SUNDANCE LONDON 2013 - MUD

Despite the critical hype surrounding Jeff Nichols' TAKE SHELTER, I just couldn't get into it. It was just so dour, and obscure and wilfully pessimistic that it alienated me.  Nichols' sequel MUD is an entirely different beast, and worth every ounce of praise it's receiving.  The movie drips with humanity and compassion.  It speaks, as did BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, to a vanishing of a lifestyle rooted in its environment and local community on the banks of the Mississippi.  The stakes couldn't be higher.  But to the movie's great credit, it's shot through with a disarming blunt humour delivered by one of its two superb child stars, Jacob Lofland.  That helps to make us really care about the characters, and so to become susceptible to the thriller-like tension of the movie's final act.  

The plot is deceptively simple.  Two charming kids, Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacon Lofland) stumble upon an escaped convict called Mud (a grungy, grifty looking Matthew McConaughey).  Ellis - from a mixture of plain decency and romance - decides to help Mud gather the materials to repair a boat and escape purely because he wants Mud to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart Juniper (Reese Witherspoon).  The tension comes from the fact that Mud killed Juniper's abusive ex-boyfriend and his family is out looking for vengeance.  Moreover, at an emotional level, we are deeply concerned as to whether the vulnerable skittish Juniper will have the courage to follow through with Mud.  Indeed, a theme that flows through this movie could be summed up as "la donna e mobile".  The movie is full of  women who are flighty and let down their romantic with a capital R menfolk.

The resulting film has a wistful, darkly comic tone.  We feel the grittiness and the griminess of the locale as well as the stunning beauty of the river. The plot point that motivates the final act is heavily foreshadows and yet the betrayal that triggers it is so powerful that one can't help but get carried along with it.  McConaughey continues his run of superb character roles, really getting shabby and battered for this one. And while Mud is charismatic enough to get these boys to help him, this is no Magic Mike style pure show-man. Mud is a far more layered, vulnerable and sometimes even pathetic character.  Reese Witherspoon is good in a cameo role, but it's really the kids who carry the film and win our hearts. 

MUD has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA.

MUD played Cannes 2012 and Sundance 2013. It opens on France on May 1st and in the UK on May 10th.

STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS

Zachary Quinto as Spock, Benedict Cumberbatch as John Harrison, and Chris Pine as Kirk.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed J J Abrams' STAR TREK reboot, never having watched any of the various iterations of the TV shows. It had real youthful energy, genuine camaraderie, and a cast that definitely outperformed expectations (Chris Pine, I'm looking at you!)  Add to that one of the few time travel/parallel universe storylines that actually makes logical sense, and I was totally sold.

J J Abrams' sequel unites the original crew in front of and behind the camera, with the exception of adding writer Damon Lindelof, who managed to piss off most TV sci-fi fans with LOST and really messed up the reboot of ALIEN.  The good news is that his hand is not notable in this movie - the story is logical, involving, asks profound questions, and yet has a wonderful light comic touch.  I particularly love the fact that even small characters that we forget about - like Chekhov (Anton Yelchin) - end up playing a critical and plausible role. The additions in front of the lens - Benedict Cumberbatch as the new villain John Harrison, and Alice Eve as a new crewmember - both work out really well too. Add to that the same sleek visuals, intelligent script and beautiful score, and I'm struggling to work out why, while I had a good time watching this flick, I left the cinema feeling somewhat underwhelmed. 

Anyways, back to the plot.  The movie opens with Spock on Mordor sacrificing himself for the greater good of the planet and his crew, resulting in Kirk doing the human gut instinct thing and rescuing him, exposing a comically pre-civ planet to awesome tech, and getting kicked off Enterprise by an irate Starfleet as a result.  This then brings us to the setup of the movie proper, in which a nasty evil vengeful terrorist (Cumberbatch) manipulates a desperate father (Noel Clarke) into launching an attack on Starfleet. What I love about that scene is that it plays almost entirely without dialogue - and while Clarke has a small cameo role, the acting that he does without words is exceptionally strong.  

All these machinations lead to the Enterprise being sent to the Klingon home planet to assassinate Harrison, armed with deadly secret Starfleet weaponry, that raises all sorts of moral questions about assassination without trial, and the use of deadly weapons in a pre-emptive strike. Whether you think the writers were heavy-handed in tackling these is a matter of taste: I rather liked it, but even I felt it was quite jarringly clear that they were basically making out Harrison to be Al Qaeda/Black Spiderman, the Klingons as the Taliban, Kronos as Afghanistan, Admiral Marcus as a kind of Donald Rumsfeld/Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, and Captain Kirk as the patsy sent to do his dirty work.  And even for me, with only a cursory knowledge of Trek lore, it was obvious who Harrison really was, and also the role that Alice Eve's scientists and Scotty were going to play.

I guess that's kind of my problem with the whole film. I loved the emotional stakes - and the contrast between Spock and Kirk/Uhura in how they deal with emotional stress.  But the actual plot, while not entirely predictable in its details, was basically obvious once you figured out who Harrison was.  And knowing the antecedents of his character meant that you knew basically how the final scenes were going to play out, and how everyone was going to live happily ever after to leave this film at, pretty much, the start of the old TV series - on a five year mission to go exploring.  One other quibble - there's a wholly unnecessary and rather juvenile plot device that allows us to see Alice Eve in her underwear. That was unworthy of this film.

STAR TREK: INTO THE DARKNESS is rated PG-13 in the USA and has a running time of 132 minutes.

STAR TREK: INTO THE DARKNESS is on release in the UK, Australia, Austria, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Hong Kong, India, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Taiwan and Thailand. It opens next weekend in Egypt, Bosnia, Chile, Croatia, Hungary, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, the Ukraine, the UAE, Canada, Colombia, Cyprus, Estonia, Iceland, Indonesia, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Panama, Romania, the USA and Vietnam. It opens on May 23rd in Cambodia and Macedonia; on May 30th in South Korea; on May 31st in Poland; on June 5th in Belgium and Finland; on June 6th in Denmark, the Netherlands and Portugal; on June 7th in Turkey; on June 12th in France, the Czech Republic, Israel and Italy; on June 14th in Brazil and South Africa; on July 5th in Spain; on July 11th in Greece; on July 19th in Venezuela; on August 22nd in Argentina and on August 23rd in Japan.

GIMME THE LOOT

Sofia (Tashiana Washington) and Malcolm (Ty Hickson) -
charismatic stars of GIMME THE LOOT

GIMME THE LOOT is a wonderful joyful movie that proves that you don't need a big budget and big stars to make an exceptional movie - you just need love-able characters with real chemistry and deep sense of place.  In his début directorial feature, Adam Leon provide both of these to create one of the most charming, real, memorable movies of the year to date.  Amateur stars Tashiana Washington and Ty Hickson star as Sofia and Malcolm, two close friends and graffiti artists, on a mission of revenge against the rival gang who defaced their designs.  This involves a MacGuffin about graffiting a dumbass fixture at a sports stadium, which in turns requires raising enough cash to bribe the security guard.  This is the driving heart of the movie: watching the two friends trying to scam and steal their way to the pathetically small amount of money and seeing them being scammed and cheated on in turn.  It's a rare feat - but the director manages to show just how savage and dog-eat-dog the streets are, without ever making this film seem downbeat or miserable.  Instead, we root for our plucky hero and heroine.  We laugh at the unexpected joyful victories of Malcolm, when he improbably scores with a trust-fund chick, and feel his humiliation when she rejects him.  We sympathise with Sofia's world-weary, ever-scammed existence, and root for her to catch a little of Malcolm's levity.  And behind it all, we get a real feeling for the heat and hustle of the City, the rat-a-tat dialogue keeps us laughing, the shooting style involves us, and the score reminds us of those long-hot summers when as kids we felt we owned the city.  This is a film not to be missed. 

GIMME THE LOOT played SXSW 2012 where it won the Grand Jury prize for Best Narrative Feature. It also played Cannes and London 2012. It opened earlier this year in France and the USA and opens in the UK tomorrow.

GIMME THE LOOT has a running time of 80 minutes. The movie is not yet rated.