A CURE FOR WELLNESS

A CURE FOR WELLNESS is a really fascinating, beautiful film full of references to films and novels that I love. And so, despite it being about 45 minutes too long for what is, in effect, just GET OUT for white folks, I can't help but have a soft spot for the film. It's directed by Gore Verbinski who made the amazing RANGO, and this film is similarly cine-literate.  We are highly aware that he loves Kubrick, and Thomas Mann, and Visconti, and Russian Ark, and dark fantasy horror from the likes of Lynch and Del Toro.  And as with all of those, it's deeply aware of the dark gothic medieval fairy tales that underpin all of our worst fears.  It's a film where every piece of art direction is meticulous and every framing choice an echo of an iconic forbear. 

The movie opens with a young American financier called Lockhart (Dale DeHaan) being sent to Europe to extract his company's errant CEO.  Instead of getting him out, he's involved in a weird car accident that results in him becoming an increasingly unwilling patient in the sanatorium. (Echoes of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain!) He's schmoozed by the chief physician, Volmer, played by a deliciously oleaginous and sinister Jason Isaacs with a hilariously perfect German accent. And he's fascinated by a young girl called Hannah (Mia Goth) who seems pre-naturally innocent. As the film unravels, Lockhart gets more bodily and mentally fragile, as he tries to understand why the bizarrely passive patients are ageing and desiccated despite taking "the cure". We get to predictably sinister and fantastic territory but it all takes so very long that I found myself wishing that the movie had had more discipline rather than trying to throw every single image and every single idea onto the screen. Nonetheless, it's a noble failure. A movie full of wondrous moments and cine-love, that just needed a more disciplined hand at the tiller. 

A CURE FOR WELLNESS is rated R and has a running time of 146 minutes. It was released in 2016 and is available to rent and own. 

RANGO - Wonderful, radical, revolutionary

RANGO is a revelation. It is one of the best films I have seen this year, one of the best animated films since TOY STORY, and must surely raise the bar in terms of what is seen as appropriate material for a children's film, and the level of ambition one can bring to the visuals in an animated film. I wonder if history will judge it as revolutionary as AVATAR in terms of bringing the craft of cinema forward and - contra AVATAR - showing us just how dazzling and immersive visuals can be without 3D, but when the CGI animators are guided by one of the best cinematographers working today, Roger Deakins (TRUE GRIT, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN).

The movie has been put together by the team behind PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN - director Gore Verbinski and star Johnny Depp - and it's their best film to date - capturing the sheer energy and comedy of the original POTC film, but allying it to a stronger story and imbuing it with an indulgent love of cinema. For this is, above everything, a film for cineastes - a film about the joy of transformation - of being part of a story that you craft - and about living up to the Heroic Ideal. To that end, John Logan (GLADIATOR)'s screenplay leans heavily on the plot of 70s film noir, CHINATOWN, but lives in the shadow of all of those wonderful Clint Eastwood westerns, not to mention doffing its cap to FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and APOCALYPSE NOW among others.

Johnny Depp plays a pet lizard with no real friends but a vivid imagination. The lizard is the ultimate cinephile, indulging in wild cine-literate fantasies, but ultimately lonely and confused about who he really is. When a car accident leaves him wondering into a old western town in the Mojave desert, he takes the opportunity to reinvent himself as "Rango" - a gun-slinging hero along the lines of The Man With No Name. And boy does this town need a Hero. Some Evil man (obvious to anyone who's seen CHINATOWN) has been hoarding water, leaving the town to run dry, forcing humble farmers from their land....In order to sort this mess out, Rango has to over-come his fear, make good friends, and become a Real Hero, helped out by a wise armadillo (Al Molina) and a surreal dream featuring Timothy Olyphant as the Clint-like Spirit of the West.

What I love about Rango is its evident love for the genres it's referring to (in sharp contrast to the risible YOUR HIGHNESS) and its evident love for the textures of the western. I've never seen an animated film - typically full of shiny, bright, smooth CGI - look so dusty, weather-beaten and worn. The details of the fur, the clothes, the buildings is quite stunning and the film is drawn as if it really has been shot on old fashioned 35mm by the best cinematographer in the business. Add to that a story with real stakes and real emotional heart, voiced by actors at the top of their game. (Special mentions for Isla Fisher as Beans and Ned Beatty as the Mayor.) But most of all I love that this film neither patronises its young audience nor bores its adult audience - and yet doesn't pander to quick, cheap laughs with post-modern winks at popular culture - a trait I particularly detest in the SHREK films. Which other animated movie would dare to have a joke in which the word "thespians" is confused for "lesbians" - or a sequence in which the Hero cross-dresses?

All of this makes RANGO at once marvellously old-fashioned in its cinephilia, its textures and its wonderful photography, but also marvellously modern in its subversive adult humour and willingness to use surreal dream sequences. This really is a wonderful film - and one can only hope that other animated features rise to the challenge of matching its attention to detail and depth of vision.

RANGO is on global release in all bar Japan where it opens on September 23rd.

You can tell they started filming PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END without a finished script

Unlike director Gore Verbinski, I am going to keep my review of PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END short, structured and to the point.

Positive aspects:
1. Handsome production values;
2. Plentiful funny sight gags;
3. Occasional witty dialogue;
4. Admirably restrained handling of the Keith Richards cameo;
5. Acc. to Nik, an ending that "twisted and turned so much, and was so laughably stupid", it was rather fun.

Negative aspects:
1. A labyrinthine plot that is near impossible to follow and therefore to care about;
2. A plot so full of random shit and plot lines that the film-makers don't have time to take each strand to fruition;
3. Johnny Depp slipping into self-parody;
4. All other actors wooden or on auto-pilot;
5. Chow Yun-Fat's incomprehensible English;
6. Misplaced political allegory in opening scenes and in Keira Knightley's absurd "I have a dream" speech near the end;
7. A bloated, indulgent run-time;
8. Markedly less light-hearted and funny than the original movie;
9. Absurdity of Jerry Bruckheimer peddling a movie wherein the audience has to sympathise with renegade freedom-loving pirates (who are bound by an iron-clad Pirate Code, by the way) as opposed to the capitalistic, "big business" Hollywood studio, I mean, East India Company!

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END is on global release.

APPENDIX: An email exchange.

Bina007: You're remarkably positive about your experience given how shite it was.

Nikolai: Well, you see, somehow the film retained a charm. Probably because it was so unpolished. It was like being at a dress rehearsal. You don't expect the play to be good, and you feel for the actors personally when they get their lines wrong and shit. You think, awww, Johnny Depp, you're making it up as you go along aren't you? And then at the end of the film, and I mean the last 5 - 10 minutes, they'd almost recaptured what made the first one great! And it's like - fuck - why couldn't the last 2.4 hours have been like this? And what happened in dead man's chest? Why did they have to embellish a simple formula that worked with all this dumb-assed CGI and stupid baddies and unbelievably intricate plots sub-plots double-plots and wank. So yeah, I had some sympathy for the film - in the same way as I have sympathy for a lame beggar trying to walk down the street to get to a better begging station. Capiche?

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS, I mean, hard cash

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS is an astounding movie. It's being sold as this emotional tearjerker about a solid-gold dad who lifts himself and his cute little kid out of poverty through sheer hard-work and endurance. It's a real-life American Dream. We know the dad is a good guy because he's being played by Will Smith, whose whole public persona is of a good guy and solid father. And we know the guy is smart because he can solve a Rubik's cube. And hey, his kid really is very sweet. We see this guy suffer eviction, the IRS jacking his savings and even homelessness, but he makes it in the end. Excellent.

The subversive part is this: the character Chris Gardner surely wants to be a good father and put his family on a solid financial footing. But he also wants a fast car painted pillar-box red. In fact, the entire motivating force of the movie is summed up in a quick scene where Gardner sees a guy pull up to a skyscraper in a sweet convertible. He asks him what he does for a living, and decides that that's what he's going to do. Because, in this movie, The Pursuit of Happyness is actually The Pursuit of Cash. Pure and simple. Dress it up with cute kids and gritty cinematography all you want: the guy wants to be rich.

Ain't nothing wrong with that. I personally hope to be very rich all my life. But it's just funny to find that underneath the soft, cuddly, sweet, sentimental exterior of this movie (imagining dinosaurs in the train station: ye gods I nearly vomited) beats the cold, ruthless heart of a greedy capitalist bastard. The kind of guy who bilks a cab fare or pushes onto a bus in order or lies that he's in the neighbourhead or jumps the call list in order to get ahead.

Subversion aside, there are some other things to like. Will Smith does give a nuanced, quietly impressive performance, and his real-life son Jaden is highly impressive as his on-screen son. I also appreciate a script in which THE MAN isn't holding back the struggling worker. Gardener faces obstacles but they aren't the vicious injustices of an uncaring system.

Still, I can't honestly recommend a film that was at least half an hour too long, repetitive and nauseatingly sentimental in parts. I really don't need to see Will Smith running at break-neck speed across a road to get to get to a life-changing appointment so many times.....And don't even get me started on Thandie Newton's hysterical performance as Gardner's haggard wife. Poor direction or poor chocies on Newton's part? Who knows? And who cares? Because after an hour and a half I really didn't care any more.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS is on release in the USA. It opens in Australia tomorrow and in Italy and the UK on the 12th. It opens in Germany and Israel on the 18th and in Japan on the 27th and France on the 31st. It opens in Argentina, the Netherlands, Brazil and Spain on Feb 2nd and in Belgium, Estonia, Finland and Venezuala on the 9th. It opens in Hungary on the 15th, Sweden on the 23rd, Singapore on March 1st and Turkey on March 2nd.

Overlooked DVD of the month - THE WEATHER MAN

This month's overlooked DVD is a small-budget indie-type pic written by the guy who wrote the Will Smith schmaltz-fest THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS and directed by the man responsible for PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN. Despite this, it's a rather wonderful, mournful, seditious film featuring a pitifully brilliant performance by Nic Cage.

Cage plays a financially successful Chicago weatherman who hates his life. He's not a qualified meteorologist; he resents the public's identification of him with the weather (not least because they keep throwing fast food at him); his ex-wife is seeing another man; his daughter is obese and self-hating; his junkie son is being sleazed on by a pederast therapist; and to cap it all off, he feels he does not have the respect of his fatally ill father. Unsurprisingly, then, this movie is downbeat. It's like a blue-grey tone poem of middle-aged angst; brilliantly and brutally well-observed.

The movie is so relentlessly down-beat that some have complained that it's dull to the point of frustration. But that, I think, overlooks the thin but rich stream of black humour contained within the script. There's an interior monologue as Cage's weather man has to go to the grocery store and pick up some tartar sauce for his wife that's absolutely hysterical, for example. A more valid criticism is that Michael Caine once again fails to pin down the American accent, but frankly his performance is otherwise so good I can overlook this. Hope Davis is similarly good as Cage's wife, as is Nicholas Hoult as the son.

But the real reason I think this movie deserves a look is that the ending is about as seditious as I can imagine. The fact that some critics have accused it of being schmaltzy staggers me. Because what the movie tells us is that all this stuff is blowing in the Weather Man's face, but he will be okay and his life be judged a success. Why? Because he takes a job as Weather Man on a nationwide breakfast show, pulling in a million two a year. The final scene has Cage standing on a parade float waving and smiling blandly at the crowds lining the streets - behind the fire brigade but ahead of Sponge-Bob. He is rich. "The ultimate American accomplishment" and a damning indictment of American society from the screen-writer and film-maker. I can't remember the last time I saw such a daring, materialistic, seditious ending. And watching this film close on the heels of THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS, I keep wondering if critics missed a trick with just how materialistic and seditious that movie also is.

THE WEATHER MAN was originally released in the US in October 2005 and in the UK in March 2006. It is now out on DVD.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST – a degradation

Let me state for the record that I loved the original PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movie. From the very beginning, when we see Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow sailing into Port on a sinking ship and bribing the guard, I knew I was in for a good time. A summary of the film reads like the memorable description of The Princess Bride: pirates, duels, fear, death, true love... In short, there was swash and there was buckle and there was rum. A good time was had by all. If you take all these characteristics and negate them, you have the essentials of the sequel, Dead Man’s Chest.

But first, let’s glory for a moment in the good parts of the film. First off, the production design is lavish and glorious. Pirates are grimy, locals are exotic, ships creak, waves roar, and the un-dead morph into sea-beasties. It’s everything we expect from a big-budget summer crowd-pleaser. The second good thing is the casting, which is at worst good and at best brilliant. Keira Knightley is a good sport and brings her usual vim to the role of Elizabeth Swann – the Governor’s daughter who secretly wants to be a pirate. Admittedly, she is wearing less realistic hair extensions than in the first film(!) but I rather liked the development of her character into a horny teenager tempted by the scoundrelous Sparrow. Who wouldn’t find the flaccid goody-two-shoes, Will Turner, a turn-off? Poor Orlando Bloom reprises his role as the Elizabeth’s fiancé. His acting role is reduced to looking put-upon and being the good guy, cuckolded in spirit if not in fact. But he does his best. Indeed, all the British character actors - Tom Hollander, Jonathan Pryce and Jack Davenport, Mackenzie Crook - turn out sterling performances in what are often cameo roles with limited potential. Special praise must go to Bill Nighy and Naomi Harris. Nighy manages to be almost sympathetic as the villain of the piece, Davy Jones, despite looking like an octopus. And Naomi Harris is utterly convincing and captivating as the witch, Tia Dalma. Finally, of course, we have Johnny Depp reprising his role as Captain Jack – the scoundrelous pirate.

Okay, so now on to the manifold problems. To summarise: the film is too long; the narrative arc is confused; the movie rips off Star Wars; there is too much angst and too little piracy.

At two and a half hours, DEAD MAN’S CHEST is longer than any summer block-buster should ever be and could happily lose an hour. It’s full of little segments which while full of spectacular CGI do not advance the plot one iota. For instance, we spend about 15 minutes early on the movie on a segment where Will Turner is searching for Jack Sparrow on a tropical island. Will is captured by natives who are straight out of Peter Jackson’s KING KONG. But the blatant rip-off doesn’t stop there. Turner is roped to a wooden pole, Luke Skywalker-style and taken before the natives new god-incarnate – Jack Sparrow. Now Jack, who is also a captive, must decide Will’s fate, clearly ripping off the C3PO and the Ewok’s plot strand in STAR WARS EPISODE VI: RETURN OF THE JEDI. The whole segment is meant to be fun, and there is the odd frame of visual humour. But apart from being a blatant rip-off, it doesn’t take the audience any further along the story.

And believe me, a bit of obvious plot signalling would have been nice, because this is one of the most confused and bloated narratives I have seen. The basic idea is that a lot of different people are after Davy Jones’ chest. Davy Jones is the un-dead spirit of the sea who captains a ship of the damned and commands the vicious sea-beast – the Cracken. The chest represents bargaining power over Davy – whether to rescue a loved-one, repay a debt or open up the Atlantic to trade(!) So we see people run after Jack’s compass, which will direct them to the key to the chest, or straightforwardly to the key, or indeed the chest, or its contents. The movie hasn’t just got one MacGuffin – it’s got four! The sad part is that the characters don’t just get on with chasing after this stuff but get side-tracked doing other stuff, like ripping off King Kong. This leaves no time for anything as obvious as, say, hijacking a ship or being hunted down by the British navy. In short, there is not much actual piracy in the second movie.

But let’s get back to the blatant rip-off of Star Wars. The blatant stealing from Star Wars goes beyond the C3PO and the Ewoks segment. While on Davy Jones’ ship, Will meets his father, played brilliantly Stellan Skarsgård. Papa Turner has been condemned to servitude to the evil Davy Jones for staging the mutiny against Jack. Although he abandoned Will to go pirating, Will still sees “good in him” and vows to rescue him. Do you see where we are going with this? An evil slave master controlling the father who must be redeemed by the son. I swear that at the point where Davy Jones makes Bootstrap Bill Turner scourge his own son, Will, all I could think of was the Emperor telling Vader to destroy Luke on the Death Star. And it doesn’t end there. In the climactic scene, the Black Pearl is under attack from the Cracken and Captain Jack has abandoned his crew-mates to their fate. However, it classic Han Solo in Episode IV style he returns to the ship just in time to help Will and Elizabeth blow up the Death Star kill the Cracken. Could it get any cheesier than the bullet-time shot of his decisive stroke?!

Which brings me to my general point that there is too much angst and not enough swashbuckling. The original movie succeeded because Captain Jack was a devil-may-care rogue. Turning him into a nice guy subverts the pleasure of the franchise. There is too much soul-searching and not enough humour! Yes, humour. The humour, where it exists, relies on Captain Jack being ambushed my baddies and uttering “Oh, bugger” in a mockney accent. It’s funny the first time, less so the fifth, and anyway, haven’t we done that to death with Blackadder?

So to summarise, this movie combines a bloated and over-complicated plot with a subversion of the roguish nature of Captain Jack Sparrow. What we get is a beautifully rendered series of spectacles with no narrative drive and little emotional impact. I didn’t laugh. I was not entertained. I want my money back.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST is on release in the US, UK, France and Australia. It goes on release in Finland, Sweden and Israel on July 12th. It opens in Brazil on July 21st, Austria and Germany on July 27th and Spain on August 11th 2006.