DARK PLACES

On the back of the wild success of GONE GIRL and now the new TV miniseries SHARP OBJECTS, I was compelled to read Gillian Flynn's middle book - Dark Places - and was surprised to find that it had also received a big screen adaptation. I was even more surprised when I realised it had a stellar cast of big names, because it's release had utterly passed me by. Upon further investigation I realised that it had been horribly reviewed and went straight to video. Nonetheless, it's now available on a lot of pay per view streaming services so I decided to check it out. 

The plot of the film is remarkably faithful to the book which has - admittedly - a highly cinematic structure.  As with SHARP OBJECTS we open in the present day with a survivor of childhood trauma who will be our heroine. She's also falling apart - desperate for money, deeply emotionally scarred, self-medicating.  As with SO, she's sent back into her past to investigate a crime, except this time rather than being a journalist she's paid by a weird crime club of enthusiasts who believe that the testimony she gave as a child to convict her brother of murdering her mother and sisters was co-erced and that a grave injustice has been done.  And so the movie / book proceed by alternating scenes / chapters between the present day investigation and flashbacks to the day of the crime, culminating in a big reveal.

The plot is satisfyingly tricksy and gnarly and riffs off familiar topics from the WEST MEMPHIS THREE case - accusations of satan worship and child molestation. But as with all SO, I've come to believe that the point of Gillian Flynn's fiction is not so much whodunnit - it's perfectly possible to enjoy it having guessed that - but exploring the margins of American life - the people left behind by globalisation, suffering under bad debt and addiction, living from pay cheque to pay cheque and falling apart. It's this social observation of post financial crisis America that makes for compelling reading. That, and Flynn's eye for the grotesque - the stink and sounds and horror of life that other authors choose to avoid. She is a deeply visually impressive author.

And that's really the problem with this plot-faithful but atmosphere-blind adaptation. The director and production designers and costume designers just won't let it go grungy enough. Charlize Theron is also horribly miscast - this stunningly beautiful amazonian woman just doesn't look malnourished, maladjusted and on the poverty line. Her childhood just isn't dirty and shambolic enough.  Christina Hendricks admittedly does better at looking beaten down as her mother, but she has to look truly broken - a woman who would resort to the desperate - and she doesn't. The only people who really look perfect are Chloe Grace Moretz as the vampy teen girlfriend of the convicted man, and Drea De Matteo as a washed up stripper.  Otherwise this entire film just isn't gritty, grimy and grungy enough - and contrasts poorly with the production design and slippery memories of SHARP OBJECTS. 

DARK PLACE has a running time of 113 minutes and is rated R. It went straight to video in 2015. 

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

An ageing successful actress, Maria (Juliette Binoche) travels to Switzerland to accept an award on behalf of the reclusive playwright, Wilhelm Melchior, who gave her her big break. But matters are complicated when it is discovered that Melchior, loosely based on Rainer Werner Fassbinder, has died and the acceptance speech has to become a kind of eulogy.   While at the ceremony, Maria is persuaded to star in that two-hander play once again, but this time in the older role of Helena rather than the younger role of the seductive Sigrid.  She practices the role with her loyal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart) at the beautiful mountainside home of Wilhelm's widow.  This role reversal, with Maria forced to play her age, and Valentine transformed from PA into sexually powerful Sigrid, throws up all sorts of conflicts and echoes.  This is most mischeviously played out in the character of Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz) - a wild child starlet who, in echoes of Kristen Stewart's own life - has slept with her director.  

THE EQUALIZER (2014)

THE EQUALIZER is the big screen remake of the 1980s TV show starring Edward Woodward as ex CIA agent Robert McCall who provides vigilante justice for the downtrodden. Denzel Washington stars as a buttoned up insomniac loner who befriends a hooker with a heart of gold (Chloe Grace Moretz - KICK ASS). When she gets beaten up by her Russian pimp, Robert tries to buy her out, and when this doesn't work goes on a violent revenge spree, revealing in turn that he is obviously a skilled pro killer (although not using guns, as in the show). The movie then degenerates into a classic action-packed killing spree - although more stylish and imaginative than most movies.

It's hard not to like any movie starring Denzel Washington and Chloe Grace Moretz embraces an older and gritty role. Director Antoine Fuqua certainly has a sure and compelling visual style and as his TRAINING DAY proved, he knows how to build and sustain tension.  But the movie is fatally undercut by its sub TAXI DRIVER cliche of a young imperilled sex worker and its mid-point descent into violence.  The problem is that that violence doesn't have the emotional heft, or character development of the superb TRAINING DAY. In other words, what we have here is a superior stylish version of a Tony Scott movie. I also feel that the movie could have lost a good half hour of its running time.

THE EQUALIZER has a running time of 132 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Toronto 2015 and is on global release. 

KICK-ASS 2

You can listen to a podcast review of this film by clicking here, or by subscribing in iTunes.

KICK-ASS 2 is a movie about two kids who happened to be masked vigilantes, working out whether to turn their backs on a life of danger and try to be "normal". In other words, should they stop subverting justice, stop swearing and stop beating people up?  The movie itself happens to be grappling with exactly the same problem.  And while writer-director Jeff Wadlow has his hero and heroine throw off the shackles of society and embrace their destiny, he himself has the balls of a little girl - well, any little girl except Hit Girl.  Wadlow chokes, giving us the same egregious violence and swearing as the original, but couching every single scene with heavy-handed parental guidance, quite literally giving Hitgirl a swear jar. 

The resulting film is not without its fun.  I had a good enough time during its 100 minute run-time. I loved Chloe Moretz as Mindy, struggling with the Mean Girls at school, and spoofing one of my favourite teen movies, FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF.  She steals the show as the teenage girl who gets her first crush, goes on her first date, and puts the mean girls in their place.  Brilliant!  I even liked the nascent romance between Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Kick-Ass and Night-Bitch.  There was a little dust in the theatre when Dave/Kick-Ass faces the consequences of his continued vigilante activity, and I really do want to see what happens to Dave and Mindy in the inevitable threequel.

But most of the rest of the movie falls flat. Ser Jorah Mormont looks completely out of place - far too good/serious a performance - as Chris/Red Mist/The Motherf***er's uncle.  By contrast, Jim Carrey is utterly anonymous as Colonel Star-and-Stripes. In fact, I literally forgot he was in the movie.  And the subversive swearing just seemed gratuitous once it lost its shock value from the first film.  

So, overall, a mixed experience.  KICK-ASS is what it is. It needs to stop doubting itself, and pandering to its critics, and just revel in its gonzo madness. Bringing back the original director, Matthew Vaughn, would be a good start. 

KICK-ASS 2 has a running time of 103 minutes. It is rated R in the USA, and somewhat generously, 15 in the UK for strong bloody violence, sex references and very strong language.

KICK-ASS 2 is on release in the UK, USA, Ireland, the Philippines, Austria, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, Cyprus, Finland, India, Latvia, Mexico, Romania, Sweden and Turkey. It opens on August 21st in Belgium and France; on August 22nd in Australia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Netherlands, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia and Thailand; on August 23rd in Estonia, Iceland, Norway, Poland and Taiwan; and on August 29th in Denmark, Malaysia and Portugal; and on August 30th in Spain and Lithuania. It opens on September 5th in Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine and the UAE. It opens on September 11th in Egypt; on September 12th in Croatia; on September 13th in Indonesia and on September 27th in Panama and South Africa. It opens on October 4th in Colombia; on October 9th in South Korea; on October 10th in Argentina and Chile; on October 17th in Peru and on October 18th in Brazil.

DARK SHADOWS - Enough already.

When was the last time Tim Burton made a half-decent movie? 2005's CORPSE BRIDE? Well that was animation.  1994's ED WOOD?  And yet I think of myself as a massive Tim Burton fan.  Maybe it's just because I like the idea that in the botoxed, day-glo Wood that is Holly, there is still room for a camp-goth weirdo.  But I guess, like an abused wife, it's time to realise that he may tell you he loves you, and that he's sorry, and that it won't happen again, but that you have too much self-respect to go back yet again to hurt and disappointment.

Am I over-reacting? Maybe. But the mind-boggling stupidity of DARK SHADOWS - the two hours of grating boredom -  have unleashed two decades of pent-up anger, sorrow and regret.  Tim Burton used to be radical. He used to be subversive.  Now he's just predictable, banal and worst of all, aimless. Where once there was auteur vision, now there's just a shapeless, nonsensical mess.

DARK SHADOWS may well be worse than JOHN CARTER.

Ok, so let's take a moment, calm down, and start this review again.  Once upon a time a long time ago, there was a camp-horror TV series called "Dark Shadows".  Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Michelle Pfeiffer fell in love with it. It centred on a 17th century guy called Barnabas Collins, living in then-contemporary 1970s Maine with his formerly rich, impoverished, odd-ball family.  Clue lots of fish-out-of-water comedy, and some good old hammy romance-vengeance as the witch who originally cursed Barnabas continues to purse him.

In this remake, which was can only presume is loving and a fan-fic, Depp takes on the role of Barnabas, Pfeiffer the current matriarch and Eva Green the witch, Angelique.  The film is, as one would expect, beautifully designed, with the exception of Green's shockingly bad blonde wigs. (Second only to Cersei's bad wigs in HBO's Game of Thrones, season one.)

The problem is that the story zigs and zags with no apparent logic.  The movie is tonally all over the place. Is it a spoof? A straight comedy? Is it even trying to be spooky at all? Some characters are under-used and under-developed (poor Jonny Lee Miller as Pfeiffer's brother is a case in point).  Other characters have major plot reveals that are dictionary definitions of non sequitors (Chloe Moretz as Pfeiffer's daughter).  And the key romance between Barnabus and a contemporary nanny just has no emotional purchase on us whatsoever.  This movie is a mess. And not a mess in the manner of a quirky indie movie, whose rough edges are part of its charm.  A mess that is frustrating and boring to endure.

Avoid.

DARK SHADOWS is on global release everywhere bar Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, where it is released on June 22nd.

HUGO

HUGO is a movie about the wonder and beauty of cinema - an elegy to the age of celluloid and hand-made special effects - a plea to preserve the fragile, crumbling history of this fantastic art form.  In this aim, HUGO is a wondrous, magical success.

But, far from being, conservative and nostalgic, legendary film-maker Martin Scorsese has shown us not just the past but the future of cinema.  The nostalgia is matched by an equal wonder at the new technology of 3D - not piss-poor retro-fitted 3D - but delicately aligned, beautifully designed 3D designed to give us that same immersive, spectacular thrill as when those first cinema-goers gasped at the Lumiere Brothers' train arriving at the station.  In this aim - in showing us both the past and future power of cinema, HUGO is a technical achievement that surpasses AVATAR and redefines what we thought was possible with 3D. HUGO is, if ever there was one, a movie that demands to be seen in 3D and on the biggest screen you can find.

HUGO is also meant to be a children's adventure - a physical comedy - a plea not to give up on love, or yourself. In that aim, HUGO is a tedious bore.  

So let's tackle these elements in reverse order. Hugo is the story about a young orphan boy (Asa Butterfield) who lives in a train station in a 1931 Paris heightened by fantasy and stunning production design.  Hugo is a tinkerer - he loves to fix things - in particular the beautiful automaton his father left him.  His love of mechanics lies in his loneliness and his need to find his own place in the world.  Together with a plucky little bookworm called Isabelle (Chloe Moretz), Hugo scampers through the station, stealing little mechanical parts to finish his work, and desperately trying to avoid the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his hound-dog.  These chase scenes through the hidden passages and platforms of the station make up much of the tedious first hour of the film.  The dialogue is minimal, as are the genuine belly laughs. Poor Sacha Baron Cohen does his best, but I get the feeling that Martin Scorsese just cannot direct physical comedy.  Moreover, too many of his chase scenes through the train station are there to showcase the 3D and the spectacular production design but nothing else. They become repetitive.  They don't advance the plot.  The first hour of this two hour film could easily lose forty minutes. 

Then again, let's talk about that 3D and the production design.  Dante Ferretti (SHUTTER ISLAND, SWEENEY TODD) has created a beautifully detailed, rich set that evokes a kind of super-Paris - a Paris as we would all imagine it to be in our wildest romantic moments. Always snowing - couples dancing - accordion music - little plucky girls in berets - steaming croissants -  book shops that groan under the weight of beautifully engraved volumes - the Eiffel Tower always in the background.  All this forms the environment for a kind of 3D cinematography that combines achingly superb attention to detail with Scorsese's trademark breath-taking tracking shots.  The opening scene of this film, where we swoop through Paris, itself a giant automaton, then into the station, along the track, weaving through the crowd until we reach Hugo hiding behind the face of a clock - is a tour de force to match the Copacabana tracking shot in GOODFELLAS.  Martin Scorsese and longtime DP Robert Richardson - both new to 3D - deserve credit for such an achievement - not just in creating a particular look for their own film - but in echoing and recreating some of the seminal scenes of early cinema.

And so to the history of cinema. The second hour of the film, where the children are led through the history of cinema, first from Professor Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg) and then through Melies himself (Ben Kingsley) is just an absolute pure joy for any lover of the artform.  I already mentioned the recreation of the Lumiere Brothers' train scene, but the pivotal recreation is of Melies film, "A Trip To The Moon" - see the Youtube clip below. The movie shows us the joy and wit of those early special effects and spectaculars, and the final montage is a thing of awe and beauty. I defy any film-lover not to start crying at the skilful direction of a scene that is at once a culmination of the technical achievement of the film, and its emotional high-point.

The resulting movie is one that is, as I have said, not without its flaws. The first hour drags, and I do wonder whether children will engage with it.  But for cinema-lovers, the second hour is pure joy and an experience I would happily repeat at the cinema, because this is a movie that assures us that despite the fashion for watching movies on mobile devices - sometimes magic demands a communal experience and a big screen.

HUGO was released last weekend in the USA and Canada. It was released this weekend in the UK and Turkey. It opens on December 14th in France; on December 21st in Belgium; on December 23rd in India; on December 30th in Mexico; on January 5th in Russia; on January 12th in Australia and New Zealand; on January 26th in Israel and Spain; on February 3rd in the Czech Republic, Italy, and Poland; on February 9th in Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and Portugal' on February 16th in Hong Kong and Brazil; on February 27th in Finland; on March 15th in Denmark, Singapore, Norway and Sweden; and on April 27th in Lithuania.

London Film Fest 2010 Day 2 - LET ME IN

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN was one of the best films I saw in 2009. A beautiful, delicate, fragile little love story between two pre-teens in suburban Sweden - finding comfort in each other's company. He is the child of divorce, bullied at school, ignored by everyone else, deeply, violently frustrated and in search of emotional warmth. She is a little kid without friends, dragged from town to town, isolated, odd, and surprised to find a misfit she can relate to - someone her own age.  The story had a sinister under-tone. She was a vampire, kept by an older man. But the presumption of paedophilia was over-turned - she was exploiting his weakness to satisfy her own craving for blood. It was this contrast - between her power over the older man and his twisted love for her - and the apparently more innocent but unreal relationship she had with the little boy - that made the film powerful. Its horror was emotional - rather than dependent on the old man murdering people to satisfy his young lover's blood-addiction.  

By contrast, Matt Reeves's (CLOVERFIELD) Hollywood remake is clumsy, garish and utterly without merit.  At every possible moment, Reeves amps up the horror and gore at the expense of the delicate emotional story.  The opening scene is straight from slasher-horror; the little girl is given the voice of Regan possessed in THE EXORICST, and CGI is used so clumsily as to give the murder-in-the-tunnel scene an unreal, almost comedic vibe that utterly took me out of the story.  The only scenes that worked were the quiet scenes on the climbing frame that were shot for shot remakes of the original. These scenes allowed Chloe Moretz and Kodi Smit-McPhee to shine in the central performances. But whenever Reeves' took the story in his own direction it became just another generic horror flick. 

Now, in fairness, I walked out of this film half an hour before the end because I was so disgusted with its dumbing down of the source material. That final half hour might have redeemed it. I doubt it. I should've listened to Bateman's prejudice about Hollywood remakes never adding anything to the original. I went in with an open mind, I assure you, but I was proved wrong.

Additional tags: Greig Fraser, Kodi Smit-McPhee,

LET ME IN played Toronto 2010 and is currently on release in the US, Canada, Belgium, France and Australia. It opens in Spain next week and in the UK and the Netherlands on November 5th. It opens in New Zealand on December 2nd.

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER - twee

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER is a hipster movie in love with its own kookiness. It thinks it’s being truthful about modern dating, and daring in its fantasy sequences. But what we really have is a romantic drama about a vapid, irritating woman and her schmuck of a boyfriend. The schmuck is played by Jospeh Gordon Levitt, taking a break from his typically grittier fare with an outing in G I JOE earlier this summer, and now this confection. He plays a greeting card writer and geek, who falls for the cute office girl. He wants a relationship – indeed he thinks he’s in one already. She refuses to “put labels on it”. You could interpret Zooey Deschanel’s character as emotionally scarred and, therefore, afraid of commitment, but then, right after dumping the schmuck, Summer marries another guy. The schmuck is understandably dismayed, as was I. It also doesn’t help that we don’t meet the guy who is so she’s suddenly so sure about it. Because of this rather opaque writing, the girl’s motives are unclear and her behavior hard to understand. The result is that, despite the innate charm of Zooey Deschanel, Summer came across as basically a bitch, and I just wasn’t interested in her, or in any man content to be screwed over by her. Harsh, but there it is.

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER played Sundance 2009 and opened earlier this year in the US and Canada. It is currently on release in the UK, Australia and Italy. It opens next week in the Netherlands and on October 1st in France, New Zealand and Taiwan. It opens on October 8th in the Czech Republic, Singapore and Turkey. It opens on October 22nd in Germany, Russia and Spain, and on October 30th in Finland and Norway. It opens in November in Belgium, Croatia, Brazil, Poland and Argentina. It opens in December in Slovenia and Estonia and on January 9th in Japan.

THE EYE - not scary

High production values don't offset the lack of imagination, visual flair or genuine chills in this piss-poor Hollywood remake of the Pang Brothers 2002 original. Jessica Alba plays a blind concert violinist who undergoes an eye transplant after which she starts seeing dead people. Alessandro Nivola is the psychiatrist who helps her journey to Mexico to discover the original owner of her eyes and the secret behind the spooky visions. It's all very predictable, nicely done, but not scary in the least.

THE EYE was released in early 2008 and is available on DVD.