A Review of Redbelt (2008)

'Where can I strike you...
... don't stand there'



David Mamet has had a rather checkered history on the silver screen. As the man responsible for the screenplay of Glengarry Glen Ross and the director of minor classics like Heist he was rightly praised but rambling misfires like Edmond and the taut but slightly ridiculous Spartan have made his move from the theatre less than seamless. Mamet’s latest is Redbelt, for which he assumes writing and directing duties, and it is a mixed bag – indicative of his obvious talent as a storyteller but also his continued unease with the medium of film.

Redbelt tells the story of a martial arts teacher who, through a series of events, becomes embroiled in a morally bankrupt world where his way of life, his personal unwavering philosophy, is threatened. It is an archetypal story in many ways: the lone man with an unbreakable code, often associated with violence but somehow not corrupted by it. Archetypes in movies are necessary, they create shortcuts for the audience, allowing them to accept and understand characters and situations almost instantly. Problems arise when these shortcuts are also adopted by the filmmakers. In Redbelt, the main character is archetypal and nothing else. He is a cipher for the misunderstood hero; reacting to each situation in the most clichéd way imaginable. This would be forgivable if the lead were Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude VanDamme and if we were living in the 90’s but its not and we aren’t. As discerning movie-goers we demand a little more of our martial arts spiced character studies, and Mamet seems unable to deliver.

The worst part is that the movies faults are not that apparent. While the construction of the main character is undoubtedly flawed, Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance is simply mesmerising. He projects a palpable sense of restrained power and wisdom, and this is just the latest in a string of memorable roles. Let’s hope that it gets him the attention he deserves. Likewise the martial combat (when it happens) seems relatively fluid and real, at least by comparison with the stroboscopic editing of most contemporary action. The film is also nicely shot and peppered with a cast of impressive names. But technical competence and a single standout performance are not enough to save it film from its fate of curious mediocrity.

A Review of The Dark Knight (2008)

I was never a fan of Batman Begins (2005). It will forever remain in my mind as the comic book film where the hero escapes from the police during a chaotic chase scene by TURNING OFF HIS HEADLIGHTS! A ten tonne behemoth driving at 60 miles an hour changes lanes and disappears. How in the name of all that is good and mighty did that make the final cut of a major Hollywood movie. Add to this Christopher Nolan's uneasy approach to staging action - particularly in retaining a sense of geography during the fight scenes - and a less than thrilling denoument and I was left distinctly unimpressed. In fairness to the film, it was meticulously designed and the origin story was genuinely engaging but once Christian Bale donned the (rather humourous looking) suit and that hideous carcinogenic drag queen voice I swiftly lost interest. Batman Begins managed to steer the franchise well clear of the cringeworthy excesses of Batman and Robin (1997) but in doing so it went a little too far, and created the unthinkable - it made a comic book film rather boring.

With this in mind I approached The Dark Knight with mixed feelings. The hype machine has been revving away for almost a year, with the first teaser trailer appearing in late July 2007...




Needless to say it didn't do much to change my mind and Heath Ledgers performance of the Joker, taken out of context, seemed destined to be irritating rather than terrifying. Then, on the 22nd of January 2008 Heath Ledger was found unconscious in an apartment in New York. He died later that day. The press reaction was incredible, with the immediate call of suicide echoing around the world. For a time The Dark Knight was lost as the world mourned the passing of a great talent in an acting community which has few enough actors of any real depth.

A Review of Felon (2008)

Felon is a simple, familiar story of a man who is betrayed by the rule of law and finds himself alone in the microcosm of the prison system. The set up is simple but effective and the film is devoid of the usual forced theatrics of prison movies. The focus is not on a thrilling escape attempt or a courageous quest for redemption in the eyes of the law. Instead it is an intimate portrayal of the journey from being free to becoming an incarcerated, institutionalised felon. It is sometimes brutal and unflinching, occasionally pseudo-philosophical but always maintains a connection to the personal cost of a prison sentence.

Stephen Dorff and Val Kilmer head the cast, Dorff as the wronged man and Kilmer as an enigmatic lifer. The relationship is that of teacher and mentor, there is even a voice over with a montage, but the quality of the performances saves it from falling into overwrought cliché. Dorff proves that a slew of underwhelming roles sold him seriously short and Kilmer creates a compelling physicality and presence, despite his relatively limited screen time. To rate one performance over the other would detract from the impressive dynamic they create. The supporting cast are generally solid apart from Harold Perrineau, a man with no discernible acting talent who still turns up in all kinds of places. His character in Felon is supposed to be complex, gorged on power and alienated from his family but Perrineau simply can't pull it off. It is a shame in a film that does little else wrong.

The film was clearly made on a budget but the grainy, mostly hand-held camera work works well in this setting. The shooting style reminded me a lot of Narc (which can only be a good thing) in its low key approach and sometimes arresting imagery.

All things considered, Felon is a well made, impressively acted, tersely plotted drama which deserves to find an audience. It is better than many movies I've seen this year but can only be seen on limited release before being swiftly kicked to DVD where it will probably sink without a ripple in a sea of direct to video dross. If you find it wedged firmly between the latest Seagal pseudo action flick and some dodgy labelled classic that never was or will be, check it out. Its worth a look.

Trailer Digest - Max Payne (2008)

Max Payne was not the most obvious choice for another Hollywood attempt at reeling in the video game playing masses. Quite apart from the fact that the two games have barely half a story between them, it has been 5 years since the last game in the series, with no immediate signs of a return for the character. Regardless, I can't help but be a genuinely intrigued by this project, particularly after seeing the extremely well produced teaser trailer...







The action seems intense (despite confirmation that the desired rating is PG-13) and the production design and colour pallete really capture the mood of the games. In all honesty I was expecting a teaser which just showed Mark Wahlberg suspended in mid air firing a gun in super-slow motion, which seemed the limit of Hollywood's ability to interpret video games up to now. But the combination of the grim visuals and the symbolic use of demonic imagery has really caught my attention. So it really did its job well as a teaser!

Max Payne is set for release on the 17th of October in the US and UK and I, for one, am quite looking forward to it.

A Review of Wall-E (2008)

Is Wall-E Pixar's greatest film and, by extension, one of the greatest animated films in the history of cinema? The better question is, are these claims even meaningful in an arena as subjective as entertainment. You may love Cars (which I find unlikely) and I have a strange and lasting fondness for oft-ignored A Bug's Life but the use of hyperbole in critical reviews is, essentially, worthless. Rather we should deal in specifics; Wall-E is one of the most consistently entertaining and enjoyable movies I have seen this year. It is exceptionally animated, technically peerless and has a design aesthetic and attention to detail which would be the envy of most live action films. It also has its negative aspects. Some are common to many Pixar films - it is a little saccharine and, to my mind, the music score is a little lacking. Other issues are more or less unique to this film. I found the voice acting for the human characters a little weak and uninvolving (perhaps intentionally) and the plotting was quite one dimensional, despite supposedly dealing with some extremely complex themes (Centuries of isolation and that old Asimov chestnut of the evolution of robotkind).

I make these points merely to allow an element of realism into the proceedings, something which seems particularly relevant in a week where the Dark Knight is being heralded as the most super amazing awesome and exciting thing to ever flicker through mass consciousness. The hype is interesting and, no doubt, commercially important but after those first few weeks it becomes irrelevant. The real test of a films quality is whether people will continue to watch it in the future, whether it stands the test of time.

Is it smaltzy? Yes, but nowhere near as saccharine as the low points of Finding Nemo.

Is it funny? Yes, it beats misfires like Cars hands down and approaches the rapid fire success of Toy Story 2.

Is it surprisingly dark? Yes, but in the good way that The Incredibles did so well.

In these ways and many others Wall-E is emblematic of Pixar’s ability to learn from its mistakes, expand on its successes and highlights their maturation into one of the most deservedly successful movie studios in the world. I for one would love to see Pixar drop the ‘message’ and the constant reach for a g rating (in this way The Incredibles, with its PG rating, was a step forward) but that may just be my selfishness. I don’t want to share these films with anyone else. Sitting in a darkened cinema, I realized that what they managed to achieve is far more impressive. Several hundred people – from six to sixty - were entertained and enthralled for a full 90 minutes. There are very few recent movies, very few movies ever made, that can make the same claim…

P.S. The Presto short at the beginning is rather excellent too. A suberbly animated and insanely energetic tex avery style short.
Enjoy

:)


Wall-E's introduction was one of the best teaser trailers in recent memory.

A Review of Hancock (2008)

Tonight He Comes (Hancocks original, rather humourous, title) is one of the best unproduced scripts floating around Hollywood.
And it should have stayed that way.


Hancock is a superhero film with a difference. The (genuinely clever) conceit is that the protagonist is an amnesia stricken, homeless, mannerless, alchoholic superman clone who is drawn to help people but often manages to cause more damage than he avoids. With personal property damage in his adopted town of Los Angeles spiralling into the tens of millions, Hancock is more of a liability than a defender of 'Truth, Justice and the American Way'. This neat inversion on the standard story works very well, at least for the first act.

Will Smith, as the titular character, flies around drunk, crashes into buildings, destroys fleets of police cars, derails a train and abuses the locals – all in the first 10 minutes. This serves to introduce the initial plot of the movie:Hancock is, according to our definitions, a superhero but he is more or less hated by the regular inhabitants of the city. This is an interesting perspective on the superhero character (though not entirely unique – Spiderman for example has a long history of being presented as martyr and menace) but it is dropped into our laps far too quickly. There is no sense of how this world functions, how day to day life continues with a super strong, inebriated idiot roaming the skies. He has lived in the city for years, so where is the damage? What encouragement is there for us to believe in this world? Yes I know it’s a superhero movie, disbelief is part of the contract between the filmmakers and the audience, but we still need to be enveloped by the internal, fictional reality of a movie world.

The whole film is stricken with a kind of PG-13 Tourette’s. The populace of Las Angeles seem intent on being rude but their lexicon of bad language is less well developed than the average six year old. I understand that it is partly a rating issue (the one use of the f-bomb here is relatively effective in the offhand way its tossed out) but surely someone could have thought of a number of less offensive swear words? I’ve never heard the word asshole used so many times, and to so little effect. It makes Smiths reaction to the word all the more laughable and unmotivated. He should be responding to the hate of the public, not to a particular word and placing the focus of his rage on a couple of syllables is just another example of the films lack of depth.


whats worse is I really thought this trailer had promise...

Massively Effective

I just finished MASS EFFECT
and it was really rather excellent.
I urge you all to play it.
:)

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

A spellbinding trailer and surely another classic from David Fincher.

ONG BAK 2

I've never been to Thailand and I honestly don't know much about it but the impressions I've managed to accumulate are far too much fun to ever be dispelled by the intrusion of reality. Everyone drinks whiskey there from buckets, the natives talk as though the atmosphere were composed entirely of helium and they seem to actively seek out pain. I imagine an entire country populated by persistently drunk, hyper-active, gerbil-voiced sado-machochistic midgets. It is an image that pleases me, so no attempt should be made to dispel it.

And where does my impressively naive and blinkered view originate? Well the highly informative world of cinema, naturally. More specifically the movie niche within a movie niche of martial arts film produced by Thailand in the last 5 years. Namely, Ong Bak (2003), Tom yum goong (2005) and Born to Fight (2004). All are terribly written, awfully acted and, in their own way, wonderfully enjoyable. Sinewy little Thai folk throw themselves (and each other) around with wild abandon - snapping limbs and using elbows in ways you've never thought of before.

The international release of Ong Bak heavily stressed it's not-reliance on CG or wirework, no doubt in an attempt to distance itself from the increasingly ludicrious zero-gravity of recent films like The Matrix sequels and Charlies Angels 2. While it would be innacurate to say that Ong Bak features no CG, its' central action is impressively real. In Thailand, it is clearly believed that stuntmen are incapable of any acting, even pretending to take a punch is beyond them. As such, Thai stuntmen are perhaps some of the last remaining proponents of true method acting. So they really hit each other. Over and over, sometimes (with slowmotion) from multiple angles. No that's not a really good match between performance and camera angle, thats a little asian guy kicking another asian guy in the face. And there it is again a little to the left and at half speed. The stuntwork in these films is truly extraordinary, and the filmakers are smart enough to embroider the action with a minimum of plot, unfettered by the demands of focus groups which require 'coherence' in their action movies.

The star at the centre of the recent international interest in Thai action cinema is Tony Jaa, the lead in both Ong Bak and Tom yum goong. Comparisons have been made with Bruce Lee for years and, in a certain respect, this is accurate. The sheer sense of awe when Jaa perfoms some of his stunts is comparable to the paradigm shift in western action cinema for which Lee was the catalyst. Jaa's work contains a considerable gymnastic, almost free-running element which Lee's lacked, and it is all the more impressive and cinematic for that.

So, check out the other films I mentioned and any other Thai action film you can get your hands on. I guarantee it'll be something you haven't seen before (provided your idea of a good time is watching stuntmen genuinely getting hurt for their no doubt tiny pay cheques).

I mention these points because I just came across the promo reel for Ong Bak 2 - Jaa's directorial debut and another source of images and impressions for my alternate reality of Thailand.

Enjoy.

A Review of The Machine Girl (2008)

Kataude mashin gâru

GIRL HAS ARM

GIRL LOSES ARM

GIRL REPLACES ARM WITH A GATLING GUN AND SEEKS REVENGE...


I urge everyone to check out the trailer for The Machine Girl. If you don’t laugh, this film is not for you. If you do, prepare to rupture something as, over the course of 90 minutes you will experience: tempura battered forearms, digit-spiced sushi, dismemberment through tripping, A DRILL BRA, ninjas in tracksuits, sapphic arm-wrestling, necrophilic deflowering, bullet flaying, vomiting intestines and gallons and gallons of geysering blood.

Good writing, good performances, good CG and good taste are not The Machine Girls’ forte. What it does have going for it is an abyssal black sense of humour and a penchant for treading the line between the disgusting and the absurd (avoiding, as it does so, the pitfalls of some more extreme Japanese horror offerings). The story, such as it is, revolves around a seemingly normal Japanese high school girl who – after the death of her brother – goes after the ones responsible. There are some other incidentals; the mystery surrounding the death of her parents and the over-complicated bullying of her brother but they are really filler – the tasteless bread surrounding this sandwich of ultraviolence. The opening scene is a perfect demonstration of Machine Girls’ intentions – it contains plot spoilers that reach halfway into the film – effectively stifling any chance of tension or drama. And then a petite girl in a Japanese schoolgirl outfit straps a Gatling gun to the stump of her left arm and you understand. You reach calmly into your brain and turn the switch marked ‘Reality’ to the off position, dial your gorge reflex down a couple of notches and prepare to ride the claret rapids wherever they may take you.

The Machine Girl is gory, tasteless, voyeuristic and peppered with ‘performers’ from Japan’s porn industry. It is also funny, self-aware and delivers on its promises very effectively – its’ main implicit promise being: lots and lots of blood. It has its’ corny moments (ninjas) and is technically rather low rent but, in all honesty, competent filmmaking would only distract from the films gleeful, nihilistic bloodletting. So sit down with some popcorn (avoid sushi), grab the (even more hilarious) dub of The Machine Girl and prepare to dissolve all sense of good taste and decency for an hour and half. I almost guarantee you’ll enjoy it…