Iron Man 3

Posted on by

Iron ManIn Iron Man 3, Shane Black has fixed what was always broken in the franchise.

The big problem with Iron Man 2 for me was that there was too much Iron Man and not enough Tony Stark. As soon as Robert Downey Jr is hidden away inside that metal suit the personality evaporates and the movie loses all of its charm. They put Downey Jr’s name on the poster, but the computer graphics wizards are the star of the film, and they don’t have nearly the same appeal.

The same was true of the first film, albeit to a lesser extent. I praised the first Iron Man when it came out for managing to focus as much as it did on the man behind the hero. But when you make an expensive mid-summer comic-book blockbuster you can’t really get away without the climactic action scene, and making that scene without the big iron suit would have been a disaster. It was inevitable that the man would fade into the background in favour of the suit at least at the end of the film, and so it went. It appeared that this was the best we could hope for.

That’s why I was so delighted to find that Shane Black (who up until now was best known for writing the Lethal Weapon films, and previously directed Downey Jr in Kiss Kis Bang Bang) had obviously done his homework to figure out how to address the problem in this third instalment. This film is Stark from beginning to end, with all the wit and charming arrogance that goes with him. Like in the first film, he’s forced to fend for himself without his technological backup for significant chunks of the film. But unlike that film, this one sees him in and out of the suit throughout the finale. The sense of this still being Tony Stark fighting the good fight carries on through to the end; it’s not just a red and gold fighting machine in his place.

When Downey Jr’s not hogging the spotlight there’s the occasional opportunity to appreciate the excellent supporting cast. Don Cheadle gets a slightly expanded role in this film relative to the previous one, and he’s about at his most bad ass ever. Ben Kingsley is brilliant as the Mandarin, especially in the latter part of the film. I won’t say what I liked about him for fear of spoilers, but he has a couple of great scenes. Gwyneth Paltrow is typically under-used, but she gets to kick a little bit of ass.

The plot isn’t especially clever, but it does a fair job of avoiding the worst of the comic-book movie clichés. The joy of this film is more in the details than in the big picture. That said, there are a lot of great moments so it adds up to a surprisingly great film. It’s streets ahead of its predecessor, and while I wouldn’t necessarily claim it’s better than the original I also wouldn’t argue too strongly against anyone who did.

★ I’ve got all five senses and I slept last night. That puts me six up on the lot of you.

Posted on by

Brick

#489 Brick, Rian Johnson, 2006
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

On Monday evening Rian Johnson, whom you are most likely to know from last year’s Marmite-like1 sci-fi thriller Looper, was kind enough to take some time out of his holiday to visit the Prince Charles Cinema for an audience Q & A. The original programme was a double bill of Brick and The Maltese Falcon, but when Johnson contacted the cinema with an offer of making an appearance it was changed to an all-Johnson bill of Brick and Looper with the Q & A sandwiched in between. I’ve been a fan of his since I first saw Brick in 2006 so of course I jumped at the opportunity to sit up front and listen to him talk about his movie creations.

Rian Johnson Audience

Rian Johnson’s picture of the audience, taken during his Q & A session. You can just about make me out at the extreme left of the front row.

The cinema has posted the audio of the Q & A if you fancy a listen. The person immediately to my left (visible giving the thumbs up in the picture above) video’d the whole thing too, but he left before the start of Looper so I didn’t get a chance to ask if he planned to post it online. I’ll post an update if I manage to find it.

Left: Johnson takes a photo of the audience. Right: Q & A in progress.

Left: Johnson takes a photo of the audience.
Right: Q & A in progress.

Happily, Brick is on the 500 greatest films list, so on top of a chance to see a director I greatly admire I also got the opportunity for another review. I actually reviewed Brick on my other blog back in 2006 when it was first released, but that’s no reason not to have another crack at it. Back then I obviously had more difficulty appreciating the less mainstream style of the film, though I still liked it a lot and I urged everyone that would listen to me to watch it. I don’t know whether I’ve become more or less discerning since then, but I enjoy this movie more every time I see it.

For anyone who hasn’t seen or heard of it — which may well be many of you; it didn’t see a huge amount of success on its release — Brick is a classic film noir story of a private detective (named only Brendan, and played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) investigating the suspicious death of an ex-girlfriend and the knot of organized-crime politics that led to it. It has all of the hallmarks of film noir: the hard-assed gumshoe who plays by his own rules, the shady mobsters, the seductive dames. What sets it apart from other such films is that the detective is a highschool student, the mobsters are small-time pot dealers, and the whole thing takes place in a sunny California town instead of a rainy 1920s inner city.

Johnson says he loved noir books as a kid — I think he called out Dashiell Hammett specifically — and he wanted to make a film with that kind of exaggerated grittiness, but he was concerned that audiences are so familiar with the visual language that they would be prone to shutting off and failing to engage with the film in the way that he did with those books. His creative solution to that problem was to change the visual language by transplanting the story into a completely different context, while maintaining the other core elements of the genre. So the pinstripe suits and trilbies are out, but the intrigue, the danger, the snappy dialog, and the preternatural self-assurance of all of the characters are all still there.

The film makes an occasional nod to the incongruity of the setting. When Brendan finally manages to meet with the Pin, the town’s big crime boss, the two sit uncomfortably while the Pin’s mother goes through the fridge to see what she can offer Brendan to drink. The few scenes like that are strange, because the rest of the film makes it clear that these characters are for real; they aren’t just children playing at grown-up games. It’s like putting a scene or two from the Goonies into Lord of the Flies. You get a few laughs out of it, but on balance I would have preferred the film to be played totally straight.

One of the more amusing insights that came from the Q & A was about the film’s characteristic jump cuts. Some of the longer shots are broken up by flashes of what one assumes are either dreams or memories, which highlight Brendan’s increasing levels of both obsession and stress. It turns out these jumps came about because so much of the film was made up of very extended shots, many of which needed to be shortened. As it was impossible to remove the parts containing crucial information, and there were no alternative angles to move between, Johnson had to cut out bits of the middle of the shots:

Its nature, because it’s a detective movie, is “this interlocks with that, interlocks with that”. It’s not like a drama where you can start reshuffling scenes. And there wasn’t even that much we could cut out.

When I shot I didn’t do any coverage and I shot a lot of stuff in just single master shots, so when I got in the edit room it became a problem. I’d have a scene where I couldn’t cut it out because you can’t lose that information but at the same time the scene was running like 40 seconds and the movie was too long. The movie was 2 hours and 40 minutes or something. We had to cut time out of it, but how?

And that’s what led to… there’s a lot of scenes where you see these jump cuts that look like pre-planned artistic choices. I decided I would just cut the boring bits out of the middle of the shot, and so it compressed it. And saved our butts.

He mentioned that he was working on his next film, but didn’t give anything away about what it might be. Given the two year gap between Brick and the Brothers Bloom, and the four year gap before Looper, it might be a while before we see the next thing hit our screens. But when it does come out, I hope he will consider coming back to London to show it to us.

  1. You either love it or you hate it. ↩

★ I wish to check the position of the Nile. My sister tells me it is in South America.

Posted on by

Sense and Sensibility

#315 Sense and Sensibility, Ang Lee, 1995
Cast: Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant.

My English teacher in school, Miss Tallon, was a fan of Jane Austin, so whenever the curriculum made room for her to cover an Austin book she took it. While I don’t think I would have expressed any significant affection for the books at the time, I must have taken something from them because I’m quite fond of them now. At secondary school I studied Pride and Prejudice and Emma, and I’ve seen a couple of film and TV versions of each of those stories. Sense and Sensibility is my first film based on an Austen novel that I hadn’t previously read, and it surprised me by quickly becoming my favourite.

There’s a certain style you have to expect from Jane Austen: she never strayed from the themes of love, family politics, and comedic misunderstandings. Her work is packed with verbal wit. The requirements of nineteenth century English etiquette force her characters to couch both affection and insult in much more subtle terms than anyone would bother with these days. As there’s little I find more amusing than an intelligently veiled jibe, the style suits my tastes perfectly. In a strange way it’s a little reminiscent of the dialogue you get from Aaron Sorkin.

As I said, I haven’t read the book (Austen’s first) so I don’t know how much of the script to attribute to the author and how much to Emma Thompson, who not only plays Miss Dashwood, the lead, but who also adapted the novel for the screen. Thompson won the 1996 Oscar for best adapted screenplay, so clearly she contributed something.

The cast are all stellar, with Thompson and Kate Winslet having each been nominated for Oscars for their roles as the sisters of opposing sensibility alluded to in the title. But my favourite role is Hugh Grant’s Edward Ferrars, love interest to Miss Dashwood. No-one does a better Hugh Grant impersonation than Hugh Grant does, and this film features possibly his finest example. Even better than his bumbling “I think I love you” speech from Four Weddings and a Funeral, and that’s saying something. Here he is charming Emma Thompson by winning over her elusive younger sister:

As a light entertainment with plenty of situational and verbal humour, and little to tax you — intellectually or emotionally — this is a pretty perfect film if you’re tired or under the weather. It would make a perfect in-flight movie. But it’s also worth seeking out a DVD or (don’t tell anyone I said this) looking to see if anyone has uploaded the full film to YouTube (hypothetically of course).

★ We lay my love and I, beneath the weeping willow.

Posted on by

The Innocents#153 The Innocents, Jack Clayton, 1961
Cast: Deborah Kerr.

Oscar season is over and, as promised, I am (after a bit of an unplanned delay) back to the classics. Last weekend I watched a DVD that’s been sitting on the stack for a few weeks waiting for the novelty of the awards season to pass, the 1961 Victorian haunted house tale, The Innocents.

For the benefit of those who are as ignorant of this film as I was, it’s a story of a new governess in an English country house in the late nineteenth century who comes to suspect that neither her new home nor her two wards, a young brother and sister, are entirely as they seem.

Well sure, of course things aren’t as they seem. It’s a horror film. That’s how horror films work. But this isn’t just any horror film. This is without a doubt the creepiest film I’ve ever seen.

One night when I was about 13 I was up late talking swapping scary stories with some friends. We had the usual collection of killers hiding in the backs of cars, people grabbed from below while walking through graveyards at night, the works. We stopped when one guy came up with what we agreed was the creepiest scene we could imagine: a girl in a white dress, swinging on a swing in an otherwise empty and silent playground, at night, singing softly to herself. If that’s an image that would keep you awake at night then this film is for you. It’s Village of the Damned children, a huge shadowy house, dying roses, creaking doors, creepy dolls, flickering candles and soft slow singing from beginning to end1

This is the second horror film I’ve reviewed for this project, and it couldn’t be more different from the first. Where Night of the Living Dead is a straightforward monster movie, The Innocents is an ambiguous, subtle, psychological story. It’s deliberately unclear about what’s really going on. You could interpret it as not even being a horror film, as it’s easy to argue either way about whether the ghosts really exist, or whether they’re just the delusions of a frightened mind.

When you consider that the film is ultimately based on a novel by Henry James, and that the final script was largely written by Truman Capote, it’s easy to see how it might have turned out a bit higher brow than the zombie flicks of the late 60s (or the Hammer horror films that were its contemporaries).

  1. In fact one of the child actors, Martin Stephens, who went on to do precisely nothing else ever, was actually in Village of the Damned. ↩

Oscar predictions 2013

Posted on by

OscarI’ve seen seven of the nine best picture nominees, but my petition to get the ceremony delayed until I could squeeze in Zero Dark Thirty and Amour hasn’t been successful, so I’m just going to have to go ahead and make my predictions based on what I’ve seen. Such is life when you prefer cinemas to BitTorrent.

I’ve avoided reading anyone else’s predictions and I’m also largely unaware of most of the other award ceremonies that have taken place over the last few weeks (with the exception of the Golden Raspberry awards, of which The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 was the deserving star). I wanted to make up my own mind about both what I thought was best and what I thought would win.

So here, along with a promise not to come back and edit this post in the morning, are my 2013 Oscar predictions:

Best picture

I said it nearly from the outset, and I stand by my original assessment: Lincoln for best picture. It wasn’t my favourite (that would be Django Unchained), but I think it will get it.

Best actor

Lincoln again. Daniel Day Lewis is the most certain call you can make this year.

Best actress

I’ve only seen two of the nominated films in this category, but I would choose Quvenzhané Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild) over Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook), even though I preferred the latter film.

Best supporting actor

I have my fingers crossed for Christoph Waltz in Django Unchained. I’d only be a little upset if it went to Alan Arkin in Argo instead.

Best supporting actress

I couldn’t care less. I saw three of the films in this category and can’t muster any enthusiasm for any of them. People seem keen for this to go to Anne Hathaway in Les Misérables and even though I’d prefer not to see that film get any recognition, I’m not going to be waving any flags for the other nominees either.

Best original screenplay

Of the two films I’ve seen here I would choose Django Unchained over Moonrise Kingdom, both as my preference and my prediction. My guess is that one of the films I haven’t seen will take this one, because neither Django nor Kingdom seemed much in line with the academy’s usual preferences.

Best adapted screenplay

This is the only category in which I’ve seen every nominated film. Argo was my favourite of the five, and is also my pick for this award.

Best director

I’ve always struggled to pick out the directing as a single aspect of film-making. I don’t entirely understand how the best director is anyone other than the person who made the best film (although statistically about three quarters of the time the two awards are won by the same film). Purely for that reason I have to say Steven Spielberg for Lincoln, but I don’t say it with any particular conviction.

Others

I haven’t made a prediction for cinematography because I’m still not totally convinced I know what that is. I’d love to see ”Everybody Needs A Best Friend” get best song, just because I love the idea of Ted having won an Oscar. I fell so much in love with Middle Earth again when watching The Hobbit that I’d be thrilled to see it get the award for production design.

Now, if I can find a way to stream the ceremony in the UK, I’ll soon find out how well I did. See you after!

Les Misérables

Posted on by

I was not impressed by Les Misérables. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better story turned into a worse film than this. I believe my friends when they tell me the stage show is brilliant, but it doesn’t translate to screen at all, at least in this incarnation.

Sitting through this film was like trying to watch a stage musical over video conference, only with less emotional depth. I have to agree with Film Crit Hulk’s brilliantly detailed explanation of the basics of cinematography, with an emphasis on how Tom Hooper doesn’t seem to even know which end of a camera does what.

Les Misérables

The point of cinema is to tell a story visually, not to have your actors read out their lines in a series of uncomfortable close-ups staring straight down the camera at the viewer. It’s hard to empathise with someone when you feel like your head is in danger of hitting their tonsils.

Maybe that’s not entirely fair. There were a handful of shots that didn’t look like dermatological scans of the actors’ faces. But as you can see from the shot above, they all gave the impression that Paris is situated on quite a precarious slope.

The source material is obviously excellent, and there are enough good songs to convince me the stage musical is probably worth seeing, but this is not a good film by any stretch of the imagination.

Django Unchained

Posted on by

Nobody tell Ben Affleck, but Argo might not be my favourite movie from this year’s Oscar season anymore.

Django Unchained

Sometimes watching all1 of the Oscar nominees, and all of the 500 greatest films of all time2 means watching something I wouldn’t have ordinarily chosen to watch. This is a good thing. It’s led me to discover some films I really love, and it’s expanded the range of films I can enjoy. But it also sometimes means having to put a bit of work in to get something out; having to think about the film instead of just sitting back and taking in some entertainment.

So it’s good when a film like Django Unchained comes along and you just know you’re going to love it.

It’s another very long film, about 2 hours 45 minutes, which is going to lead to criticisms of poor pacing and over-indulgence, but just like with The Hobbit, I’m going to take the position that the length of the film means value for money. You get more entertainment for your ticket price than you would have with a 90 minute rom-com.

For the most part, Django is a stylish, witty, over-the-top, western revenge story, a pure entertainment piece. But underneath its well-dressed surface there’s an uncomfortable grittiness. The film switches from good guys in white hats fighting bad guys in black hats, where every death is a baddie who deserved it or a hero who expected it, to a darker picture of slavers and slaves, where deaths are sudden, cruel, and (worst of all) believable.

It’s a strange feeling to laugh at a massacre one minute and to be shaken up by a single death a short while later, but it’s because one is an action movie shoot-up of heroes and villains and the other really happened to terrified, undeserving victims of an extraordinary cruelty, the echoes of which are still ringing loud in America today.

Theres a lot about this film that I really loved, but none more than Christoph Waltz and his character of Dr Schultz, the dentist-turned-bounty hunter who frees Django and accompanies him on his mission of rescue and revenge. He’s erudite and witty, and there’s no small amount of satisfaction to be drawn from his constantly showing up the less sympathetic characters. It’s refreshing to have a German character portrayed so positively. Hollywood tends to treat Germany as a pool from which to source its villains.

I’ve seen four of the five performances up for best supporting actor, and Waltz is my favourite (sorry again Argo). For best picture, I don’t see this winning. I don’t even think it would have been nominated if there were still only five nominees each year. It’s just not what the academy tends to recognise. As for the other award categories, we’ll just have to wait and see.

  1. Or most. Or at least some. ↩
  2. Which this blog is still ostensibly about. Back to normal starting next week! ↩

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Posted on by

The final week of desperately trying to see as many Oscar films as possible kicked off on Sunday, with Beasts of the Southern Wild at one of the needlessly many poor quality Odeon’s in the Leicester Square area.

Beasts is up for four awards: best picture, actress, director, and adapted screenplay. I wouldn’t say it’s a contender for any except, amazingly, actress. Quvenzhané Wallis1, the nine-year-old lead, is the youngest ever nominee in her category and she is unquestionably the best thing about this film. If a nine-year-old best actress contender is not reason enough to give this film a chance I don’t know what is.

Still, I’ve never believed that good acting — even record-breakingly good acting — can make a good film, so what of the rest?

Beasts Of The Southern Wild

The setting is a good one: an area of the southern USA called the Bathtub, threatened by imminent flooding due to rising sea levels, abandoned save for a small group determined to remain in their homes, subsisting off the land. Hushpuppy (Wallis) lives with her dad, whose failing health is the second looming threat in Hushpuppy’s future. Together they, and the other residents of the Bathtub, struggle with poverty, flooding, illness, and the general sense that the world is falling apart around them.

There were two things that preventing me from really loving this film. It sounds trivial, but the constant shaky camerawork bothered me enough to be distracting. I’m sure it served to show the instability of the world and of Hushpuppy’s life or something, but it also made me nauseous.

The other problem was that I didn’t sympathise nearly as much as I might have with the characters. Maybe I’m a bad person, but it seemed like so many of their problems were self-inflicted that it was hard for me to feel bad when things went wrong for them. It could be I’m just too used to films portraying an unrealistic tendency for people to work their way out of life’s biggest tribulations, so it’s harder to accept a (probably more realistic) narrative in which the people in the most dire circumstances tend not to have the tools (emotionally, intellectually, financially, whatever) to lift themselves out. But even understanding that, you don’t burn down your own house and then complain when you get rained on.

  1. Don’t pretend you don’t need a hint. It’s pronounced Wah-liss. ↩

Moonrise Kingdom

Posted on by

Moonrise Kingdom isn’t up for a whole bucket full of statues like Silver Linings Playbook or Lincoln — it’s only up for best original screenplay — but it has the major advantage of being out on DVD already, so I was able to watch it while I spent a week sick at home. They say laughter is the best medicine1, and Moonrise Kingdom certainly helped me feel better.

Moonrise Kingdom

I’ve never counted myself among Wes Anderson’s fans. I had people tell me for years that I just had to see The Royal Tenenbaums, but when I did eventually capitulate I couldn’t see what the big deal had been. I tried again with Rushmore and I didn’t get that either. I really wanted to like those films. I don’t think my friends are crazy, so I’m convinced there must be something great there that I just didn’t understand.

Well something changed. I don’t know if I went into this one with the right attitude, or different expectations, or if Moonrise Kingdom is just a bit less Wes Anderson-y than his previous films, but I really enjoyed it. It’s fun, and funny, and just ridiculously endearing.

I love how the whole film plays within very rigid constraints. Most shots are static, with the action coming in from one edge of shot or leaving from another. Any shots that aren’t completely static are steady horizontal or vertical pans, or zoom shots. So the camera only ever moves along exactly one of the three primary axes. Everything runs on rails. The characters mostly stick to the grid-like pattern too: they’re generally either shot either directly face-on or at a right angle (and sometimes from directly behind). It all gives a sense of being an approximation of reality. Like a model world, or a pop-up picture book. It works really well with the polished 60s aesthetic and makes the whole thing really quite charming.

Moonrise Kingdom script

Unfortunately I’ve lost track of where I came across it, but Focus Features has actually made available online a beautifully illustrated script for the film, including loads of production photos, storyboard sketches, and stills from the finished film. I guess it’s intended for Academy voters (and voters for other awards) but it’s available to anybody who cares to take a peek. It’s well worth browsing through.

  1. I’d say that paracetamol is a contender too. ↩