500 Days Of Zooey

Thanks to Nathaniel at The Film Experience for reminding me that 500 Days Of Summer has just received it's Sundance premier, and things are sounding good. Since it stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Brick is a great film) and Zooey Deschanel ('She & Him' is a great album) and is directed by Marc Webb (so many cool videos), I've been following this film pretty much since it was announced, but somehow didn't notice that a trailer had been released:

I'm looking forward to this film now more than I was before. I'm predicting that it's going to be the cult indie of the year, like Donnie Darko or Brick or (shudder) Garden State. Respected obscurity's the limit!

"Lost" versus "Battlestar Galactica"

Ever since Lost and Battlestar Galactica have co-existed in my viewing consciousness, they have always been inseparably intwined. I started watching Battlestar during the huge break that we UK viewers had to suffer between Lost seasons two and three while Channel 4 and Sky fought over the distribution rights. I missed my fix of the show, and I needed something else like it – The Sopranos and Deadwood were all well and good, but it wasn’t quite the same. Those are both slow-burning, character pieces, but I wanted something more gripping, that would take me along for the ride. I constantly heard how Battlestar Galactica was similar to Lost in many ways and so, despite my reservations (I have never been one for Star Trek-type shows) I watched the two-part mini-series which kicks off the show and then, suitably convinced, purchased the first series.

Which I liked. I appreciate and admire how topical Battlestar was, how it told the story of a society under attack from a race vowing to destroy it, complete with civil-liberties crackdowns, prison-torture scandals, religious fundamentalists and suicide attacks. It was an allegory for the current war on terror, yet never explicitly took any side. In fact, in Battlestar’s hands, it was our heroes that led the suicide attacks. It did all this, however, without losing any of its kick-ass excitement and Hollywood movie-worthy thrills. I just felt it wasn’t up to the quality of my beloved Lost.

However, last night I finally caught up with the two most recent episodes of both shows, and it confirmed to me what I had long suspected – Lost is just turning into pure crap, especially compared to Battlestar. I started to fear the worst during the last season, which I thought had taken a significant decline from the first three (although a lot of people will try and convince you that series three was rubbish. Which it wasn’t). It seemed to have lost sight of what had made the show great – it was a story about the people who crashed on an island, not about an island that had some people crash on it. Series four suddenly became all-action, all-the-time, cramming exposition and narrative details into every single scene – it was exhausting. What happened to the great scenes from seasons gone by, such as when Jack realised he couldn’t save Boone’s life, or when Locke, wracked with guilt over his part in Boone’s death, bangs on the top of the hatch door, or when Michael, drifting on the broken raft, weeps over the fate of his missing son – all moments which were accompanied by the brilliant, mournful piano score. Lost used to know when to slow it down and focus on the characters, which were once the most important part of its dynamic. Now, it has none of that. It doesn’t even feel like the same show anymore. Season one has a totally different tone and pace to this current season, and I am really questioning how they are going to bring it all together so that in years to come, when I watch the entire series back again, it will feel like a consistent, flowing story.

Battlestar Galactica, however, is just going from strength to strength. It has never lost sight of what it was originally trying to say, and each plot development has been a natural evolution of the narrative. Sure, it has had some weak points – specifically in season two, when it got particularly episodic (what the hell was the point of that awful black market episode?) – but for a show of such otherwise consistently high quality, that is a minor flaw. The great thing about Battlestar is that even now, as the series is winding down and they are increasingly gaining momentum towards their unpredictable (but seemingly logical) conclusion, it has never forgotten the characters, and the smaller moments. Moments such as when the fractured relationship between Admiral Adama and his son Lee was healed a tiny bit just by a proud look from father to son after Lee had successfully destroyed the Cylon fuel ship, or when Gaius Baltar, isolated and alone as the fleet celebrate a victory, starts to believe that he is an instrument of God himself (both moments, actually, come from the same episode – the exemplary ‘Hand Of God’ in season one). The most recent episode, ‘The Oath’, while being heart-racingly exciting, also had these smaller moments, including a particularly great scene where Baltar makes a selfless (well, as selfless as Gaius Baltar can get, anyway) last-ditch attempt to contact the leader of the mutiny (no spoilers here) and implore him to call it off.

I used to think Lost was the most perfect show on television, and the first two seasons are, but while it used to be the show that gave me inspiration to think of my own TV show pilot, it is now just a show that gives me encouragement to actually write it. After all, if poorly-written crap like last night’s episode is held up as “better than anything else on primetime” then why shouldn’t mine be able to succeed?

Review: Frost/Nixon

LIGHTS, CAMERA... TALKING

dir: Ron Howard

starring: Michael Sheen, Frank Langella, Kevin Bacon

You could be forgiven for having been completely unaware of the interviews between talk-show host David Frost and disgraced ex-US President Richard Nixon before the publicity blitz of this film. However, director Ron Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan would want you to think that it was one of the most important moments for politics, journalism and basically American culture in modern history, and are willing to spend two hours to convince you of just that. Whether or not you end up believing them is one thing, but you can’t doubt their tenacity and the fact that they very nearly succeed is thanks in no small part to the committed cast, particularly (and unsurprisingly) Michael Sheen and Frank Langella, who serve as the titular acting duet.

Langella may be the one getting all the attention for his stooping, roaring performance as the proud, dying lion that is Richard Nixon, and it is easy to see why. Mimicry being what mimicry is, he naturally and effectively disappears inside the role, and the entire film seems built to serve his performance (even pointing it out as Frost is criticized by his team for allowing Nixon to dominate the early interviews). However, it is Michael Sheen who quietly steals the film away from him, not only bringing the much needed pathos to a film that could otherwise have just been two arrogant men talking to one-another, but also imbuing the film with a surprising lightness of touch. In particular, the early scenes establishing Frost’s character – the loud suits, the self-assured flirting, the ridiculous celebrity embellishments – are very funny in Sheen’s capable grasp. It seems at first that he may just be doing his Tony Blair again, the role that made him famous in both The Deal and The Queen, but so sleight is Sheen’s hand that you won’t notice as the cocky smile weakens and the shifty eyes deepen that he has turned the character completely inside-out.

While the film is all about Frost and Nixon, however, with a cast featuring such heavyweight character actors as Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt, there is some great acting from the sidelines as well, and it all serves as a welcome distraction from the weight of Peter Morgan’s screenplay, which is almost as self-aggrandizing as David Frost himself. Morgan is a fine writer, and as he has proved with The Queen and The Last King Of Scotland, he is extremely adept at making engrossing stories and compelling characters out of episodes of history that wouldn’t immediately seem to lend themselves to theatricalising. Along with Ron Howard, himself a consistently strong, adept filmmaker, he has created an absorbing, well-paced tale (apart from the misjudged documentary structure it has given itself), successfully finding character arcs in what is a very talky piece as the publicity-hungry Frost soon begins to realise that his selfish reasons for wanting to conduct the interviews – fame and fortune in America – pale in comparison to what his team, and the entire American public, expect of them – the trial Nixon never had to face over the Watergate Scandal.

However, Morgan is ultimately unable to escape from the inherent problems that the story itself brings with it. The film obviously fancies itself a call for the necessities of journalism on this age of Fox News, or a topical parable about a despised ex-President marred in scandal being brought to justice (how many Americans must wish that someone like David Frost was around nowadays?) but there is no ignoring the fact that the Frost/Nixon interviews were merely a relatively inconsequential event here being treated as if they were life-and-death.

VERDICT: *** out of *****

Review: Rachel Getting Married

"MARRIED" GETS A WARM RECEPTION

dir: Jonathan Demme

starring: Anne Hathaway, Rosemary DeWitt, Bill Irwin

For such a famous movie star, Anne Hathaway has been on the sidelines through her whole career. Her starring role in The Devil Wears Prada was overshadowed by Meryl Streep, she was is always the forgotten member of the Brokeback Mountain quadruplet, and while her contemporaries such as Rachel McAdams and Michelle Williams have won challenging parts and critical acclaim, she has always been stuck labelled as a “Disney princess” because of her early films The Princess Diaries and Ella Enchanted. So it’s no wonder that she was attracted to her role in Rachel Getting Married. The whole film revolves around her – even the other characters are aware of it (much to their frustration).

Hathaway plays the character of the damaged, emotionally unstable Kym, a recovering drug addict who has been released from rehab for the weekend to attend her sister Rachel’s wedding, and in doing so brings up home truths and past demons which the family had hoped to keep out of such a beautiful occasion. However, while Hathaway serves as the catalyst for events, the film is a true ensemble and is about all the guests and party-goers – much like a real wedding.

Director Jonathan Demme and his cinematographer Declan Quinn do a great job creating the atmosphere of a real wedding video. The whole film is shot in a hand-held, home-movie style, with characters often acknowledging the camera and sometimes the other cameras in the room even getting in the shot. However, this style is often at odds with the random bursts of melodrama that Jenny Lumet’s (daughter of the great director Sidney Lumet) screenplay delivers. Demme makes sure that his self-aware filmmaking technique is reigned back for such scenes, so as to allow them to speak for themselves, but even that can’t save misjudged moments such as Kym’s confrontation with her estranged mother (Debra Winger). The skeleton that lies in the closet of the family’s past also seems a little bit over-the-top for such an intimate, otherwise unsentimental film. Once it has been revealed, you start to question how realistic it would be for Kym and Rachel to share the banter that they do.

Such criticisms do little to ruin the great multi-cultural spirit that the entire cast and crew work to create, however. There is no formal “score”, but music is extremely important to the film, which is full of diagetic world music that comes from different sources from the wedding band playing constantly all weekend (in a humorous in-joke) to the groom’s sweet a capella performance of Neil Young’s “Unknown Legend”, and although we don’t meet every guest at the wedding, we observe everyone as Demme’s roaming cameras capture the ever present ensemble cast filling out the scenes like background furniture.

Of the characters that we do become familiar with, however, from Rachel’s groom (TV On The Radio front-man Tunde Adebimpe) and his best man (and the story’s awkwardly forced love-interest for Kym) to Rachel’s best friend and bridesmaid, it is Rosemary DeWitt as the titular bride-to-be, Rachel, and Bill Irwin as her and Kym’s big hearted but oblivious father who particularly stand out. Along with Hathaway, the three perform a great triumvirate of simmering tension and convincing familial bond. DeWitt especially has a tough role to play as she has to convince us that not only is the doe-eyed, former sweet-natured Disney princess Hathaway a selfish attention-seeker undeserving of such consideration, but also show us why even Rachel herself ignores all else to pander to her sister’s insecurities.

Which of course, as the film itself does, brings it back to Anne Hathaway, who obviously saw the career-changing potential in her character, at one moment delivering a icy, deadpan quip and at another suffering an hysterical breakdown, and she approaches it with relish. It is not an easy part to play, and to her credit, Hathaway doesn’t shy away from the unlikeable aspects of Kym’s character, of which there are many. The screenplay asks us to do as her family does, and if we can’t like her or understand her, we at least have to accept her. And it is this spirit that will resonate with you long after you have left the cinema. The film may have its flaws, but it is so forgiving and understanding of the flaws of its inhabitants that you can’t help but respond in kind.

VERDICT: *** out of *****

Welsh Psycho

This is probably old news now, being that it started doing the internet rounds yesterday (time moves fast on the old web) but I thought it was hillarious. It is an audio clip recorded on the set of Terminator Salvation capturing Christian Bale going mental at the director of photography for walking into a shot:

Most people think Bale needs anger-management or something (especially after the little “beating up his Mum and sister” incident last year) but it sounds to me like he was just giving the DP the telling off he deserves. I know from personal experience how annoying it can be to be filming and then someone looks at the camera or whatever, and that is just for a 5-minute film to show my University class, let alone a $200 million movie with a huge crew and a deadline to meet.

To me, the real story here is the fact that director McG stood by and did nothing like a coward while his star demeaned his director of photography (who is probably second only to the director on set) in front of the entire cast and crew. Talk about unprofessional.

I imagine the whole situation was magnified by the fact that they were shooting a Terminator film, so Bale had probably got himself into an intense, aggressive mind-set which unfortunately carried over when the cameras stopped rolling. But it’s hardly Zach Braff on Punk'd when he ruined his loveably affable Scrubs character by suddenly going mental at some kids - we all know what Bale is like, and if anything this just makes me like him more. Now when I watch American Psycho and Batman and The Prestige and The Machinist and see him being an intense, murdering psycho, I know it isn't an act.

Review: Valkyrie

THE CRUISE-UAL SUSPECTS

dir: Bryan Singer

starring: Tom Cruise, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy

Most thrillers rely on a sense of mystery, that is the point of them - to thrill the audience to the edge of their seats wondering “what is going to happen next?” So how do you build a thriller around a story of which the audience knows the outcome right from the start? This is the case with Valkyrie, based on the conspiracy to kill Hitler by a group of his own Nazi generals, and I don’t think any journalistic codes of ethics are being broken when I tell you that the plot fails. Not only that, but the film has been plagued by pre-release rumours and speculation about everything from test audiences panning it to critics writing it off before they had even seen it simply because Tom Cruise doesn’t attempt a German accent. However, from this has been crafted a tense, engrossing war thriller.

Director Bryan Singer is back in the territory of his breakthrough film, The Usual Suspects: a group of plotters involved in a plan in which everything goes horrifyingly wrong. Throughout his career, from Suspects to first two X-Men movies (i.e. the good ones) and Superman Returns, Singer has never made a dud, so why pundits thought it would end up being so is probably the biggest mystery of the entire film. Along with the likes of Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson, Singer is one of the best in the business at shepherding an ensemble cast, and the way he does so here is one of the film’s major strengths. He works masterfully in introducing us to the major figures in the plot, allowing us to tell them apart, explaining their roles and suggesting their differences and, to his credit, never allows proceedings to simply deteriorate into a star vehicle for Cruise, who provides a perfectly fine anchor for the story to centre around (say what you will about Tom, no one does defiant heroism like him).

The taut and crisply paced direction is aided in no small way by the skilfully efficient screenplay (from Nathan Alexander and Usual Suspects writer Christopher McQuarrie). The film is built around the idea that the biggest plans revolve around the tiny details, and it spares none of them yet still manages to make such a complex story coherent and seem almost straightforward. However, this almost complete submission to the plot does sacrifice attention to the characters.

Colonel Claus Von Stauffenberg, the man who engineered the entire plan, is clearly an interesting and complex character – a career military man and a Nazi who is willing to risk everything, even the safety of his own family, to kill Hitler, yet Tom Cruise never has the opportunity to play him as anything but intense and determined. We see the group discuss the morality of murdering Hitler rather than simply overthrowing him and whether the risk of the plot is worth it with the Allied forces looming over Belin, but we never find out why Stauffenberg, or any of the other members of the conspiracy, have gone from Nazi generals to deciding to rid themselves of their Führer. Although maybe the audience’s own knowledge of history is supposed to fill in those plot points for us. Who needs a “reason” for wanting to murder Adolf Hitler?

With this knowledge of history in mind, it is perhaps surprising that the greatest success of Valkyrie is that there are still genuine twists. The makers of the film have been blessed with the fact that the details of the plot are still relatively obscure, so although we know that the bomb intended to kill Hitler did not succeed, it is the aftermath of this sequence which is the most intriguing. The plot fails at about the halfway point of the story, and I guarantee that everything that takes place afterwards will be news to you, and that despite yourself, you will end up on the edge of your seat wondering how it is going to end.

VERDICT: *** out of *****

Review: The Wrestler

DO YOU SMELL WHAT THE ROURKE IS COOKIN'?

dir: Darren Aronofsky

starring: Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood

The underdog and the comeback are the staples of the sports movie genre, from The Champ to Rudy, even Mr. Baseball, and The Wrestler is no different. However, this time, the plucky challengers fighting against the odds and one-time heroes looking to get back on top are the off-screen stories, rather than on.

Mickey Rourke plays the wrestler in question: a washed-up, battered one-time 80’s icon considered past his prime by anyone who cares to remember him, a character so close to Rourke’s own real-life story of a career self-destructed by drugs, fights and bad decisions that almost from the beginning of the film, the line between how much of the performance is an act and how much is real becomes blurred. You will have heard a lot in the media about his comeback role as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a former professional wrestling star now working for a pittance on the independent circuit, forced to live in a trailer park and make ends meet by manning the deli at a supermarket, and it is well deserved, but if you’re looking for an equally uplifting story on-screen, you’ve come to the wrong place. Although Randy dreams of one day stepping back into the ring for the big leagues, this ain’t no Rocky. Randy is a “broken down piece of meat”, not a contenduh, and there isn’t much in the way of character arcs or sentimental scenes of triumph or overcoming adversity, but that is what one should expect from director Darren Aronofsky, he who directed the unrelenting, freaky-deaky Requiem For A Dream.

If Rourke is the comeback, then Aronofsky is the underdog of this particular sports-movie cliché. After the critical mauling that met his criminally misunderstood The Fountain, he seems to have dismissed the overly cinematic flourishes and visual embellishments that have marked his work so far and gone in the complete opposite direction, creating a small, low-budget character study, with the focus being on the atmosphere and sense of place, and it is this aspect in which The Wrestler scores on every level. His hand-held camera follows Rourke from shabby school gyms and grubby community centers to seedy strip joints (where Randy meets his favorite stripper and the only person who understands him, Cassidy, played winningly and with great naturalism by her of the perennial heart-of-gold, Marissa Tomei) and, of course, into the wrestling ring, which is captured perfectly. As Rourke and his fellow wrestlers (all played by real-life independent professionals) leap off ladders into barbed wire-tables and bounce off the ropes into a body-crunching move from their opponent, you can’t help but pity them. Randy’s limited self-worth and belief that it is all he can do have driven him to this. The authenticity that Aronofsky captures works wonders in enhancing Mickey Rourke’s already moving performance, but to his credit, Rourke never allows the film to become a downer. It may seem like an easy performance for him, as Randy is characterized by the grotesque physical features (the swollen face, the leathery, fake-tanned skin) that define Rourke himself, but with his self-deprecating sense of humour he comes across as a likeable chump while a lesser actor (such as the studio’s terrible first choice for the role, Nicholas Cage) may have used the excuse to emote and “act”.

However, not everything operates on this level. The script, in particular, is predictable and contains some awkward moments (particularly when Randy goes and sees his estranged daughter, played by Evan Rachel Wood who, to her credit, almost overcomes the clunky dialogue written for her). The story is merely a stage on which to display Rourke and Aronofsky’s work, but even the director himself makes some bad decisions. When Randy walks through the back of the supermarket, about to walk through the plastic curtains onto the deli counter, did we really need the dubbed-over crowd noise to understand the parallel between this and Randy walking backstage at a wrestling show? However, such faults are minor compared to the film’s achievements. Randy The Ram may be a “one-trick pony”, but The Wrestler is definitely a contender.

VERDICT: **** out of *****

Oscar Nom Reactions (10 days late, whoops)

I haven’t updated for a while (over a week, Jesus) but it’s taken me that long to get over the shock of the Oscar nominations.

Well, not really, because like I said in my last post, this has been a particularly boring year. Even though there is no consensus on who the actual winners might be, the nominees have been set in stone for a while. However, there were some surprises, but we’ll get to them in a minute.

The strange phenomenon this year regarding the Oscar nominations has been for the media to try and scrutinize how they reflect the society in which we now live in. In what ways will the collection of films that the faceless “Academy” have deemed as the best of the year provide a representation of the zeitgeist for historians in the future. In the post-Obama era, will the pick of Slumdog Millionaire as Best Picture winner-apparent show how the world was feeling particularly international and globally-minded, or will the record-tying nominations haul of The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button show that America had closed its borders and turned even more insular and picked a home-grown big-budget Hollywood epic in this time of economic despair? To be honest, both analyses would be wrong.

Like I said last week, “nobody knows anything”, and last Thursday morning proved that. As always, when the dust cleared and all the predictions and declarations that “this film is a lock” or “that movie has no chance” (even, admittedly, from me) passed, the Academy did as they always did and just chose what they liked. Simple as that.

Now, here are my five nominees for “most surprising moments of the Oscar nominations” (catchy title, don’t you think?):

1. They loved The Reader

As Sally Field would say, they really loved it. They even loved it enough to ignore the potential category fraud of Kate Winslet as Best Supporting Actress and put her in her rightful place as 

Best Actress (which surely makes her the favorite to win now, which she wouldn’t necessarily have been had she been nominated for Revolutionary Road). Not only that, but they love Stephen Daldry. Only three films to his name, but a Best Director nomination for each of them. Watch now as pundits have seen the pattern emerge and his next movie becomes pre-ordained as a sure-fire Oscar nominee but ends up being ignored. The Academy have a habit of doing that, you know. They don’t like to be told what to think, they just like what they like. Although I’m sure the deaths this year of both beloved producers of the movie (and Oscar-winners) Sidney Pollack and Anthony Minghella didn’t hurt.

2. Harvey Is Back

Anyone who watched the Oscars in the 1990’s will know that Harvey Weinstein dominated for the entire decade. By taking films with mainstream, audience-friendly sensibilities such as Pulp Fiction or The English Patient and giving them art-house friendly credentials by 

distributing them under the Miramax banner, he created an Oscar formula that couldn’t fail, and a Miramax movie was nominated for Best Picture at least once every year all the way from 1992 to 2004, with Harvey himself leading the campaign trail. Since the Weinstein brothers were kicked out of Miramax and founded The Weinstein Company, things have been quiet on the Harvey front, but when The Reader’s name was called out on nominations morning, it meant one thing – Weinstein is back in the race! And anyone who thought he may have changed his tact and become a bit more passive and relaxed nowadays were reintroduced to the old Harvey that very afternoon, as he sent out a press release positioning his movie as the underdog in the race, and promising that it would win Best Picture. Welcome back, Harvey. The Oscars haven’t been as fun without you.

3. omg they hated the dark knight!!!

Well, they didn’t hate it. Despite what you may have read in the papers or websites, The Dark Knight wasn’t “snubbed” or “ignored”, it just wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. Eight nominations is a hell of an achievement for a genre-film that was released in the summer, and it judging from its run of guild nominations and critics awards, it must have come pretty close to the finish line. It may not have made it to the final five, but just the simple fact that a film like it got as close as it did will certainly have repercussions on Hollywood over the next couple of years at least, and it has opened a lot of doors for genre films – be they comic-book, horror or sci-fi – to be taken seriously by both the critics and awards bodies, like The Lord Of The Rings before it. (For what it’s worth, I think that the LOTR trilogy’s Oscar success paved the way for The Dark Knight’s campaign).

4. The Music Branch went full retard

Anyone who may have taken the time to have even the briefest look at the Best Song nominees over the past couple of years (well, even since it’s inception) will know that it is a category with very little value, apart from every once in a while when it will actually see the light and 

give it to a deserving winner like Once last year. But the small way they went a year ago to building some respect by awarding that great film was totally destroyed this year when they DIDN’T NOMINATE BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN! Anyone who has seen The Wrestler or even just heard the song (called, incidentally, “The Wrestler”) will know that it is clearly the best song written for a film this year (though admittedly, that’s usually not the highest praise you can bestow) but because of category rule changes that are both too boring and too complex to explain, the Boss was ignored. I’m sure it’s probably the last thing on Springsteen’s mind, but along with The Dark Knight and WALL•E not being nominated for Best Picture, it has gone some way to further damaging the Academy’s already fractured reputation.

5. They weren’t Happy with Sally

Sally Hawkins wasn’t nominated for Happy-Go-Lucky, which was not only a surprise (because Mike Leigh’s female muses always do well 

with the Academy, be it Brenda Blethyn in Secrets & Lies or Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake) but also unprecedented, because in the 34 years that the National Society Of Film Critics, the LA Film Critics, the New York Film Critics and the Golden Globes have all existed, only SEVEN women have won all four – Sally Field for Norma Rae, Meryl Streep for Sophie’s Choice, Michelle Pfeiffer for The Fabulous Baker Boys, Emma Thompson for Howard’s End, Holly Hunter for The Piano, Helen Mirren for The Queen and, this year, Sally Hawkins for Happy-Go-Lucky. All of the other six women were nominated for Oscars, and all but one of them won (Michelle Pfeiffer being the unlucky one). I don’t really know how to explain it, because I thought she was a sure-thing. I guess it’s just that “nobody knows anything”.