The Bling Ring - materialism gone even madder

The second film I saw on the way to Chicago last month was The Bling Ring.  Based on a true story, it tells of a small group of Southern Californian teenagers who systematically broke into the houses and stole from a variety of well-known celebrity figures.  Far from any showing devious criminal intent, these teenagers appear to be stealing from their idols because they adore them - almost as if the celebrities who have been chosen to have their possessions stolen are being honoured.  The Bling Ring depicts this small band of teenagers (led by Rebecca - played by Katie Chang) as being obsessed with the cult of celebrity, shows their desire to bask in the shadow of the idols and emulate them in any way they can - including by owning what they own by any means possible.

The Bling Ring is a strangely interesting film to actually watch, given what it actually consists of.  The film goes into a lot of detail in depicting the upper middle class teenage gang breaking into the houses of the rich and the famous, and even more detail as we watch them try on their clothes and gape in awe at the riches before them.  Expensive watches, row after row of shoes, boxes of fine jewellery - all toys that we watch these young criminals gawk in awe at, try on and steal for themselves.  We then get to see the aftermath, as the young gang go around to each others' houses to wear the stolen clothes, brag about their antics on Facebook and go out to exclusive clubs to photograph themselves prancing about in their material gains.  All the while our ears are assaulted by a barrage of Southern Californian 'valley girl' drawl - the dialect of the English language that showed us how the phrase "I was like..." is a synonym for "I said..."

But the film isn't really about these people, it's about why these people are able to exist.  Given the focus that the film puts upon the lives of Rebecca and her growing band of followers, and their obsession with the material gains of celebrity culture, it's clear that The Bling Ring is trying to be an indictment of vacuous materialism.  Witness the way that the characters in the film see worth only in things, possessions, looks, fame and stardom.  Director / writer / producer Sofia Coppola is making a statement about a generation of young Americans who are risking getting lost in a brand of hollow celebrity culture that rewards nothing but fame for fame's sake and values nothing above consumerism.  These are people who see value only in being famous, and if you can get famous by stealing from the famous - what's wrong with that?  The film ends on an interview with co-criminal Nicki (Emma Watson) that sums things up nicely.  Why should she have any compunction about what she's done?  She has her 15 minutes of fame now - and that's all that matters!

Parental influence is a strong theme in the film, it shows how bad parenting can reflect terribly on a child and their upbringing.  Nicki's mother is depicted as subservient to her children, interested only in the reflected fame that Nicki's notoriety will bring her.  Most of all though the film is a warning about what can happen if a society allows a cult of consumerism and 'might is right' to become endemic at all levels.  The only difference between what is depicted here and the riots that happened in the summer of 2011 in Britain is the social class of the people taking part.  Both stem from the same problem, which is that society has sleep-walked to a place where we idolise material possessions and fame - with an understanding that if you can get away with it then no-one should ask why or how you have them.  That's a dangerous place for us to be.  The Bling Ring tackles that head-on, and as such I think it's a film well worth watching.

Oblivion - Moon-lite

The first film that I watched on my flight to Chicago two weeks ago was Oblivion.  This appears to be the latest attempt to re-invigorate Tom Cruise's up-and-down career, this time by giving him another sci-fi action role in which he gets to look tough and caring while having not only one but two love interests each young enough to be his daughter.  Seriously - Andrea Riseborough and Olga Kurylenko are 19 and 17 years younger than him respectively.  More evidence that you're not allowed to grow old and be female in Hollywood, aka the "What happened to Meg Ryan" effect.

Oblivion opens with a background story to a future gone wrong, a future in which Earth was attacked by aliens known as the Scavs.  It was a war that humanity eventually won, but at great cos to the Earth and its population.  The remains of humanity live off the surface now, on a great pyramid called the Tet that orbits the Earth and from which engineers struggle to make use of Earth's remaining meagre resources.  Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough play two such engineers, a crack team who live on a floating platform above the surface of the Earth and act as custodians to several huge fusion reactors and the flying drones that act as mobile defences against the remaining Scavs.  The perils of the mission in front of them is offset by a strong loving bond between them, as such they seem ideally-placed to carry out this long mission isolated from the rest of humanity.

After a close encounter with a group of Scavs, and after discovering a building that seems to be triggering dormant memories, Jack (Cruise's character) starts to ask a questions about the true purpose of their mission on Earth.  When an ancient relic of the war between the humans and the Scavs crashes nearby and he thinks he recognises one of the survivors, he resolves to get to the bottom of the nagging doubts gnawing away at his brain.

Oblivion is a very good science fiction film.  It has beautiful sets, a genuinely futuristic aesthetic, an excellent concept and nice little science fiction touches such as the deadly menace given off by the hovering drones.  Andrea Riseborough in particular gives an outstanding performance as a woman torn between loyalty to a person and loyalty to a mission.  The comparisons with Moon are undeniable though (though to actually compare them in detail would involve too many spoilers), and though it definitely isn't anywhere near being a rip-off it gets very close to it in many ways.

In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that Moon is such a spectacularly brilliant film I'm sure I would be rating Oblivion a lot higher.  The biggest downside to the film is that it feels a little bit like a committee of Hollywood execs saw Moon and decided that they fancied a slice of that pie for themselves.  So they got someone to write a similar-ish story but with more guns, action and attractive women but fewer disturbing smiley-faced androids.  There are some people out there who will see that as an upgrade, personally see it as bordering on copyright infringement.  A smaller let-down is that the film is billed as starring Morgan Freeman, and when he doesn't appear for 30 minutes a wandering mind might start to wonder where he is.  From there is isn't too hard to start guessing the plot twists.

Overall I want to end the review on a positive point, because I definitely enjoyed Oblivion.  It has the right blend of action, hard science fiction, future tech and humanity to keep everyone happy.  It mixes those things up well and tells an engaging story with a number of twisty bits which is only really damped when comparing to one of the best science fiction films of recent years.  The makers of Elysium should watch and learn.

Elysium - Universal Health Care gone mad

I have a lot of films to review since flying to Chicago and back from New York recently.  On the plane over to the States I watched The Bling Ring, Oblivion and Mud.  On the way back the flight was quite short and the entertainment system a bit more limited, so I re-watched Snatch - nothing new there, still funny as ever.  I'm going to start things off with a film that I went to see at the Chicago AMC, the brand new science fiction action film starring Matt Damon - Elysium.

Here's the plot part of the review.  In a future littered with standard science fiction depictions of society gone wrong, the haves live in a techno wet dream paradise that orbits the Earth named Elysium while the have-nots live on the surface of the planet.  Elysium is an idyllic palace populated by poshos talking in well-received English and the occasional French.  Earth is an extended refuse tip where people scratch out the barest of livings, speaking a mix of street English and Spanish.  Matt Damon plays an every-man who has some unspecified connection to a local crime-lord and once was 'the best' at something, but is now 'out of the game'.  Whatever that is.  After Damon's character Max suffers a near fatal injury at work because of his heartless employers on Elysium, he decides to suit up and steal his way to Elysium to get himself healed up.  Because on Elysium technology means that basically no disease exists, everything is curable, whereas on Earth to get or injured means incapacitation and a life of the scrap heap before a likely early grave.

This is the sort of thing that good science fiction is meant to do.  The problem with Elysium is that it's full of lazy characterisation and even lazier storytelling.  There are the haves, who clearly need to be able to speak French, while the have-nots must speak Mexican-Spanish.  Jodie Foster as the leader of the haves is tediously one-dimensional in her brand of evil, Matt Damon as the every-man we should root for is introduced with such a thin background that the only reason we know he is the hero is because the film tells us he is the hero.  Then there's the South African bounty hunter Kruger (admittedly played with a gleeful nastiness by Shalo Copley), who just runs around killing stuff for no apparent reward and gets to punch and be punched by Matt Damon in the film's numblingly inevitable final fistfight.

Plot holes are littered throughout Elysium.  Why is transporting information in people's brains more secure than standard wireless transmission if it's that easy to kidnap people and download the data?  What is the 'death' fail-safe thing that the information mule guy uses to transport his data?  Is that standard practice?  Wouldn't they use an expendable data mule for that purpose rather than using the chairman of the company if they're going to do that?  Can anyone think of a more obvious target for potential data interceptors?  Also the end makes no sense either, but I don't want to give away any more spoilers.

It doesn't take too much thinking to work out that Elysium is a poorly-disguised essay on the benefits of Universal Health Care.  Given the political shit-storm that has engulfed US politics since Obama's attempts to introduce even the smallest amount of universal healthcare provision in that nation, it is no surprise that a film like this should exist.  No surprise either that the film stars Matt Damon, well known for his liberal political activism.  As a confirmed socialist myself, I am fiercely in favour of universal healthcare and I believe it would do America a lot of good to have something like the NHS to replace their divisive private healthcare system.  But this film isn't going to do a lot of convince the naysayers otherwise.  It's unsubtle in the extreme, full of bad characters, mis-stepping plot lines, unimaginative uses of science fiction tropes and reduces itself to an over-reliance on punching and stabbing to resolve its story-line.  Some good special effects cannot save Elysium, it's a big disappointment.

Only God Forgives - but is it art?

I've waited all weekend before trying to put my thoughts about Only God Forgives down into the Blogosphere.  I saw the film on Friday evening last week.  I had been hoping to see one of the final showings of Pacific Rim, but due to poor takings that seems to have vanished off screens early.  Instead this new and very moody-looking film was offered up as a replacement.  The trailers for Only God Forgives make it look stylised and hint at a violently brutal storyline.

It turns out that the trailers did a very good job, because to call Only God Forgives stylised is to hugely understate what this film is.  It is one of the most heavily-stylised pieces of film-as-art I've seen in a long time.  If you thought Stoker was stylised, you aint seen nothing yet.  Not a single shot of Only God Forgives goes by without the director lovingly ensuring that the light from nearby street lamp falls in exactly the right place over a character's face, everything has been sculpted to an impossible level of perfection.

Ryan Gosling plays Julian, son to criminal Matriarch Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) and brother to a man murdered in vengeance for raping and killing a local girl prostitute.  Julian is a big time drug dealer in Bangkok, and when Crystal arrives in town to demand that Julian find and kill her son's murderer, Julian tells her that he has already found the man, but decided to let him go.  After all, he did rape and kill the man's daughter.  Crystal flies into a rage at this, and hires her own killers to do the job she thinks Julian wasn't man enough for.  All well and good, except for the local police chief Chang, the man who was responsible for telling the girl's father about her murder and effectively goading him into killing Julian's brother in revenge.  Crystal decides that he too is responsible for her son's death, and so resolves to kill him too.

It is around this conflict that the film then revolves.  For Chang is not the sort of person anyone should be messing with.  Chang is portrayed as a deliberately slow-mannered man.  He is a man who sings karaoke to a room full of police officers silently appreciating him, a man who walks as if carried on a cloud and hands out justice in the manner he sees fit with the pointy end of a sword.  He is a character that the film portrays as an almost other-worldly force, an entity that exists out of the realm of normality silently passing judgement on the filth of society in a variety of excruciatingly violent ways that more than justify an 18 rating.

The title of the film implies a connection to the Judeo-Christian concept of god.  The implication being that either Julian or Chang represent god, or that they perhaps each represent two halves of the god presented in the bible.  Julian perhaps is the god of the new testament, turning the other cheek to the killer of his brother; Chang perhaps is the god of the old testament, breathing fire and brimstone and bringing righteous vengeance upon anyone stupid enough to challenge him.  Perhaps instead Chang is the devil and Julian is god, Chang the bringer of vengeance and death, Julian using his inner strength to bring peace?

All of this is fine of course, except that the film itself is mostly over-stylised gibberish and miles too slow even for its short 90 minute run time.  It's art masquerading as cinema.  Director Nicholas Winding Refn clearly had a vision for what he wanted to do on screen and it's all up there without much in the way of script editing by anyone else.  There are too many scenes of Ryan Gosling staring at his knuckles or having visions of Chang or sitting in rooms with prostitutes milling / sitting around artistically (can anyone tell me why this is in the movie?).  No one needs more than one scene of Chang standing in front of his police underlings singing karaoke - here was have 3.

When I left the cinema on Friday I was astonished that someone would be willing to put such a film together, let alone show it in cinemas and claim it was a movie.  I was amazed that a movie exec somewhere hadn't vetoed what was going on before it became a mainstream release.  With the calm reflection of 5 days behind me though, I'm happy to give Only God Forgives a little more leeway and declare it at the least interesting.  If you thought Drive was too slow then you will hate this.  But if you're happy to sit through 90 minutes of slow-burning violence you might find something of interest here.  Have a go if you've got the time, but don't blame me if you hate it.

The World's End - the final Cornetto

Friday a week ago I went to the Showcase in Winnersh to once again worship at the fanboy altar and revel in the glory of a Pegg / Frost / Wright production, the first since Hot Fuzz and the closing chapter of the hitherto magnificent Cornetto Trilogy.  The World's End follows Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead into a world in which the tropes of Holywood cinema are transported into the mundane humdrum of Englishness - where everything will be OK so long as we can find a pub and a decent cup of tea.  Chuck in a heap of cultural references, some frenetic camera work and a shed load of genius one-liners and you've got yourselves a couple of genuinely hilarious cult classics.  Given my adoration for Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead you can imagine my anticipation of this film, and my slight fear when the trailers came out and they weren't that good.  The jokes looked a bit tired, the format looked jaded and it seemed to lack a bit of the sparkle of earlier Pegg / Frost / Wright collaborations.  Things did not look good.

Sadly having actually watched The World's End I think I sort of got the right impression from the trailer.  In it Simon Pegg plays Gary King, a man who never let go of his youth, who still wears the same t-shirts he did at the end of high school and fantasises over the greatest night of his life when he nearly completed a famous 12 stop pub-crawl in his home village - 20 years ago.  Gary gets the old gang (who have all most definitely grown up) back together to return home and go on the same pub crawl once more.  However he discovers that things are not quite the way he remembers them, and that the creeping standardisation that has affected so many of Britain's high streets as also infected his village.  Not only this though, but the neutralisation of culture appears to be the work of an alien influence, here to apparently save us from ourselves.

Edgar Wright has said in interviews that the aliens in the film are meant to represent some sort of pan-galactic Starbucks, here to pacify tensions and ease people into a quiet happy numbness where all needs are provided for and all conflict is quelled.  Of course the metaphor is a neat one.  The film presents two opposing forces and contrasts the failings of each.  Gary King, with his old band t-shirts and devotion to Primal Scream, represents the old school, the crazy recklessness of youth, optimism and nostalgia.  The aliens are the corporate, the conservative force of conformity; they represent the idea that for society to work people must somehow suppress their own individuality to conform to an idealised norm.  Should we root for Gary or the Aliens?  Or perhaps neither?

I had less fun watching this than I did watching either Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz; a lot less fun.  Now I don't know if this experience makes it a worse film than those, or if it has something to do with my over-inflated expectations of the Pegg / Wright output, but it was a fact none-the-less that I left the cinema underwhelmed by what I had seen.  Perhaps it was the character of Gary King that left me cold.  King is a dislikeable guy who doesn't really get any redemption or change, hardly a Shaun or Nicholas Angel for the audience to root for.

As Wright has indicated in interviews, it might be that the real enemy presented by the film is in fact nostalgia itself.  Could it be that with this final part of a trilogy that once re-defined British cinema, that Pegg, Wright and Frost are in fact trolling their own audience?  Does Gary King represent the vocal minority of Spaced fans still calling for a third series?  Maybe he even represents fans such as me, the people harking back to Shaun of the Dead and lamenting Simon Pegg's ongoing move into the American mainstream?  Perhaps Pegg and Wright are telling us that it is time to move on, to not end up being a Gary King living your life in a glorious past that existed so very briefly?

However you choose to look at it, and regardless of the fact that I felt it was a let-down, The World's End is still funny.  It's a pleasant antidote to the endless churn of Holywood action blockbusters slugging it out for audiences this summer.  I'm trying to heed the lessons of The World's End and not get too nostalgic here, but I think Simon Pegg's best work has always been rooted in a deep understanding of Englishness, nerd culture and the hilarity of the mundane.  I hope that he, Frost and Wright all keep their feet on the ground and not get too carried away by their increasingly elevated statuses amongst the Holywood literati.  I'm sure they've got a lot more to give to the cinema-going world; and I would like to see them making films together for a few more years yet.

Spiderman - another one!

Accidentally watched Spiderman the other day after I got the DVD through the post.  That happened because I forgot to re-order my LoveFilm list after I sent a better film back last week.  Well I guess I put the thing on my list so it's nobody's fault but mine it happened.

This review has got off to a bad start, probably because I didn't enjoy myself a great deal watching this reboot of yet another Marvel superhero they're rinsing to death for all the money they can.  This time around we have Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker, a young lad who geekily stumbles his way through high-school before for some reason going into the big city, getting bitten by a spider, getting superpowers, making a red and blur suit before finally turning into The Amazing Spiderman.

Andrew Garfield is a fine actor, Rhys Ifans plays a good bad guy and I have a bit of a crush on Emma Stone - so you would think that with the cast alone there would be plenty of scope to make this a decent superhero movie.  It's not too bad, but I took something of a dislike to it as I've definitely had my fill of this kind of Marvel origins film where a nobody becomes a superhero and then has to have a fistfight with someone at the end to satisfy the fanboys.  Ifans plays your typical Marvel scientist who creates something he can't control and it drives him mad, a madness that can only be cured by Spiderman punching win a whole heap of times.  It's the same old story that's been done tonnes of times in the past and needs to be a little more imaginative if it's going to keep me interested.

I guess this is the sort of thing that pleases the vocal majority of Marvel fans out there as the film is rocking a respectable 7.1 on imdb and has a lot of glowing reviews.  Green Lantern was a low point in this genre of film and to an extent Iron Man also sits in that spectrum.  Let's not forget Captain America, but that was such a terrible film anyway it hardly warrants comment.  This version of Spiderman is hardly the worst of the bunch, but it's getting flak from me because I'm getting sick of the constant reboots.  There's a sequel pencilled in for next year so we'll have to wait to see what they do with the format.  Hopefully they'll try something interesting and make a slightly less-tedious movie.

Flight - Denzil Washington doesn't make bad movies

Denzel Washington seems to always make good films.  I'm not talking about masterpieces here or claiming that he's always a huge box-office draw, but whenever Denzel Washington is in a film I immediately expect the it to be at least passable or better.  I don't think I've ever seen a Denzel Washington film that was genuinely bad.  Case in point was Unstoppable a few years back.  It's a film that should have been terrible, but turned out to be pretty good.  Solid film from a solid actor who has consistently delivered solid performances for years.

And so we come to Flight, the Denzel Washington film of 2012 in which he plays an alcoholic airline pilot named Whip who saves a doomed plane from crashing out of the sky by performing an incredible maneuver that involves flying his passenger airline upside-down.  Disregarding the physics of this maneuver for a second (though a quick google search indicates that the plausibility of the feat is greater than I had originally assumed), it's a dramatic event that confirms Whip as a hero.  Until the investigators find out that he had alcohol and drugs swimming around his system at the time of the crash.  Whip awakes in hospital to find that only 6 people died in the crash - including the air hostess with whom he had spent the previous night.  The media are hailing him a hero, but the crash investigation team and his lawyers know that his secret cannot stay hidden for long.

Flight is a film about redemption and saving people both literally and spiritually.  Religion plays an important part in the film.  Whip's co-pilot Ken is an ardent Christian who sees his survival in the crash as a message from god to change, when in hospital Whip meets Nicole - an alcoholic in rehab who makes it her mission to try to save him from himself.  Whip of course is responsible for the saving of nearly 100 lives when he successfully brings the plane to the ground - but is he capable of saving himself?  As Whip is encouraged to better himself and clean his act up to survive the inquiry into the crash he struggles to cope without booze, is he better trying to change himself or simply being the man he really is?  At several points in the film Whip looks to the heavens as planes meander by, whether he's looking to the sky for salvation or lamenting his ostracisation from the life that brought him fame and joy is unclear.  What is clear is that he knows his life has to change, but has no idea how to do it.

Flight is a film that has a bit of action, a bit of wit, a bit of courtroom drama, a bit of spirituality and quite a bit of nudity in its opening scene.  As we see Whip for the first time waking up in his hotel room he takes a phone call as air hostess Katerina prances around in the buff behind him for several minutes - for no apparent reason.  As far as I can tell this is one of the only things in the movie that ensures the film has a 15 rating, it's almost as if the scene's there to ensure the film gets the 15 rating.  Though Whip's near-continual use of cocaine in the film is probably worthy of the 15 rating too.  Probably.

In conclusion, Flight is a surprisingly good film.  For a film that tries to be a little bit action, a little bit silly (Jon Goodman hamming it to the max) and a little spiritual - it mixes them up quite well.  Though as I said at the top of the review, Denzel Washington doesn't do bad movies - so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised at all.