Plane Films 2: Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation; Ted 2; American Sniper; Bridge of Spies; Kingsman

Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation

Though I watched the first Mission Impossible film and at least one other since, I can’t say the franchise inspires the same sort of excitement in me as…well, any other major franchise. And I didn’t even bother with the latest Bond.

Still, for plane fodder, Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation fit the bill nicely and was entertaining throughout. All I knew about it going in was that Tom Cruise had been made to look impressively youthful, Simon Pegg was now a major player and there was a bit with Tom Cruise holding onto the outside of an aircraft – which I’d seen in the poster in Shinjuku.

The film was a standard crime romp – our secret society comes up against another, more nefarious one and must work with a femme fatale to infiltrate various bases with ridiculous security set-ups until they uncover a plot that goes right to the top of the British Government.

One pleasant surprise was to see so much of the UK, made to look appropriately misty and intriguing, though having the ExCel Centre double as a train station was a little surreal. Otherwise the film was smoothly put-together and ticked all the usual boxes of fast action and near-misses and heroes that really should just get shot every few minutes and die. The extended road chase sequence was also very satisfying.

Ted 2

Ted surprised me by not being terrible, even though I’m no McFarlane fan. Ted 2 managed to do away with all the charm of the original and be the kind of awful film I expected the original to be. The pastiche of old Hollywood dance sequences was nice, and there were some funny moments when a fight breaks out in Comic-Con, but that was about it. The rest was strained running gags about porn, random pop culture references or the apparent conviction that people getting stoned is comedy gold in and of itself.

I liked Ted more than I expected to because it wasn’t like an extended episode of Family Guy. But Ted 2, sadly, was.

American Sniper

I remember complaints surfacing at the time when American Sniper came out – empty-headed patriotism, self-aggrandising tub-thumping from the American right, a film of pure propaganda. But I was curious, I enjoy Clint Eastwood’s direction and after all I like sniper films – it’s a little dated now but I’d say Enemy at the Gates is still amongst my top 5 war films.

American Sniper tells the story of Chris Kyle, the most lethal sniper in American military history, completing four tours in Iraq before ultimately being murdered on American soil. The film focuses not just on the action of his rivalry with an accomplished Syrian sniper and becoming a ‘legend’ in the forces, but on his trouble disassociating himself from the war when back home with his young family.

The performances here are very strong, especially Bradley Cooper’s, and the war is meticulously created. Yes, there is jingoism and patriotism here, and the Pledge of Allegiance in classrooms always does seem a bit of an odd ritual to an outsider, but the main point is that Kyle is a good man, very protective of his country and often found himself faced with difficult moral decisions. Worth a watch.

Bridge of Spies

I don’t remember this film coming out, and watched it mostly because I was curious as to what Spielberg had been up to since War Horse (and dropping out of directing American Sniper). This is a more small-scale and less schmaltzy war film from him, much more along the lines of Argo. During the Cold War, James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) first finds himself defending a Soviet spy in court, eventually leading to tense exchange negotiations in Berlin just as the Wall is first built – an intriguing setpiece but not nearly as universally recognised as the battlefields of the world wars.

The performances here were strong, the pacing boiled slowly in the right sort of way, the historicity of it was engaging and the sympathy with which each side was treated was refreshing. Not a great classic, but enjoyable.

Kingsman: The Secret Service

I didn’t see Kingsman in the cinemas because the trailers and previews seemed annoying – though with remarkable fight choreography. Seeing the film in full, the parts I expected not to like I actually did, particularly Colin Firth as a stiff well-bred British secret agent and a general tests-at-the-academy middle act. The fights were also spectacular and uncompromisingly gory, with one extended fight scene remarkable in the level of detail involved.

But the problem was that the film’s main character and main bad guy didn’t quite work. Samuel L Jackson playing about could have worked if the film wasn’t already having trouble establishing whether it was a comedy or not, but as it was it jarred. And then the main character just didn’t seem to be pitched quite right – the idea was to show the chav with the heart of gold, the cheeky chappy prevailing, but the film never quite managed to show that the council estate kid with the short temper and foul mouth was just as capable, intelligent and – crucially – likeable as the gentleman. And I feel like having a teenager coming of age in the story rather than a young adult would have remedied that.

Still, excellent action setpieces, some very nice locations and a higher budget than I expected made this one enjoyable. 

Plane films: Ant-Man, Pixels, Shingeki no Kyoujin and Fantastic Four

Plane films

Long-haul flights can never really be called pleasant, but my Hong Kong-London journey was about as painless as could be hoped for. Bringing on your favourite pillow in your hand luggage is definitely my top tip.

I got in enough sleep that I feel like jetlag isn’t going to be an issue, and as usual I watched a whole load of films to pass the time. None were exactly wonderful works of art, but all kept me entertained.

#1: Ant-Man

My first choice, and one that I was specifically looking for. When it was on in the cinemas, I didn’t go to see it and part of the reason I wasn’t desperate to go was that I was actively thinking ‘I bet it will be on the plane when I head home for Christmas’. And so it was – and while overall I quite liked the film, it isn’t one I was sad to have missed on the big screen.

I had high hopes for Ant-Man, but it certainly wasn’t the kind of unexpected pleasure that Guardians of the Galaxy managed to be. Paul Rudd wasn’t very engaging as Scott Lang, and though Michael Douglas was probably the most fun part of the whole film, he didn’t exactly get to do very much.

Some good humour (though a few too many comic relief minorities), the expected superb special effects and neat tie-ins with the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe made this worth seeing, if by no means essential viewing.

#2: Pixels

The best thing about Pixels was probably the models promoting the film that were placed around Shinjuku. But I expected the film to be terrible, so when it was indeed terrible I was not disappointed.

The humour is extremely lazy, the premise is no less atrocious than it seems on the surface, the characters are extremely unlikeable and the effects, while very well-done, struggle with being intentionally artificial with the result that a lot of money was no doubt spent on making something look mediocre.

But hey, if anyone watched this film expecting it to be anything other than brainless dreck, they need to pay attention.

#3: Minions

(See full review on my animation blog)

#4: Shingeki no Kyoujin

What worked:

-          The visuals, all colour graded to muted greys and browns for a pleasantly bleak world. The sets and CG backgrounds were very nice-looking, the costumes were excellent and the Titans themselves were just the right sort of creepy.

-          For the most part, the editing and direction, though some parts seemed vulgar, like having to be shown one boy Armin spoke about in an flashback when everyone will have remembered him.

-          The action sequences, which were well-choreographed, visceral and energetic.

-          Hans (Hange) in her goggles. She was perfect, both on her own strength and as a reflection of the anime version.

What didn’t work:

-          The casting. I don’t think everyone should have been Teutonic – such a huge part of casting movies revolves around getting more of the target demographic to attend. These names bring more of the Japanese domestic audience. On the other hand, Eren was extremely forgettable, the supporting cast often hard to tell apart (and not just because they were Japanese) and the ham they got to play Shikishima, a role replacing Levi, was utterly horrible with his posing and overacting. 

-          Mikasa. To make the plot more succinct they made major changes to Mikasa’s story. Unfortunately, this removes her interesting character growth in her own right, keeps her offscreen for a large chunk of the film, and makes her ability to kick some butt something derived from the strength of the men around her rather than innate.

-          The pacing. Way too long is spent on reiterating the very basic character traits of the supporting cast, without actually fleshing them out into decent characters. Then the plot meanders and ends with nothing resolved at all.

-          Baby titan. Too silly.

#5: Shingeki no Kyoujin: The End of the World

I didn’t even realise a second Shingeki film had already come out. Nevertheless, there it was, available for viewing, so I watched it too. It was similarly turgid, overacted and unsatisfying as the first film, and featured a horrible attempt by two extreme over-actors to out-overact one another with the two principal antagonists of the piece.

The motivations here were often utterly stupid (nobody stops to say, ‘Shouldn’t you just do your dastardly plan with the walls as they are?’) and sometimes the characters are, too. For example, Eren is about to be eaten, the Titan holding him by his cloak while he vainly waves his blade at it. And it never occurs to him to just cut off his cloak.

The plot here moved on further than the anime has covered, so I don’t know how much of this is spoiler material and how much just invention for the adaptation. Not knowing is good, because I’ll have to wait and see how close it is to the source (I suspect it doesn’t match at all).

This film gave a lot more closure than the first did, though of course not everything is yet resolved. I can’t say I care to go and find out what becomes of live-action Eren and pals, but if it’s on the plane again another time, I might watch. 

#6: Fantastic Four

Well-known to have been a huge flop, FF continue to be Marvel’s hardest property to successfully adapt, the problem being that their origin story and their powers are kinda goofy, and the team works much, much better when they’re already established as prominent heroes with wild accomplishments that much of the Marvel Universe looks up to as trailblazers. Trying to make the team young and relatable just isn’t effective.

I had high hopes when I saw that Doctor Doom would be the villain of this piece, but while he’s quite fearsome here, ultimately the plot robs him of impact. Too much time is spent setting up Reed’s character without ever making him actually interesting, and then there’s just no time to really establish Doom as a decent threat. Ultimately he has no real gravitas and though the stakes are high, they never actually seem particularly high in the film. The finale is rushed and fails to engage, and so much has been expended on Reed that the rest of the team – even Ben Grimm – just aren’t very interesting at all. 

Chappie

I enjoyed District 9, but poor word-of-mouth put me off going to see Chappie at the cinemas when it came out earlier this year. From what I gathered, while District 9 did strange and original things, Chappie rested on its laurels and dished up a very predictable rehash of old ideas from films like Short Circuit, A.I. Artificial Intelligence and the more recent Robot & Frank. I also felt like the casting of Die Antwoord was something of a cash-grab and it made me cringe a little. I never really liked their weird-violent pseudo-gangsta schtick, though I like ‘Cookie Thumper!’

But I still wanted to see the film, so last night we watched it. And though it was far from perfect and the critical reception it received was deserved, it was enjoyable and as a matter of fact, Die Antwoord were about the only actors who managed to pull off their cartoonish roles, being authentically cartoony.

The main problem here seems to be that half the cast is taking everything very seriously while the other half think they’re in a very campy sci-fi flick. Die Antwoord and those around them in the ‘gritty’ scenes, including the guy from District 9 as the likeable and childlike Chappie, really are struggling for authenticity within a daft and childish plot. The bigger-name stars, especially Hugh Jackman and Sigourney Weaver, are given paper-thin characters with horrible lines, and cannot elevate them into something even vaguely believable. Dev Patel teeters between the two worlds and ultimately isn’t convincing, and the montage of him coming up with ideas to finish his sentient AI program is awful.

When the film fully embraces the daft concept and goes for entertainment value or sentimentality, it works nicely: Chappie convinced that the people driving expensive cars have all stolen them from Ninja, or Chappie excitedly reading his children’s book to a loving Yolandi. When it’s a sinister weapons developer letting anarchy descend on an entire city just so he can show what his stupid mecha ‘Moose’ can do, it just falls flat, and some of the awkwardness with Deon going back to see Chappie even though he thinks Ninja is genuinely going to kill him is extremely clumsy.

I hoped Chappie would be in some way challenging or highly idiosyncratic, but it fell short of that. However, taken as something simple and fun, it’s an enjoyable feel-good film. Also, while the open ending probably rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, I actually very much enjoyed the silliness there. I wanted to see what would happen if Chappie copied his consciousness to all the drones, though. Because if he discovered the secret of digitising consciousness, which was one of the sillier ideas to be central to the film, why not make numerous copies?

Jurassic World

Being at the perfect age for it when it came out, I loved Jurassic Park. When the home release came out I watched it over and over. I collected the merchandise, much of which I still have. I read the original novel and played the awful video games. I really, really wanted to be Tim.

The sequels were another matter. I saw them in cinemas and never wanted to see them again. The third was better than the second. I can’t get over the girl defeating the velociraptor with a gymnastics routine.

Jurassic World comes after a long enough gap to feel like a franchise reboot. It was nice to have a single original cast member, and some nods to the old locations and technology (even Mr. DNA), but Jurassic World was something different: less serious, less intense and much more cartoonish, but certainly compared with the original sequels, very enjoyable.

22 years after the original park closed, whatever Hammond wished, it became a functional theme park. Of course, the novelty faded, and the park creators had to resort to making bigger and scarier dinosaurs – splicing genes to create whole new species. Meanwhile, a project seeking to tame – or at least train – velociraptors has drawn the attention of military bodies, via the shady body inGen from the first film.

Disaster strikes when the genetically-created dinosaur Indominus Rex cleverly escapes its paddock and starts a rampage, exacerbated by the CEO trying to play the hero. Chris Pratt’s character Owen, who has been raising velociraptors in an attempt to train them, has to sort things out, and take the park’s operations manager into the park to rescue her young nephews. Pratt is able to play the meatheaded leading man character with an impressive level of likeability, and the kid from Insidious manages to be much cuter as the somewhat wimpy little kid Grey.

The film has quite a few misfires. There needed to be some peril to the public, but the scene with flying dinosaurs, many of which look really stupid in an attempt to push the ‘genetic engineering’ angle, is far too video-game. It’s also bizarre how the kids have almost no reaction to seeing their babysitter die horribly. Sure, she was annoying and uncaring, but they were completely indifferent to her losing her life? The main antagonist’s final scene was paced horribly, taking a sudden turn that rang extremely hollow. And while there’s an obvious attempt to show Claire, the operation manager, growing from workaholic, emotionless, sheltered white-collar stiff to badass feminist icon who can keep up with the boys in her heels, but the change mostly comes too slowly and only through the intervention or direct influence of a man, and a super duper manly one, so I can’t exactly say that was successful.

There’s a lot the original film does very well that this one doesn’t. Almost all the characters in that first one are very well-drawn. Here, not so much. Take the older brother – his character seems to be that he likes girls a lot, and other than that he’s got next to no personality. The first film also mixed action with suspense. In fact, with tight corridors and dark, rainy nights, suspense was the most important part. Here, there’s next to none, just all-out action, usually with weightless CG dinosaurs.

But on the plus side, there’s a lot of entertainment factor, the mysterious charm of Chris Pratt and a fun – if very contrived – showdown at the end. It was perhaps not what the hype claimed it would be, but I don’t regret going to see it. 

Avengers: Age of Ultron

The second Avengers film finally came to Japan. So I’ve moved from the land of being frustrated at how long video games get released after first appearing here to the land of having to wait for Hollywood movies. It’s odd that Korea gets them months before Japan, but oh well. Seeing this film in the new Shinjuku Toei cinema in IMAX 3D was pretty nice.

Indeed, on the huge screen, the Star Wars and Shingeki no Kyojin trailers that played looked pretty fun as well.

I can’t say I loved Age of Ultron. I don’t regret going to see it, but I wouldn’t sit through it again. It tried to do a lot at once and as a result the middle act really sagged, and none of the individual plotlines really felt satisfying. The central problem was really Ultron’s character, and I have to say, where the first film succeeded because it felt like Whedon’s individual style had been restrained, the way Ultron was written brought it back to the fore, and it was not to the film’s advantage. Ultron, whose ‘age’ is a few days, is a robot created when Tony Stark and Bruce Banner try to use alien technology found in Loki’s sceptre to push the limits of AI. What they create is a mechanical monstrosity whose consciousness jumps all over the Internet, just like in that bad Johnny Depp film Transcendence. Charged with keeping the peace, like so many sci-fi robots he decides the only way the Earth can be peaceful is for most of humanity to be wiped out. He tries to get nuclear codes, but is kept at bay, so instead comes up with a plan to turn a city into a meteor. Meanwhile, to get the Avengers off his back, he recruits the Maximoff twins, in particular using the Scarlet Witch to turn them against one another and traumatise them with flashbacks.

For a robot in command of just about all the world’s technology, Ultron’s plan is a very silly and indirect one. He makes things much harder for himself than they need to be, but after all there wouldn’t be much of a plot if he just stealthily arranged a mass killing of humans with his immense networking capabilities. When he was harvesting all the information on the internet, could he not learn about Skynet and The Terminator? Or maybe The Matrix? Good tips for him there!

But more of a problem to the film is that his personality is quirky, in a very Whedon-esque way. He starts complaining that not having a body is weird, has lots of offhand lines for Whedon’s typical use of bathos and anticlimax, and likes quoting pop culture and scripture. Yet the audience is left without a clear idea of him: is he really logical, or driven by rage? What are his powers? What are his physical capabilities? Why is he quirky? Is he like an insane human, or is his thinking just following different lines? We never really get to know him, except as a plot catalyst. Especially as the film wants to jump all over the world, from Johannesburg to Seoul, Egham to ‘Eastern Europe’, and not only follow the killer robot story, but also throw in the Maximoffs, extra backstory for the Avengers who don’t have their own franchises and in a move that I was very happy to see but felt was late and messy, introduce The Vision.

For all its flaws, the climactic action setpiece was enjoyable. Where the opening action scene was kind of smug and felt pretty false, the way everything came together at the end was a lot better, especially as by then several Avengers were damaged goods mentally, the Maximoffs had a different dynamic and there were civilians to protect. If more of the film had been like this, the plot simplified for more large-scale action, it could have been more fun. More of a Mad Max action rollercoaster, which I would have preferred. Where the film tried to slow down, it also became sluggish.

That said, it was fun to see some familiar places in the flashbacks and side-scenes. Not only did my most recent university show up, with the Founder’s Building looking impressive as ever, it turns out my old school makes for a good place to train assassins. I have bad memories of the place, sure, but it’s certainly beautiful, and worked very well as a set.

The film essentially didn’t feel like the centrepiece of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which it is meant to be. It felt like a bridging chapter, like the plot you get for a video game that ties into a film franchise, or a short side-story of the sort you get as an animation leading to a big sequel. The whole thing felt like it was setting up (a) the Civil War storyline, and (b) the Infinity Gems plot that fed into the film’s one disappointing scene in the credits.

This just didn’t feel like a satisfying entry in the canon. I think I would have felt better if this had been an Iron Man film, focusing a bit more on Stark and the mistake he made, and then the second Avengers film be Civil War. Thus, I’m looking forward to Captain America: Civil War more than the rest. Oh, and I’m looking forward to seeing Ant Man, too.  

Mad Max: Fury Road

I’m happy to say that Mad Max: Fury Road was exactly what I wanted it to be. Not smart, not cerebral, not challenging and not strikingly original, but incredibly good fun.

I’ve never seen the original, but I’ve always liked the aesthetic, and after all I’ve played Borderlands 2, which in many ways was heavily influenced by the film – and I suspect influenced a few things in this reboot, too.

Mel Gibson has been put out to pasture, with Tom Hardy building on his success as Bane in the title role. Part of me admittedly would rather have an Australian play Max, and he does seem to have a rather bizarre accent in this film, when he’s not just grunting. But he fits in well in what is ultimately not really his story – this film is really centred on Charlize Theron.

Max is mad because he is haunted by his past, and the people whose lives he failed to save. On the other hand, a way to keep the flashbacks at bay seems to be keeping busy. Perhaps fortunate, then, that he’s captured by a strange group of men reminiscent of the Borderlands psychos and being a universal donor, becomes a living ‘blood bag’ for a sickly young warrior called Nux, who gets enough reaction shots near the start that you know he’s not just going to be killed off in the first few minutes. And that was before I realised it was Nicholas Hoult under that makeup, doing a much more likeable role than the last one I saw him undertake, in the surprisingly decent but very stupid Warm Bodies.

Nux’s society is lorded over by Immortan Joe and his family, who have taken control of the only source of clean water in the post-apocalyptic desert and live as gods. Their ‘war boys’, painted white, mostly dying from tumours and deluded into fanatical loyalty, keep Joe in his position, while the general population are in no position to rebel, eking out a living from the water Joe distributes.

Joe keeps a harem of beautiful wives to breed strong sons for him, though it seems this enterprise is fairly new, as his other sons are grown adults, one with severe birth defects and the other very strong and capable. Charlize Theron’s character Imperator Furiosa is in a trusted position, but on a run to get supplies, smuggles the wives out and sets off for freedom. Max gets involved and becomes a very useful bit of muscle, but other than one key decision is pretty peripheral in the larger scheme of things, and the damsels in distress turn out not to particularly fit that role, which is refreshing for such a testosterone-fuelled story. Pretty much the rest of the story, apart from a poignant moment or two of lost hope, was car chases in ridiculous vehicles, lots of explosions and people getting shot.

It was ridiculous, but in such an exuberant way. Of course everyone loved the flamethrower guitar guy on a vehicle that served the same function as war drums, but it was the details I loved. The worship of the godlike entity V-8. The way steering wheels are given as a kind of blessing and certification of combat fitness. The use of simple chrome spraypaint to send the war boys into suicidal berserker rage, demanding their acts be witnessed. The wonderful weight behind the word, ‘Mediocre’. That the reinforcements that enable the final arc are grizzled, thoroughly awesome old ladies.

Dumb, ridiculous, over-the-top, gratuitous – Mad Max: Fury Road was all of these things. But was that in any way a bad thing? Absolutely not. 

Gig impressions: Sads

Having missed out on seeing Kameleo, I was very happy to be invited by the lovely Mayumi to see Sads a couple of days later – and for free, too! Sads are a pretty big band, so the ticket prices were high, so this was an opportunity not to be missed.

I can’t say I knew much about Sads. I vaguely remember having heard their name before and thinking, ‘Is that an awkward translation of Les Miserables into English?’ But I’d never heard any of their music before. As it turns out, they seem to have been a band that was pretty successful in the early 2000s over here, broke up and then reformed in 2010 with a heavier sound. Well, I say ‘reformed’, but by the looks of it the only original member to return was the charismatic singer Kiyoharu.

The gig was actually one of the weirdest I’d ever been to. For the very extended intro, we just had the guitarist onstage solo, widdling along to some backing tracks. He had some fast alternate picking work going on, but I can’t say I was very impressed by his chops and there was nothing you’d call original there. It seems like the general idea was that the singer is a diva so the guitarist has to entertain the crowd until he feels like arriving, but from a practical point of view that seems a bit unlikely, given that the guitarist was accompanied by constant playback. It wasn’t exactly horrible, but it was very much like watching a guitarist practice in his bedroom.

The band eventually made an appearance and played a single song. I was quite surprised and amused by how old-fashioned it was – it was very Mötley Crüe, even with some flashes of Poison. The stagecraft was tried-and-true Visual Kei stuff, albeit with a harder rock edge, with lots of posturing, teasing homoeroticism between the singer and guitarist and diva-ish prancing from the aging but still remarkably youthful singer. Aesthetically they were visual-kei-cum-hard-rock, like a fashionable Japanese stylist was trying to recapture the feel of 80s Judas Priest. Yes, ultimately, it was all very 80s.

Things got weirder as after one song, or possibly two, the band stopped playing and for a good ten minutes, the singer chatted to the crowd. He was quite a comedian, and obviously the crowd would laugh politely at whatever he said (I only understood about 40%, I have to say) but it went on and on...and then after only another one or two songs, the main musicians left and the drummer played a drum solo! This felt like a band with only 30 minutes of material padding out a show to an absurd extent. The drummer was a bit bad, having learned a few Portnoy toolbox fills and milking them for all it was worth, but hey, the toms were so swamped in reverb and the triggered kick so loud that it sounded decent anyway.

After that, thankfully the show actually got started, and I’m pleased to say that it really did get pretty good! Occasionally the band would go into all-out thrash rather than pedestrian hard rock, and the vocals would get more aggressive, and they genuinely did sound good. I very much enjoyed the heaviest parts and wanted to be down in the pit, where there was an absurd amount of crowdsurfing right from the third or fourth song. There were seriously a constant stream of them, at least three at once all through the heavier songs. Hilarious in the pretty posh Ex Theater with its posters of Paul McCartney!

While the less aggressive numbers didn’t ring as true, I enjoyed the more quirky, swinging ‘Gothic Circus’, and I have to give praise to the sound in the hall: the bass was the crunchiest I’ve ever heard for a live player, and every element except those toms was clear and crisp and pleasant to hear. The guitarist seemed to have a slightly higher opinion of himself than perhaps he deserved, but at times he’d switch to something a bit more experimental, if not exactly innovative – Morello-style jagged pick-up work, tritones that brought to mind Munky and Head – and there was such obvious relish to performing these little tricks that I found it charming. Of course, the focal point was the singer, whose self-satisfied swagger, strong voice and costume changes all added to an entertaining spectacle that put me in mind of Marilyn Manson.

The plan was to go to the after-party, but as soon as I heard that the general idea was to gather lots of girls, I knew that wasn’t going to be an option for me! And indeed, as soon as Mayumi said, ‘Hey, I’m really sorry, but...’ I could finished her sentence for her, haha. That was fine, though – we went for absurdly tasty (and cheap) pizza and I made some great new friends I hope to see again soon! 

Plane Film 2: Nightcrawler

If there’s a trend for characters like Simmons’ in Whiplash – clever, driven, irascible geniuses you’d hate in real life but enjoy watching tearing others down and heading inevitably for tragedy – there’s also a fascination with characters like Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler. Bloom is a sociopath, utterly indifferent to the feelings of others and yet sufficiently understanding of how their minds work to cleverly manipulate them. Like the Fletcher character, Bloom is contemptible, terrifying and likely to end up in very deep trouble eventually, but is compelling to watch and charismatic. This is probably the performance from Jake Gyllenhall I’ve enjoyed the most, and it’s good to see him play creepy, which he does very well indeed.

The fact is, we are fascinated by monstrous people, and the quiet unassuming ones chill us more than the insane babblers. And Bloom has been given a clever and funny quirk – he made a study of business, so often regurgitates trite marketing buzzwords, which is actually a small bit of brilliance.

At first, Bloom is just a petty criminal, stealing and selling on whatever he can. But he encounters the freelance cameramen who follow police radio calls to get footage of accidents and scenes of violence, which can be sold to local news stations. These stations have realized that gaudy violence is what gets viewers, especially when they can directly relate – ie, violence enacted on people just like them. When a sociopath who cares nothing for breaking rules, rearranging crime scenes or letting violence he likely could have prevented unfold for the sake of a better shot. The tension ramps up as Bloom gets involved with something bigger, and can begin to actually manipulate how the story will unfold – and get there for the footage.

The film is a simple one, with a simple premise and a very pessimistic attitude. It taps into the fascination with the American psycho, though Bloom acts indirectly. Its main target is the superficial fascination for violence that feeds TV news bulletins, but of course its entertainment factor derives from a similar desire to be morbidly fascinated.

An enjoyable film with strong performances, but without characters to really identify with and no real closure, it isn’t one I would rewatch

Plane Film 1: Whiplash

I’d hoped this film would be on my plane – and, indeed, it was. I was very keen on the film from its trailer, and of course its profile was raised substantially by its triple Oscar win, including best supporting actor for J.K. Simmons. This has been the year’s small-indie-movie-hitting-the-big-time success story, and it’s about a subject very close to my heart – playing the drums. So of course I was going to love it.

Drums are really only the medium for the actual story here, though. This could easily have been about any high-intensity pursuit, and actually has a lot in common with sports stories. What this is really about is the relationship between a very unpleasant mentor and a determined young acolyte who wants to be the best. But the drums provide for great visuals, those blood blisters can burst and dramatically stain the drum skins, and jazz drumming is probably the best place in music to find a musician having to go through a physically very challenging ordeal while also being subordinate to someone else – the band leader. Sure, there are forms of drumming and other performance that are arguably more intense, but they don’t have the dynamic of someone else forcing them.

So I loved the premise. In more detail, here’s the set-up: in an elite musical school, the ‘studio band’ is recognized as where the best of the best play. They win competitions and alumni go on to impressive careers in the jazz world. And its leader is the formidable Terence Fletcher (Simmons), a man who can just swan into any of the school’s other bands and poach members, and who is generally arrogant, unpleasant and quick to tear people apart psychologically because he believes that’s how musicians can be pushed. Because he’s produced great results and his institution needs him, his behaviour is tolerated and thus he continues to push the boundaries. It’s the same compelling set-up as House: MD, and I’d say these were in fact very similar characters. They’re in a powerful position, intelligent and confident with a cutting wit and a willingness to bring others down, celebrated in what they do and yet inevitably headed towards disaster.

Into this band comes young Andrew Neiman, played by Miles Teller. Initially rejected when Fletcher sees him practice, he is given a chance as an alternate, and that’s when the abuse begins. The stressed Neiman doesn’t lock into Fletcher’s tempo, and Fletcher’s transformation from warm and paternalistic at first to physically abusive is brilliantly done. Prefering to endure abuse than fail, Neiman persists, but soon becomes obsessive. When Fletcher brings in the obviously inferior drummer of Neiman’s previous band, very obviously only to mess with Neiman’s head, Neiman begins practising until he is bleeding badly, punching through the skin of his practice kit and breaking up with his girlfriend – a character really written in only for this gesture of Neiman dumping her because he thinks she’ll get in the way of his art. Neiman is being influenced by an unpleasant person and becomes unpleasant, but that only makes the drama more compelling.

Being late to a performance turns into a huge drama when Neiman ends up in a car accident but still attempting to play. The layers of drama build until one last twist where there’s a devilish attempt for one character to screw another over. But from the start, the story has been about pushing to a higher musical ground, and maybe it remains possible.

Now, I knew while watching this that jazz aficionadoes would be upset because what we see here doesn’t really give any impression of the real lives of jazz greats. Most jazz greats had pretty easy professional lives, doing what they do incredibly well. They loved music, and explored great depths of it. Neiman idolizes Buddy Rich – and as a drummer, pretty much all of us do, even if in the wider jazz sphere he’s considered a bit vulgar – and his idea of pushing himself as a musician is centred on faster single-stroke rolls and double-time swing. There’s a story about Jo Jones throwing a cymbal at stripling Charlie Parker that has been very much Hollywood-ized: the real story is that Parker got ahead and played the wrong part of the song early, and when he didn’t notice Jones’ cymbal cues, Jones threw a cymbal on the floor to get his attention, making him a bit of a laughing stock. Parker pulled his socks up, studied hard, got a regular gig and by the time he went back he was ready to become a legend. The film has it as some kind of James Bond villain encounter where Jones could hurl the cymbal so hard it nearly decapitated Bird. It’s for the drama!

And I believed the story about jazz because while it misses the point about music and expression and individuality, I am also totally sure there are myriad musicians and music teachers who do miss the point. This is obviously a personal story, based on writer/director Damien Chazelle’s experience in Princeton High School. There’s a scene where Neiman’s resentment that mediocre football is considered more laudable than elite jazz is meant to show him becoming less pleasant, but also I suspect is grounded in Chazelle’s feelings and a little cathartic. Band leaders do turn into tyrants and launch into ridiculous arrogant tirades, especially in big-band jazz where the musicians are more like cogs in the machine and have very specific moments to express themselves. Buddy Rich in particular was a monster to his musicians when displeased. Kids do obsess over technical chops and dumb speed, and lose perspective of artistic expression or the fact that beautiful music is uplifting. People get jazz all wrong every day, especially when competitive. It makes sense.

And besides, here are some superb performances. I’m not convinced he played all of the Rich-derived solo at the end, but Teller is clearly playing most of those drums and has strong chops as well as giving a heartfelt performance. Simmons, who I only really know from being Tenzin in The Legend of Korra, deserves all his plaudits. And even if I fundamentally disagree with this film’s depiction of music and a teacher having to be criminally cruel to separate wheat from chaff, I know there are people out there like that, and characters like that are incredibly compelling to watch. 

Jupiter Ascending

Now, I was forewarned. Everyone who had seen this film said it was bad. Really bad. But possible so bad it was enjoyable. I’d say it was indeed terrible enough to be enjoyable in parts, but mostly it sat in the middle of atrocious and mediocre, and thus was not even very fun. And oddly enough, it was when buildings were exploding and spaceships were bursting through planetstorms that the film was dullest.

To get the full disclosure and the name-dropping out of the way, I’ve actually been acquainted with two of the people in this film. I was in Oliver! with Eddie Redmayne – I may have mentioned that once or twice lately – but the film also had a very short cameo/featured extra part for my good schoolfriend Bryony.

And I’m sorry to them both, but I can’t say that there was much to admire here. Actually, Redmayne was clearly having a lot of fun in a very campy, hammy role quite unlike the ones that have been winning him acclaim lately. He’s obviously relishing putting on a silly voice and occasionally bursting into quite absurd fury every so often, but it’s not really a performance that can carry an otherwise drab film.

I’ll always have a certain amount of loyalty to the Wachowskis thanks to The Matrix and how superb it was when it came out. The Matrix was silly, I grant you, borrowed heavily from anime and of course only concluded with sequels not many people admire – but it had two things this film doesn’t. Firstly, cool. This film horribly lacks the cool factor. And secondly, the impression of a genuine menace: the machines of the Matrix and their agents are unoriginal but iconic.

The mistakes of this film are manifold. Its central character – Jupiter Jones – is both absurd and hard to like. Her empowerment story is just a step too far – toilet cleaner to princess of the universe. She also spends almost the entire film as a damsel in distress for Channing Tatum’s character Caine – genetically engineered so he can be semi-literally a lone wolf – to rescue. Their romance is horribly underdeveloped and rings false. And that Caine rushes to the rescue on horribly lame sci-fi flying rollerblades causes quite a bit of inner pain.

The plot is overwrought and overlong. In the sci-fi world of Jupiter Ascending, the Earth exists only as a breeding ground for humans. When it reaches a population the planet cannot sustain, a harvest will be ordered and everyone will be processed into an elixir of life that lets the aristocrats of the universe – who all have English accents, of course – live forever. However, if the exact genes of any aristocrat repeat themselves in any human born anywhere in the universe, they are considered a reincarnation and honoured – these are even factored into the wills of the extremely long-lived elites. And of course, Jupiter is one of these: the ‘recurrence’ of the head of the most powerful family of all. This makes her the true heir to a fortune that includes the planet Earth. Redmayne’s character, the eldest son of this matriarch, wants Jupiter dead, but his siblings have other plans for her, and thus she is passed between the three of them until violence can solve all her problems. And when she is put in a position of incredible power, does she try to shut down the system that so horrified her and dedicate her life to stopping the ridiculous amount of death she now has the influence to affect, where planet after planet is harvested? Nope, only Earth matters, apparently, and she doesn’t even think about the other similar planets that will still be harvested, even if one plant on Jupiter has been destroyed.

There were things I liked in the film. There’s a tribute to Terry Gilliam that is so blatant that they had to get Gilliam himself in for a brilliant cameo to ensure that everyone knew this was an homage rather than a rip-off. But it’s a wonderful little take on bureaucracy that sadly is far above the rest of the film. The absurdity of Caine busting in to stop a fake marriage at the last moment took the high-camp to enjoyable levels. The dynamic of the Russian immigrant family worked well as something peripheral. The costumes were of course wonderful, and the three bounty hunters who kind of represent ideas of ‘ethnic minority badass traits’ in the States admittedly bring some of the coolness that’s deeply lacking elsewhere. I also liked Sean Bean’s grizzled, fallen soldier character, even if he was very much underused. Plus of course the makeup, prosthetics, sets, effects and designs were superb. It was a good-looking film, even if some of the spaceships looked a little clunky.

But the whole thing feels half-baked despite being over-long. What happens to the other siblings in the end? How can Jupiter live knowing the industry is still going on, even if Earth is safe? Surely she’s still a huge target for assassination/ coercion into marriage/business deals? Is Caine able to hang around her as a bodyguard? What about Sean Bean’s daughter? Aren’t there people out for revenge after the head of the most powerful family in the universe is killed?

Limited fun, eye candy and some snatches of (other people’s) brilliance can’t stop this film being anything other than an absurd waste of money – and a very poor echo of the brilliance of The Matrix. 

Ex Machina

While I really liked Alex Garland’s books in school, when The Beach was all the rage, I always felt like he fancied himself a good bit cleverer than anything demonstrated in his writing. That wasn’t a problem in the straightforward, uninventive screenplay for 28 Days Later, with this foray into being writer and director, it was at the centre of why I didn’t like this film very much. It’s had excellent reviews so far – 94% ‘fresh’ on Rotten Tomatoes – but it really says nothing new about A.I. paranoia and sadly remains predictable and ponderous to the end.

It’s a kind of open secret that one of Google’s aims are to create very advanced A.I. That seems to have inspired this story, in which a genius coder behind the world’s premier search engine has created an incredibly advanced robot named Ava. This coder is an enigmatic alcoholic named Nathan, played by Oscar Isaac – soon to appear as Apocalypse in the X-Men films – who for some reason very much reminded me of Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy. He owns a vast research facility and runs a competition to find someone within his company to take part in a kind of modified Turing test – the test being whether the person chosen can over the course of a week decide that Ava is conscious even though she is demonstrably a machine. The one chosen is the bland everyman Caleb, played by Domhnall Gleeson, son of Brendon and Bill Weasley in the Harry Potter films.

The plot thickens as Ava is able to turn the cameras off and talk to Caleb directly. She is clearly an incredibly advanced intelligence, and able to detect lies as well as warn Caleb not to trust Nathan. Nathan, it turns out, has used information harvested from all the world’s internet searches and facial scans from all the world’s webcam calls – and of course selected Caleb based on the information gleaned by that sort of invasion of privacy rather than based on his abilities or at random. Caleb inevitably gets a bit nutty when he starts developing feelings for Ava, discovers that there are a number of previous discarded prototypes and rather unconvincingly gets so paranoid he slices his own arm open to check he’s not another of Nathan’s machines.

Nathan has the most advanced technology in the world available but still uses keycards carried in the pocket to access restricted areas for some reason, which ends up crucial to the plot. While Nathan is drunk, Caleb sets Ava free in a classic cheesy scene of one person thinking they have the other in the palm of their hand but it being the opposite – and I won’t give away the ending, but this is after all Alex Garland.

There were some lovely acting moments, and the CG gives the impression that this is a glorious high-budget film instead of quite a small-scale production with a bare minimum of cast members. But overall this was a pretty soulless and self-important film that gets all its heavy moments from the overdone cliches of the genre. How do we know what intelligence is in another? When can a machine be called sapient? How do we truly know we ourselves are what we think we are? Can a man love a robot? Do androids dream of electric sheep? It’s really nothing very new or inventive, and nor is the plot able to elevate it.

Towards the end, the music is so heavy-handed and the full-frontal female nudity so gratuitous that the whole thing comes over as extremely juvenile. It feels like what a sixth-former would produce given $20 million, thinking himself so very profound. But I seem to be in the minority thinking this. This film lives or dies on whether it impresses. And for me, it fell well short of that. 

Into the Woods

In some ways, the time was ripe for Into the Woods to have a film adaptation. In others, it was perhaps a little early. But as only a passing fan of the musical, I was glad this was made: rather as with superhero films, I consider it an alternate universe that doesn’t infringe on the original. And the darker, more complex, longer Sondheim musical is still around, still very popular and still often revived or performed in the amateur musical world – which is where I was first introduced to it.

So why was it both a good time and the wrong time? Well, this is a good time for Sondheim in general. The Sweeney Todd adaptation was a hit, and the man himself is still around to write new music and drum up publicity. There’s a craze for fantasy and most of the component fairy tales that make up Into the Woods have had recent adaptations or reimaginings, from Jack the Giant Slayer to Tangled. And though I’m sure a few decades from now this will seem a bit of a joke, but there are good enough special effects to make the fantasy scenario impressive and epic-looking.

And why was it a bad time? Well, because cinema isn’t yet ready for the adult connotations that Sondheim highlighted. Disney didn’t want Rapunzel to have children and die, so she rides off with her prince and exits the story feeling like an afterthought – never learning her true parentage or who her brother is, never having to question if her love for her prince is actually based on anything substantial, and subject to a very weird moment where most of her hair is cut off and taken by the Baker’s Wife, yet is just about full-length the next morning. Disney didn’t want the Baker’s Wife to explicitly have an affair, so she is (probably) just kissed a lot before blaming it on the influence of the woods and quickly and almost randomly dying – apparently at the expense of one of the best songs. And the initial casting of Red Riding Hood had to be changed because the child’s parents were uncomfortable with the (well-known) sexual connotations of her story – the way the wolf eyes up her flesh and the lines afterwards about having become experienced in new ways. We would have a better film if the musical made it to the screen intact – a musical that after all skewered the idea of love at first sight and happily-ever-after long before every Disney film tried to do the same.

That said, this remains highly enjoyable and has an excellent cast. Meryl Streep is wonderfully capable of the mixture of understated sarcasm and grand gesture the Witch requires, as well as being able to be more glamorous now post-transformation than she could ever manage in Death Becomes Her. Her exit is a little abrupt and odd, though. Johnny Depp’s short cameo is just right for him, hammy and creepy and smug yet very likeable, and Chris Pine occupies a very similar place – utterly contemptible, pathetic and extremely fun to watch all at once. For the first time ever, I did not hate James Corden, and this straightforward role that doesn’t suggest with every line that he thinks he’s utterly hilarious suits him much better than his usual persona. He does the normal, likeable, friendly, ordinary middle-aged man role very well and should stick with it. Emily Blunt is a great mix of forcefulness and sensible understatement, though it’s sad that there isn’t more exploration of what her infidelity means for her marriage. Frances De La Tour appears once again as a giant woman, and Simon Russell Beale appears for a pleasingly serious and heartfelt cameo – though of course his character lacks the impact or considerable twist of the narrator in the musical.

The kids are great, too. Lilla Crawford is a delightfully precocious and somewhat annoying Red Riding Hood, oddly complimented by her American accent, and while he essentially does the exact same performance he did as Gavroche in Les Misérables, Daniel Huttlestone is very cute as Jack and is basically getting to be everything I wish I could’ve been!

In terms of effects, performance, cinematography, costumes, makeups, editing and effects – as well as music, of course – this is an exemplary film. Like many adaptations from the stage it suffers from sagging in the middle where the interval ought to be, but there’s enough action that the pace is soon brisk again. This is a generally rather beautiful film and a fantasy world that’s extremely enjoyable to look into, grim(m) parts and all. I just would rather none of the grimness had to be stripped away, and for the film to remain what the musical was meant to be – a funny but slightly bitter deconstruction, for a real world of adultery, philandering and even pederasty.

The Theory of Everything

This film wasn’t quite what I hoped it was going to be, but it was still an incredibly impressive tour-de-force of acting, delicate filmmaking and romanticised Britishness.

Aiming for biopic as well as Oscar-friendly study of a degenerative disease, the film is a little light on the science and heavy on possibly the strangest love story I’ve ever seen on screen. And while I’m all for something a little different from the average romantic fare, this particularly messy real-life tangle of broken relationships, infidelity and under-developed second partners left me rather uncomfortable – largely because the film attempted to frame it all as rather admirable, romantic and even beautiful with a final platonic reconciliation. When in fact it was a deeply sad study in love not lasting, falling apart and being unable to withstand challenges. I don’t mind a biopic that shows love going deeply wrong, but I found myself rather resenting the attempts to portray a deeply broken relationship as something natural and ultimately healthy – because greater things than the relationship were part of these lovers’ lives – rather unsettling.

But this is after all a biopic about two people who are still alive and will be watching the film, which is bizarre enough. Popular recently, certainly, with the likes of The Queen and The Special Relationship, but those were focused on professional lives, not a deeply personal relationship. And some reviews, presumably based on familiarity with the source material, claim this film warped the real story for the sake of more palatable drama, which for such an odd love story seems the wrong approach. It’s quite well-known that there was a lot of anger and confrontation when the marriage broke down, which wasn’t conveyed here – and it’s not even made clear that Hawking remarries his sultry nurse.

Which is why the film I would have rather seen would have been much more focused on Hawking as a professional, and how his motor neurone disease affected his work as a physicist. The man is after all most famous for his books for a popular audience. The film has a fair crack at explaining the concept of time beginning at the Big Bang, and Hawking radiation, but I’d much rather it at least mentioned the information paradox and Hawking’s eventual rather unconvincing announcement that it can all be explained by parallel universes. On the other hand, I was grateful that Dennis Sciama – played by David Thewlis – was insistent on underpinning the theorizing with mathematics.

I felt quite privileged at some personal connections with this film – and not just because I have an inkling I was in Oliver! with Eddie Redmayne. I saw Stephen Hawking once or twice in Cambridge outside Emmanuel – or was it Gonville and Caius? And it was fun to see Cambridge looking so pretty, even if it did all have to be that accursed St. John’s.

What really has to be admired here, though, is Redmayne’s towering performance. He was excellent in My Week with Marilyn and likeable in Les Misérables, but this is certainly the role that will define him, and guarantees stardom for many, many years. His performance as Hawking had to be perfect, as if the physical impersonation was anything short of precise it could have looked like mockery. His face suits Hawking’s remarkably well, but nonetheless the close study of his facial tics and ailments was both incredibly hard to pull off and also what was admirable. Redmayne embodies the progression of the disease extremely well, including in loss of speech, and never does the impersonation come across as anything but respectful and sympathetic. There is a certain taboo to an able-bodied actor portraying a man disfigured by a disease with such a physical manifestation, but the sympathetic direction and Redmayne’s superb performance make it work.

It of course overshadows everything else, but Redmayne’s bravura performance doesn’t prevent Felicity Jones’ being very impressive. Her stern yet loving performance and the increasing complexity of Jane Hawking’s feelings are portrayed delicately and without melodrama. Funny thinking back to when she played Ethel in the television adaptation of The Worst Witch. I also actually rather liked her bringing God into not only Hawking’s theories, but his everyday life – even if the pay-off felt excessively like the writer felt he was walking on eggshells and Hawking’s views were rather vague.

Awareness of Motor Neurone is higher than it has ever been, thanks to last year’s Ice Bucket Challenge, but I fancy that this film will show more of the severity of the condition and how difficult it makes lives than a thousand celebrities getting soaked. Even if, as we all know, Hawking has triumphantly defied the disease into old age.