Flight Films #7: The Other Woman

This isn’t really my sort of film, but I thought I’d watch it for something light and easy and because Jun and I considered going to see it purely because it had Nicki Minaj in it – and she after all gave us the holiday’s theme song.

A silly film about a licentious conman who cheats on his wife with numerous women – until they find out about it and decide first to screw with him and then to bust him. Quite apart from coming from that bizarre and alien world of American dating – where it seems everyone is expected to have a few dozen short-term relationships a year – this is a definite chick-flick. Its humour primarily comes from having a shrill, ditzy woman as the wife doing silly things, and occasional poop and body part jokes – though there are some great little off-beat natural moments.

Can’t say I found it very interesting at all or rooted for any of the characters very much – though they all acted as well as they could under the circumstances – but I was lightly amused. And Minaj’s small role was done perfectly.  

Flight Films #5: Divergent

There was nothing very original on offer with Divergent, but what it did, it did well – and certainly made for a more satisfying film than the similar The Hunger Games.

Reminding me of The Wind Singer but very like every other sci-fi about a caste system and main characters who do not conform, it followed a young, spirited girl who like everyone else in her enclosed society, takes a test in her teens to determine the entire course of the rest of her life. She has been brought up in the worthy Abnegation faction, who essentially do charity work and live ascetic lives, and because of this nobility are the entire society’s governors.

Though a film that lends itself to an awesome trailer, with a focus on dream imagery, it was actually very straightforward and ordinary. After Beatrice chooses to join the Dauntless, the peacekeepers, the film segues into the obvious boot-camp film where Beatrice struggles to make the cut against more physically able students but shows her super-special-ness in the natural talent when facing fears category. In a classic American anti-intellectual twist, not only is the kid who was brought up in the bookish ‘Erudite’ faction the real arsehole amongst Trice’s classmates, but the Erudites as a whole have launched a dumb plan to mind-control the Dauntless and slaughter the Abnegations so that they can take over. Because, presumably, the smart ones are not actually very smart and prefer incredibly obvious power-grabs.

Of course, the ones to stop them are the Divergents. The lawyer faction, Candour, apparently never look into the matter, while the last faction are just Earth Ponies, and nobody cares about them. Unsurprisingly, Trice finds an ally in a smoulderingly hot young man who is also divergent, graduated top of his class at Dauntless, and steps in to save her whenever she’s a damsel in distress, which is rather often for a film feminists are very keen on.  

The plot is obvious, the characters thin and the overarching plot unlikely, but the film is fun to watch and easy. Solid. 

Flight films #3: Saving Mr Banks

Another I regretted missing in the cinemas, but had another chance to see! And also quite my favourite of the films I saw on the flight. I’m not sure how true the story is – presumably at least the story of her being prickly giving the rights away and making extraordinary demands was based on reality, especially given the real tapes played at the end, but I think much of the backstory was likely embellished. It’s very popular to claim that an author’s best-known work must be entirely based on real, harrowing elements of their life, so I’m sceptical that was genuinely the case.

On the other hand, this is a marvellous story, essentially with three parts – Pamela’s life growing up in Australia with an alcoholic father, which is done sensitively; the story of Walt Disney trying to get an insight into this difficult woman’s hangups; and the story of the creative team, including the Sherman Brothers, trying to understand the writer’s bizarre requests. The implication is that Marry Poppins is really about the attempt to save a self-destructive, alcoholic bank manager father, which I don’t really buy – but which works very well as a film. Peripherally, there is also the rather nice relationship between Pamela and her driver, probably my favourite of the roles that Paul Giamatti has ever done.

This film is both much heavier than I expected and much more artistic. The different eras and locations are expertly evoked through subtle filmmaking techniques and the performances are top-notch. Emma Thompson is perfect for the role and Tom Hanks has the slightly oily charisma of Walt Disney beautifully. I was engaged throughout and there wasn’t a character I didn’t find interesting. Very enjoyable!

Flight films - #2: Transcendence

To follow The Railway Man, I wanted something stupid that still took itself seriously. From the trailers, Transcendence looked like it would be just that. Johnny Depp uploads his consciousness to a computer and becomes something greater than humanity. Unfortunately, there was rather too much of the serious and not enough of the stupid. Yes, they end up attacking a transcendent being with a bunch of guns and mortars, but the entertainment value here is extremely low.

The concept neatly skirts the interesting question of what would happen if someone uploaded their consciousness but also still had their original mind by having it happen when Depp’s character is dying. The cause? A terrorist group who think the technology he is developing is dangerous. Which of course it is, and provides antagonists/saviours later on.

There are so many things that are stupid. With this sort of nanotechnology why doesn’t Depp immediately build a body? Why isn’t he making self-contained units so that the system can persist no matter what? Why create a huge conspicuous headquarters when the technology could be incredibly discreet? And why on earth start enhancing and controlling humans against their will when it’s obvious where that would lead. Of course, taking this where something with transcendental intelligence would actually take it would mean no story, but in all honesty there was next to no story anyway.

I wasn’t expecting much, but this was a disappointment anyway. Which is pretty damning!

Flight films - #1: The Railway Man

I was a little sorry to have missed Prisoner of War film The Railway Man when it came along a few months back, and while it was a somewhat odd film to watch as an Englishman en route to Japan on a plane full of Japanese people, I was pleased to be able to watch it. Though at times ponderous and worthy, with a very flabby middle arc, this was a touching and enjoyable film.

The opening part introduces Colin Firth’s Lomax character, who is somewhat fixated on trains, knowing all the routes and being highly enthusiastic about things like gauges and timetables. He meets a woman on the train, played by Nicole Kidman with a very good English accent, and there’s a spark between them. He slightly creepily stalks her, but she likes it and they’re soon married. However, he has mental walls up, and the second part is devoted to the wife probing her husband’s friends to find out the truth – that as a POW in Singapore, her husband worked on the infamous Death Railway as an engineer. While one of the lucky ones not put to work as a labourer, he puts together a radio receiver, which when found results in brutal torture. In later life, he finds out his old torturer is still alive and goes to Japan to confront him.

The confrontation is of course the highlight of the film, though of course mostly this film is about talking, finding peace and whether or not a man has the capacity to forgive. Honestly, I think I would have found the book more touching, or even a documentary, with the most affecting part certainly being pictures of the real people involved in this story. But the performances were strong and the subject interesting, so I’m glad I watched. 

The Purge 2: Anarchy

Amazingly, the debacle that was last year’s The Purge managed to get a sequel.

To be fair, one of the things that I thought when watching the original was that so much more could have been done with the premise – so here we have more being done with it. But none of it is the right stuff, and critically none of it is filtered through the stories of characters anybody should actually care about.

The last film had a Panic Room-style claustrophobia to it, with a family trapped in their house with nutcases trying to get in. This one goes the other way, taking its characters out into the wider world of violence and destruction.

Of course, the exploration of ‘all crime is legal’ remains extremely limited. Stronger explosives are explicitly banned, cybercrime and fraud aren’t mentioned, rape is hinted at being permissible but this kind of film is never going to mention child abuse, and it seems a little remiss that the decadent parties glimpsed here don’t feature any drug use whatsoever. Still, if I wondered before why people don’t go around in huge armoured vehicles with heavy arms, the answer is that they do – even if it’s only the evil gubmint. Yes, a rather silly anti-authority theme pervades here, because not only do we see that the government managed to bring in this ridiculous law, they feel there aren’t enough deaths so send out killing squads to kill off the more vulnerable and undesirable parts of society – ie targetting poorer black communities. Sounds like it would inevitably lead to revolution? Yeah, that’s a given. Though apparently we should believe that the government here couldn’t possibly have thought that would happen.

Our story follows one badass ex-cop who is in completely the wrong sort of film and makes attempts at real social comment seem absurd – but who at least you can get behind. He goes about this anarchic world kicking the butts of trained SWAT-style units and ‘purging’ lunatics from all walks of life single-handedly, all on a quest for revenge. He’s fun but doesn’t belong in a film that ought to be trying to get its audience to feel the would be helpless and vulnerable in this situation. He’s joined by four others brought together by a dramatic episode involving the nasty gubmint. Two are random white people who are incredibly annoying, snapping at each other over their ailing relationship and making stupid noises when they need to be quiet. The others are a black mother and daughter – the mother is probably the most sympathetic and believable character, and I can see why she would lie to protect her daughter, but I couldn’t believe she just got upset about her husband at the very start of her story until there’s some action, whereupon she forgot all about him. The daughter, though – oh, she annoyed me so much. She was supposed to get under the badass guy’s skin by being winsome and innocent and yet having a child’s instinctive knowledge of what is right. But she was just incredibly cocky, irritating and stubborn. There were many times in the film I thought ‘They would just kneecap the other person at this point, to keep them talking but utterly subdued’. But with her, I actually wished they would.

The plot is a total mess. They set up so much that goes nowhere. The gubmint plot? Left for the sequel. The revolution? Left for the sequel. The woman with the loudspeaker and automatic up on the roof? Disappears. The guys in masks (including a painted fencing mask, woo!) who turn out to be not killers but facilitators? Peripheral. After the black characters are forced out of their apartment on the flimsiest of excuses (the SWAT team could have killed them, but no, some grizzly guy wants to mow them down personally), our main characters unite. Rather than take the armoured truck, they set off on foot. We’re told nowhere is safe, yet the banking district is utterly deserted. They go to an apartment where of course violence erupts, get everyone in the building killed by drawing the gubmint there, escape and then get caught and sold to elites who purge in relative safety. They haven’t met Mr. Badass, though – who takes care of this momentary dip into the territory of The Running Man – or, y’know, The Hunger Games. They are in an enemy stronghold, though, but luckily the revolution happens just then and they can escape.

Badass man is given the chance to show mercy. Will he? Well, if he does I’m sure some hackneyed, highly coincidental event will show him that mercy is the best course of action, even though of course mercy could just has easily have meant the opposite. Hypothetically, of course, because spoilers are bad. In that sort of scenario, though, I’m sure the ER of a city hospital would be totally empty after a night of murders and attempted murders, and you’d be able to drive right up to its door.

This film broached several more interesting avenues of thought connected to its ridiculous premise...but didn’t do a good job on any of it, made that premise more ridiculous still, and did it with incredibly annoying characters. Very bad.