FLY ME TO THE MOON**

Director Greg Berlanti (LOVE SIMON) returns to our screen with half of a good film. The good part is Scarlett Johansson playing a smart, slick, wisecracking ad-executive in the misogynistic 1960s of Mad Men fame. She is hired by Woody Harrelson's shady Fed to run PR for the Apollo space programme, beset by costs Congress is loathe to fund. NASA desperately needs someone to make ordinary Americans fall in love with the romance of the space programme again, and in doing so, pressure their Congressmen into turning the funding back on.  

All of this crass commercialism comes up against an all-American square-jawed earnest Flight Director played by Channing Tatum.  I think this is the bit where sparks are meant to fly, and the screwball comedy really takes off. Except that debut feature screenwriter Rose Gilroy chooses to go sentimental and syrupy and to effectively numb ScarJo's spark. She inevitably discovers that earnestness has its charms and a third act falling-out is so swiftly resolved as to barely register as a relationship hiccup. What a waste!

I also note that this film has come under criticism for positing that NASA really did stage a fake moon landing under political pressure because the Cold War stakes were too high to risk a live stream of the real moon landing.  Apparently this plot point risks fuelling conspiracy rumours. To which I respond, that ship has sailed, and any any plot point is fair game The only sadness is that its deployed to so little effect.

FLY ME TO THE MOON is rated PG-13, has a running time of 113 minutes, and is available to rent and own.

ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD

Ridley Scott's new movie is a true life thriller about the kidnapping of the 16 year old oil heir John Paul Getty III (Charlie Plummer) and his billionaire grandfather's refusal to pay the ransom.  There were many sensible reasons not to do this - such as not encouraging or indeed financing further terrorist acts, but as played by Christopher Plummer, Getty I's primary motive seems to be miserliness. There's no shade, no colour. He claims to love his grandchild but we see no evidence of it. Indeed, in Plummer's hands this becomes one of the most convincing and frightening depictions of greed on screen - when Mark Wahlberg's ex CIA fixer asks Getty how much money he would need to feel secure, he roars "more", and we believe him.  I won't spoil the consequences of this miserly response, but suffice to say that it pits Getty against his ex daughter-in-law Gail (Michelle Williams). She is seen as the voice of reason, familial love, and frustration. She's also, thankfully, not without her own smarts in going up against the oil tycoon.

There's lots to like in this thriller - and I genuinely didn't know how it would turn out for poor JPGIII.   Ridley Scott avails himself of some superb location photography, from LA DOLCE VITA recreated Rome, to sunrise in Marrakesh, to the menacing, claustrophobic, winding streets of a Calabrian hilltop town.  Williams and Christopher Plummer give excellent performances, Romain Duris is also superb in a supporting role in the kidnapper with a heart, and this offsets the somewhat banal presence of both Wahlberg and Charlie Plummer.  I also liked the screenwriter's willingness to mix up the linear timeline early on, and show us a younger version of Grandpa Getty and how ruthless he was.   That said, this movie is not without its flaws. It suffers from a lack of pace in its middle section, Scott is clearly not interested in the victim's experience, Wahlberg is just miscast, and Williams, whose performance is good, chooses to adopt a Katherine Hepburn style mid-atlantic accent that kept on pulling me out of the film.  

ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD has a running time of 132 minutes and is rated R. In the UK it is rated 15 for strong violence, injury detail, threat and language.

The film was released in 2017 in the USA, Greece, Israel, Canada, Belgium. France, Malaysia and Estonia. It opened earlier this year in Australia, Italy, Bulgaria, the UK, Ireland, Lithuania and Romania.  It opens on Jan 11th in the Netherlands, on Jan 12th in Finland, Jan 18th in Hong Kong, Jan 25th in Brazil, Denmark, Hungary, Portugal, Singapore, Norway, Poland and Sweden, on Feb 1st in South Korea, on Feb 15th in Germany, on Feb 22nd in Russia, and on Feb 23rd in Spain and Turkey. 

EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS

Listen to a ten-minute podcast review of the film here:

EXODUS: GOD AND KINGS isn't a good or a bad film but rather a collection of films that may or may not hang together as a sweeping biblical epic of the Charlton Heston kind.  It's long, uneven in pace, and takes too few chances to be really memorable. 

In its first act the movie feels like GLADIATOR.  The dying king is transposed from a Roman emperor to a Pharaoh played with surprising majesty by John Turturro. His jealous, power-hungry and paranoid son is transposed from Joaquin Phoenix to a shaven-headed and bejewelled Joel Edgerton.  And the rival for power who will lead a down-trodden people to freedom is transposed from Russell Crowe to Christian Bale.   This section is the most satisfying of the film - literally awesome in its lavish costumes, Egyptian cityscapes, jewels and vistas.  It feels like an old-fashioned big-budget epic of imperial power-politics, pitting two alpha males against each other.  Ben Mendelsohn is superb as the effete toady who reveals Moses' Jewish origin to both Moses and Ramses and I love the genuine conflict as Moses struggles to come to terms with his true identity. The only sadness was seeing Sigourney Weaver as Ramses mother use an anachronistic broad American accent and then become sidelined for the rest of the film.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES - A movie so dull I walked out after 90 minutes

About fifteen minutes into the latest PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movie, Dame Judi Dench -  her ear be-slobbered by Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow -  asks "Is that all?"  I felt very much the same way as I waded through this over-stuffed and yet ultimately vacuous blockbuster.  For let us be clear: this is an absolutely terrible movie. Derivative, muddled and, sin of all sins, dull.  I walked out after 90 minutes, leaving a good 45 minutes of the movie left to run.  Still, not to worry.  No doubt the shameless hacks chez Bruckheimer are penning episodes 5 asnd 6 of this lucrative franchise as we speak.

So, what it all about, Alfie? Three ships are sailing to South America to find the Fountain of Youth (TM).  One ship contains Spaniards, trying to capture the elixir for their king. (We don't hear much more about them.)  The second ship contains Captain Barbosa (Geoffrey Rush), who has swapped piracy for privateering - the only credible bit of character development in the film - and an interesting analogy for the way in which this franchise has sold-out from camp farce to clunking establishment milk-cow. The final ship contains Captain Blackbeard (Ian McShane, presumably cast because he is the only working actor more wrinkled than Keith Richards), Blackbeard's daughter Angelica (Penelope Cruz) and Captain Jack Sparrow himself.  The movie sees these crews assembled, reach land in South America, do battle with some cannibalistic mermaids, and then set off over land to find the fountain.  That's the point at which I left.

I left because it had become painfully clear that ON STRANGER TIDES was suffering from two structural problems that were not going to be resolved by simply hanging about for another forty five minutes. First up, the movie commits the cardinal sin of subverting the very formula that made it successful!  In the first flick, which I rather liked, the prevailing atmosphere was "camp family fun"! We had pretty young lovers to root for,  a little bit of spookiness, and every now and then a bit of naughtiness in the form of Captain Jack Sparrow - a pirate so effete and ineffectual he was a walking spoof of the pirate movie genre.  By contrast, in ON STRANGER TIDES, Sparrow is front and centre throughout, rather than being used as comic relief. His presence tires -  he has become the establishment - in fact, he's rather good at getting out of scrapes even if all the set-piece fight scenes are lifted straight out of Indiana Jones or earlier PIRATES films. Worst of all, the camp Jack Sparrow has to sustain the main love story, with a smouldering Angelica, utterly at odds with his camp style. All of this leaves Geoffrey Rush's Barbosa as by far the most interesting, and certainly the only entertaining, figure on screen.

The second big problem is the direction. Rob Marshall is, simply put, a terrible director. And here, I am looking to his previous films too - CHICAGO, NINE and MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA.  Marshall seems to direct by throwing everything at the kitchen wall - more characters, more plot, over-loaded production design, more angles, more cuts, more orchestration (Hans Zimmer particularly irritating here). The editing style is the biggest culprit here, especially in the set-pieces.  Marshall doesn't seem to be able to trust the action itself - the choreography (ironic given his background) to be interesting enough to hold our attention. So he cuts, cuts, cuts, all the time holding the camera so close to the action that I wanted to pull back for breath.  Take for example an early scene where Sparrow is dancing on top of the King's dinner table and then swings from chandeliers. Why not just let the camera sit back and see his quick, deft, steps across the table?  The whole thing smacked of complete lack of confidence in the material.

Of course, added to these two big structural problems, there are many minor irritations. The cavalier hijacking of the Indiana Jones format. The way in which the hero and heroine conveniently happen upon trap-doors. The fact that the producers evidently thought - "you know, those vampire movies are making a bunch of money - let's get some hot teenage girls and give them vampire teeth!".  Worst of all, the screenwriters actually gave us a love story between a priest and a mermaid. I have seen anything as crass since the notorious soap opera Sunset Beach had the Father Fit storyline.  Weak.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES is on global release.

EAGLE EYE - slick vacuous paranoid thriller

EAGLE EYE is a very slick, not undiverting action movie with a plot to so ludicrous* you could stick a cherry on top and call it Sarah Palin. Two normal people, played by Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan, are plucked out of obscurity by a sinister female voice on the end of a cellphone who seems to be able to control any IT system in America. Naturally, the fuzz, in the form of Billy Bob Thornton and Rosario Dawson, are also chasing after our heros, in a movie that splices by NORTH BY NORTHWEST with 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and ends up some way south of both of them. There are some flashy stunts and car chases and a suitably paranoid thriller element in which the very systems designed to keep us safe turn against it. As a basic guide, if you enjoyed WANTED or HITMAN you'll probably enjoy EAGLE EYE, but don't expect something of the same quality as DISTURBIA.

EAGLE EYE is on release in the US, Argentina, Australia, Chile, Hong Kong, Peru, Thailand, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, the Philippines, Venezuela, Belgium, Singapore, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Russia, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Turkey, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, South Korea, Austria, Estonia, Spain, Egypt, Indonesia, Kuwait, India, the UK and Japan. It opens next weekend in Iceland and Norway. It opens on December 24th in France and on January 2nd in Japan.

*Seriously. *SPOILER* Would an artificial intelligence so powerful it could control every network need to coerce two dumbass civilians anyways?

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET - bizarre directorial decisions weaken a visually stunning film

An odd experience on Friday night - finally getting to see one of my cinema-heroes, Tim Burton, do a Q&A at a point where I was starting to lose faith in him. I was coming to terms with the fact that SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET had left me underwhelmed. I was wondering if Burton, like Wes Anderson and Kevin Smith, was joining the league of directors delivering diminishing returns. When Tim Burton first came to our attention he was doing something radically different. He was creating fables, even if they were set in contemporary America. He was creating slushy romances set against a bitter, twisted and hateful world. And when he took teen heart-throb Johnny Depp and mutiltated his face in EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, he was radically altering our perception of the actor.

The years have passed by and we have seen Burton express his fascination with dark comedy, thwarted love and expressionistic horror films in myriad form. We've seen stop-motion animation, period horror stories and re-made children's novels. Now, with SWEENEY TODD, we get a musical. But in every case, the movies are very direct, unfiltered expressions of Burton's world. The heroines will have long blonde hair set in waves and almost white-blonde eye-brows. No matter which period the source material was set in, you are most likely going to see women in corsets and men in stocks and frock coats. Johnny Depp, the ominpresent hero, will have slightly crazy wavy hair. The photography will feature chiaroscuro lighting and an expressionistic use of colour, where it appears. Our thwarted lovers will finally be united but not after a couple of hours toiling against the world's mis-deeds. The humour will be dark - the orchestral score from Danny Elfman - rich and dominant. All these factors are distinctly Burton. I don't think he can make a movie any other way and be faithful to his interests and particular talent. But I have to say that I am becoming, well, a little bored by it.

SWEENEY TODD is a case in point. Johnny Depp looks like an older version of Ichabod Crane - the costume is the same - the only change a white stripe in his hair and rouge-noir under his eyes. Jayne Wisener, who plays Todd's grown-up daughter Johanna (badly, I mght add), is a dead ringer for Katrina Van Tassel. All the other characters and sets are dressed in an indistinct Burton-land - a sort of vague Victorian stock-horror look. The result is that the film doesn't feel new and interesting, even though the costume and production design is evidently brilliant. Another side-effect of Burton's choices is that the movie doesn't feel as though it's set in London. Sure, you see St Paul's on the sky-line now and again, but there is no respect for the topography of the area or the peculiarity of Victorian London. Fleet Street, and Mrs Lovett's pie-shop are less claustrophobic and squalid than one might imagine. All in all, the London of SWEENEY TODD looks like a more built up version of SLEEPY HOLLOW.

So the movie feels familiar. That wouldn't be so much of a problem if the framing and editing weren't also pretty weak. Too often, Burton and DP Dariusz Wolski created a beautiful tableau only to have the director/editor (Burton regular Chris Lebenzon) snap away in a jarring movement that destroys the mood. The final scene is a classic example of this. I also have problems with Burton's choices as a writer too. I'm all in favour of a slash-and-burn policy with regard to long musicals. I love that he cut out the Ballad of Sweeney Todd, which would have been an annoyingly didactic overture. But by refocusing the musical on Todd and, to a lesser extent, Mrs Lovett, Burton leaves his love story high and dry. For much of the film, I'd been bored to tears by the insipid Anthony (inspid performance too by Jamie Campbell Bower) blathering on about his Johanna, but all the same we were building toward an exciting confrontation. Johanna is hidden in a box in Todd's barber shop.

(SPOILERS till the next paragraph.) She discovers that Todd is a serial murderer and that he has just killed her guardian. She discovers that Todd is actually her father, Benjamin Baker, and that Barker was shipped off to Australia by a corrupt judge who then had his wicked way with her mother. Furthermore, she then discovers that her mother was alive until Todd just killed her! And now Todd is remorseful until he too has his throat slit. So, poor Johanna has just gone through an enormous revelation while sitting in the box in Todd's barber shop. Moreover, she has just run away to be with her Anthony. As boring as I found this character, and as annoying as I found the actress portraying her, it would have been nice to get her out of the box and give her some closure!

So much for the disappointments: what of the good? Well, despite all this grumbling, I did actually enjoy SWEENEY TODD for four simple reasons: first, Stephen Sondheim's score is brilliant and the lyrics very funny and very dark; second, Helena Bonham Carter is brilliant as the demented lover of an acknowledged murderer who bakes the corpses into pies; third, Johnny Depp is brilliant as Sweeney Todd, acting through his expressions rather than through words - his decent singing voice compensating for a dodgy British accent; fourth, Sacha Baron Cohen's scene-stealing performance as Italian barber Pirelli. (And take note, Depp fans, if you want to see a London accent done properly, the unmasked Pirelli is your benchmark.)

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET opened in the US in December 2007. It opens in South Korea on January 17th; Japan on January 19th; France, Australia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Iceland, New Zealand, Turkey, the UK and Venezuala on January 24th; Hong Kong, Lebanon and Portugal on January 31st. It opens in Denmark, Greece, Singapore, Slovakia, Brazil, Egypt, Argentina, Estonia, Finland, Spain, Germany, Swizterland, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Belgium in February. It opens in Russia on March 6th.