FRUITVALE STATION

Oh dear. The poor women next to me was in floods of tears and actually apologised for crying to me when the lights went up.  This may well be a peculiar trait of the English: apologising for a visceral emotional reaction.  I rather gather that this has been the response of the majority of viewers of FRUITVALE STATION - the critically acclaimed debut feature from writer-director Ryan Coogler. He has evidently made a deeply-felt earnest and politically charged film, and audiences are responding in kind.  After all, who can't feel sorry for a charming, fallible, but loving son, boyfriend and father who, through no fault of his own, ends up getting shot by a policeman at the metro station that gives this film its title.  The real Oscar Grant didn't deserve to die.  But he also deserves a better film than this piece of emotionally manipulative hagiography.

Ryan Coogler's conceit is to give us the man on the day before he died, enlightening only with a flashback to his time in prison and his beef with a fellow prisoner.  We see Oscar as a loving if occasionally unfaithful boyfriend, raising his daughter Tatiana responsibly, and supported by a loving extended family. It's certainly a far cry from the cliche of young black men raised by single mothers, ditching their multiple baby-mamas and up to no good.  To be sure, he's done time, and he has a cowardice when admitting to his family and friends that he's lost his job, but deep down we know Oscar is a great guy.  Why? Because he helps a pregnant woman take a leak and cradles a dying dog.  The problem is that this is a whitewash. The incident with the dog just didn't happen, and other factors we should have known about aren't mentioned.  Most crucially, the way the movie wraps up leads the audience strongly to believe that Oscar was deliberately shot by a racist cop, when the truth could be that it was just an honest mistake. Who knows?  The point is that the film doesn't admit of an alternative narrative and in doing so becomes trite propaganda.

Okay. So what if we were to approach this film as fiction and ignore any attempt at veracity, how does it work as pure drama? The opening shot of found footage showing a young man brutally treated on a metro platform is powerful and throws us into the action.  The opening scenes of the movie give us a character sketch of his relationship with his girlfriend that is deft and interesting. But then, as he roams around for the day getting ready for his mother's birthday party the movie loses pace and interest. We are marking time, hungry for character development.  The set piece confrontation at the metro station is brilliantly tense and horrific, if one can draw oneself back into the film, but just as you think "this is a tremendous movie" it descends into hackneyed E.R. territory and then into its politically simplistic ending.  So, a movie that doesn't quite cohere - that doesn't quite convince - hanging on the shoulders of a masterful set piece. A tremendous waste.

FRUITVALE STATION has a running time of 87 minutes and has been rated R in the USA and is rated 15 for strong language, violence, and injury detail.

FRUITVALE STATION played Sundance 2013 where it won both the Best Drama and Audience Award and Cannes where it won the Un Certain Regard - Avenir award. It also won the Independent Spirit Best First Feature Award. It opened last year in the USA, Singapore, Greece and Turkey and opened earlier this year in France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, South Korea, Portugal, Brazil, Italy, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Germany. It opens in the UK and Ireland on June 6th.

Ankle-frack Round-Up 4 - REAL STEEL

REAL STEEL is set in the near-future where robot fighters have taken over from humans.  Hugh Jackman plays a washed up ex-boxer called Charlie, who's so deeply indebted and uninterested in his son Max (Dakota Goyo), that he effectively sells his right to parent to his rich sister-in-law (Hope Davis).  Paid to babysit the kid for a summer, Charlie surprisingly finds himself bonding with the kid who shares love of robots, as well as enough charisma and chutzpah to get their underdog bot a prize fight.  Newly inspired, Charlie teaches the bot to shadow box, setting the film up for a Rocky-like final bout and a schmaltzy finale in which father and son and bot have bonded with each other and the crowd.

I fully expected to hate REAL STEEL but rather enjoyed it.  It's an entirely derivative affair, to be sure, heavily borrowing from ROCKY.  And after the first twenty minutes you can predict everything that's going to happen in the film.  But for all that, there's an unmistakable chemistry between the lead actors, some wonderfully designed fighting robots, and some handsomely choreographed fight scenes - apparently courtesy of Sugar Ray Leonard.  The upshot is that while I knew exactly how the movie would play out, I was genuinely excited and moved by the final fight scene and the shamelessly populist ending. 

Digging into the credits, it's easy to see why the movie works.  The Sugar Ray Leonard credit combined with cinematography from Mauro Fiore (AVATAR) and direction from Shawn Levy (NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM) adds up to technically impressive and visually engaging vis effects.  And the original idea, based on a story by Robert Mathieson (I AM LEGEND) holds our interest.  Overall, REAL STEEL is a perfectly fine kids movie with enough fighting skills to hold an adult's interest.  I can't quite understand the rather sniffy reviews.

REAL STEEL was released in autumn 2011 and is now available to rent and own. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects but lost to HUGO.

COSMOPOLIS

COSMOPOLIS is a steaming pile of pretentious wank. This may well be the point. Either way, it's boring as hell. Robert Pattinson plays a young Wall Street "big swinging dick" stuck in a limousine for a day as he tries to cross town for a haircut but is trapped in heinous traffic by a presidential motorcade and anti-capitalist protesters  En route, he meets his wife, lovers, advisors and a doctor. All of these people, and the antihero himself, speak in a bored self-assured monotone. Mostly they speak in nonsensical platitudes. There are no emotions, and little real intellect. They are trapped in a slick process, and smugly content there. When the antihero's wife says "it hurts" she shows no emotion. Her husband responds by telling her "my prostrate is asymmetrical".  It's all basically bollocks, especially the bits where Cronenberg (or maybe source author David Cronenberg) try to construct dialogue that refers to central banks or any actual financial happenings.

Is this how the creative industry views Wall Street? A bunch of humourless, self-deluded, pretentious, vapid cyborgs? Because it's nonsense.  If you want to really know about Wall Street and its ethics you can watch MARGIN CALL.  Because COSMPOLIS is nothing more than beautifully produced but alienating and alienated nonsense. And as for the ending, don't even get me started on just how massively Cronenberg pussies out.

COSMOPOLIS played Cannes 2012 and opened earlier this year in France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Hungary, Portugal, Croatia, the Netherlands and Canada. It opens this weekend in the UK and Ireland. It opens on June 22nd in Poland, June 28th in Israel, July 20th in Russia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, on August 2nd in Australia, on August 9th in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Ukraine and Turkey, on August 16th in Slovenia and the USA,  on August 21st in Finland, on September 7th in Brazil and Sweden; on September 13th in Hong Kong, on September 27th in Greece, on October 11th in Spain and on November 8th in Argentina.

COSMOPOLIS is rated R and has a running time of 109 minutes.  

X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE - works, but not as intended

Gavin Hood's addition to the fantastically popular and lucrative X-MEN franchise has attracted mixed reviews. Fans of the original Marvel comics have complained about the cavalier attitude of screen-writer, David Benioff (25th HOUR), to the source material, in particular, the transformation of mutant Logan (Hugh Jackman) into adamantium-enhanced Wolverine in the lab run by General William Stryker (Danny Huston). Logan's relationship with his some-time partner Victor Creed/Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber) has also been changed. Other complaints include the fact that we never see Wolverine go berserker and that too many classic comic book characters are introduced and then given not much to do. Perhaps the most damning criticism is that the content of this movie adds precious little to the narrative arc of the original three X-MEN movies. It is, when all is said and done, a $150million irrelevance.

I can't really defend the film against these charges. Nonetheless, I did enjoy watching it. I liked the action set pieces. I liked the sarcastic humour of Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson, even if he was only on screen for 10 minutes. I liked the gallery of mutants. I was genuinely surprised by the plot twists and double-crosses. And most of all, I bought into the love affair between Logan and Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins). Hugh Jackman may look ludicrously buff as Logan, but he can also look vulnerable. He sells the love story.

The upshot is that I didn't so much enjoy WOLVERINE as a standard summer blockbuster but as a thriller with some emotional heft, enlivened by the occasional technically brilliant action set-piece. And I think that if you take the movie on those terms, it works perfectly well.

WOLVERINE is on release pretty much everywhere except Japan, where it opens on August 22nd.