Review Post 45: Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 / The Hurt Locker

MESRINE: PUBLIC ENEMY NO.1
DIR: Jean-Francois Richet
CAST: Vincent Cassel, Mathieu Amalric,
Ludivine Sagnier



This concluding part of Jean-Francois Richet’s biopic of the French gangster Jacques Mesrine shares both the virtues and the flaws of Mesrine: Killer Instinct.

Holding it all together is a towering performance by Vincent Cassel. It’s powerful work, shining through the endless changes in Mesrine’s appearance, the myriad bad hairstyles and the ever changing, usually laughably unconvincing, facial hair. Cassel projects raw charisma, allowing you to buy Mesrine as both ladies man and folk hero, despite the fact that he’s awful to his girlfriends and a thief and possibly a killer. Cassel really transforms himself. For Public Enemy No. 1 he added over two stone to his usually trim frame, developing a hefty beer gut for Mesrine’s later years. He also manages to make Mesrine somewhat sympathetic, especially during an interview, as he reflects on how he doesn’t expect to live long. It’s a masterful piece of acting, one in which Cassel is completely lost.

The rest of a huge cast also impresses. In Killer Instinct it was Gerard Depardieu who stood out, with a bear like portrayal of a gangster who took a young Mesrine under his wing. In Public Enemy No. 1 the focus is shared a little more evenly, and this allows the supporting players to make more of an impression. The luminous Ludivine Sagnier is excellent as Mesrine’s last companion, while Mathieu Amalric is the most charismatic of Mesrine’s partners in crime. My favourite supporting player in this film appears for only about three minutes, but even with such limited screen time Anne Consigny (as a lawyer who helps Mesrine escape a maximum security prison) again serves notice that she’s a huge and diverse talent.

I liked Jean-Francois Richet’s remake of Assault on Precinct 13 rather more than I probably should have.  Here, again he shows that he’s a talented filmmaker. The action scenes are excellent; pacy, punchy and admirably varied given just how many bank heists and prison escapes there are in the story.

The problem with both parts is that, even taken as a whole, they feel frustratingly bitty and incomplete. Even with a collective running time of four hours there is a sense of rushing through events that deserve more breathing space. It feels like the story would be better suited to television, where there would be time to get deeper into the events and the characters surrounding Mesrine. It would be particularly welcome to see the Police explored in more detail. There is also a niggling sense that, while the performances are wonderful and the direction is stylish, there’s not really anything new here. Structure is also an issue. Mesrine unfolds in a circular narrative, beginning and ending with Mesrine’s shooting by the French police. The fact that Public Enemy No. 1 spends so long on this sequence, which we’ve seen already, trying to play it for tension a second time, tested my patience. Without that opening sequence it would work brilliantly, but with it fresh in the mind it is little more than a 15-minute action replay.

Mesrine is a frustrating film. There is much to recommend it, but it is also riddled with flaws. Overall this second part is the better, because it has more of a through line, but as a whole it ends up as a relatively average addition to the legacy of the gangster film.


THE HURT LOCKER
DIR: Kathryn Bigelow
CAST: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie,
Brian Geraghty



Kathryn Bigelow is pretty well unique in Hollywood. I can’t think of another woman who makes action movies, let alone makes them so successfully as Bigelow.

The Hurt Locker is probably Bigelow’s most down to Earth film, lacking both the unreal setting and events of films like Near Dark and Strange Days and the almost parodic maleness of Point Break. It is set in the present Iraq war, and tells the story of a team sent out to discover and disarm suspected IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices). The team is led by bomb tech William James (Renner), who seems to love his job a bit too much. He’s backed up by no nonsense Sergeant Sanborn (Mackie) and young Specialist Eldridge (Geraghty). There’s no real overarching narrative, we just follow these guys in the last month of their tour of duty.

For its first hour The Hurt Locker is an unqualified masterpiece, not just the best film of 2009, but one of the best war movies ever made. Then, after a truly spectacular mid-film set piece, it collapses like a house of cards. It is very hard to generate real tension in a movie, but over and over again Bigelow has us white knuckled at the edge of our seats, because in the film’s opening sequence she has established the rules - anyone can die here. Each sequence involving the examination and deactivation of a bomb unfolds with almost unbearable slowness, the tension is like a wire, being drawn ever more straight and taut, cutting into you just a little more with each passing frame. During the outstanding sequence in which James has to disarm a bomb in a car and can’t find the activation switch to remove, my entire body was tense. I swear even my teeth were on edge. Each sequence in this first hour is like a brilliant short film of its own.  Bigelow’s style plunges you into the reality of this war in a way so visceral you are almost dodging the bullets with the team. She does this by using a gritty, handheld style. There is some shaky-cam, but it is used for a good reason, rather than to hide crappy fight choreography (as is often the case).  Bigelow moves fluidly and with assurance between that style and more composed shots. There is much to admire in the visual style of this movie, notably a gorgeous scene in which James tosses a smoke grenade, the pall from which then hangs over the entire sequence.

After an astonishing, knuckle whitening, confrontation with a house full of snipers the film seems, perversely, to lose confidence in this shapeless, but incredibly viscerally effective style that it has laid down, and attempts to impose a narrative upon itself. In an instant The Hurt Locker goes from being an unpredictable exercise in nail biting tension and starts piling on the clichés until you can see pretty much every turn of the story coming. This is also, sadly but inevitably, where the film begins to ring false. James is painted as something of a maverick, but in the second half he becomes reckless to a point that I didn’t believe his teammates (especially Mackie’s strong, resolute, Sanborn) would go along with. The war movie clichés get ticked off, especially in relation to Eldridge and the base shrink he essentially goads into riding along with the team (guess what happens to the shrink). The performances and the visuals stay strong, but the movies credibility is holed below the water line and it sinks like a stone.

It’s a real shame that The Hurt Locker doesn’t end as well as it begins, because up to the hour mark I was thinking I was going to see one of the great war films. If it had been an hour long it would have been all but peerless, but the second hour smacks of a team and a film losing its creative nerve. A terrible, terrible shame, but you should still go and see the first hour of this film.

Review Post 44: (500) Days of Summer / Funny People

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER
DIR: Marc Webb
CAST: Joseph Gordon Levitt, Zooey Deschanel,
Chloe Moretz



We all have our own Summer. Mine was called Tara, while watching this film I missed her.

That’s one of the (many) great things about this rather atypical rom-com; it’s a film that will provoke a reaction in any audience member, because it pricks at things that we’ll all recognise. It is designed to provoke an extremely personal response and, for me, it succeeded completely. The film stars Joseph Gordon Levitt as Tom and Zooey Deschanel as Summer, two young colleagues who start a relationship after meeting at work. Tom falls in love with Summer almost immediately, but his feelings aren’t reciprocated.

What’s best about (500) Days of Summer is that it doesn’t indulge in the usual clichés of the romantic comedy genre. You don’t get the meet cute, or the inexplicable third act break up, or the chase to the airport, or the scene where the guy makes some big, stupid romantic gesture (usually in song). Instead this film concerns itself, if not with what relationships are really like, with what they feel like and it is better at dramatising that than almost any film I’ve seen.

Pop promo director Marc Webb uses his camera pretty unobtrusively, the few directorial flourishes he employs serving to put us inside Tom’s experience of his relationship with Summer. One of the best of these moments is the dance sequence, set to Hall and Oates “You Make My Dreams Come True”, which occurs after Tom and Summer’s first night together. Another real standout moment is an extended split screen sequence showing an important party scene, with Tom’s expectations on one side of the screen and reality on the other. It’s this sequence that really captures the mix of tones that makes (500) Days of Summer work so well and feel so real. The film is sweet and romantic but it is also, at times, raw and painful.

This is an interesting choice for Joseph Gordon Levitt, who has avoided generic fare in recent years, generally to wide acclaim. At 28 he’s one of the most interesting actors working, mainly because he seems willing to go just about anywhere for a part. Here he really doesn’t have much distance to travel. Tom is a pretty regular guy, but that’s tricky, because it would be easy to be bland and given how much of the film’s running time Tom spends moping, easy to be irritating. Gordon Levitt’s performance is neither of those things. As much as you may sometimes wish to slap Tom he’s never bad company. Having put in six years service on sitcom Third Rock From the Sun Gordon Levitt also possesses finely honed comic timing and the rare ability to make a joke play naturally.

Zooey Deschanel’s kooky shtick has been this close to wearing thin of late, but she reins it in for Summer. This girl, cynical as she is, feels much more real than - for example - Happy Lolly from Gigantic. There’s not the aggressive quirkiness that she so often brings to a part and that, along with the fact that she looks like Zooey Deschanel, means that you buy Tom’s immediate interest. More than two individually fine performances it is the combination of those performances that allows (500) Days of Summer to be truly successful. Deschanel and Gordon Levitt have been friends since working together on Manic and that familiarity with one another really helps the credibility of the central relationship in this film. There’s a warmth between them that is entirely convincing and if the chemistry is never scorching, that’s entirely appropriate to the story.

The supporting cast are all fine, but the real standout is Chloe Moretz, who will have a star making part next year in Matthew Vaughn’s Kick Ass, she's excellent as Tom’s wise beyond her years sister. This could have been a trite and unrealistic part, but Moretz plays it just right.

There are only a couple of mis-steps in the film. The first and biggest is the occasional use of an omniscient narrator, who adds as little to this film as Little Children’s irritating narrator did to that one, popping you out of the story whenever he chimes in. There’s also an opening caption which strikes an inappropriately caustic tone, setting you up for a rather different film and a closing scene which feels pretty trite, particularly with its closing line. These are all small things though,  overall (500) Days of Summer is a hugely enjoyable film, one that feels unusually real. You’ll likely leave the cinema on a real high, humming something from the brilliant indie soundtrack, quoting some of the brilliant dialogue and utterly in love with Zooey Deschanel.


FUNNY PEOPLE
DIR: Judd Apatow
CAST: Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen,
Leslie Mann, Eric Bana



Have you seen the trailer for Funny People? Then you’ve seen Funny People. Do yourself a favour and skip the feature length version.

This is Judd Apatow’s third film as writer/director and the success of The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up has allowed him free rein. The result is a spectacularly self indulgent, masturbatory, 146-minute mess. It plays like Apatow dumping the contents of his brain onto film and then simply organising them chronologically. This isn’t a film; it’s summer camp for Judd and pals. You might think that being invited along to that would be fun, but for me it was an experience like going along for a night out with a group of people who have known each other for years and being the new guy that one person knows. It’s awkward and even when they’re laughing, you generally aren’t.

It has always been clear that somebody needs to hire Judd Apatow a strict editor, and never has this been a more urgent need than with Funny People. Just because a film is long doesn’t mean it’s bad. Hoop Dreams could be six hours long rather than the three hours it is and I’d probably still be enthralled by every frame. Funny People feels long. At times it feels endless, largely because it’s so incredibly repetitive. There are innumerable scenes, for instance, of Seth Rogen talking Adam Sandler to sleep. It’s not just the repetition though; Apatow is so evidently in love with his actors improvisations that scenes are often brutally overextended. Comedy is all about timing and Funny People’s timing is broken.

Perhaps the most glaring flaw in Funny People is that it isn’t one film. It’s two. Two films that have almost nothing in common, yet have been awkwardly stapled together because… well, God knows why. The first film is about a comedian (Sandler) who discovers that he is dying of some mysterious illness (we’ll call it McGuffin’s syndrome) and decides he wants to go back to his stand up roots, so he hires a young comic who idolises him (Rogen) to write his jokes. It’s your basic bromance, two grown men who initially don’t like each other learning to be close to one another. Of course it doesn’t work, because Sandler’s George Simmons is so repellent that you can’t understand why, even if he puts up with him for career reasons, Rogen’s Ira Wright would want to be friends with George.

George’s character is also the reason that the second film - a romantic comedy that sees him attempting to reunite with his ex-fiance Laura (played by Apatow’s shrill voiced wife Leslie Mann) despite that she’s now married (to Eric Bana) with two kids (played by Apatow and Mann’s daughters) - fails. There’s no reason to want Sandler and Mann to end up together; even when Apatow makes it clear that her husband is also a total shit he still seems a nicer guy than George. The result is that the whole film just sort of sits there, unspooling before you, yet never affecting you for a second. These people are either complete arseholes (George), shallow and dimwitted (Ira) or so idealised that you can’t take them seriously (Laura), so why should you care what happens to any of them?

Look, it’s nice that Judd Apatow loves his family and friends, but that doesn’t mean that he should get to spend $70,000,000 (how the flaming blue fuck does a movie like this cost that much?) on a glorified home movie. Apatow and Mann’s children are pretty and charming, but that doesn’t mean that we need to spend time watching home videos of one of them singing Memory from Cats. It’s like being forced to look through your friends’ photo albums; only you don’t even know or care about these people.

Even at its most basic level Funny People fails, because it never convinced me that these were funny people, even though they spend what seems like hours laughing at their own jokes. George Simmons is as amusing as punch in the face and Ira’s material is no better. The ‘highlight’ of Ira's routine is an extended bit about Tom Cruise, Will Smith and David Beckham rubbing the tips of their penises together. Which is funny because? It clearly wasn’t just me. There were some laughs in my screening, but they were sporadic and very scattered, the film very clearly missing far more frequently than it hit. I got a few laughs, mainly out of Sandler’s doctor, who is constantly compared to Alexander Godunov from Die Hard (and I’ll admit, I did roar with laughter when the doctor said Yippe ki yay mother fucker). Three or four laughs in almost 150 minutes isn’t anything like enough in a comedy though.

Funny People is a dull, uninvolving, unfunny, self-indulgent movie. It is packed with uninteresting and unsympathetic characters and it is spectacularly overlong, with little idea of what it wants to be or to say. Miss it.

Musical Interlude 8

The dance sequence from the really rather wonderful (500) Days of Summer.

Review Post 43: The Final Destination / Jetsam

THE FINAL DESTINATION [3D]
DIR: David R. Ellis
CAST: Bobby Campo, Shantel VanSanten, Nick Zano,
Haley Webb, Mykelti Williamson



It is my sad duty to report that on Friday the 28th of August 2009, at approximately 3:30pm, the Final Destination franchise died. The cause of death was reported as total creative bankruptcy. It was nine years old.

Okay, so the Final Destination franchise was no artistic milestone, but it had a good central idea. The concept of death stalking a group of people who have escaped an incident in which they were supposed to perish is a strong one. The franchise was never really concerned in exploring that idea in any depth, rather it preferred to use it as the jumping off point for death scenes that even Rube Goldberg might have regarded as needlessly complex. Combined with an awareness of the innate silliness of the series and with capable casts of pretty young things, that was plenty for three enjoyably dumb 90-minute chunks of horror.

The Final Destination is, on the surface, no different to its predecessors. In fact it is practically the same film. Some young adults escape a crash at a Nascar track and then find themselves elaborately picked off by Death. It’s not in the concept this movie fails though; it’s in the execution. It is a surprise that The Final Destination fails so completely, because both director David Ellis and writer Eric Bress worked on the series’ second instalment, which remains its high watermark. Sadly the wit and invention that made that sequel better than the original has completely deserted Ellis and Bress here. The screenplay may well have been scribbled in crayon on the back of a handful of napkins and filmed from that first draft. Lazy isn’t the word.

The script is so underdeveloped that some characters don’t even have names. Justin Welborn, who has a featured role and about 12 minutes screentime, is credited as ‘racist’.  Krista Allen, in a larger role, has to make do with ‘MILF/Samantha’ as her credit. Names are, of course, given to the main characters like Nick and Lori (Campo and VanSanten), but that is all we ever know about them. It’s not as if I’m asking for some deep character study here, but Lori doesn’t have a single discernable trait, let alone a personality. This is a problem because if you don’t know anything about the people in the movie why should you care whether (or how) they live or die? Final Destination 3 was no masterpiece and was hardly character driven, but Mary Elizabeth Winsted’s character Wendy had at least a modicum of personality, while Winsted’s winning performance allowed you to have some investment in her fate - making that film’s final sequence a real thriller. The Final Destination, by contrast, is just a bunch of stuff happening to people who are all but interchangeable because none of them is anything more than a name.

Still, Ellis should have been able to make a silk purse of this sows ear of a script, particularly given the fact that the 3D process should have thrown up a lot of interesting new ways to show the death scenes. Sadly this is perhaps the film that makes it most obvious that, technically improved though it may be now, 3D remains no more than a gimmick. Stuff pops out of the screen at us with a regularity that borders on tedious. Ellis fings cars at us, pushes body parts out of the screen at us and attempts to convince us we’re about to be impaled by spikes. The only problem with this is that it is all so patently fake, the clearly cut rate CGI so appallingly bad that not one single shot is even a bit scary. In 85 minutes, with things popping out of the screen at roughly five-minute intervals, my audience didn’t jump once. Jump? They barely reacted to anything. Much as CGI has been these last 20 years 3D seems, to date, to be a stylistic crutch that filmmakers are leaning on to allow them to avoid effort in other aspects of their work. It’s 3D, so who cares about the script?

The Final Destination franchise has had its breakout stars. The first had Ali Larter and Seann William Scott, and the third film brought Mary Elizabeth Winsted and Amanda Crew to Hollywood’s attention. You’ll be hard pressed to find anyone here who you’d expect, or want, to see again. It’s perhaps not nice to pick on a girl, but still, Shantel VanSanten is the worst actress I’ve seen in a very long time. She’s pretty as a picture, but there’s nothing behind it. There’s a total vacancy to her performance, a sense of watching a completely empty vessel whose attempts at expressing emotion are so off that you wonder if she’s ever felt one. Terrible as VanSanten is she’s hardly alone in her awfulness. Bobby Campo has fewer expressions than the teddy bear I had as baby, while all Mykelti Williamson does is speak his lines and look absolutely mortified that he’s ended up here.

The Final Destination is staggeringly bad. It’s a film that makes me question whether anyone involved in the movie business gives a shit about anything beyond an opening weekend anymore. It exists purely because of and in service of a gimmick (a gimmick that doesn’t work), and it makes me scared for the future of cinema.


JETSAM
DIR: Simon Welsford
CAST: Alex Reid, Jamie Draven,
Cal Macaninch, Shauna MacDonald, Adam Shaw

Made in 14 days, for £2500, Jetsam looks like it was made… in 14 days, for £2500.

Bad films come in all shapes and sizes and this year they’ve ranged from the colossal turd that was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen to this extremely low budget British ‘thriller’. Jetsam does actually start rather intriguingly. In a silent opening sequence we meet a young woman (Reid), washed up on a beach with a USB stick in her pocket and seemingly no idea why she’s there.  Then we watch as she stumbles across a man who has also washed up unconscious, she wakes him up and he immediately chases her, seemingly wanting to kill her.

That’s a great start. It poses all sorts of fascinating questions. Sadly the film then proceeds to answer those questions in a way that is both unspeakably boring and hilariously implausible. Saying much about Jetsam’s story would risk spoiling the film, but it’s about industrial espionage and as befits a thriller with that subject it’s a twisty narrative. That twist is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a cinema this year, because it is so totally unbelievable, both at script and performance level.

The film hinges on Reid’s character, her relationships and her job; to spy Macaninch and his girlfriend MacDonald. The problem is that neither script nor performances give us a way in to these people and their lives, so the idea at the heart of the film, as well as being so well worked over that it would have been old hat in a 1940’s Hitchcock movie, never remotely convinces. Alex Reid, who was in The Descent with co-star MacDonald, is a blank slate. Her unchanging expression leads us through the film like a blindfolded guide leading a hike through the mountains - always hesitant, with little idea what she’s doing or where she’s going. Jetsam may be a rather minimalist film, but Reid’s acting is minimal to the point of not being there at all. The others aren’t bad, Cal Macaninch and Shauna MacDonald might have been able to do something interesting if the script weren’t monumentally awful.

Everything that might have worked is undone by writer/director Simon Welsford. While it’s an achievement to get a film together for £2500 it would still be nice if the final product looked somewhat professional, after all, cheaper films have managed it in the past. Sadly the technical side of things is just awful. The film is drenched in grain, artifact heavy and very poorly lit. Perhaps the funniest technical failing is the fake blood, which is a vivid shade of pink.

There is nothing to see here. Jetsam is poorly written, acted and made, it should just be allowed to drift away, like the discarded rubbish it is named for.

Musical interlude 7

Here's a song from Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, sung by Catherine Deneuve and Francoise Dorleac. A cleaned up print of this movie has been playing at BFI Southbank lately, I highly recommend it.

Freedom?

It seems that the 25-year-old law governing video censorship in the UK was, through some oversight, never actually enacted. It was a simple oversight: the European Commission was never notified of the act, but it now means that the 1984 act and the revisions of 1993 and 1994 are invalid and that, in effect, the system of classifying films for video release no longer exists.

This will likely prompt tabloid scare stories about how our children can now be sold porn. Technically this may be true, as there can now be no legal penalty for supplying films to underage customers, but it’s a distraction from the actual issue. Shops aren’t suddenly going to begin selling 18 rated films to five year olds just because of a loophole in the law. The more disturbing part of this is what it may mean for the future of our system of classification and censorship.

This legal issue, discovered during a routine look at the act before the latest amendment, enacting classifications for video games, essentially means that, should it wish to, the government can now throw out the entire system we’ve had over the last quarter of a century and rewrite the guidelines. This worries me. With lunatic fringes like Mediawatch and Christian Voice well organised to mount high pressure campaigns for more restrictive censorship and a Government unpopular and headed into an election year there is a real danger here for movie lovers, this could genuinely affect and restrict our freedom to choose what we watch.

The BBFC, as yet, have made no public comment on the issue, if they don’t do so soon I shall write and ask them about it. I’ll have more on this as it develops, including my own proposal for what a new system (should such a thing be proposed) ought to look like.

Review Post 42: Afterschool

AFTERSCHOOL
DIR: Antonio Campos
CAST: Ezra Miller, Lee Wilkof,
Jeremy Allen Wright, Addison Timlin



It is easy to see that somewhere in Afterschool there is the germ of a good movie. Which makes it all the more frustrating that this is a terrible, terrible movie.

26 year old director Antonio Campos has already been making films for half his life and he clearly isn’t short of confidence (he dedicated a short made when he was 13 to Stanley Kubrick). His most recent film Buy it Now was intriguing. It was the story of a girl who decides to sell her virginity on ebay, told both as a ‘documentary’ and a drama. Afterschool, similarly, focuses on teenagers and has the same unpolished, observed style. The difference is that in (at least the first version of) Buy it Now that style seemed to have purpose, to be used to the advantage of the story while here it seems like Campos showing off how clever he is, to the great detriment of his film.

The slight story is set at an American boarding school where two students die of a drug overdose. The film chronicles the school’s reaction to this event, largely through the eyes of Robert (Miller), a chance witness to the event. Much of the film is concerned with the making of a tribute video to the dead students and this is reflected in Campos’ style, which is defiantly unpolished. The problem is that, while I understand why Campos shoots the film in this fashion, it looks amateurish and is frustrating in the extreme.

Campos' framing is often deliberately off. Characters only half appear in shots, the camera is too close, or too far away, to get them entirely in focus. He’s trying to express how teenagers are wrapped up in themselves and their tight groups of friends, to the exclusion of the outside world - especially the adult world - but it just looks like he’s randomly positioned the camera and hired a drunk focus puller. The shallow focus is incredibly irritating; it means that you can only ever see about 20% of what is in the shot. It might be clever to begin with, but it begins to look like the only idea Campos has.

If the visuals were the only problem with Afterschool then the film as a whole might have worked, but sadly nothing here really works. The story is fundamentally broken and impossible to care about. The girls whose death precipitates the story appear only to die. We never know anything about them as people, or their relationship to the other people in the school. There is a similar idea running through Heathers, where we see the hypocritical tributes to Heather Chandler after her ‘suicide’. There is no real clue to what Campos is doing here - are the tributes to these girls heartfelt or hypocritical? - we never know or care, because we don’t have a clue who they were.

Sadly this lack of engagement also extends to the people we actually meet when they are alive. Every character in Afterschool has a maximum of one note and Robert is as blank a slate as Twilight’s Bella. Endless minutes of this already punishingly long 107-minute film are devoted to Robert staring into space, or at a desk, or at his feet. Why does Campos think I’m going to care about this? With so little to work with it is perhaps little surprise that the film’s performances are almost uniformly bereft of emotion, stilted and false in the extreme. The only glimmer of light comes from Addison Timlin, a 17-year-old actress who impresses with a strong performance as a freshman less innocent than she looks.

At the heart of Afterschool there is an interesting story, but it is so badly told from both a narrative and a technical standpoint that this ends up being one of 2009’s very worst films.