MUDBOUND - Day 3 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

Dee Rees' MUDBOUND is a profoundly cliched and deathly slow-paced film about racism in post-WW2 Mississippi.  We're on a mud-drenched farm, owned by a small-minded white man (Jason Clarke) and his rather superficial, simpering  but ultimately warm-hearted wife (Carey Mulligan). They live there with their two daughters, and his cruelly racist but caricatured Pappy (Jonathan Banks), while the brother (Garrett Hedlund is off fighting in Germany.  Also living on the farm are the black tenant farmers, of eminent virtue and no character nuance whatsoever. As Meester Phil put it, the mum is played by Mary J Blige in the "Oprah Winfrey" role. The tenants son Ronsel (Jason Mitchell) is also off in Germany fighting the war, and experiencing far more freedom than he ever found in the USA.

The plot of the story, such as it is, sees the white brother and black son return from WW2 and form a friendship through their shared trauma.  Clearly nothing good is going to come of this anachronistic enlightenment and in due course we get a searingly violent scene set to a beautiful gospel hymn. In fact, I would wager that it's an unintentional irony of this film that all the really truly shitty stuff happens either in church or when set to a hymn.  I think the ending is meant to be uplifting, nonetheless, but I found it all rather patronising and fantastic - as if Germany post-war was an utopia of racial harmony.  

Overall, this is a long drawn-out film, whose paper-thin characters can't stand the weight of history thrust upon them.  And I found the wannabe Mallickian voice-overs deeply irritating.  Seriously - watch the first half and ask yourself - would this be any less good - would my understanding of characters' feelings be any less - without this incessant portentous rambling?

MUDBOUND has a running time of 134 minutes and is rated R.  The film played Sundance, Toronto, New York and London 2017. It goes on release on the internet in the USA on November 17th. 

PAN

PAN is a really badly conceived and constructed film that has flashes of wit but by far not enough to compensate for the hour and a half of boredom it inflicts upon the viewer.  The director is Joe Wright, whose movies tend to be very high concept, over-worked and under-emotional for my taste.  And the writer, Jason Fuchs, seems to have way too much concept and far too little original thought. (Rather ominously he is also scripting the forthcoming WONDER WOMAN movie.)

So what's it all about? The movie is an entirely redundant Peter Pan sequel. Or rather it feels like the first half of one.  Peter is a young orphan left with some rather sadistic nuns in a gloomily lit world war two London of food rationing and German bombs. One night he is captured by a flying pirate ship captained by Hugh Jackman's camp but angsty Blackbeard and taken to the spice mines of kessel, sorry, the pixie-dust mines of Neverland. Enslaved, Peter makes friends with a character that's half Indiana Jones- half Han Solo called, wait for it, James Hook (Garrett Hedlund)!  We know Peter is going to lead a slave revolution because, hey, he can fly and his mum's called Mary! So together Hook and his sidekick Smee he nicks a ship and flies to fairyland with his new friend Tigerlily (Rooney Mara). She's a kickass girl and clearly the writers are trying for some kind of Han-Leia relationship with the rogueish Hook, complete with a last minute rescue reminiscent of A NEW HOPE. Anyways, there's then some Moria-ish stuff about fairy writing and a key and some Harry Potterish stuff about a childhood crush gone wrong and you end up just wondering why Blackbeard didn't just kill Peter when he had the chance.

PAN has a running time of 111 minutes and is rated PG. The movie is on global release.

UNBROKEN

You can listen to a podcast review of this movie below, or subscribe to Bina007 in iTunes.

One of the less edifying revelations of the Sony hack was producer Scott Rudin's contempt for Angelina Jolie's talent as a film-maker and his bile at her leave of absence from his CLEOPATRA project to make UNBROKEN. So I approached this World War Two biopic with some interest and maybe some scepticism. What I am happy to say is that UNBROKEN is a handsomely made film about a true wartime hero, that while conventional in its approach, has so much authentic concern with the human condition that it left me with real tears, as opposed to some of those more mawkish and manipulative films that want to make you cry but don't. (THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING, I'm looking at you here.)

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS - LFF 2013 - Day Seven

Oh man.  So here's the thing with the Coen Brothers.  Sometimes they write goofball comedies.  Sometimes they write movies that take you into dark existential angst. Sometimes they write movies that just take a decent guy and have the world beat up on him unrelentingly.  The last time they did that was in A SERIOUS MAN, which was perhaps the biggest downer of the London Film Festival that year, but was still, in its own way, a movie with a compelling narrative.  With INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, I'm not sure they've even given us that.  Nope.  INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS is a fantastic soundtrack album masquerading as a deep and earnest film.  It's meant to be making the point that talent doesn't rise to the surface, that inane nonsense is popular, and that sometimes good people are so beaten down by life they become their own worst enemy out of frustration.  All that might have made a compelling film, but INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS isn't it.  It's just a dull grey-green dirge - the colour of bruised skin - paced so slowly as to be funereal, in which we watch a man freeze and starve and struggle into submission, giving up on his career as a folk singer on the very night that Bob Dylan's career is about to take off.  Honestly, there's not much to like here other than the music.  They let John Goodman have a comedic cameo at around the half-way market to jolt us awake again, but other than that it's just a plain-chant dirge.  There's not even the characteristic fantastic cinematography, unless you count a moodily lit Llewyn singing on stage.  Just move along here, there's nothing to see.

The plot? Such as it is.  Oscar Isaac plays a folk singer called Llewyn Davis who lives on people's couches and can't quite seem to catch a break.  Everything he does turns to ashes.  He travels to Chicago in desperation, looking for an audition that bombs. He comes back to New York and decides to give it all up to become a merchant seaman again. But even that doesn't go well. And he ends up literally beaten up. That's honestly it - just spiced up by the John Goodman cameo and Adam Driver in an even smaller cameo as a nonsensical backing singer on an absurd song.  

Maybe you think I've spoiled the movie for you? I promise you I haven't.  When you see Davis refuse royalties on the banal record for cash up front, we know it'll be a hit.  When you see him angrily tell his sister to throw out his stuff, we know it'll contain something he really needs.  It's just that kind of film.  This isn't the "sweet sad funny" picture I've heard described, but cinematic sadism.  It wasn't the best movie I saw that day, let alone the best movie at Cannes. 

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

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS has a running time of 105 minutes.  

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS played Cannes 2013 where it won the Grand Prize and London 2013.  It opens in France on November 6th; in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the USA on December 6th; in Portugal on December 26th; in Mexico and Spain on January 3rd; on Greece on January 9th; in Italy on January 16th; in the UK and Ireland on January 24th; and on February 6th in Argentina and Denmark. 

TRON: LEGACY 3D - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

TRON: LEGACY is the much anticipated sequel to the iconic, pioneering 1982 sci-fi flick that took us inside the computer for the very first time. It is faithful to the original, while at the same time taking full advantage of new technologies, and while I am sure fan-boys will be happy, as a complete newbie, I found it exciting, evocative and literally wonderful. However, as I'll go on to explain, it's not without its problems - and for those reasons - I think the original movie stands head and shoulders above the remake.

As with the original movie, TRON: LEGACY has a simple plot that is explored on two levels: in reality and on the Grid (the computer-world), and characters exist both in real life and as avatars in both. A prologue tells us that back in 1989, talented computer programmer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) disappeared, leaving his little boy Sam an orphan. 27 years later, and Sam (Garrett Hedlund) is lured into the Grid by an apparent signal from his long-dead father, and both will try to battle a Programme more powerful than MCP (the villain of the first film). This time, the enemy is the very avatar Kevin Flynn created to patrol the Grid, called Clu; and Clu has bent Tron, the original security programme, to his will. No matter - for the Flynns have their own programming skills, as well as the help of a pioneering new programme called Quorra (Olivia Wilde), not to mention the attention of an oleaginous show-man called Castor (Michael Sheen).

The first good thing to say about TRON: LEGACY is that is looks absolutely bloody amazing. I watched it in 3D and what they did with the Disney logo - the logo - not even the film ! - had me gasping. We then break into scenes of real-life as we establish the prologue and the back story, but once we enter the Grid we're back into a world of clean fluorescent lines; dazzling car and motorcycle chases; iconic costumes and sets; and simply amazing 2012-like interior design. I can't wait to see this film again just to, quite simply, see it - to luxuriate in its design. I guess this reflects well on the fact that Disney respected the original designs and the camerawork of David Fincher's DP, Claudio Miranda, particularly skilled at working in DV. But most of all, the seamless use of CGI. Take, as just one example, the way in which Jeff Bridges' younger self plays CLU, retro-aged using the same technology that made Brad Pitt old in Benjamin Button.

The second good thing to say about TRON: LEGACY is that the story makes absolute sense. In other words, the screen-writers didn't mess up the logic or the lines of the original but extended it forward in a perfectly reasonable manner. That might sound petty but I've seen many a movie "opened out" by careless writers trying to over-shoot themselves. Edward Kitsis and Adam Horrowitz (veterans of LOST) don't make that mistake. And whenever there's a nod to the outside world - the world outside the movie - it makes sense and doesn't break the fourth wall. So, for instance, TRON the video game exists in the world of TRON: LEGACY but as an Encom product. Another example is using Daft Punk as the house-DJs in the Grid's End of the Line club. This might've been distracting were it not for the fact that Daft Punk's whole style, clothing and music is so Tron-like anyways that they fit right in.

The third good thing to say about TRON: LEGACY is that despite all the technological wizardry, a number of the key cast members give really powerful, believable performances, not least Jeff Bridges as the young, self-assured CLU and the older, wiser, more regretful Kevin Flynn. In the scene where he acknowledges his youthful pride and his love for his son, as the only true "perfection" that can be attained, Bridges just acts everyone else off the screen. Perhaps more surprising is that Olivia Wilde, as Quorra, is actually rather good. Wilde has the kind of linear, hard beauty that makes her superb casting as a computer programme. And the surprise for those of us who knew her from her role as Mischa Barton's love interest in The OC is that, when given half a chance, she can actually act. As Quorra she displays a certain wide-eyed excitement about the real world - what's Jules Verne like? what's the sun like? - that's captivating and engaging. And the movie desperately needs characters we can feel for to counter-act and humanise all the technology and CGI stylings.

But this movie really does have problems too. First up, first-time feature director Joseph Kosinski uses every directorial cliché in the book, especially in the 2-D live action scenes. For example, when Sam rides his motorcycle up to his dad's old arcade hall, we see his reflection in the motorcycle mirror. Why? What for? Except that's what directors usually do. Moreover, while Kosinski can direct high-paced thrilling Grid battles, he can't film a thrilling live action motorcycle chase. The opening cops versus Sam chase is simply dull.

Second, and far worse, two of the key performances are seriously off-beam. Michael Sheen's Castor/Zuse looks like a cross between an Albino and an Oompa-Loompa and he plays the character like Alan Cumming as MC in Cabaret. His performance is so camp, frenetic and outré, that it's begging to be called "scene-stealing" but instead I found it out of place and distracting. But far worse, and the biggest weakness of TRON: LEGACY by far, is the casting of Garrett Hedlund (Patroclus in TROY) as Sam Flynn. According to IMDB, Ryan Gosling was in the running, and would no doubt have pulled off the scenes of emotional heft with greater depth than this wooden-surfaced, persistently-smirking young man. Seriously, this guy gives Mark Hamill in NEW HOPE as the most wooden, peevish sci-fi protagonist of all time. He truly grates. And I guess it's the director who ultimately has to carry the can for a) casting him and b) not directing him better. If you need evidence check out the scene where he meets his father - the person he thinks walked out on him and left him an orphan - for the first time in 27 years. He should be angry, happy, confused, questioning, bewildered - any or all of these things. Garrett Hedlund's Sam can only register far off angst or a smirk or bland acquiescence. Shame, shame, shame.

It says a lot for the visual brilliance of TRON: LEGACY that I still think it's worth checking out despite the ham-fisted live-action direction and Garrett Hedlund's lack of acting ability. But it's desperately sad that a movie that had so much right, has been pinned back from true greatness by poor casting.

TRON: LEGACY will be released on December 15th in Egypt and the UAE. It is released on the 16th in Argentina, Australia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Malaysia, Russia and Singapore. It is released on the 17th in Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Finland, India, Japan, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the UK, the USA and Venezuela. It opens on December 23rd in Hong Kong and Russia; on December 24th in Lithuania and Poland; on the 25th in Colombia; on the 26th in Iceland and on the 30th in Estonia and South Korea. It opens on January 6th in Slovakia; on the 12th in Italy; on the 13th in Portugal; on the 26th in Belgium and the Netherlands; on the 27th in Germany and on the 28th in Turkey. It opens in France on February 2nd.