THE LITTLE STRANGER - Crimbo Binge-watch #7

Lenny Abrahamson (ROOM) returns to our screens with another film based on a prize winning book - this time the slow-burn period haunted house story THE LITTLE STRANGER by Sarah Waters. The adaptation is faithful and so shares the books strengths and weaknesses.  Its strength is its evocation of post-war England in which the great estates are being bankrupted and social change is afoot. Our protagonist is a doctor (Domnhall Gleeson - Star Wars' Hux), soon to become part of the NHS. He still resents the fact that his mother worked herself to the bone in a grand country house, and while he ingratiates himself with the family carries a working class chip on his shoulder.  The grand family hard on its luck are made up of a still grand mother (Charlotte Rampling), a brutally war-injured son (Will Poulter - superb in a "posh" character role), and Ruth Wilson who as ever seems to be operating on a far higher emotional level than the other actors she's working with.  She's really the focus of our attention - a woman who is clever and capable but is stuck trying to keep the family together against financial ruin and now - apparently - spooky goings on.  I also love the theme that Sarah Waters often explores of how women, no matter how smart, are often under-estimated, unheard, or worse wilfully disbelieved simply because of their gender. 

What I like about the film is its patient slow build, but I can see why this might frustrate fans of more pacy and punchy horror. After all, I am a notorious coward when it comes to watching horror so if I can get through the film you know it's not really that scary - more of an emotional exploration of the history that is haunting the family.

THE LITTLE STRANGER is rated R and has a running time of 111 minutes. It was released earlier this year. 

THE REVENANT

In the 1820s much of north west was harsh country, fought over by various colonial and native american factions.  There was money to be made though - trapping animals for their skins - and military outposts to guard the frontiers and protect trade.  One trapper, Hugh Glass, became incredibly famous for surviving a real life bear attack and somehow managing to get back to camp despite being abandoned by his colleagues. That story in turn become a novel by Michael Punke, and now a film written by Mark L Smith and directed by Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu (BIRDMAN).

The resulting film is epic.  It is meticulously grounded in authentic reality - from Emmanuel Lubezki's natural light photography to the incredibly violent, raw depictions of human and anima violence.  And yet the story itself is absurd, taking the real story of Glass and making it bigger, crazier, larger at every turn. Whether you enjoy this film therefore depends on how far you can allow the former to trump the latter.

To speak of the film's strengths is to start and end with Inarritu's visual direction and the central performances. In BIRDMAN Inarritu created a technique of circling his actors with a fluid and expressive camera, and for creating shots that felt never-ending.  He uses that technique here to bring us up close to a key character, pans around to show us what they are seeing, and then pans back by which team we see them already reacting, moving away or into action. It creates an amazing feeling of being inside the action and reaction of this organically unfolding story.  Another thing is that Inarritu is fearless when it comes to showing us violence - an arrow through the head - a bear ripping up a man's back - a man sealing up a gash in his throat with dynamite - to name but a few.  

When it comes to the performances, this is a lead role that asked Leonardo di Caprio to experience and portray hardship, as he keeps telling us in his Oscar campaign. It's a very good, gritty, nuanced performance. But the guys who really steal it for me are Tom Hardy as the cynical but interesting trapper that leaves Glass behind and Will Poulter as the young man he co-erces to help him.  What's amazing about Hardy's performance is that here's a guy who does things we hate. But he's also a man who survived being near-scalped. So in a sense he's a commentary on how war brutalises us all, as is the entire movie.  And as for Will Poulter, his career is quite impressive. He's done broad comedy in WE'RE THE MILLERS and pure drama in this and WILD BILL. An actor to look out for.  So from my perspective, the direction, cinematography and performance by Hardy deserve Oscars. I suspect it's Dicaprio who will get one.

Turning now to the annoying.  I get that Inarritu is probably one of the few directors to actually treat his native American characters with anything like respect and to give them fully developed motives but did Glass really need a son and lots of Terence Mallick-style quasi-spiritual shots of wheat fields and floating wives and whatnot. It's just derivative nonsense designed to make Glass the good guy because not only does he not share the colonial views of the bad guy he can visibly display this in protecting his son. It's all so unnecessary. The Glass story is great enough without making him some kind of anachronistic earnest liberal.

THE REVENANT has a running time of 156 minute running time and is rated R.  The movie went on release in the USA on December 25th 2015 ad went on global release throughout January.

THE MAZE RUNNER

THE MAZE RUNNER is the latest in a series of dystopian action films aimed at the teenage market and adapted from successful Young Adult fiction franchises.  As with HUNGER GAMES and DIVERGENT we find ourselves in a post apocalyptic America where teenagers are pitted against each other in a kind of mad game, society riven by factions and controlled by some kind of overlord.  In this case, the protagonist isn't a girl but a boy, Thomas (Teen Wolf's Dylan O'Brien) who wakes up to find himself inside a Glade enclosed by the Maze.  A society of Lost Boys explains the rules to him - each person has a role in society, and the runners get to go inside the Maze and find food, although to be trapped overnight is to be killed by the Grievers.  A girl called Teresa (Kaya Scodelario) is sent into the mix with two vials of anti-venom and a jolting Big Reveal in the final 30 minutes of the film.  Be assured that if you're familiar with the genre, it won't be a big surprise.

What the plot lacks in originality or genuine scares, it makes up for in good acting. The mostly British lead cast sport know how to sell the complex emotions of abandonment, brute cruelty, camaraderie and mistrust.  Thomas Brodie Sangster (GAME OF THRONES) is very sympathetic as one of the Glade's leaders, and Will Poulter is, as ever, the most captivating of the actors in a tricky unsympathetic role. The movie has a far lower budget than HUNGER GAMES or DIVERGENT but this isn't a problem. It is beautifully designed and the lack of big show piece effects focusses the audience's attention on the characters. 

Overall the familiarity of the set-up is a bit of a problem, as is the occasionally hammy dialogue. But I'm sufficiently interested to see what's next to welcome the inevitable sequel.

THE MAZE RUNNER has a running time of 113 minutes and is rated PG-13.  The movie is on global release.

WE'RE THE MILLERS

WE'RE THE MILLERS is a lukewarm, predictable comedy about a group of misfits who learn to love each other on a roadtrip to Mexico in which they're trafficking mary-jane.  (As a side-note I find it amazing that getting baked is now seen as so acceptable by the mainstream media that you can have a mainstream box office hit featuring you're friendly neighbourhood dope peddlar.)

The classic odd-couple comedy sees Jason Sudeikis of SNL fame cast as Dave, the arrested development pusher who is blackmailed into going to Mexico by his college room-mate turned megalomaniacal drug-kingpin (Ed Helms.) He figures he'll be better able to smuggle the drugs if he recruits a Brady Bunch style family, and turns to his neighbour, who happens to be a stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold, Rose (Jennifer Aniston), his goofy neighbour who is a virgin, Kenny, (yes - that's his tag!) (Will Poulter) and some homeless chick (Emma Roberts.)  Naturally, the misfits scrub up well, and bond over singing TLC's Waterfalls, and Rose gets to strip so that Brad Pitt can see how Jennifer Aniston still is, in perhaps the most unsexy stripping scene in movie history.  Finally, there's one of those Han Solo moments in which Dave realises that what he really wants is a family, and hey presto, it all ends happily.

There are one or two genuinely good laughs in this flick - the first aimed at satirising wannabe gangsta teen boys - and the second aimed at - what I can't even remember.  The rest of the film is disappointingly weak on humour, suggesting that the two screenwriters who wrote the piss-poor HOT TUB TIME MACHINE had more to do with this than the two screenwriters who wrote the brilliant WEDDING CRASHERS.  The direction, from Rawson Marshall Thurber (DODGEBALL) is fairly pedestrian, which is pretty much the description I'd give to this whole film. It's very Tab A into Slot B.  You know exactly where it's going as soon as you see the opening credits.   Acting-wise, Jason Sudeikis is always charming, as is Aniston, and Emma Roberts has little to do as the pissed off hobo.  It's good to see Will Poulter getting his first major US role, and he's good in a straight comedy role. But basically, this movie is one for DVD and dinner night at best.

You can hear a podcast review of this movie here, or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

WE'RE THE MILLERS has been rated R in the USA and 18 in the UK. It has a running time of 110 minutes.

WE'RE THE MILLERS is on release in the USA, Canada, Switzerland, Iceland, Austria, Denmark, Israel, Poland, Serbia, Bulgaria, Italy, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, the UK and Ireland. It opens next weekend in Belgium, Argentina, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Taiwan. It opens on September 6th in Russia, Singapore, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, Mexico and Romania, and on September 12th in Chile and Italy. It opens on September 20th in France, Hong Kong, Norway and Sweden and on September 27th in Brazil. 

London Film Fest 2011 Day 9 - WILD BILL

Jimmy and Dean fending for themselves in a Newham council flat.

There are those of us of a certain age who have grown up with Dexter Fletcher. As kids we watched him as the cute wanna be tough guy "Babyface" in Alan Parker's delightful BUGSY MALONE. As teens we watched him in the TV show "Press Gang" playing a cool American wannabe journo.  In our errant twenties we watched him plan a heist in Guy Ritchie's superb caper flick, LOCK STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS, and more recently, we've seen him cover up for Robert De Niro's cross-dressing pirate in Matthew Vaughn's STARDUST.  This familiarity bought Dexter Fletcher a great deal of goodwill from the London Film Fest Audience who watched his debut directorial effort.  And the good news is that the film is really worth watching, despite a somewhat predictable plot once the initial set-up is in place.  

WILD BILL is set in the same London of Guy Ritchie's flicks - the East London of drug-dealers, hard-men and hard-ups in council houses.  But it has far more heart, far more subtlety, and is far better observed.  In other words, you gain a whole lot of authenticity and insight, while losing none of the comedy. In fact, one of the great comedic charms of the film is realising that Fletcher has discovered the new "babyface" -  a young kid called Sammy Williams who plays Jimmy - a little kid with an hilariously foul mouth, but also a lot of vulnerability.

As the movie opens we meet Dean (Will Poulter) and Jimmy living alone in a filthy council flat, with Dean taking on the grim responsibility of a father and the age of just fifteen. Their mother has abandoned them and their father, "Wild Bill", a violent drug pusher and addict, has been in prison for eight years. Bill emerges a reformed man - he wants a clean break in Scotland - but isn't reformed enough to want to take care of his kids.  Problem is, he has to stick around long enough to fool social services, so that Dean and Jimmy aren't put into Care.  What follows is a predictable family reconciliation, complete with a "tart with a heart" character, and an aggressive local mafiosi threatening Bill's conditions of parole.  

From left to right, Sammy Williams (Jimmy); Will Poulter (Dean);
 Charlie Creed-Miles (Bill); and Dexter Fletcher (Writer-Director)
introduce WILD BILL at the London Film Festival

But the film is elevated above its narrative clichés thanks to its genuinely sympathetic characters, the whip-smart dialogue and the fact that Fletcher doesn't flinch from poking holes in the Guy-Ritchie-style myths of East End hard-men.  Many a time we see a guy giving it all that, but turning and running at a key point, and the annoying Ali-D style white boy, Pill (Iwan Rheon) gets a verbal slapping too. I also love the fact that where ROCKNROLLA (a film I still liked) made heavy work of contrasting the poverty of the East End with the redevelopment of Stratford, Fletcher shows the same contrast with much more subtlety. It's enough to show the view of the new Olympic village from the balconies of crumbling social housing - it speaks powerfully enough of the issues facing British society - without being crass or simplistic.  

In front of the camera, I'm full of admiration for Charlie Creed-Miles who has to portray a nasty selfish character at the start of the film but also make his road to responsibility seem credible, and to Sammy Williams who steals every scene he's in.  Behind the camera, George Richmond's lensing use the Arri Alexa is crisp, and the sound-track is superb.  Overall, this is an assured debut directorial effort from Fletcher, deftly balancing raucous humour and pathos - and I can't wait to see what he does next.

WILD BILL played London 2011.

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER

THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER is the third installment of the Narnia franchise, based on the children's fantasy novels and Christian apologia by C.S.Lewis. It comes to our screen after a troubled birth. After the disappointing box office on PRINCE CASPIAN, Disney pulled out of funding, having tried unsuccessfully to restrict the budget to $100m. And presumably in order to boost sales, Walden Media retrofitted the movie with 3D, resulting in a picture that looks very handsome indeed when you take off your 3D glasses, but dim and murky with the glasses on. But for all that, I think THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER is a perfectly entertaining family film, especially if you are not wedded to the books.

As the movie opens, World War One has begun, and the elder Pevensie children are in America with their parents. (In other words, they are now too old to go to Narnia - the magical land where good fights evil amidst a mish-mash of ancient mythological creatures, talking animals and Celtic lore). This leaves the younger children, Lucy (Georgia Henley) and Edmund (Skander Keynes) stuck in Cambridge, living in the house of their beastly Cousin Eustace (THE SON OF RAMBOW's Will Poulter). Lucy is kicking against her youth, wanting to be as pretty and desired as her elder sister. Edmund is kicking against his youth too, hating a world in which he is no longer a king. And poor Eustace is kicking against his delusional cousins who keep going on about Narnia.

Five minutes later and we are back in Narnia, aboard the Dawn Treader - the finest ship in the Narnian fleet. Prince Caspian is now King and has pacified his lands. But he still needs to find the seven lost Lords of Narnia and, we are later told by a magician, lay their seven swords on the table of Aslan in order to vanquish an evil mist that tries to corrupt and tempt us. This forms the MacGuffin of the film - a driving reason for the characters to visit a number of strange and fantastical islands, to battle slave traders and sea serpents. The green mist also provides a number of moral challenges - offering Lucy beauty, Edmund the chance to emerge from his elder brother and Caspian's shadow, and tormenting Caspian with his father's disapproval. Poor Cousin Eustace doesn't even get the psychological treatment but is turned into a dragon in order to teach him humility and kindness! And so, after some rather fast-paced and random seeming island-hopping and pouting and moaning, everyone eventually emerges wiser and better at the End of the World with Aslan the Lion aka Jesus.  Lucy and Peter and Caspian have resisted temptation, Reepicheep has his final reward and Eustace has faith.

There's a lot to like here. Murkey 3D aside, the production design, costumes and visuals are handsome - the sunsets glint on the sea and the End of the World looks suitably magisterial and beautiful. The acting is first class. Georgia Henley is superb as wise, courageous Lucy, but Will Poulter absolutely steals the show as Cousin Eustace. And thank goodness poor Ben Barnes has been allowed to drop his Spanish accent! The only shame is that they couldn't get Eddie Izzard to reprise his role as Reepicheep - the valiant little mouse - especially as his story culminates in what should be a very moving scene - I certainly found it so, even with Simon Pegg's rather flat delivery. And, finally, there's enough action - dragons and sea serpents included - to keep little ADD minds constantly amused.

The negatives are twofold. For the "casual" viewer, the movement from island to island seems a little random and ill-developed. So too does the resentment of Edmund for Caspian, and Caspian's torment. We sort of get that they are being tormented by the green mist but it's never particularly well developed. For the "committed" viewer, who has read and loved the books, there is plenty to complain about. The introduction of the seven swords (horcrux like), the reduction of Lucy's character to teenage angst, the ease with which the dragon's bracelet is removed, the length of time for which Eustace remains a dragon, the fact that the sea serpent is now conjured by Edmund's imagination (Staypuft Marshmallow man!).....

These are all valid concerns, and THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER has more gaping holes than it should. But, as I said before, it's a perfectly enjoyable confection, and with Will Poulter as Eustace Scrubb, I certainly hope it does enough business for the studio to consider making THE SILVER CHAIR.

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER is on global release bar the Nordics, where it opens on Christmas Day, Argentina where it opens on January 6th, Venezuela where it opens on February 4th and Japan where it opens on February 25th.

London Film Fest Day 11 - SON OF RAMBOW: A HOME MOVIE

Each year, one movie stands out as the great unexpected discovery of the London Film Fest. In 2005 it was CACHE and last year it was SHORTBUS. Far be it for me to prejudge the rest of the fest, but I have a feeling that for 2007, SON OF RAMBOW: A HOME MOVIE will be the stand-out movie. 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS, THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD and INTO THE WILD were all deeply affecting and beautifully shot, to be sure. And SON OF RAMBOW doesn't match them on the tech package or profundity of the message. But for all that, SON OF RAMBOW has some very unique features: it's laugh-out-loud funny, anarchic, touching, nostalgic, crazy and despite touching on deep emotional issues, never heavy-handed or manipulative. Writer-director Garth Jennings must be very pleased that he'll be remembered for something other than that disastrous HITCH-HIKERS GUIDE adaptation!

So, what's it all about? It's 1980s Britain. An era of Corona soda, fizzing sherbet, New Romantics, pirated VHS tapes and cassette mix-tapes recorded from the Radio 1 Top 40 on a Sunday night. Will is a straight-laced kid with a vivid imagination and a flair for drawing. He lives in a family with strict religious beliefs, including being banned from watching TV. He forms an unlikely friendship with the school trouble-maker, Carter, who also has issues with absentee parents and a distant elder brother who he idolises. Will watches a pirate copy of FIRST BLOOD - can you imagine a more crazy way to be introduced to video?! - and creates a fantasy world in which he's the Son of Rambow who rescues his father from the clutches of the Evil Scarecrow. So the kids start shooting the home movie and soon all the cool kids in school - including the insanely cool French exchange kid, Didier - are clamouring to join in.

In terms of production values, the movie glories in the "look" of the early 80s and the incidental props are spot on. Jennings seems to like very staged set pieces in the manner of Wes Anderson. This is particularly evident in the scenes with Didier and his acolytes. In front of the camera, the actors do a great job - especially the two kids in the lead roles. You really buy into their budding friendship. The relationship between Will and his mother, battling to preserve her religious beliefs in the modern world, is also very touching.

But the biggest sell is that the film is extremely funny. And not in an ironic, deadpan, oh-so-clever way but in a straight-from-the-gut belly-laugh way. A skinny little English kid dressed up as Rambo is just funny. But beyond this there's a silly joy at physical comedy as well as some classic one-liners. It's a world of practical jokes, pratt-falls and taking the piss out of all the stupid clothes we wore in the early 80s. Nostalgia-tastic!

SON OF RAMBOW: A HOME MOVIE played Sundance, Toronto and London 2007. It opens in the UK on March 28th 2008 and in the US on May 2nd.