HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER 1***

I was surprised to find myself rather enjoying the first instalment of Kevin Costner's Horizon saga.  It came to our screens freighted with controversy.  Costner had apparently bilked out of the wildly popular Yellowstone TV show to make his passion project, enduring a messy divorce in the process.  Much like Frances Ford Coppola's MEGALOPOLIS, early feedback was that HORIZON was a bloated, boring, self-indulgent, intentionally regressive film.

To speak to the latter accusation, this film is indeed wilfully old-fashioned but in a way that I appreciate. It's a good old-fashioned Western where men are men (good or evil) and women are either loving home-makers or hookers with a heart of gold. This film is not interested in character nuance.  But it's not entirely without modern concerns: note that whether men are good or evil comes down to whether they have an accommodative or antagonistic attitude toward Native Americans.  And while there's probably a PHD to be written on how these issues are dealt with in Yellowstone and Horizon, I think Costner has probably benefited from exposure to the former. 

The problem with the film isn't so much its political attitude as its format. This isn't a film with a beginning middle and end so much as a three hour prequel that establishes character. Heck, the real baddie doesn't even show up except in a final montage sequence setting up the second instalment. All of which makes me believe that this multi-film cinema project would have played far better as a TV miniseries where a patient three-episode build-up would have been better tolerated. Instead, what Costner got was a box office failure that has condemned the second film to a streaming roll-out anyway.

And what of this instalment?  I very much liked Sienna Miller as the earnest widowed housewife who begins a romance with Sam Worthington's equally earnest military man.  That's strand one of the film, and the closest set of characters to the newly established town of Horizon. In the film's second strand Kevin Costner is in Montana, hooking up with Abbey Miller implausibly bleach blonde sex worker.  It was nice to see Jena Malone back on screen in this strand. In the final strand, it was also lovely to see Luke Wilson back on screen as the leader of a wagon train, also making its way to Horizon. In all three segments, the cinematography was lovely. I will indeed watch the sequel.There is an honest joy in seeing the landscapes of the Wild West so lovingly portrayed on screen.

HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER 1 is rated R, has a running time of 181 minutes, and is available to rent and own.

BURNT

Director John Wells (AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY) returns to our screens with a slight and predictable romantic drama that had the capability to be so much more. BURNT stars Bradley Cooper as a michelin star chef called Adam who is a recovering addict.  He returns after a two year hiatus to open a new restaurant to prove all the critics wrong, win a third star, and poke two fingers in the eye of his rival Reece (Matthew Rhys).  On one hand, this movie wants to be a light romantic drama about a difficult person finding love and emotional balance. So naturally when Adam meets a feisty chef called Helene (Sienna Miller) and they have a massive ding-dong battle, we know they are going to end up falling in love. She even has a super-cute kid with which Adam can bond.  And when the first act of the movie sets up Adam as a dinosaur who refuses to cook sous-vide, we assume she's also going to give him a water-bath and some plastic bags and lead him joyously into the food revolution to wow the critics.  

But then the movie thinks about taking a slightly different turn into a much more complicated and fascinating world and we think - yes - this is why Brad Cooper has agreed to do what seems on the surface like quite schlocky fare.  We realise that within his kitchen he's dealing with the consequences of his addiction - the colleagues he hurt and the maitre d' he'd let down. And throughout the film we have the shadowy French figures who are after him from drug debts.  We see him struggle with his addiction and think, finally some meat for Cooper to sink his teeth into. But in the end it's too late in the final twenty minutes of the run-time to drag the film back into profundity and it wants its perfect romantic ending too badly. This is a tremendous shame, and a waste of a supporting cast that includes Emma Thompson, Alicia Vikander, Omar Sy and Daniel Bruehl.

BURNT is rated R and has a running time of 101 minutes.  The movie is on release in the USA, Turkey, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Macedonia, Portugal, Bulgaria, Iceland, Poland, Kuwait, Serbia, Singapore, Canada, Turkey, France, the Philippines, South Korea, the UK, Ireland and Sweden. It opens on November 12th in Russia and Estonia; on November 20th in Lithuania and Norway; on November 26th in Italy and the Netherlands; on December 3rd in Germany and Finland; on December 10th in Brazil, Denmark, Hong Kong; on January 21st in Chile; and on January 28th in Argentina and Thailand. 

HIGH-RISE - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Four

Yeah so, I love J G Ballard and High Rise is one of my favourite novels, and I really love Ben Wheatley's gonzo horror craziness, having done retrospective podcasts on his earlier films.  Tom Hiddleston is obviously not just a great actor but a nice guy.  So I was super excited about this new film.  The problem may have been high expectations. The problem may be that High Rise is a high concept novel and these can sometimes come across as flat on screen. But whatever the reason, HIGH-RISE was utterly underwhelming.

The movie, and indeed the novel on which it is pretty faithfully based, are set in 1970s England - another time of deep social inequality and financial disruption.  The high concept is that an architect has built a high-rise apartment block complete with all amenities - swimming pool, school, gym, supermarket - so that one need never leave.  And in classic English fashion, the social hierarchy is perfectly preserved inside - lower orders in floors 1 to 10, middle classes to floor 35 and upper classes above, with the architect as God in the penthouse.

AMERICAN SNIPER

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes:



When people like Matt Taibbi get angry at AMERICAN SNIPER I think what they're really angry about is the Iraqi war.   I don't believe my country should've gone to war in Iraq after 9-11 but that doesn't have anything to do with AMERICAN SNIPER. This film is not pro-war propaganda nor is it mindlessly racist.  Maybe the real Chris Kyle was all of these things are more.  I don't care.  What I care about when I'm reviewing a film is what I see on screen. And what I saw was a beautifully made, superbly acted film that had the courage to show the flaws and delusions of a simple patriot, and the grave toll that war takes on everyone involved in it. It's an intelligent and sensitive film and I wish people could just watch it on its own terms.

FOXCATCHER - LFF14 - Day Ten

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here:




FOXCATCHER is an extremely slow building true crime drama, based loosely on the murder of wrestling coach Dave Schultz by the incredibly wealthy wrestling patron John E Du Pont in 1996.  The tone of the film is wintry cold - one of repressed emotion, deep insecurity and resentment set in rural isolation.

As the movie opens we meet naive and hard trodden wrestling champion Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum).  He's living in the shadow of his elder brother Dave, another Olympic champion, and receives little in the way of adulation or financial support. Accordingly, he's absolutely ripe to fall for John E Du Pont's sales pitch - to live and train at his palatial Foxcatcher ranch - to move out of the shadow of his brother and achieve greatness on his own terms.  But as we move into the second half hour of the film we realise that Du Pont (Steve Carrell) is not just eccentric but deeply disturbed. Utterly resentful and yet still needing the approval of his contemptuous mother (Vanessa Redgrave), Du Pont has a fantasy image of himself as mentor and guru to Mark - one that he pays to make real by creating motivational videos and fake wrestling championships. At one point he criticises his mother by buying him a childhood friend, but his whole adult life is predicated on that same corruption.

G. I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA - cinematic TVR

The British, god bless us, do many things well, but building sports cars isn't one of them. We used to build a car called the TVR - a car so uncool it's name was a shortened version of "Trevor" - a car so insane it put a v8 engine inside a light-weight chassis - a car so loud and shouty that Jeremy Clarkson famously said of it, "it will kill you". Further, "my wife loves this car. She loves the noise and the vibrations and the sense of danger and the way that when you over-rev it, the whole dash lights up like a baboon's backside. Richard Hammond on the other hand, he pretty much hates it. He says its too difficult and too complicated and that all the stitching in here looks like the kind of stitching you find when someone's tried to mend their own shoes."

I feel the same way about G I JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA. Your teenage kid brother might like it, but what does he know, eh?

G I JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA isn't so bad, it's good. It's so bad, period. Much like the TRANSFORMERS flicks, similarly spawned from shitty kids toys, the movie is heavy on ludicrous CGI special effects and loud-shouty battle scenes. In the brief spaces when the fighting stops, there's a lot of rather convoluted plot crammed in. Essentially, there are bunch of baddie arms dealers who've created nano-bot super-soldiers. On the other side, there are a bunch of tooled up soldiers who are trying to stop them. In the middle, there's a chick who used to be in love with the good guy but who is know kicking ass for the baddies. But hey, apparently even a woman scorned can't resist beefcake Channing Tatum.

The resulting movie is just no fun. It's actually pretty boring being brutalised by non-stop loud battle scenes. All of which is a crying shame, because idiotic, puerile premise apart, this movie has pedigree. The DP is Mitchell Amundsen, of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE III, BOURNE SUPREMACY, and PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN fame. The script was written by Stuart Sommers, who wrote the far funnier MUMMY movies. Not to mention the fact that you have people who can actually act - Joseph Gordon Levitt, Christopher Eccleston - in major roles. God knows why they went for this flick. Let's hope they, Tatum, Miller et al, have paid for their respective new houses and can now all get back to the indie flicks they're known for.

G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA is on global release.

THE EDGE OF LOVE - Keira Knightley rises to mediocrity

Hard-drinking, womanising poet fucks wife and ex- in Welsh squalor. Cuckolded husband understandably pissed off at funding menage a trois while fighting WW2, returns with psychological trauma and loaded gun. Cillian Murphy phones in perf. as English cuckold; Matthew Rhys suitably charming as Dylan Thomas; Keira Knightley surprisingly not a disaster as The Ex, including plausible Welsh accent; Sienna Miller steals show as discarded wife despite complete lack of Irish accent. Highlight of film is close-up of Miller cryng, book-ending scene wherein she is betrayed. Other 100 minutes desperately dull despite visual flourishes.

THE EDGE OF LOVE is on release in Ireland and the UK. It opens in Australia in August and in New Zealand in October.

London Film Fest Day 3 - INTERVIEW

INTERVIEW is another teeeeee-dious drama from actor-director Steve Buscemi. Once again, he features self-pitying, narcissistic people doing not particularly interesting stuff.

INTERVIEW is a two-hander between Sienna Miller's teen idol, Katya, and Buscemi's cynical journalist, Pierre. Sienna plays a character close to home, known more for who she fucks than who she plays. Buscemi is a failed Washington hack and failed husband nursing grim secrets and a superior attitude for all things Superficial. Pierre patronises Katya. She spends the next hour and a half running rings around him in her loft apartment. They both swing from fascination to hatred to contempt with alarming and incredible alacrity. And in the end we have seen some cutting one-liners, some apparent revelations, more proof that Miller can actually act, but nothing of any substance.

All of which left me wondering "Why?", as at the end of the LIFF screening of LONESOME JIM two years ago. Why was this film ever made? As a memorial to Theo Van Gogh, who directed the Dutch original, apparently. I don't see how translating his work into this insular little film does any good.

INTERVIEW played Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and London 2007. It has already been on release in the Netherlands, the US, Belgium, Frnace, Morocco, Tunisia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Israel, Slovenia, Turkey and Romania. It opens in Norway and the UK on November 2nd and in Ireland and Malta on November 9th. It opens in Spain on January 4th.

STARDUST - as charming as THE PRINCESS BRIDE

High praise indeed for a film based on a novel that I didn't particularly like. I've always found Neil Gaiman astoundingly good at creating new worlds with magic rules but less good at creating gripping plots. But this film somehow gives the novel, STARDUST, the sense of excitement and pace that I had found lacking in the book.

Gaiman's conceit is to make a grown-up fairy-tale in which a Victorian villager called Dunstan crosses the Wall into a magical kingdom called Stormhold and has proper sex with an enchanted Princess. Nine months later, a son, Tristan turns up. Years later, Tristan (Charlie Cox) promises to fetch a fallen star from the other side of the Wall to impress the village coquette, Victoria (Sienna Miller). Little does he expect to find that the fallen star is in fact a beautiful independent girl called Yvaine (Claire Danes.) Tristan vows to take Yvaine to Victoria before helping Yvaine return to the sky. But an evil witch and a heartless prince have other plans. The witch (Michelle Pfeiffer) wants to eat Yvaine's heart and so regain her youthful beauty. The prince (Mark Strong) wants Yvaine's necklace in order to regain his crown.

STARDUST has everything you want from a fairy-tale. True love, though not in the most expected place, sword-fights, evil princes, tricky witches and derring-do. It's wonderfully designed, beautifully imagined and a lot of fun. As cynical as I am, it's great to believe in a hero like Tristan who is just a decent ordinary sort of chap. And both Charlie Cox and Claire Danes are the sort of actors with whom its a pleasure to spend time. They are so amiable! Other good things include a wonderful role for Robert de Niro as a closeted pirate and Ricky Gervais as, well, David Brent in a silly hat. If I had to find a complaint it would be that Michelle Pfeiffer cannot sustain a credible English accent, in contrast to the flawless Danes. More fundamentally, the studio loses the rumpy-pumpy that made this a different kind of fairy-tale in the first place. I guess the sex didn't fit with the target demographic......

STARDUST has already been released in Russia, Canada, the US, Egypt, South Korea, the UAE, Kuwait, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Hong Kong, Israel, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Slovakia, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Thailand, Colombia, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Turkey, the Philippines, Argentina, Hungary, Brazil, Denmark, Italy, Poland, Japan, Germany, Estonia and the UK. It opens in Belgium, France, Greece, Spain and Japan later in October and in Singapore and Taiwan in November.

FACTORY GIRL - poor little rich girl

Despite charismatic performances by Guy Pearce as Andy Warhol and Sienna Miller as his one-time muse, Edie Sedgwick, FACTORY GIRL is a mediocre film. Shot on every kind of film bar standard 32 mil and "benefiting" from heavy-handed inter-cutting of talking heads, flash-backs and conventional narrative, the film-makers try to give the movie a gonzo-energetic sixties documentary feel. They fail miserably because the film is otherwise so conventional. An underground scene of real energy and chaos thus becomes a conventional love-triangle story with a helping of poor-little-rich-girl thrown in for kicks. The love triangle features Andy Warhol indulging in a sort of asexual love affair with Edie Sedgwick, conveniently exploiting Edie's beauty and patrician connections. He drops her for the even more glamorous Nico as punishment for her love affair with a crypto-Dylan figure played by the hopelessly outclassed Hayden Christensen. This story strand is pure day-time TV. To wit, the sex scene between Edie and the crypto-Dylan is all crackling log fires and soft focus, pearl-lighting. And as for the poor-little-rich-girl storyline, don't get me started on the irony of a movie that portrays Edie partially as a victim of her father's incestuous attentions as well as Warhol's more conventional financial exploitation but then plays fast and loose with Dylan's reputation, presumably to spice up the recognisable headcount for the yoof-market. So, despite the chilling and memorable portrayal of Warhol of a man who confuses morality with beauty, FACTORY GIRL is sadly very, very ordinary indeed.

FACTORY GIRL is released in the US on Feb 2nd and in the UK on March 16th.

CASANOVA - gorgeous but neither funny nor particularly romantic

CASANOVA is not a good movie. For a romantic comedy, too much of the comedy relies on physical slapstick and too little on verbal wit. There are no laugh-out-lines and some of the players are horribly mis-cast. Jeremy Irons, who plays the Catholic inquisitor, and so should have some of the best comic lines about the Catholic Church, simply cannot play comedy. The romance is there, but there is little chemistry between Heath Ledger and Sienna Miller, playing Casanova and Francesca Bruni respectively. For real romance, we must look to the marvellous and beautiful actress Lena Olin, who plays Francesca's mum - and of all people, Oliver Platt! Although Platt is cast as the fat lard-merchant that Francesca may be forced to marry, by the end of the movie, he is the closest thing we have to a romantic hero! And for real laughs, Omid Djalili steals the show. On a technical level, the faults are less obvious, but those with a sensitivity to these things will notice some ropey special effects when Casanova escapes over the roof-tops of Venice and later when he takes off in a hot air balloon. The foreground action has been "cut and pasted" onto a background and we can see the lines!

Having said all this, there are some good things in this movie which save it from being tossed into the trash-can of romantic-comedies, alongside Just Like Heaven and Bewitched. For a start, it looks gorgeous. Never has Venice looked so beautiful, so decadent, so scrumptious. Exterior shots have majesty, intererior shots are breathtaking, costumes are lavish. Still, visual flair is not enough and I found myself looking at my watch rather often during this flick. Worse still, I found myself comparing it to the infinitely better recent BBC adaptation - a common theme for today's reviews. The BBC had a fraction of the cash but produced a film of double the beauty, four times the comedy, and eight times the intelligence. So, if you want to see David Tennant and Peter O-Toole share the honours as Casanova, click here. And if you want to see a good romantic comedy, go rent THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN instead.

CASANOVA premiered at Venice 2005 and is already on release in the US, Austria and, as of yesterday, in the UK.