INSIDE OUT 2***

INSIDE OUT 2 was released this summer and has made just shy of USD1.7bn and counting on a USD200m budget. So two things are certain. 1) No-one needs another review of this film because everyone has already seen it.  2) Bob Iger is for sure gonna greenlight a threequel.

I found the film to be charming and spot on about the perils of puberty but basically blah. Maybe I am spoiled - the stunning animation and creativity are literally something I have seen before. The novelty and sheer heart of the first instalment got me all choked up in the threatre. This one, I admired, but it didn't hit me emotionally. Plus, I am hardly the target demographic.

Our protagonist Riley is now a 13 year old good kid dealing with increased anxiety and envy at the onset of puberty. She is sent to a sports camp with her two childhood best friends and faces the twin evils of wanting to hang with the cool kids, and doubting she is good enough to make the team. But of course, as we know she's a good kid, so no actual peril there.

Meanwhile, inside her head, the emotions we have come to know and love are joined by new puberty-laden baggage, and we get a new concept - the Sense of Self.  The message here is that it's damaging to try and only use good memories and feelings to create a Sense of Self. You have to let the bad stuff in too, and deal with it, and grow from it, and love it. So enough with the helicopter parenting parents!

Yep, Amy Poehler's Joy is very much the target of all those books I have been reading by NYU Professor Jonathan Haidt about the dangers of molly coddling kids in the real world, but letting them run wild in the virtual world. So as much as this film is aimed at kids, parents take note!

INSIDE OUT 2 has a running time of 96 minutes and is rated PG.

SERENITY

And so the McConaughaissance crests its wave with this awkwardly shit thriller from British writer-director Steven Knight (LOCKE, PEAKY BLINDERS).  McConaughey plays a washed up fisherman/tour guide for rich tourists on a paradise tropical island with a trademark wise loyal sidekick played by Djimon Hounsou.  All goes tits up when his ex-wife turns up begging him to kill her new abusive husband for the sake of their son.  The key issue is that earnest sweet princess-next-door Anne Hathaway sucks at playing a femme fatale, and there is zero chemistry between her and McC.  You wade through an hour of this awfulness and then the plot gets a bit twisty and momentarily interesting, except that you can't shake the feeling that this would all have been handled with more wit, brevity and horror in a BLACK MIRROR episode. 

Avoid at all costs. 

SERENITY is rated R and has a running time of 106 minutes. It is now available to rent and own.

MARK FELT: THE MAN WHO BROUGHT DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE

Director Peter Landesman (the superb JFK assassination film - PARKLAND) returns to iconic American history with this character study cum procedural of how Mark Felt - a 30 year veteran of the FBI - helped the Washington Post journalists Woodward and Bernstein expose the White House's involvement in the Watergate robbery and so triggered the resignation of Richard Nixon.

The resulting film is a handsomely shot and acted, compelling drama about a loyal man pushed to protect the integrity of his institution at great personal risk.  That said, he is also shown overstepping the mark in illegally wiretapping in pursuit of a terrorist group.  But overall, we are rightly meant to see Mark Felt as a hero. I loved the shooting style - Washington as a grey town full of grey men in grey suits.  I loved the subtle power plays - men overlooked for promotion - the flexing of political muscle. And I loved that Landesman allowed Felt to look compromised. Yes, he is doing something noble, but is there also a tinge of revenge against the man who got the job he wanted? This is truly nuanced and intelligent film-making and a must-see for all Watergate obsessives. 

MARK FELT: THE MAN WHO BROUGHT DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE has a running time of 103 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film played Toronto 2017 and opened that year. 

JUSTICE LEAGUE

After a dismally dull experience of BATMAN VS SUPERMAN and walking out of SUICIDE SQUAD after 30 minutes, it was only my recent enjoyment of WONDER WOMAN that made me vaguely interested in seeing the new DC multi-character action film, JUSTICE LEAGUE. I'm pleased to report that, given incredibly low expectations, I actually had a good time watching the film, thanks to the fact that Superman remains dead for much of it, and the charisma vacuum that is Henry Cavill, and sheer flabby uninterested of Ben Affleck are diluted by both Wonder Woman's earnest awesomeness and a trio of great new additions to the franchise. I was genuinely amused by Ezra Miller's nerdy, funny Flash, and suspect that his character benefited most from Joss Whedon taking over the reins as director once the portentous heavy-handed Zack Snyder left for personal reasons. That Miller went from playing a genuinely unnerving psycho in WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN to a disarmingly hapless teen here shows great range.  I also really liked the teasing of a more earnest backstory involving his incarcerated father played by Billy Crudup - who manages to communicate pained selflessness in a few brief scenes. Perhaps most surprisingly, I loved Jason Mamoa's rock-star ragged Aquaman. This was a great shock after he failed to impress in the CONAN remake and GAME OF THRONES - but that suggests scripts and directors that cast him for his body and not his evident charisma and ability to turn a genuinely comic line.  His AQUAMAN is an ancient hero, pissed off with the world, performing small acts of kindness while blind drunk. Insofar as he has an arc, it's realising that he has to take responsibility for saving the world and be a true heir of Atlantis. Similarly, in this film, Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman also has to assume the mantel of leadership and become an icon of  hope, just as Superman had been.  The final new addition is newcomer Ray Fisher's Cyborg, Victor Stone.  He has the most serious role to play, as he struggles to come to terms with his powers and the role his father played in mutilating him.  In the context of a rather silly film, it's his character that is the most moving.  Against this cast of genuinely funny and moving characters, it was easy to quickly move past Ben Affleck's continuing banality as Bruce Wayne and Henry Cavill's po-faced, charisma-less Superman.

BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE

BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE is even more arse-numbingly dull than last year's MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. - another action movie remake that not un-coincidentally starred The Tudor's Henry Cavill.  Cavill, just like his UNCLE co-star Armie Hammer, is an actor of beauty but little charisma.  In fact, it's a sad testament to the lack of star power at the centre of this movie, that the two most charismatic and shaggable men in it are Jeremy Irons (as Batman's butler) and Kevin Costner as Superman's dad.  Jesse Eisenberg plays Lex Luthor like a milder version of Jim Carrey's Riddler.  And what can we say of Ben Affleck's BATMAN?  All our worst fears, carried over from DAREDEVIL, are realised here.  He's the Ben Affleck of SOUTH PARK pastiches, square jaw, Blue-Steel troubled intense gaze, humourless anti-acting.  I'd go so far as to say that the only interesting thing about Batfleck's portrayal is his suit, which looks a bit like someone took an Iron Man outfit and spray-painted it black.  Apparently this is to imitate Frank Miller's graphic novel Dark Knight but it just looked laughably clunky, much like the screenplay.

TRUMBO - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day 3

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

It isn't too hard to imagine a time when an over-weaning government declared an un-ending war against an abstract noun and used that war to invade its citizen's privacy and over-ride their constitutional protections.  But I suppose there is some savage comfort in knowing that there are no new challenges that haven't already been overcome.  And as the protagonist of this new movie tells us, there are no heroes or villains, just ordinary people victimised by the terrible choices they should never have been asked to make.

So let us turn to the particular. It's the late 1940s and America is in a Cold War with the Soviet Union.  It's government has decided to investigate communist party members at home, despite the fact that it is not illegal to be a member of the Communist party.  In Hollywood, a group of right wing fearful and powerful individuals - including Ronald Reagan and the influential gossip columnist Hedda Hopper - make it their business to expose the Communists and blackmail any studio who hires them with picket lines and protests.  They might act from a misplaced sense of patriotism but the tactics are dirty, and hint at the latent anti-semitism in the Hollywood system at the time. 

INSIDE OUT

INSIDE OUT is the phenomenally successful new Pixar movie from the directors of two films I really adored - UP and RATATOUILLE.  It's smart, witty and beautifully imagined and rendered. But for some reason it just didn't connect with me on an emotional level. In fact, two days after seeing it, the thing I remember most about my movie watching experience was the Pixar short film, LAVA, that preceded the feature. I can still sing that song and feel moved by the plight of the little volcano hoping for love.  INSIDE OUT was clever, and pretty, but I'm just not sure it's going to stay with me in that way.

This is often the problem with high concept film. INSIDE OUT posits a world in which our emotions are neatly split into five key feelings, and whichever of these controls our mood generates our memories and our feelings.  So, at first glance, our protagonist is an eleven year old girl called Riley, struggling with moving across country with her family, feeling pressured to keep a happy face for her stressed out dad, but inwardly hating it all.  But the real star of the show is Riley's emotion, Joy, played by Amy Poehler (PARKS & RECREATION).  Joy has, up to this point, been largely in charge of Riley's emotions resulting in lots of happy memories.  And Joy ascribes part of her success to keeping Sadness (THE OFFICE's Phyllis Smith) firmly off the controls.  So the coming of age journey is not really for Riley but for Joy, as she learns that everyone needs a little sadness to make the happier times happy by contrast. And sometimes a good cry, admitting your suffering, allows others to reach out to you and for you to resolve, rather than smother, your issues.  So in that sense, this is a radical children's movie, for while it still gives us a happy ending, that happiness is conditional on admitting that it's okay to be sad.

NIGHTS IN RODANTHE - schmaltz - top quality - but schmaltz all the same

Unmitigated, manipulative schmaltz. An emotioanally repressed surgeon and a voluble divorcee fall in love on a stormy night in a ludicrously post-card perfect beach-front hotel. They are prevented from making a new and idyllic life together by a lazy plot point that seems a little sadistic and random. There's no prickly emotional drama (as in AS GOOD AS IT GETS). The emotional transformations are a little too pat. I detest this sort of melodramatic bilge, even when, as in this case, it's actually pretty well acted by Richard Gere and Diane Lane in the main roles and Scott Glen and James Franco in support. Real weepies make you cry uncontrollably because you're wrapped up in the story- rather than tugging self-consciously on your heart-strings.

NIGHTS IN RODANTHE is on release in the US, Brazil, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Iceland and the UK. It opens next weekend in Germany, Russia, Singapore and Austria. It opens on October 24th in the Philippines, Norway and Spain. It opens on November 6th in Australia; on November 13th in Egypt, the Netherlands and Portugal and on November 28th in Venezuela.

JUMPER - weak performances mar neat-O concept

This poster totally sums up the new sci-fi action flick, JUMPER. On the plus side, there are a lot of cool special effects and glamourous locations thrown up onto the screen. The pyramids, the Colisseum, down-town Tokyo, the beaches of Fiji...The heroes of this film run, jump, speed and slide their way through glamourous location after glamourous location. The problem is that the amount of time and care spent on, oh simple things, like character, motivation, plot and narrative arc, are disproportionately small.

It's a real shame because the basic concept is cool. Certain people have the ability to "jump" - to teleport instantaneously to anywhere in the world. These Jumpers are being hunted down by evil Paladins, who think only God should have that kind of power.

Problem is, the Paladins are led by Samuel L Jackson in a daft blonde dye-job that totally subverts his ability to look scary and threatening. Another problem is the lame attempt to inject a bigger story/possible sequel of the "Luke, I am your father" kind. Yet another problem is the fact that our hero, as portrayed by Hayden Christiansen, comes across as whiny and self-obsessed. There's never any suggestion that David will use his powers to save others. Indeed, the only thing he uses them for is to get with his childhood sweetheart. Rachel Bilson is similarly weak in her performance.

The only person who looks remotely like he's having any fun is Jamie Bell. He camps up his cameo role as a fellow Jumper, and almost, but not quite, manages to turn a weak script into something entertaining.

I'd also like to observe that the two kids playing younger version of David and his sweetheart - Annasophia Robb and Max Thieriot - are infinitely stronger performers than their grown-up counter-parts. So if we must have a sequel, might it not be better as a more fully developed prequel?

JUMPER is on release in Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Kuwait, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Lorea, Taiwan, the US, the UK, Estonia, Iceland, Norway, Poland and Spain. It opens next week in Belgium, Egypt, France, Denmark, Sweden, Israel and Italy. JUMPER opens in March in Slovakia, Finland, Japan, Turkey, Germany and Brazil. It opens in Argentina on April 3rd.

HOLLYWOODLAND - great performances mask a structural mess

HOLLYWOODLAND purports to be a movie about the truth behind the apparent suicide of George Reeves. Reeves was TV's first Superman. The problem with the movie is not so much that it doesn’t tell you who did it. After all, it’s touted as one of Hollywood’s great unsolved mysteries. The problem is that actually, bluntly, I just didn’t give a shit. And the reason why I didn’t give a shit had nothing to do with the acting – which varied from fine to brilliant. It was to do with the way in which the writer and director had chosen to frame his story.

Ben Affleck has won awards for his performance as George Reeves, both as Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. I think that this confusion as to whether or not his character is at the centre of the film is indicative of the fact that the writer and director really haven't made up their minds as to what the focus of the movie is. Is it on the charismatic and tragic George Reeves? It’s certainly a compelling story. We meet him as a slightly out-of-shape actor – a real gent – but down on his luck. He aspires to take on serious parts in quality films but he can’t get a break. He ends up starring in a cheap kids serial just to earn some cash. But, almost to his embarrassment, the serial turns out to be a huge success – to a nation of kids, he is Superman. Reeves drinks heavily and rues his cheap fame. Typecast, he can’t break into serious films. He’s also railing against the possessive hold of his sugar-mama – the wife (Diane Lane) of the VP of MGM (Bob Hoskins) – and takes up with a young brazen actress from New York – “to make him feel young”. It’s a tragic story of a man who, despite success, is not satisfied that he has lived up to his potential – and Ben Affleck portrays his inner turmoil well. It’s his best performance in years – not because Affleck went through a phase of being a lesser actor, but because he chose terrible parts.

Thing is, as fascinating as this story is, we never get a handle on it because it’s essentially a partial story told in flashbacks – little vignettes uncovered by a private detective investigating George Reeves’ alleged suicide. Half of me wishes the director had just used a conventional biopic format and let Reeves’ story have some time to breathe, but the problem is that the over-laid detective story is in some ways the movie's greatest asset. This is because as much as it destracts from George Reeves it contains the stunning performance of Adrien Brody as the private detective, Louis Simo. Simo is hired by Reeves’ mother to investigate the alleged murder. Brody’s performance is pure charisma – he plays Simo as a guy with intelligence, charm and an eye to the main chance. But he’s more than just a natty line in sports-coat and smart line for the press: he’s a good man. Although he starts off on the make – drumming up a little press to keep the mother’s cheques coming, he is genuinely aghast when he realises there might be some truth to her claims. He genuinely wants to protect his girlfriend from the mess and seems to have a real need to get some closure on the case. You sense that the director wants to make a big deal about Louis’ relationship with his young son as well. I can see why the director wants to do this – it helps flesh out Louis’ character as well as show the modern audience just how popular Reeves was with the kids and just how much his death affected them. This plot strand is interesting and well acted – but once again, it just distracts from the main story and further confuses the issue of just who’s story this is.

One final point brings me back to the issue of the unsolved crime. Like I said, this didn’t bother me too much, but it certainly makes HOLLYWOODLAND a different kettle of fish to, say, CHINATOWN and LA CONFIDENTIAL, both of which have Byzantine plots that do eventually resolve themselves. By contrast, in HOLLYWOODLAND, the alleged murder is more of a MacGuffin to allow the director to explore two interesting characters and the impact of Hollywood’s latent corruption and greed on their lives. Of course, CHINATOWN and LA CONFIDENTIAL are also brilliant examinations of the cruelty and decadence at the heart of LA and they do this stuff far better than HOLLYWOODLAND, which deals with corruption on a domestic rather than systemic level.

I am pleased to have watched Hollywoodland and can recommend it purely on the grounds of production design, Adrien Brody’s outstanding performance and some decent play from Diane Lane and Ben Affleck. But Brody aside, I can’t quite understand the Oscar buzz. This week alone I have seen more impressive performances in movies like SHORTBUS, INFAMOUS and BUENOS AIRES 1977. Moreover, performances aside, in terms of narrative structure I think this movie is a real mess.

HOLLYWOODLAND played Venice 2006 where Ben Affleck won Best Actor. It opened in the US in September and in Italy in October. HOLLYWOODLAND opens in the UK on December 1st and in the Netherlands, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Belgium and France in February 2007. It opens in Australia and Germany on March 15th.