylistically, it’s completely different. Excess is very much the key to Werner Herzog’s take on it and, as such, what to judge it on becomes murkier than a Louisiana bayou.

Opening immediately post-Katrina, we’re introduced to this film’s Bad Lieutenant, Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage), and it’s not immediately clear why he’s earned the eponymous moniker. The worst he seems to do is stealing a few nudie photos of a colleague’s wife. As he begins the investigation of a murdered Senegalese family, he rapidly becomes embroiled in a series of potentially fatal situations of his own causing. It’s only then we’re introduced to his unorthodox methods and catalogue of vices; which range from smoking crack and demanding sex as a bribe to getting impatient at waiting times in a pharmacy.

Werner Herzog has been known to nurture lunacy in his actors and he certainly does nothing to rein-in what has become Nicolas Cage’s trademark manic style of late. If anything, it would appear he’s asked him to amp it up. It’s practically played for comedy with Cage’s performance so ridiculous that it’s strangely watchable. He hunches his shoulders, he pulls faces, he screeches and he delivers the most ludicrous of dialogue (“I snorted what I thought was coke. It turned out to be heroin. I gotta be at work in an hour”) with ill-fitting brio. There’s no restraint in his interpretation. Whereas Harvey Keitel approached his similar role with a level of internalisation, Cage approaches it with all the subtlety of a raving pantomime villain.

It lurches from scene to scene with little in the way of coherence. It has to be assumed that Herzog is doing all this deliberately. The erratic style fits the character and vice versa. When, apropos of nothing, he decides to leave a scene by focusing on an extreme close-up of an alligator and following it at ground level as it scuttles off, you go along with it. The seemingly random is commonplace throughout the film from hallucinatory iguanas to Turner & Hooch-style dogsitting dilemmas.

The film has the appearance of having been shot fast and loose. There’s nothing grand about the cinematography and it suits the frenetic style. If anything, the film could do with a sizeable chunk of it judiciously pruned. There’s often too much going on with characters like the Lieutenant’s prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes) getting lost in the confusion. Solid actors like Val Kilmer and Michael Shannon are reduced to cameos and wasted as little more than expository characters for Cage to bounce off.

As a thriller, it’s never gripping and as a character study it’s lacking any depth. Once you’ve been introduced to his ‘badness’, the novelty wears off and you’re left with a character reduced to acting like a petulant child and developing a Jimmy Stewart accent after three-quarters of the film. It’s completely unsure of what it wants to be, but that’s part of its shambling charm.

If entering into the spirit of it and accepting it as deliberately ludicrous, it’s a partial success. As McDonagh unravels and creates a perfect storm, while engaging in patently ridiculous acts like torturing elderly women, it’s hard not to laugh. When it delivers what may be the most wondrously neat conclusion of all time, it’s hard to interpret its intentions any other way.

It may be lacking in focus, but not in vision and it certainly has to be treated as a wholly separate entity to Ferrara’s film. It’s never po-faced and Herzog and Cage have been undoubtedly brave to interpret the material in this way.

It’s so nuts it might just be brilliant.

3/5

Read my extended and reworked review over at www.reelscotland.com/?p=2687

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Today's Viewing & Review: Life During Wartime

Life During Wartime

I’m not exactly sure what this film is. Director Todd Solondz has adopted a similar approach to his last film, Palindromes (where the central character was played by multiple actors of differing ages, genders, sizes and races), and has made a quasi-sequel to his most successful work, Happiness. I say ‘quasi-sequel’ because although Life During Wartime follows the same characters from his 1998 film (as well as some from 1995’s Welcome To The Dollhouse) they’ve been entirely recast with scant regard paid to a visual continuity. However, the performances veer between near-identical interpretations and radical revisions.

For the sake of clarity the most important recasting is as follows: Bill Maplewood (Ciarán Hinds, previously Dylan Baker), Joy Jordan (Shirley Henderson, previously Jane Adams), Allen (Michael K. Williams, previously Philip Seymour Hoffman), Trish Maplewood (Allison Janney, previously Cynthia Stevenson), Helen Jordan (Ally Sheedy, previously Lara Flynn Boyle) and Andy (Paul Reubens, previously Jon Lovitz). The amount the performances fall in line with what has gone before appears to divide largely down gender lines, with the women and Reubens doing near identical takes.

The reason I labour this point is that on the surface it might not seem like a sequel but whether or not you like it will depend on whether you’ve seen Happiness and are, to some degree, a fan of Solondz’s work. If you’ve not seen Happiness, firstly, why not? Secondly, do so before considering seeing this. Even the seemingly insignificant opening scene in Happiness has a long-lasting effect that echoes into the follow-up. Déjà vu is mentioned early on and it’s apt for much of what follows.

The film picks up around 10 years from the events of Happiness and is largely focused around the release of sex offender Bill Maplewood from prison (although the other characters are unaware of this). Joy is now married to sex pest Allen and is still the perennial wallflower, Trish has embarked upon a new relationship and has hidden her ex-husband’s past from the children and Helen is a successful author living in California (although her reintroduction is a sour note which serves little purpose). Every character is still suffering the repercussions of what has gone before, to some extent.

All of Solondz’s trademark signifiers are here. In among the myriad taboos are the awkward silences and inappropriate conversations but, unlike his previous work, there’s a sense of a filmmaker who has matured. Each of the characters is more fully-realised and given a depth that stretches beyond being defined by their actions. Every single character is damaged in some way and although never condoning or chastising their actions, their motivations and the psychological effects of them are closely scrutinised. The central themes of characters seeking redemption, or at least a sense of normalcy, make them more relatable than perhaps they had previously been.

There’s a strange post-9/11 subtext which is a bit jarring and occasionally you long for a few more shards of lightness to appear between the scenes of misery-mongering. In spite of the darkness of the material, when it does lighten, it is undoubtedly very funny. As usual much of the humour derives from material which wouldn’t be considered suitable for comedy elsewhere. Allison Janney in particular gives a scene-stealing performance that puts even her Away We Go turn to shame.

The darkly comedic undercurrent may not be to everyone’s taste but what the film provides is a perverse peer into the lives of people more messed-up than you. There’s a foreboding sense of ‘what can go wrong, will go wrong’ but imbued with a genuine sense of emotional investment in the characters, so you really care if it looks like things are turning sour.

They may not be characters you’ll fall in love with but they certainly have a presence which is hard not to admire.

4/5

Read my tweaked review over at www.reelscotland.com/?p=1571

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Today's Viewing & Review: Micmacs

Micmacs

The last time Jean-Pierre Jeunet made a film borne out the frustrations of developing a big-budget Hollywood production, the result was Amélie. Micmacs is his attempt to positively spin the two wasted years he spent adapting The Life Of Pi into something closer to his previous work and his own sensibilities.

Micmacs is the tale of Bazil (Dany Boon), the survivor of a potentially fatal bullet to his head, who joins forces with a gang of misfits to take revenge on the weapons manufacturers he holds responsible. The problem with that summation is that it sounds like the set-up for a justice-seeking action flick – and not a whimsical slapstick farce that calls to mind Buster Keaton more than it does Mel Gibson.

Jeunet’s usual signifiers are there in force from the gang of outsiders, each with their own unique quirk, to the sickly yellow hue that colours every scene, making it look like it’s being projected through a fug of sulphur. In typical Jeunet fashion, everything in the film has the aged, worn-out look that imbues everything with a lovable, past-its-prime charm. It’s a film about outsiders which doesn’t sneer at them.

It takes the conventions of a heist picture but the ragtag characters and situations always ensure that its played for comedy, rather than ever wringing any tension. There are some scenes of elaborately planned, organised anarchy as the crew attempt to spy, steal and dupe their way towards the big guns (literally). These set-piece scenes are all individually great fun to watch but there’s an ingredient missing.

Dany Boon has great comic timing and an innate ability to master the two great French arts of mime and farce. He’s an amazingly watchable presence with a hangdog expression that fits the film perfectly. Similarly, Jeunet-regular Dominique Pinon’s appearances (among the smattering of other faces from Amélie) as a rage-prone human cannonball are among the film’s many high-points.

Micmacs’ main problem is that it’s a mish-mash. It adopts a middleground between darkness and light which isn’t a problem in itself. However, it appears to be bolted together from elements of Jeunet’s other films; it has the assortment of ‘freaks’ and dystopia-lite elements of Delicatessen and The City Of Lost Children but is aiming for the warmth and feelgood nature of Amélie and A Very Long Engagement. At times it’s overtly political and message-driven but without the weight to carry any of these messages over properly.

The look of the film is always visually interesting. There’s a frenetic pace to proceedings and a kinetic energy to the camerawork. The ramshackle mechanical mice and scrapyard dens which populate the film have lost their lustre a bit as other filmmakers have (over)used the aesthetic since Jeunet first did. The build-up to the ending seems rushed with the grande climactic set-piece never feeling spectacular enough and an element of mean-spiritedness does begin to creep in, which is out of keeping with the rest of films quirkier elements.

I never lost interest in it, but it just doesn’t seem quite so fresh. It’s hard not to be charmed by it, from the 1940s-style opening credits to the out-of-step with reality world it inhabits, but all the disparate elements never quite connect.

It has definitely managed to dodge a bullet, but Jeunet needs to worry about the backward momentum of the recoil for his next project.

(Exactly on-the-line) 4/5

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