Cinematters: Armond White is wrong… observations on film criticism.

Many of you will have, even if you haven’t heard the episode of /filmcast he made his comments on, recently read about comments made by New York Press film critic Armond White on the state of film criticism. Notably he said that he believes it is fair to say that that Roger Ebert destroyed film criticism. ROGER EBERT! The man who has done more to introduce people to film criticism than anyone else alive, the man who essentially introduced criticism into popular culture (along with Gene Siskel) with At The Movies, the man, lest we forget, who WON A FUCKING PULITZER PRIZE for his criticism. Amazingly, this was but the tip of the gigantic iceberg of wrong that White unleashed on /filmcast and actually it’s not the point I most object to.

White has a bigger bone to pick with the proliferation of young critics on the internet (ironic, given that White’s own notoriety comes largely from his own web presence) and suggested that nobody under 30 should be allowed to write criticism because they inherently lack the life experience and knowledge of art, politics and religion that he believes is required to do the job, to say nothing of the formal education in film. Where to begin?

Let’s start here, one thing is clear to me and that’s that despite the many people accusing him of being stupid, Armond White is not an idiot, and you’d be an idiot to dismiss him as such. The problem with White isn’t that he’s dumb, nor that he’s dishonest, the /filmcast interview demonstrates very well indeed that as wrongheaded as most of his opinions seem to be they are both genuine and intelligently spoken (actually, he’s got a rather flowery way of speaking and writing, which often verges on the pretentious). For my money he’s misdirected his obvious intelligence. He clearly has some understanding of how to read a film. In fact if anything he’s probably got too much understanding and enthusiasm for reading a film because he seems to think that whatever reading he comes up with, whatever the film, he must be right. And he’s so often not.

Let’s take a quick look at his Toy Story 3 review. Armond says:

“Toy Story 3 is so besotted with brand names and product-placement that it stops being about the innocent pleasures of imagination—the usefulness of toys—and strictly celebrates consumerism.”

I see where he gets that reading, but he grasps so tight on to the idea that he doesn’t see either why the toys that Pixar have chosen are recognisable ones (because Barbie and Ken are more identifiable for an audience than, say, Amy and Bob; it’s all about emotional connection) nor that the actual message that Toy Story 3 spends most of its running time delivering is THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what he thinks it is. Toy Story 3 is not a film about our disposable, consumerist culture. It is a film about the emotions we have connected to the stuff of our lives, and the rite of passing that on to the next generation. It’s as far from consumerist as you can get.

Now, let’s say that White’s right, and that Toy Story 3, rather than being a beautiful, elegiac, emotional story IS just a long form advert… well surely then that’s true of a lot of films, and especially the 150 minute car advert that is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Here’s Armond on that film:

“Bay is an ideal director to realize this peculiar genre, which remakes the surfeit of adolescent commercial media as a means of multimedia gratification.These cars, trucks, motorcycles and planes—both human-friendly Autobots and dastardly Decepticons—metamorphose fast, but their transfiguration is like the mechanical toy descriptions in E.T.A. Hoffman: fantastic and uncanny.”

So Michael Bay’s car porn is about transfiguration, but Toy Story 3 is just an advert? Lunacy! White puts a great deal of stock in a theoretical film education for critics, well, lucky for me I have one of those and that’s a real problem for Armond. White writes like a kid who has just discovered film theory, and fallen in love with the ideas, but doesn’t yet know how to apply them. There’s enthusiasm for the language, but little understanding of it. He throws out big words as if their big and complicated nature alone should make us gasp at the insight, giving little thought to the kind of film he’s looking at and whether it really warrants this level of analysis. This is the thing; not all movies need to be analysed for their subtext (Revenge of the Fallen, frankly, has none, it’s all text and very loud and obvious text at that).

White’s Transformers 2 review is so mind-alteringly strange that it almost approaches parody. He doesn’t actually LOVE the film, but the things he ascribes to Michael Bay are often flat out hilarious. Here are a few extracts:

“Who else could compose a sequence where characters (albeit robots) go from the bottom of the sea to another planet in one seamless, 30-second, dreamlike flow?”

The answer to this (whisper it) is “anyone with the CGI budget”.

“Sam innocently acquires the secret code of the aliens’ cosmic history—something to do with his American kid innocence and appreciation of middle-class life’s abundance.”

hahahahahhahahahahahahahahaha.

“Bay’s post-nuclear version of Hoffman’s The Nutcracker stirs emotion from our pop culture, industrial experience then connects to ancient spiritual myths (like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). It’s too much the production of industrialization to be considered magic, yet Bay’s sheer fascination with seeing is impressively communicated.”

This paragraph exploded my mind into a thousand pieces (if only Michael Bay had been there to film it. With six cameras. Against a sunset. In a circular motion. In slo-mo). Emotion, in Revenge of the Fallen? Honestly, when?


There's more, much more, where that came from, but I don’t want to just rag on Armond White for one review, largely because I’m sure there are quotes you could pull from this site and use in a similar way if you were so inclined. Actually to a certain degree I’m glad White is writing, he may be certifiably insane, but he seems to believe in every last word he types, no matter how far up its own arse his prose disappears, and you certainly can’t accuse him of being dull. Criticism is a job for the opinionated, and White is certainly that.

Dumb though Armond White isn’t, he did say something very, very stupid on /filmcast when he actually declared that there should be no film critics under 30. Now, I’m not, as White would style it, ‘a professional, pedigreed film critic’, but I like to think that I AM a film critic. After all, I do have that film education, that grounding in theory. I have seen films from every decade from the 1890’s to the 2010’s. I have seen films from over 30 different countries and in practically every style and genre (the only ones where I feel my experience is truly lacking being Bollywood and, well, porn). I, in short, know my shit. I am 29.

Now, apparently, Armond White thinks that in just over 11 months, on my 30th birthday, I will be magically gifted the life experience needed to qualify me to write about movies, but that the fact that I’ve spent 21 years immersed in cinema, seen over 7000 films, written about movies for an audience for 11 years and now have an audience of several thousand a month apparently doesn’t count. Well frankly that’s bollocks, and dismissing young internet based critics is blinkered and stupid.

I’ve been writing and reading film criticism on the internet for over a decade, and over that time, largely through the Joblo.com forums, I’ve seen a lot of young moviegoers who began simply as enthusiasts expand their horizons and develop their critical faculties. Did each of us like some embarrassing shit along the way, has each of us written something we wish to god we hadn’t pushed send on? Of course, but that’s exactly why Armond White is so catastrophically wrong. It is GREAT to see young people who are switched on to cinema (indeed to culture of any kind) and the younger they begin both watching and writing about cinema the faster their viewing habits and their criticism will develop. Many of the fellow critics with whom I have become friends through the net (smart, switched on people every one of them) are younger than me, and some of them blow even my mind with the depth and breadth of their knowledge of and love for cinema. Is White REALLY saying that we shouldn’t listen to them (or me) because they haven’t turned 30?

My worry about culture and the commentary on it is the exact opposite of Armond White’s; as I look around I see ever increasing numbers of sheep, herding themselves into Hollywood’s latest abomination and drooling in slack-jawed pseudo approval, I see the ever increasing acceptance in cinema of simple adequacy, so when a member of this generation sits up and says that they want to engage with movies I want to encourage them. I want to help excite them about this wonderful artform, not to tell them that their opinion is worthless to me for the next 15 years. What kind of prick does that?

I recently met a kid on the train who clearly loved movies, he was 10, so he doesn’t have any grounding in film theory, nor any pretensions, he was just excited by cinema. That’s a wonderful thing. I told him that I was a critic, and he asked how I’d started doing it. “Write”, I told him, “just write about everything you see, you’ll get good”. Film criticism is too important, and cinema a thing of too much childlike wonder, to be left strictly to the grown ups.

Inception Podcast

Once again I'm guesting with the lovely and talented Supermarcey on her podcast. This is a short episode, a bit of an addendum to her forthcoming longer episode on Inception. We talked about Christopher Nolan in general and my feelings on Inception specifically, before briefly covering our part in the Blogathon I've been running recently.

I think it's an entertaining listen, hopefully you do too. Enjoy.

24FPS Top 100 Films: No.73

73: THE HUDSUCKER PROXY [1994]
DIR: Joel Coen [and Ethan Coen]


Why is it on the list?
The Hudsucker Proxy may not be the Coen Brothers best film, but for my money it is certainly the funniest and the most underrated work of their 25-year plus career. It’s a rather out of time film, belonging in both design and genre more to the 1940’s than the 1990’s. It’s a screwball comedy, in the genre’s heyday it could have starred the likes of Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn or Jean Arthur opposite some solid leading man in the James Stewart or Cary Grant mould. This being the 90’s those people weren’t available, so instead we get Tim Robbins as young inventor Norville Barnes who, thanks to the suicide of a corporation head and an attempted takeover by his right hand man (Paul Newman), finds himself president of Hudsucker Industries and Jennifer Jason Leigh as fast talking reporter Amy Archer, out to get the scoop on Barnes.

The Coen’s quirky sense of humour runs right through the script, whose razor sharp dialogue effortlessly mirrors that of the best of the films that inspired it. Perhaps the masterstroke is the very simple, but always effective, joke at the film’s very centre; that of Norville’s ‘extruded plastic dingus’ invention, the schematic and pitch for which amount to a piece of paper with a circle on it and Norville’s enthused “Y’know, for kids”. Whenever the dingus is the focus of a scene hilarity is all but guaranteed.

However good a screenplay you’ve got, it doesn’t play without a strong cast and though at this stage in their careers the Coens weren’t in the rarefied position they now enjoy in the industry they were still able to call on an excellent ensemble cast ranging from character players like Charles Durning and Bill Cobbs to old pals like Bruce Campbell and Jim True and from (then) rising stars Tim Robbins and Jennifer Jason Leigh to the legend that is Paul Newman.

Of the central trio, Robbins has the largest role. As Barnes his bumbling, gangly, charm works very nicely and for a smart man he plays dumb in a way that is both endearing and believeable. As much fun as Robbins’ turn is, Jennifer Jason Leigh is a fast talking whirlwind in this movie and she just runs away with the film. She’s channelling Rosalind Russell’s character from His Girl Friday, but has given her Katharine Hepburn’s voice. The amazing thing about Leigh’s performance is just how much of it there is in the amount of time she’s on screen. She blasts through the dialogue at 100 miles per hour, never seeming to pause and draw breath, but also without stepping on a single syllable or allowing a punchline to miss. Even more impressively, Bruce Campbell has said that he was intimidated by Leigh, not just because she nailed the performance so thoroughly but because she was letter perfect every take.

Just because Leigh steals the film that isn’t to say that the other performances aren’t great. I’m especially fond of some of the smaller performances; Charles Durning’s surprisingly sunny turn as Waring Hudsucker, for example, and Jim True as Buzz the wisecracking elevator operator. Neither is in the film for long, but both make a real impression. Paul Newman has a great deal of fun as the scheming Sidney Mussburger, contributing an amusingly slimy performance.

The film’s look is pretty astonishing, with a scale (and a price tag) that had previously eluded the Coens. Dennis Gassner’s production design is huge, beautiful, detailed and entirely in keeping with the period, and Roger Deakins does the exceptional design work (especially on the huge clock set) full justice with his customarily stunning cinematography, but this is really a showcase for the brilliant wit of the Coen brothers and for their typically eclectic and accomplished cast. All in all, The Hudsucker Proxy is the best kind of throwback; it reminds you of why you love the films that inspired it, but it’s also able to stand on its own as a great film and great fun.


Standout Scenes
The sketch
Any and every time we see Norville’s invention as a design it’s just priceless.

A Muncie girl
Wanting to get close to Norville, Amy pretends to be from his hometown, and sings the Muncie High School fight song with him.

“The Hoopsucker”
A very funny sequence in which three marketers (shot in silhouette) attempt to name the ‘extruded plastic dingus’.

Memorable Lines
Amy Archer: Finally there would be a thingamajig that would bring everyone together, even if it kept them apart spatially.

Mail Room Orienter: You punch in at 8:30 every morning, except you punch in at 7:30 following a business holiday, unless it's a Monday, then you punch in at 8 o'clock. Punch in late and they dock you. Incoming articles get a voucher, outgoing articles provide a voucher. Move any article without a voucher and they dock you. Letter size a green voucher, oversize a yellow voucher, parcel size a maroon voucher. Wrong color voucher and they dock you! 6787049A/6. That is your employee number. It will not be repeated! Without your employee number you cannot get your paycheck. Inter-office mail is code 37, intra-office mail 37-3, outside mail is 3-37. Code it wrong and they dock you! This has been your orientation. Is there anything you do not understand, is there anything you understand only partially? If you have not been fully oriented, you must file a complaint with personnel. File a faulty complaint and they dock you!

[Norville Barnes introduces the "extruded plastic dingus" to the board members]
Board Member 1: What if you tire before it's done?
Board Member 2: Does it have rules?
Board Member 3: Can more than one play?
Board Member 4: What makes you think it's a game?
Board Member 3: Is it a game?
Board Member 5: Will it break?
Board Member 6: It better break eventually!
Board Member 2: Is there an object?
Board Member 1: What if you tire before it's done?
Board Member 5: Does it come with batteries?
Board Member 4: We could charge extra for them.
Board Member 7: Is it safe for toddlers?
Board Member 3: How can you tell when you're finished?
Board Member 2: How do you make it stop?
Board Member 6: Is that a boy's model?
Board Member 3: Can a parent assemble it?
Board Member 5: Is there a larger model for the obese?
Board Member 1: What if you tire before it's done?
Board Member 8: What the hell is it?

Mini-Reviews: Rapt / Le Concert

RAPT
DIR: Lucas Belvaux



Belvaux’s latest is a solid, confident kidnap thriller. It’s certainly flawed, but still, it’s a promising work from a director who has been gaining steady acclaim film by film.

It starts brilliantly, with just a very little setup before company director Stanislas Graff (Yvan Attal) is taken in a brutal early morning kidnapping by a gang who subsequently demand € 50 million for his safe return. Against this backdrop Graff’s wife (Anne Consigny) and teenage daughters find out that not only are they, thanks to Graff’s gambling, not rich enough to pay the ransom but their husband and father is a serial philanderer (something his wife takes not just calmly, but defends).

For about 75 minutes the film cuts between Graff’s captivity (which begins in a tent, guarded by a group of masked men who treat him very roughly, but later becomes more palatial when he is transferred, and his new captor seems almost perversely friendly) and his family and business associates attempts to raise and exchange the money for his release. The exchange sequences are perhaps the film’s best; intricately designed so that even though neither the basic ideas nor Belvaux’s approach are especially new (there’s more than a shade of Michael Mann, happily minus the blue filters) you never quite know where things are going and you remain really caught up in the moment.

Yvan Attal has a tough part to play, but he’s better here than I’ve ever seen him be. With his ragged beard and messy hair he begins to look genuinely gaunt in captivity, and he manages to make Graff relatable without asking for sympathy for a relatively loathsome character. I’ve admired Anne Consigny for some time, and she’s as good as ever, and again demonstrates her versatility, as Graff’s wife. As much as she exuded warmth in Not Here to be Loved, here Consigny is a cold, hard surface. One telling sequence has her looking around her captive husband’s love nest, never removing her sunglasses. Consigny manages to play a woman who has to hold her emotions under the surface without being bland.

It’s a disappointment, but Rapt all but falls apart in its last half hour, which trades the momentum of the first 90 minutes for uneventful longeurs, but the film just manages to pull itself up again, closing with a hauntingly unfinished ending which has enough confidence to let us fill in the many blanks as the credits roll. By no means a classic then, but well worth a look for those who like their thrillers slow burning.


LE CONCERT
DIR: Radu Mihaileanu



If you go to Le Concert looking for plausibility then you’re going to come away disappointed (and likely more than a little annoyed), but embrace this movie as the featherweight fairytale that it is and, though it’s not going to change your world, you’ll likely have some fun.

The film centres on Andreï Filipov (Aleksei Guskov), he’s now a janitor at the opera house in Moscow, but 30 years ago he was the conductor of the Bolshoi orchestra, but he was publicly removed from that post for employing Jewish musicians, and hasn’t been allowed to conduct since. One day he intercepts a fax from a prestigious Paris concert hall, asking for the Bolshoi to come and play, and decides to get the old band back together and play the concert they were never allowed to finish. Provided that Paris will let him have as soloist violinist Anne-Marie Jacquet (Inglourious Basterds standout Mélanie Laurent).

The film is pretty predictable. Preparations for the concert become a (literal) French farce, as Filipov’s gypsy orchestra lets him down time and again, there’s a mysterious long ago connection between Anne-Marie, her agent (Miou Miou) and Filipov and of course the final lets put on a show moment goes as these things always do, plausibility be damned. What keeps it afloat is the verve and charm with which the whole thing is executed. Le Concert could easily have become a freewheeling mess, but director Mihaileanu manages to keep it on the rails, juggling storylines and tones with aplomb.

He’s aided by a top notch cast, especially big, barrel shaped Dmitri Nazarov, who, as Filipov’s chief co-conspirator proves equally adept at comedy and drama and Miou Miou, whose relationship with Laurent has a plausible closeness to it, which really helps with the backstory. That said; it’s Mélanie Laurent who walks away with the film. Never mind her angelic beauty, this is a role a long way from Basterds' Shoshana, and though it’s rather cliché and not a little thin, she completely commits and in the film’s climatic sequence her emotion comes across as the most raw, most genuine thing in the movie and just for a moment I felt myself choke back a little tear.

For the most part though, Le Concert is a comedy, and it’s often a riotously funny one, farce is tough to get right, but Mihaileanu keeps the laughs coming, while finding just enough time to have the story work. I know this is fluff, but it’s really well made, really well acted, really enjoyable fluff and at the end of the day there’s nothing wrong with that.

Film Review: Bluebeard

BARBE BLEUE
[BLUEBEARD]
DIR: Catherine Breillat
CAST: Dominique Thomas, Lola Créton, Daphné Baiwir,
Marilou Lopes-Benites, Lola Giovannetti



Catherine Breillat is not an easy director to get along with. The two previous films of hers that I’ve seen; Fat Girl and Romance, are both pretentious, often extremely dull and desperately trying to shock, and by reputation I can infer that much of her filmography is of a similar tone, especially her debut; A Real Young Girl, which had such censorship problem that it ended up unreleased for almost 20 years.

It seems that with Bluebeard (an adaptation of a much filmed fairytale about a young girl who marries a rich man all of whose previous wives have gone missing, presumed dead, a year after their nuptials). Breillat has mellowed. There is little here to suggest the controversy magnet of old (though the film does have a profoundly sexual undertone) and rather than long, pretentious dialogues during sexual encounters most of the storytelling here is presented through the gorgeous visuals. The period is a little uncertain, but it seems roughly medieval. Rather than be entirely wedded to period detail, Breillat goes for a more impressionistic approach, creating shots that are as much about artistic tableau as they are storytelling.

This choice may be a function of the structure, which has the story being read by two young sisters (Lopes-Benites and Giovannetti) who often disagree and argue about the details of the story. There’s a definite feeling that what we’re watching in the bulk of the film is not so much the fairy tale as it is written, but as it is told by these two children. Unfortunately, Breillat doesn’t carry this idea as far as it could go, the children argue about the story, but the telling doesn’t seem to be hugely affected by their disagreements (as it was, for instance, in The Princess Bride). Breillat also seems a little unsure of how involved the children are in the story. In one key moment one of the young sisters appears in the Bluebeard story, an intriguing idea, but one that is never raised again and seems to have little purpose.

The Bluebeard story is the centre of the film, and that too revolves around two sisters, teenagers this time; Marie-Catherine (Créton) and Anne (Baiwir), when their Father dies they are kicked out of their convent school because the fees can no longer be paid, but soon Bluebeard (Thomas) comes calling. Despite his reputation and his ugliness 14-year-old Marie-Catherine seems unafraid and agrees to marry him. There is only one room in their castle that she is not allowed to enter, but soon her curiosity gets the better of her and there are dire consequences. Marie-Catherine is clearly on the cusp of womanhood physically, but she’s much more grown up as a person than her older sister. Lola Créton, in a beautifully understated performance that promises much for her later work, gives Marie-Catherine steel and guts, and a manipulative streak a mile wide (see how she explains to her returning husband the party she has had in his absence) but she also keeps just enough of the impression that Marie-Catherine is, after all, just a child out of her depth.

Créton is the centre of the film, and by far the stand out performer, but the imposing Dominique Thomas can hardly fail to make an impression. Next to the delicate Créton his size is made to seem even more vast and hulking, and yet for much of the film there’s an unexpected gentleness to him (especially given that he’s a serial killer).

The film’s stand out passage is its ending, in which Breillat strips the final moments down to the barest possible essentials, telling what would in another film be at least five minutes of story in just a handful of still shots. It is perhaps an attempt to replicate the idea of an illustrated book, but whatever the intent the images serve their purpose beautifully, wrapping up the story in sharp and satisfying fashion. At just 80 minutes Bluebeard feels almost abrupt, it’s easily Breillat’s most accessible and enjoyable film and if nothing else the imagery and Lola Créton will probably stick in your mind long after the credits roll.

Film Review: Inception

INCEPTION
DIR: Christopher Nolan
CAST: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon Levitt,
Marion Cotillard, Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy



I’m not sure what it is, but I’ve never really, the excellent and underrated The Prestige aside, got on with Christopher Nolan. I can appreciate his movies from a visual standpoint (well, with the exception of Batman Begins terrible fight scenes), but he’s never really managed to engage me on a deeper level and from the gimmicky Memento to the colossally bloated The Dark Knight I’ve often found his films a bit of a chore to sit through. That said, I approached Inception hoping for the best; the reviews are stellar, the cast is large and talented and between the last two Batman films his ‘for me’ project was the one film of his that I’d really engaged with. Sadly I found Inception to be almost exactly what I had feared it would be; a huge, beautiful, completely unengaging bore.

Inception is basically a heist movie; albeit one that takes place inside someone’s mind, on at least four levels of dreamscape. It revolves around Dom Cobb (DiCaprio) who is hired by companies to enter people’s dreams and extract ideas, but when an extraction goes wrong Mr Saito (Ken Watanabe) offers a price Cobb can’t resist, if he can successfully perform ‘inception’ and place an idea in the head of the heir to a multi-national corporation (Murphy). So Cobb assembles a team that includes Ariadne (Page) a college student who builds the dream levels (and acts as a walking exposition machine), Arthur (Gordon Levitt) Cobb’s long time right hand man and Eames (Hardy), the slightly camp weapons man and sets about designing a dream that can help him perform this seemingly impossible task. Complicating matters is the fact that Cobb is, in the dream world, followed by his memory of his dead wife Mal (Cotillard).

You have to give Inception credit for its ambition, the concept is genuinely different and potentially thrilling, the fact that it doesn’t come off is really down to the execution. The great problem with the script (by Nolan, his first solo writing job since his debut; Following) is that it is so complex, so bound up with different levels of dream, different time frames within those levels, forms of espionage and other ideas that it all but collapses under their weight. The first hour of the film is pretty much raw exposition, as Nolan lays out the rules of his dreamscape and the reasons that it has to be built by a third party rather than Cobb or his mark. In these sequences, as DiCaprio and Page move through very realistic (and frankly usually rather drab) dreamscapes the film begins to resemble The Matrix and its tedious scenes in which Morpheous had to explain the matrix to Neo. The sheer amount of time that Nolan has to spend establishing his world (and frankly its not really enough, I was rather lost by the end, but I’d stopped caring by then) means that there is little to no time for him to spend on character development.

For instance, let’s take Arthur, what’s his relationship to Cobb? Are they friends? How long have they been together? How did they end up as a team? Who is Arthur? The most we ever know about him is that he might have a little thing for Ariadne, but that’s explored for exactly one line, and then dropped. Gordon Levitt is as charismatic as ever, but the script gives him little to work with, and it seems that that’s because it’s much more interested in dazzling us with ideas than really letting us engage with them through the characters. Ariadne is another good example; though Page is also good Ariadne remains rather a blank slate. Her lines essentially fall into two categories; asking how or why something works and explaining how or why something works. Eames (Hardy) is briefly afforded personality on one rather camp line to Arthur, but again the film swiftly forgets this, and he goes back to being a cipher with guns.


Of the large cast of characters it’s only really Cobb that has any depth, through his issues about his wife. Unfortunately Nolan explores these issues in a very predictable psych 101 fashion. He doles out regular revelations about Mal and Cobb’s relationship and the reasons that Cobb can’t see their children, few of which are ever very surprising (and will be less so if you saw Shutter Island). DiCaprio and, especially, Cotillard are strong and make a decent fist of Nolan’s rather bald dialogue, but they can’t rescue the storyline from the sense of familiarity.

The biggest problem though is that I just didn’t care enough. I don’t mind films being complex, point of fact I want them to be complex, but you have to care about the solution to the puzzle. For instance, the various levels of reality in Satoshi Kon’s magnificent Perfect Blue are interesting to puzzle out because the film’s main character is interesting and likable, so her being in peril (or being mad, as the case may be) is engaging. Cobb’s story isn’t interesting, because he isn’t interesting, so there’s no investment. And that’s clearly what Nolan wants us to be invested in because, story wise, everything else is so bland and anonymous. The idea that the team are to implant in Cillian Murphy’s head is a classic McGuffin; there solely to facilitate the plot, rather than to have any real importance to or effect on it. That means, spectacular and cleverly mounted as some of the action is, the stakes always remain low, because the film hasn’t really given any import to this mission.

Nolan and DP Wally Pfister do pull out some amazing shots. A sequence of a city folding in on itself is stunning, and Joseph Gordon Levitt gets a very stylish fight in a revolving hallway, but the pretty pictures are really just window dressing, undoubtedly beautiful, but strangely unmoving. The other technical departments also excel; the effects are seamless and sometimes genuinely spectacular, Hans Zimmer’s score is suitably doomy and Lee Smith’s editing probably deserves an Oscar just for the extended sequence in which he manages to keep layers of action intelligible as they effect each other across four levels of dreamscape.

I like dream movies, and in fact cinema is the perfect medium in which to replicate a dream state, but Inception, despite fairly bursting with ideas, is a disappointment. Despite its tricksy narrative it is pretty predictable (I knew early on what the last frame would be, and groaned when I was right) and while it can be spectacular and I was often impressed by individual moments, none of it added up into anything I cared about or was interested in. Frankly if you want to see a film about dreams I’d point you to Paprika, or Valerie and her Week of Wonders BOTH of which you could watch inside the time it takes to sit through this 150 minute boreathon.

Film Review: Toy Story 3

TOY STORY 3 [3D]
DIR: Lee Unkrich
CAST: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack,
Ned Beatty, Michael Keaton, Jodi Benson



The thing that people who dismiss film as unimportant or simply frivolous (and there seem to be a depressingly large amount of them) miss is this; sometimes films are more than just films. Take the Toy Story trilogy. Of course you can see them as nothing more than three children’s films, gentle comedies, each sharing the same basic idea and structure; sentient toys are lost/stolen/accidentally thrown away and must band together to rescue each other and return to their owner, but you’d be missing a lot if you thought like that.

The Toy Story films work on two much deeper levels. First, more than almost any film series, they are the childhood experience, both watching them and living them, of their audience (okay I was a bit old, at 14 when the first film came out, to really be going through these experiences - at least Andy’s experiences - as I saw the films, but if you’re seven to ten years younger than me then it caught you at exactly the right moment). That’s also important to this film, both because it plays on familiarity with the first two films (though not in a way that should exclude newcomers) and because there was a palpable warmth in the cinema as the film unspooled, almost a glow in the audience.

The other thing that hits on a much deeper level with these films is the emotional journey of the characters, and the way Pixar use these toys to tell universal human stories, to explore our fears and our hopes at the same time as making us laugh. Which of us could fail to identify with Jessie’s song in Toy Story 2? Honestly, who isn’t at least a little fearful of the pain of losing what they love? These things are what made the first and second films special, and happily they are strongly felt in this third, and almost certainly final, chapter.

The film opens with an engaging action sequence, which makes affectionate reference to the first two films, with quotes verbal and visual working on both our nostalgia and our funny bones, all while delivering a dynamic and exciting opening few minutes, which includes one of the more spectacular visual moments in the film. Soon though, the laughs begin to give way somewhat to pathos. Andy is now 17, and off to college, and we find Woody (Hanks), Buzz (Allen) and their severely depleted gang have been living for years in a seldom-opened toybox. It is, to some degree, an apt metaphor for the eleven years between Toy Story 2 and this film. It’s here that we begin to find the prevailing theme of the film; aging, retirement and even death hang over this movie, not too heavily, not so much that the tinies will feel it, but it’s an inescapable overtone.

Retirement is supposed to take the form of a journey to the attic in a trash bag, but through a series of mishaps the toys end up at Sunnyside daycare centre, where we meet a host of new characters. There’s Lotso’ Huggin Bear (Beatty); a strawberry scented teddy with an agenda and a sad past, Ken (Keaton); always attempting to convince the others that he’s not a girl’s toy, despite his dream house and extensive wardrobe and then there’s Big Baby; a doll who wears the scribbles on his arms and legs like tattoos and whose comparatively hulking size makes him threatening. Sunnyside, from its name on down, seems initially to be an idyllic retirement community for toys, where they’ll be played with day in, day out, by an ever replenished set of children, of course once the toys begin to settle in they see that this isn’t a retirement home so much as a prison, ruled over by Lotso, and so begins the breakout.


For me, Toy Story 3’s only real misstep comes in the second, Sunnyside set, act. It’s not that the film isn’t funny in these sequences (after all you’ve got Barbie (Benson) and Ken’s relationship, lots of incidental jokes and, best of all, Spanish Buzz (Javier Fernandez Pena)) but the jokes are sometimes drowned out by the prevailing, all encompassing, darkness. Even in the film’s funniest sequence, in which Woody accidentally finds himself taken home by a little girl, only to meet a group of toys (including Timothy Dalton’s hilarious Mr Pricklepants) who treat play as improvisatory theatre, darkness encroaches, in the form of a very sad backstory for Lotso. This does mean that while the film is affecting, the mix of laughs and emotion isn’t quite as deft as in the first two films, and the prevailing mood may see the youngest children get a little fidgety. That said, the second act, with its Great Escape feel and many memorable moments (from the escape itself to the very funny visual of Mr Potato Head (Don Rickles) attaching his part to a piece of felt to an hilarious encounter with a screaming monkey) is highly entertaining.

The film really soars when it leaves Sunnyside, with the last twenty minutes taken up with two of the series greatest and most moving scenes. What’s really important about this last act is that it works because of the relationships we’ve all developed with these characters over the years. That’s why the genuinely perilous last action sequence works, and it’s also why that scene’s gentle, quiet, payoff works. It’s a moment in the great tradition of visual art that cinema is a part of; a series of silent gestures that say more than any words could at that moment. In that moment Toy Story 3 is everything cinema should be, and it just keeps on getting you after that, because the film’s final scene is perhaps the best thing you’ll see on a screen this year. It is at once completely joyous and deeply sad, because you know that what is happening to Andy has also happened to you, that this wonderful reunion with old friends is coming to an end, and that you may not see them again, but that’s okay too, because even as the tears streamed from beneath my 3D glasses I was happy. Happy for these characters, happy that Pixar hadn’t messed this up, happy that Toy Story 3, even if it is the 'weakest' of the trilogy, can stand with its elder siblings as a truly great family film.

On a technical level Toy Story 3 is, plain and simple, a masterpiece. For the very first time I gave no thought to the 3D, the colour timing appears to have been done to take into account the colour loss from the 3D lenses, and for the first time even fast motion is smooth, and free of that smeary quality 3D has had to date. I still question the point of the technique, and I don’t think there’s a single shot in this film that needs to be in 3D (and nor does the story benefit from it one iota) but at the very least it’s not distracting. The animation is quite beautiful, and often funny in itself (look at the way Ken walks, for example) and the adjustments in the character design, the aging of the human characters and of Andy’s dog Buster, for example, is done in a way that makes this a credible updating of the world Pixar created 15 years ago.

The performances are also pitch perfect with everyone from the big stars (Hanks, Allen and Joan Cusack fit right back into their roles; comfortable and fresh as ever) to the odd Pixar animator (Bud Luckey, wonderful as clown doll Chuckles, whose first appearance drew a big laugh) to the newcomers (of whom the aforementioned Timothy Dalton and Michael Keaton’s amusingly highly strung Ken make the biggest impression) hitting every last beat precisely right. Special mention should also go to John Morris, returning to voice the college age Andy, and doing a brilliant job, especially in those affecting final moments.

While it isn’t without (minor) problems, Toy Story 3 is, and will likely remain, one of the best films of 2010. It’s funny, intelligent, and boasts an emotional gut punch that, while never manipulative, will likely wring tears from all but the hardest of hearts. It’s a wonderful, fitting, elegiac way to end one of the great film series of our time… hell of all time, and you should make time to see it if you haven’t already.

BLOGATHON: Jake Riley on Equilibrium

I tried to watch Equilibrium once, and I never made it through, but it does seem to have a hell of a following, and I suspect that we can add Jake's (also known as Jake Likes Movies) name to its expanding list of fans. check out his take on this cult item here.

24FPS Top 100 Films: No. 74

74: POLICE STORY [1985]
DIR: Jackie Chan


Why is it on the list?
Okay, so I can’t claim Police Story as great art, but I certainly can claim it as great fun, and that means more than you might think sometimes. There’s an interesting tale behind Police Story. It came out of Jackie Chan’s frustrating experience on his second attempt to break the US market; The Protector, in which he was hilariously miscast as a tough cop, closer to Dirty Harry than Drunken Master (it’s also just weird hearing Jackie say fuck). Disappointed with that film, and with the fact that it bellyflopped both at the US and Hong Kong box office, Jackie set out to make a cop movie with martial arts action, but one that would be made on his terms. The result? A franchise launching masterpiece and one of the most entertaining martial arts films ever made.

The story, should we wish to dignify it with the description, sees Jackie getting into comic scrapes while protecting a reluctant mob witness (played by his sister in law, Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia) and combining his job with a mishap prone romance (with a very young Maggie Cheung). But as with all of Jackie’s movies, it’s not really the story that matters so much as it is the energy and the set pieces. On those terms Police Story is his finest hour. The action is impeccable, and the film brilliantly paced. Many martial arts films tread water for an hour before going all out in their last 25 minutes with a colossal action set piece, but Police Story spreads out the action, from giant stunt set pieces to the incidental moments (perhaps my favourite stunt in the film is a simple leap over a high gate, the pure grace with which Jackie does it is just wonderful to see).

In one of the most audacious set pieces Jackie clings on to the side of a moving bus, hanging from an umbrella. Like all of the film’s stunts this is done by Jackie and for real (albeit with an umbrella with a strengthened steel handle) and it looks genuinely perilous, especially when people inside the bus start attacking him. This very real peril just heightens both the excitement and the sheer bloody amazement as you watch the sequence.

As a physical comedian, Chan draws much from silent clowns like Chaplin and Keaton, and here there’s a vintage set piece in which he tangles himself in several phone cords while juggling calls at police headquarters, and the third (and perhaps most important) physical aspect of the film is also brilliantly executed, with the fights, especially a comic fight with stuntman Mars and the many in the film’s astounding mall set finale, among Jackie’s best work.

That finale is an astonishing 20 minutes, the several months of filming on it caused the stunt team to dub the film Glass Story, due to the sheer amount of stunts that had both stuntmen and actors (including both Lin and Cheung) thrown through double thickness sugar glass. It culminates in one of Chan’s most lunatic stunts, which is saying a great deal, as he slides down a pole at least two storeys long, lined with lightbulbs which pop as he goes. He burned the skin off both hands, almost broke two vertebrae (narrowly avoiding paralysis), and dislocated his pelvis. The thing is, the pain (and the outtakes show much of it) was worthwhile. Police Story is one of the greatest films of its kind, a crowning achievement for Jackie Chan as stuntman and especially as director.


Standout Scenes
Operation Boar Hunt
An astounding car stunt (lifted wholesale for Bad Boys 2) leads into the jaw dropping bus sequence. One of the best sustained action scene ever filmed.

Glass Story
A mayhem filled last 20 minutes, packed with strong fights (a great one with Dick Wei) and amazing stunt work all round.

24FPS Top 100 Films: No.75

Click the title below for the original trailer.

75: TOY STORY [1995]
DIR: John Lassetter


Why is it on the list?
When Toy Story opened in 1995, cinema had just passed its 100th birthday. Since that time there had been numerous advances in the field, but this, for the first time in a very long time, felt like something very different, something huge, something that perhaps, in its scant 80 minute running time, had just invented an art form.

I saw Toy Story before any of my friends, in a small local cinema on a preview the weekend before its opening. I can’t tell you how exciting it was, and how the next week it was bursting out of me at school about what an unvarnished delight this film was. At 14 I probably should have been growing out of Disney movies, being cynical about how they’re for kids, and girls, but Toy Story swept me up right from its first frames. It seems to do that to everybody, and that’s largely because the premise is so relatable, seriously, what kid hasn’t wondered what his toys get up to when he’s not around? Setting the tone for Pixar’s subsequent work, Toy Story also has another level, one designed more to engage adults; Favourite toy Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) is threatened when flashy ‘Space Ranger’ Buzz Lightyear (a perfectly arrogant Tim Allen) threatens to become his owner Andy’s NEW favourite, it’s that same workplace rivalry that we all have likely experienced at some time, it’s that anxiety over a new person in a friend or partner’s life, all articulated through a cowboy doll and a deluded action figure who thinks he’s a spaceman.

A film like this can be as clever as it likes, but if the story and characters don’t engage, then it’s all for nothing. Fortunately the story; a simple but exciting buddy movie in which Woody and Buzz have to escape the house of a neighbour who tortures toys and get back to Andy before he and his mother move house, works very well, with barely a wasted frame. It’s beautifully paced, with ample character beats, but never allowing itself to get bogged down.

What really makes Toy Story extraordinary though is the characters. The writing and performance of every single character is pitch perfect. They all feel like real people, more three-dimensional than any blockbuster lead of the last few years. Tom Hanks provides a solid anchor as Woody, trading on his all American Jimmy Stewart like charm, which makes it all the funnier and all the more resonant when his resentment of Buzz spills over into fits of pique. Tim Allen steals the show though, and is so hilariously funny as the deluded Buzz that the filmmakers have had to find a way of working that naïve character who doesn’t know he’s a toy into both sequels. Allen also demonstrates dramatic chops here though, something he’s seldom been allowed to do outside these films. The scenes when Buzz discovers what he is are beautifully acted, and you really feel for the character - an action figure, remember - in these moments.

Around Woody and Buzz there’s a great cast of supporting characters. A few personal favourites include Rex the neurotic dinosaur toy (given pitch perfect voice by Wallace Shawn), The army men, led by R. Lee Ermey, Annie Potts’ slightly naughty Bo Peep (“Whaddaya say I get someone else to watch the sheep tonight?”) and Pixar lucky charm John Ratzenburger as Hamm the piggy bank. As well as each character works in their own right it’s the way that the script explores their relationships to one another, really knits them into an inter-dependent community, that gives these figures of pixels and polygons heart, soul and makes us empathise with them.

The tone of the film takes in everything from buddy comedy to thrilling action scenes to an undertone of horror when Woody and Buzz are trapped in Sid’s room, but it all melds beautifully and Pixar’s animators and director John Lassetter execute every scene perfectly in and of itself, while also tying them together into a cohesive and totally, joyously, satisfying whole. Toy Story was, and remains, resonant, intelligent and deeply moving, but most importantly it is a truly great entertainment; pacy, and packed to the gills with fall on the floor funny moments both visual and verbal.

It is both a defining film of the 90’s and perhaps the single most influential of that decade (honestly, name me one American animated film since that doesn’t owe this one a debt), but unlike many of the films that have changed the artform, this one remains as wonderfully watchable as the day it was released.


Standout Scenes
Meet Buzz Lightyear
The introduction of one of cinema’s iconic characters. Still hysterically funny.

The gas station
From Woody’s affecting despair (“I’m a lost toy”) to his hilarious row with Buzz, this scene comes close to encapsulating the appeal of the film.

The CLAW
Okay, so the three eyed aliens are a one joke item, but that joke is hilarious.


Memorable Lines
Buzz: Sheriff, this is no time to panic.
Woody: This is a perfect time to panic! I'm lost, Andy is gone, they're gonna move to their new house in two days, AND IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT!
Buzz: Mine? My fault? If you hadn't pushed me out of the window in the first place...
Woody: Oh yeah? Well, if you hadn't shown up with your stupid little cardboard spaceship and taken away everything that was important to me...
Buzz: Don't talk to me about importance! Because of *you*, the future of this entire universe is in jeopardy!
Woody: WHAT? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
Buzz: Right now, poised at the edge of the galaxy, Emperor Zurg has been secretly building a weapon with the destructive capacity to annihilate an entire planet! I alone have information that reveals this weapon's only weakness. And *you*, my friend, are responsible for delaying my rendezvous with Star Command!
Woody: [pauses and looks incredulous] YOU! ARE! A! TOYYYYY! You aren't the real Buzz Lightyear! You're - you're an action figure!
[holds hand up to eyes indicating something small]
Woody: You are a child's play thing!
Buzz: You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity.

Mr. Potato Head: How come *you* don't have a laser, Woody?
Woody: It's not a laser. It's...
[sighs in frustration]
Woody: It's a little light bulb that blinks.
Hamm: What's wrong with him?
Mr. Potato Head: Laser envy.

Woody: Tuesday night's plastic corrosion awareness meeting, was I think, a big success. We'd like to thank Mr. Spell for putting that on for us, thank you Mr. Spell...
Mr. Spell: [mechanically] You're. Welcome.

Woody: All right, that's enough! Look, we're all - *very* impressed with Andy's new toy.
Buzz: Toy?
Woody: T-O-Y, t-oy.
Buzz: Excuse me, I think the word you're searching for is "space ranger".
Woody: The word I'm searching for, I can't say, because there's preschool toys present.

My favourite critic on a great actor

I've been meaning to write an article celebrating the greatness of Isabelle Huppert, but this short video blog entry from Mark Kermode may have rendered that particular exercise pointless. Give it a watch, then go and rent some Isabelle Huppert movies.

BLOGATHON: Aaron Elliott on Dahmer

I knew immediately why Supermarcey picked this film as her recommendation in the blogathon... after all, Jeremy Renner is one of her (apparently many) husbands. Here Renner's playing a gay cannibalistic murderer... whatever flaots your boat Marcey. Anyway, you can find out what Aaron made of it in his review for his excellent new 'blog Islanded in a Stream of Stars by clicking here

BLOGATHON: 24FPS on 11:14

Here's my contribution to the blogathon. Thanks... or acknowledgement at least... to Jake Likes Movies at the Joblo forums for this recommendation


11:14
DIR: Greg Marcks
CAST: Patrick Swayze, Hilary Swank, Shawn Hatosy,
Rachel Leigh Cook, Colin Hanks, Henry Thomas



11:14 focuses on two interrelated car crashes, which apparently happen at the exact same instant, barely a mile apart, to people who not only know each other but are related, in Los Angeles. So already you can probably tell the credibility isn’t exactly high on writer/director Greg Marcks’ list of priorities. Sadly neither is a decent screenplay, or believable characters (or, indeed, characters), or performances of a higher standard than poor community theatre.

Like Magnolia and Short Cuts, 11:14 uses its central events to explore the lives of related sets of characters, each of whom have one storyline in which they dominate, while cameoing in the other stories. To say that this film falls short of its inspirations is to dramatically understate the case. Magnolia and Short Cuts are defined by their graceful editing; the way that the stories organically flow into one another, making you believe that these characters interrelating is just the natural way of things. 11:14, by contrast, feels contrived from the get go. In the first of the film’s five (mercifully) short segments Henry Thomas is involved in a car accident. Barbara Hershey drives by, and offers to help him. When the Police (in the form of Clark Gregg) arrive, Thomas runs… and ends up, by ridiculous, odds defying, coincidence at Hershey’s house (to tell you the other colossal contrivance in this sequence would be too big a spoiler).

It’s hard to explain why exactly the contrivances of the relationships don’t work in this film, as they do in Magnolia, but the fact that Marcks’ screenplay gives none of its many, many protagonists any real character surely doesn’t help matters. The dialogue is tin-eared. It’s not that he’s trying to be self-conciously cool, more that quite often characters just use one too many words. Hershey, early on, says to Henry Thomas that she can call the Police for him “I’ve got my new cellphone here”. It’s not a terrible line, but it just feels written, like she’s giving him just a little too much information. That’s a real pattern with the dialogue here, it’s just that little bit too written.

The characters don’t have time to become people (the film is, after all, barely 80 minutes long… small blessings), so we get types. That said, you do see performances where a great actor takes something that’s thin on the page and makes it real, makes it live. Not here. If anything the cast seem to be competing to see who can secure themselves the Worst Supporting Actor/Actress Razzie. It’s hardest to blame Rachael Leigh Cook, who is just completely miscast as a manipulative slut, playing several boyfriends off at the same time. Cook is just too cute, too perky, and her limited acting chops can’t overcome her butter wouldn’t melt look. Terrible in grander, more impressive ways are Colin Hanks and Shawn Hatosy, who surely must share the wooden spoon for worst achievement in line reading, each contributing several efforts that made me laugh out loud, while two time Oscar winner Hilary Swank utterly humiliates herself, playing a dumb as a brick convenience store clerk, as well as executive producing the film.

I knew 11:14 was going to be bad barely a minute in in, as it opened with a drawn out title sequence, with the credits going around a series of roads, crossing paths every now and then, all rendered in sub-playstation CGI, to Clint Mansell’s hilariously inappropriate upbeat score (which makes the film’s many chase scenes play more like a segment of the Benny Hill Show). I’m completely unsurprised that this film, produced in 2003, went unreleased in the UK for three years. Would that it had languished on a shelf for much, much longer.

Like many of the world’s stupider films, 11:14 seems entirely convinced of its own cleverness, catastrophically unaware that we’ve seen ALL of this hundreds of times before, usually done much better. Don’t waste your time on this car crash of a movie.

BLOGATHON: Supermarcey on Dogtooth

When I drew Supermarcey for the blogathon I knew that I wanted to give her a bit of a challenge, to have her watch something that she probably wouldn't get to off her own back, and, of course, to recommend her something brilliant.

I settled on the second best film of 2009 (she's seen Martyrs). DOGTOOTH is one of most striking, most original and frankly most troubling films I've ever seen, and I was fascainated as to what she'd make of it.

So, here's the first review in the blogathon series, Supermarcey on DOGTOOTH

Film Review: The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

For reference, here are my reviews of Twilight and New Moon

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE
DIR: David Slade
CAST: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner,
Ashley Greene, Jackson Rathbone, Bryce Dallas Howard



I’ve never seen a franchise so uneventful as this. Three films in, with two yet to come, Twilight remains stuck in neutral, with this instalment – if such a thing is even possible – advancing the story less than New Moon did. Okay, to give credit where it’s due, some things actually happen in this film which is a legitimate step up from the completely event free second film (which, for at least 100 of its 130 minutes, was exclusively about moping) but none of it matters. There are no stakes, there is no threat, there is no loss. Not one of the characters changes or matures; none of their decisions has any consequence. In short NOTHING HAPPENS.

That would be fine if Eclipse were just benignly dull (well, not fine, but I wouldn’t really care), but it’s not. Even more so than the first two films this is an offensive – and deeply worrying – movie, which rams a genuinely disturbing political agenda and seriously regressive attitudes down the throats of its largely teenage audience.

For those who’ve forgotten, at the start of Eclipse Bella Swan (Stewart) has managed to get her 109-year-old vampire boyfriend Edward (Pattinson) to agree to turn her into a vampire after she graduates from high school. However, local werewolf Jacob (Lautner) is doing his best to throw a spanner in the works of their relationship by repeatedly declaring his love for an uninterested Bella. Meanwhile, Victoria (Howard) is raising an army of newborn vampires to finally exact revenge for the killing of her mate James way back in the first film, which means that Forks’ vampires and werewolves must team up to protect Bella.

That all sounds pretty exciting doesn’t it? A love triangle; warring vampires and werewolves. Unfortunately it’s all wrapped up in a truly hideous screenplay and some of the worst character writing I’ve ever seen. Bella Swan is an awful, awful character. That’s a huge problem for the franchise, because she’s the point of identification, indeed the role model, for many of the series female teenage fans. I can’t begin to tell you how much that disturbs me. Bella’s just a hideous person. She’s selfish to the very core, so bound up in her youthful passion for Edward that she’s willing to abandon everything else in her life. Eclipse makes it clear that in order to be with Edward, Bella will have to stop seeing her family after she’s changed (it’s never really established why this is, aside from the fact they might find it strange that she doesn’t age, nor why they couldn’t simply tell Bella’s parents what Edward really is). Bella’s a little non-specifically and unconvincingly sad about this, but seems basically fine with it.

It’s also a problem that Bella has, outside of her frankly psychotic obsession with Edward, no personality whatsoever, because as ever we’re supposed to believe that this one girl is so completely amazing that not only are Edward and Jacob both head over heels for her, but everyone else also loves her, so much that her being in danger can unite warring clans of vampires and werewolves. All this for a girl whose primary expression is one of mildly pained confusion and who seems to have had her personality surgically removed. I’m sorry, I don’t buy it. The real problem, though, with presenting Bella as a role model is in the way she handles her relationships to Edward and Jacob, especially Jacob. Most of the time she’s a tease, playing on her knowledge of his feeling for her, and then acting all hurt when he tries (again, unconvincingly) to express them. Conclusion; as well as being an airhead, an erotomaniac and having all the personality of a shoe, Bella’s a real bitch. Yep, she’s a prize alright.

That said, Bella’s the least of this film’s numerous problems. Much more of an issue is Jacob. Rapey, that was the word that just kept coming to mind about Jacob’s relationship to Bella in this film. Here Jacob’s either a total moron or a championship level prick (it’s hard to tell which), but his impression that when he kisses Bella the word "NO” and a punch in the face essentially mean that she’s being coy, and playing hard to get definitely makes him one of those two things. But wait, it gets worse, because here’s the message for teenage boys… if when you kiss a girl she says no and smacks you in the face it means she’s playing hard to get. In a spectacularly misjudged series of moments it becomes clear that Jacob’s leering, rapey, gaze has impressed Bella. I mean, I knew this series had fucked up sexual politics, but that’s almost impressive, or would be, were it not so damn disturbing.


Edward, of course, is the series’ mouthpiece for abstinence, and that really comes to the fore in this instalment with his proposal to Bella. What’s, again perhaps unintentionally, disturbing about it is the way he essentially bribes Bella. He says that he won’t turn her into a vampire until they are married, and they can’t have sex before she’s a vampire, because he’ll bite her and kill her. The implied message (I say implied, I mean shouted) being; remember kids, sex before marriage kills. I don’t really understand how this Bella/Edward relationship is seen as romantic, because when you take even a cursory look at it what you see is two people selfishly hanging on to one another, to the detriment of both their families (remember, Bella is so special that she’s vampire crack) and treating each other in a away that could easily be described as abusive.

We’re almost 1000 words into this review, so I suppose I can’t really put off talking about the film any longer. It is, as you have probably heard, the least worst of the series to date, but don’t get too excited. It may not be the worst film of the year (point of fact, it’s not the worst film I saw yesterday), but that doesn’t mean that it’s anything less than catastrophically awful. Eclipse comes off better by comparison largely because New Moon was so paralysingly, mindbendingly, dull that David Slade could have filmed paint drying for two hours and it would have seemed dynamic by comparison. To his credit, Slade pulls out one memorable shot (it’s in the trailer; the newborn army rising out of a river), which is one more than the franchise has had to this point and he handles the action (which does take up a little more screentime, perhaps ten whole minutes, this time out) with far more assurance than either Catherine Hardwicke or Chris Weitz did. Also on the compensatory side there’s the ever-wonderful Anna Kendrick, who manages to take the awful, on the nose, graduation speech her character gives and bring life to it and, for a brief blessed moment, to the film as well.

That, sadly, is the extent of the good news. Eclipse is an abysmal film, from the writing on down, everything about is at best uninspired and at frequent worst outright offensively poor. David Slade, after an auspicious start with Hard Candy, has embarked on a downward curve, from the overrated 30 Days of Night to the miserable depths of Eclipse. He can’t inject any fire or inspiration in the film. His shot selection and editing choices are bland and schematic, and his handling of the actors is an embarrassment. Okay, the central trio were hewn rather than cast, whittled from Ash (Stewart), Oak (Lautner) and Balsa (Pattinson), but around them there are talented actors. The newcomer is Bryce Dallas Howard; a fine and genuinely interesting actress, well cast to replace Rachel Lefevre) as Victoria. Sadly Howard is awful in the role, she has perhaps six lines, all of which she delivers in the bland, breathy, tones that all Twilight cast members bar Anna Kendrick and Billy Burke (still sardonic as Bella’s dad) seem contractually shackled to, but that’s not the worst of it. Howard’s fight with Pattinson ought to be the film’s visceral and emotional climax; instead it’s the comic highlight. I DARE you to keep a straight face when Bryce Dallas Howard is snarling down the camera, she’s a fine actress, but she’s as convincingly feral as a Care Bear.

It should have stopped being a surprise, but it seems that with every film the trio of Stewart, Pattinson and Lautner find new depths of inexpressiveness to which they can sink. Pattinson is probably worst. He still looks as though he’s about to throw up the entire time, which is really unhelpful when he’s proposing to Bella (and unfair, Stewart’s no great Hollywood beauty, but you should be able to look at her and hold on to your lunch). Aside from nausea, Pattinson displays no expression. Do vampires have emotions? From Pattison’s turn you’d think not, and that neuters the entire film. Passion, which is allegedly what Bella and Edward have, is visceral. We should be able to see it, to feel it in his every reaction. From Pattisnon we get not devotion but disinterest.


Captain Shirtless… sorry… Taylor Lautner is at least trying to act this time out, rather than simply letting his (still very impressive) abs do the work. On the downside, when he tries to express emotion he does so in a voice that sounds like it’s being squeezed out him under difficult circumstances, as if he’s into the tenth minute of trying to move an especially stubborn turd, and frankly, sounding constipated isn’t really conducive to a romantic tone.

Stewart has also made some progress, in that this time she doesn’t seem afraid of the camera as she clearly was during New Moon. That, sadly, is the only improvement in her work. Those hoping to add to the Kristen Stewart Expression Count™ will be disappointed, as we remain stuck at ‘Huh?’ and ‘Can’t act, blinking’, both of which come with an option on biting her lower lip. She and Pattinson lack any sort of chemistry (a surprise, given their poorly hidden real life relationship) and their love scenes look like first rehearsals between actors who met ten minutes ago and already sort of dislike each other. Even though the love story here is worrying at best it would be nice if we could believe in it, even for just a few frames.

The rest of the cast bland their way through the film, some (notably Jackson Rathbone and the clearly too good for this Ashley Grene) have the decency to look, from time to time, like they want to fire their agents, but otherwise they just seem resigned to ploughing through this shit again. And it is shit, once again Melissa Rosenberg (who wrote for the extremely literate Six Feet Under) treats Stephenie Meyer’s sub-adolescent sparkly wank dream as though it were great art, preserving much of the barely literate dribble in the books word for word. The result is like listening to an audiobook, read by a near comatose cast, illustrated with hasty sketches by an amateur artist. And remember, this is the ‘best’ Twilight film.

Eclipse is one of the many reasons that I think mainstream American cinema is going down the pan, because this slapdash rubbish with its appalling screenplay, wooden performances, uninspired direction, awful special effects and disturbing take on sexual politics is being eaten up by the masses. In America this celluloid excretion had the second largest opening day of all time (behind – sigh – New Moon). It’s this that gives Hollywood the excuse, that tells them, don’t worry, you don’t have to try, just drive the rubbish truck up to cinemas each week and empty it out into projection rooms, we don’t need wheat, we’ll eat the chaff up and ask for seconds. Eclipse and its ilk make me depressed about both the present and future of cinema, so please do yourself, me and the world at large a favour and skip this movie even though, yes, it’s better than the first two.

Cool new poster

I've been intrigued, since it was announced, by the very existence of the I Spit on Your Grave remake. It's a perfect choice for a remake; a film that could have been great, but wasn't. I liked the trashy grindhouse vibe of the first poster, but I LOVE this new one. It's an affectionate nod to the original film, both in design and in the tagline "Day of the Woman" (Director Mier Zarchi's preferred title for the original) and the black and white gives the image a stark impact. Here's the poster.



You can get a bigger version below

24FPS Top 100 Films: No. 76

Click the title below for a trailer

76: ELLE S'APPELLE SABINE [2007]
[Her Name is Sabine]
DIR: Sandrine Bonnaire


Why is it on the list?
This is an unusual directorial debut from the acclaimed French actress Sandrine Bonnaire. Bonnaire is from a large family; she’s one of eleven children. This documentary focuses on her sister Sabine, a year younger than Sandrine, and autistic. Bonnaire’s film has one foot in the past and one in the present as, along with showing Sabine’s life as a 40 year old woman living in a home for adults with learning disabilities, Bonnaire uses extensive home video footage of her sister’s youth to show us what the younger, far more vital, Sabine was like.

Her Name is Sabine is a desperately sad film, and while it could justifiably be an angry one (we hear much about how, whenever Sabine has been institutionalised, she’s emerged less capable than she was on entering care) the tone is more reflective than that, it’s not a screaming film, or really a campaigning one (though, happily, it has apparently caused France to look closely at its mental healthcare policy). Bonnaire’s mission, if she has one, seems to be to get us to understand her sister, and people like her. It can be hard, at times we even see that it is hard for Bonnaire, who is consistently bombarded with Sabine’s fears that when she leaves after a day’s filming she won’t return. As much as anything the film becomes an insight into a challenging family relationship. These two women clearly care deeply about one another, but that can be swallowed by Sandrine’s work and Sabine’s difficulty understanding emotions.

For all its sadness, Her Name is Sabine also has a lightness of touch. Bonnaire allows moments of levity, such as often arise between Sabine and the other disabled adults, who sometimes don’t realise that they are being funny. However, what really lifts the film (while also reinforcing the overall tragedy of the story) is the use of Bonnaire’s own home movies of her and her sister in their late teens and early twenties. In these images Sabine is a dark haired, strikingly beautiful, carbon copy of Sandrine. We see her dance, we see her swim, we see her excitement at being taken to New York - out of France for the first time. It’s an intensely moving, elegiac, portrait of lost potential, desperately sad when juxtaposed with the drooling, drug hazed, heavy, Sabine of the present.

As director, Sandrine Bonnaire demonstrates brilliant instincts. Her use of the home movies is beautifully executed; she weaves them deftly throughout the film, using them to trace Sabine’s story, always to illuminate aspect of her sister that now seem lost. The shooting of the documentary footage is quite straightforward, but the existing relationship between Bonnaire and her subjects pays dividends, she’s clearly a familiar presence at Sabine’s home, and there’s an easy intimacy to the footage that surely would not have been so available to an outsider. Bonnaire’s experience as an actress also pays off, as she contributes measured, informative, and beautifully delivered narration.

This is a great film, and also an important one, as though it is first and foremost a personal story it is also one that will resonate with anyone who has known adults with learning disabilities and, crucially, educate those who haven’t.


Standout Scenes
Movie show
For the first time in many years, Sandrine shows Sabine the film of their trip to New York. I defy you not to cry.

Film Review: Predators

PREDATORS
DIR: Nimrod Antal
CAST: Adrien Brody, Alice Braga, Topher Grace,
Laurence Fishburne, Oleg Taktarov, Walton Goggins



This third Predator film has been a long time coming, and rather than a sequel it feels, as is the prevailing trend, more like a reboot of the franchise, which has lain dormant, at least in its own right, for 20 years. Predators - the basic story for which was written more than ten years ago by producer Robert Rodriguez - takes the franchise right back to basics, while also managing to continue from a few ideas set up at the end of the second film.

The film is extremely light on fat; so much so that it opens by literally dropping us, and main character Royce (Brody) into the action. There are pluses and minuses to this. On the plus side it means that the setup is minimal; we’re straight into the jungle, and the tension of the hunt (as well as that of the characters trying to figure out where they are and why) begins immediately. Of course there’s a flipside to this, and that’s that character development is even more brief and perfunctory than it was in the original film. The nine man strong group that begins the film is so sketchily drawn that you couldn’t really call any one of them a character. The two that come closest to having some semblance of personality are Brody’s Royce (a loner mercenary, with a casual attitude to this improvised team and to collateral damage) and Alice Braga’s Isabelle (an Israeli army sniper; deadly, sexy, but also a little soft hearted - at least in terms of this movie). Bar Topher Grace (whose character I won’t get into) the rest are all very one note; among others there’s the silent yakuza (Louis Ozawa Changchien), the redneck death row inmate (Walton Goggins, who has one incredibly offensive joke), the black guy (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), the Russian who want to get back to his family (Taktarov), oh, and Danny Trejo (Danny Trejo).

It’s probably a blessing that the character beats are minimal though, because in the extended mid-movie interlude with (a very doughy) Laurence Fishburne the dialogue is poor (to say nothing of generic) and for the first time the movie plods a little.

Predators follows the familiar beats of an action/horror movie. For the first 40 minutes it thrives on tension, on the characters trying to figure out what’s going on and on the audience’s implicit knowledge that violence IS coming. The film’s final hour brings that violence, and most of the action is pretty well done, even if it’s not terribly original. The action, like the rest of this film, has pros and cons. Happily the editing and camerawork are relatively restrained, meaning that the action is at least intelligible, and you’re generally aware of the geography of scenes. The trade off is that a lot of the action takes place in darkness, and particularly in the film’s final set piece there’s sometimes an irritating strain to make out all the detail in the sequence. Another, perhaps unexpected upside to the action is the fact that Brody, with his taciturn performance and surprisingly well-sculpted abs, makes for a pretty solid hero. He’s no Arnie, clearly, but come the final fight he’s robust and convincing.

Perhaps the very best things in the film are the predators themselves. Rather than going all CG Predators leans heavily on men in suits to portray its monsters. It makes all the difference in the world. Instead of formless graphics the cast get to interact with a real physical presence. This improves the action, gives physical weight to the monsters, which really helps when you’re supposed to buy them as a threat, and aids the performances by giving the cast something to play off. CGI has its place, (and aside from an appalling fire shot, it’s quite well used here) but there things it can’t do and this old school approach really pays off for Predators.

On the whole Predators is a pretty average film. It’s not so much fun as the 1987 original, and it’s got all the depth of a puddle in a heatwave. That said, it is enjoyable, the pace seldom slackens and Adrien Brody and Alice Braga, at least, keep their characters engaging. Frankly, in a summer that has already served up A Nightmare on Elm Street and Death at a Funeral, and is poised to unleash such presumed atrocities as The Last Airbender and Vampires Suck, you could do a lot worse than Predators.