Lincoln - top hat silhouette!

So here it is, the latest Oscar-fodder from Steven Spielberg.  American loves its presidents, going on about how they 'invented' democracy and the civil war; so it's no surprise that this biopic of Abraham Lincoln has been nominated for 12 Oscars this year.  I say 'biopic', but that's not really a true description of the film.  In reality Lincoln is the story of the passing of the 13th amendment of the US constitution - the one that made slavery illegal across all states.  It's a story of how back room deals and honours for votes are sometimes used for good.  It shows how Lincoln and his close allies marshalled the forces of progress and liberalism to convince just enough Democrats to vote in favour of the long overdue change to the constitution, bringing America in line with much of the rest of the Western world.

We saw Lincoln at the Winnersh Showcase on Wednesday this week in the screen at the top of the stairs on the far right hand side.  This is their 'special' screening room with huge padded chairs and big cup holders.  It's the place that they normally have one-off screenings, but every so often they splash a scheduled screening in there - hence Lincoln the other day.  It would have been great, apart from whoever runs the screen room failing to turn the lights off completely and me having a light falling on my face for the whole film.  The cinema should be properly dark when you're watching a film.  They turned all the lights off in Django last week, so why not Lincoln this week?  Put me in a bad mood right from the off that did.

The film has a very worthy concept and a suitably dreary opening.  After some scenes of carnage on the battlefields of the civil war, the film starts with Abraham Lincoln - played with some charisma by Daniel Day Lewis - sitting on a wagon talking to two black Union soldiers.  They're moaning about their pay and he tells them some weird anecdote.  Now this might be a dramatisation of a famous / important moment in Lincoln's life, but it was a very strange way to open the film.  We then move to a scene in the White House where Lincoln is talking to a middle-aged couple about some minor local dispute they're having.  Lincoln then asks them for their opinions on the 13th amendment in a scene that's very flat.  It's just a strange opening that doesn't have any kind of verve and had me wondering if the actual film hard started or if this was an extended Orange spoof.  Basically I was getting bored.  And if I'm getting bored by a film about historical politics, what must the rest of humanity be thinking?!

Thankfully the film does pick up the pace.  As soon as Lincoln enlists his political henchmen to start tracking down the 20 Democratic votes he needs to pass the 13th amendment the film feels a little bit more like the West Wing - just a bit.  Lincoln talks in parables far more often than Josiah Bartlet ever did (and he did a lot), most of which are delivered superbly but mostly impenetrable in meaning.  It's an odd way to portray this historical figure, since it makes him into less of a real person and more of a fantasy all-knowing father figure of a president - just like Bartlet.  I guess this is how Americans see their president though, which is why I suspect long lingering shots of his silhouetted beard and top hat will probably go down extremely well with audiences state-side.

After complaining in my review of Looper that Joseph Gordon Levitt needs to appear in more films that the Academy is likely to take seriously, here he is playing Lincoln's son Robert.  Sadly though he is very much a bit part character, and he doesn't get anywhere near having enough to do to warrant a supporting actor nomination.  The appearance of him and Lincoln's wife Mary are both oddly-handled in the script.  It seems to focus on Lincoln's relationship to each of them rather briefly; too briefly to allow an audience to engage with them, but longer than should be expected if we weren't meant to care.

Overall I found Lincoln to be a strange cinema experience.  The opening scenes had me checking my watch and the character development had me scratching my head, but after that the scenes in the US House of Representatives and negotiations surrounding passing of the amendment were properly riveting.  I think I would have been more satisfied with a film that was an hour shorter and concentrated solely on the 13th amendment.  Though with that we would have lost much of Lewis' outstanding performance in the eponymous role and probably would have ended up as a documentary.  I expect that the Academy will lavish great praise on Lincoln this weekend; but for me I felt the film was a half-flat experience, punctuated with a few great moments (mostly when Tommy Lee Jones was shouting at people).  By all means go and watch Lincoln, just don't expect a masterpiece.  And try to go a cinema where they turn the lights off.

Looper - half-decent scifi

At last!  At bloody last I saw Looper last week on much-smaller-than-a-cinema 42 inch TV on its now reduced in height TV stand.  I was happy to discover that it is not too bad a film at all.  In fact I'd say that barring a couple of weird plot discrepancies it's actually pretty decent.  Looper is a science fiction time travel genre film.  The central theme is that at some point ~30 years in the future time travel is invented, then instantly banned.  However the criminal underworld - which due to advances in forensic science is finding it harder to kill their enemies - immediately adopts the technology to send people back in time to be murdered.  These murderers are named Loopers, and are apparently immune from prosecution in the past because the people they're killing don't exist at that time.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt (JGL from now on) plays Joe - one such looper who has his loop 'closed' when his future self (Old Joe - played by Bruce Willis) is sent back in time for him to kill.  Old Joe escapes his death though, and suddenly the nefarious criminal ring that run all the Loopers are out to kill both present and future versions of Joe.  However if young Joe can kill Old Joe first, everything will be fine.  Got that?

This is a nice idea but has a few gigantic plot holes.  Many of the Loopers are having their loops 'closed', but this is revealed only to be happening as a result of actions carried out by Old Joe in the past. None of which would have happened if the Loopers weren't having their loops closed.  Also the criminals of the future are shown to shoot Old Joe's wife.  If it's so hard to kill people in the future, isn't it a bit odd that the baddies of the future are so indifferent about killing her? Wouldn't they need to send her back in time too?  Also there are a few character oddities regarding young Joe and his present day girlfriend (though she might not be his girlfriend - it might be that she's meant to be some stripper he's screwing around with).  Whatever their true relationship, he doesn't appear to know where she lives or her son's birthday, or give a crap about sleeping with another woman (Sara - played by Emily Blunt) at the slightest invitation.  Which kind of makes him a massive dick - which is interesting as the film spends a lot of time working hard to make him into a likeable protagonist.  But then if he is an idiot his character arc doesn't really make any sense if you think about it too hard.

Which clearly I have done.  But as Old Joe helpfully tells the audience at one point: "It doesn't matter!".

JGL is very good in the film, and in particular he's very good at taking on Bruce Willis' physical traits and facial ticks.  Willis himself doesn't get the chance to do a lot.  Mostly he spends time shouting, looking menacing and telling the audience to stop worrying about time travel and just enjoy the film.  JGL needs to play the lead role in a major movie that has Academy award potential at some point soon; either that or the Academy need to stop being snobbish and start nominating Christopher Nolan films for Oscars.

Looper is half-decent science fiction.  It's an episode of the Outer Limits with better actors and better special effects but the same old Chekov's Gun style plot signposts (telekinetic powers anyone?).  If you're looking for a subtext (and I am) to the film then it's probably that men destroy while women create.  All the Loopers in the film are men, everyone they kill is a man, all the male characters in the film are out to break something or fuck something up. The major female characters in the film are all there to reign in the destructive instincts of the men.  Be it as the mother figure to an adopted child, or as Old Joe's wife convincing him to give up a life of crime - they're nurturing figures in opposition to the destruction wrought by the men in their lives.  Or maybe there isn't any subtext and it's just lazy writing, cos you know women are always talking about their feelings and cry all the time and stuff so they probably just don't want to be Loopers.  Probably it's that.

There's your subtext from my viewpoint, why not watch it and see if anything jumps out at you?

Django Unchained

My third cinema trip of the year happened on Wednesday night last week when a few of us went down for the Orange Wednesday showing of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained at the Winnersh Showcase.  Even though Orange has now merged with T-Mobile and become EE, the Orange Wednesday promotion still seems to exist, though they no longer advertise it before films.  I wonder if it still exists for people signing up to EE with new contracts, or only for those of us with historic Orange contracts that carried over to EE.  Hmmm...

Anyway, we got in at 2 for 1 prices last night and settled in when several massive bags of sweets for near 3 hours of cinema.  After one good (mainly cos of Park Chan Wook but also cos of Mia Wasikowska having black hair and that Death in Vegas track being properly haunting) and several terrible trailers the film started with Tarantino's now-trademark throwback open credits.  This time we have a 1970s style Columbia pictures logo followed by an intro credits sequence using over-sized red technicolour lettering.  Tarantino is certainly an auteur, in that he has a visual style that's instantly recognisable.  His use of crash zooms (both in and out) and fast pans sets his films aside from most others that appear in the mainstream.  He stays true to his own roots with Django Unchained too.  It's a film with a huge amount of bloody violence, but none of it is CGI, digital or necessary.  The violence is terrifically visceral and accomplished using traditional special effects, real fake blood spurts and cartridges firing extra-smoky blanks.  Basically it looks like a cheesy exploitation gore shocker for the 1970s, which is exactly what all Tarantino's films are supposed to look like.

At its heart, Django Unchained is a revenge fantasy movie made in the style of a Spaghetti Western-cum-exploitation movie.  Django (played by Jamie Fox) is an ex-slave who teams up with a bounty hunter (Christophe Waltz) to hunt down and kill wanted men.  What Django really wants though, is to be reunited with his wife - who is still toiling under slavery - and on the way kill as many white slavers as possible.  The film has some extremely funny scenes, often accompanied by extreme and bloody violence.  The film also has a couple of fantastic performances, most notable of all is perhaps Leonardo DiCaprio who seems to revel in playing an unashamedly bad guy - plantation owner Calvin Candie.  Fox too puts on a great physical performance, in which he delivers his often minimal dialogue with searing intensity.  His character's intense desire to wreak revenge upon the slave-owning population of the south seeps into every action he takes and word he says.

The film is a bit long, and has a false end when it looks like the big climax is coming but then doesn't for another 20 minutes.  Tarantino is notorious for having the production company give him his own way, and while that creative freedom generally results in something brilliant happening, it would be nice if he would let a bit of editing on his scripts.  Fun though the film is, a 2 hour 45 minutes run time is far too much for what amounts to a collection of prosthetic limbs exploding and Leonardo Dicaprio shouting.

Peter Bradshaw has pointed out in The Guardian how the film is perhaps the only mainstream Western ever to tackle the subject of slavery in the USA head on.  Many Western films are set during an era and in a place where slavery and cruelty towards black people was at its height, but that this is rarely overtly shown.  Django Unchained might have no historical accuracy whatsoever as far as its plot goes, but its depiction of the terror of slavery on an industrial scale in rural Mississippi in the 1850s is no doubt close to the mark.  Tarantino hasn't only righted a historical oversight of the Western genre, he has turned it full circle and thrown it in everyone's faces in all its despicable horror, all the while making a hideously gruesome and entertaining shock genre action movie.  Django Unchained is a very good film, probably Tarantino's best since Jackie Brown.

Black Mirror - disturbingly brilliant

On Monday evening Black Mirror returned to Channel 4 for a second series of three stand-alone episodes.  The new series follows on from last year's critically acclaimed triptych, which explored ideas about the alienation of humanity through technology, and the self-aggrandisation of traditional and social media.  The series is notable for being darkly comic in places, and just plain dark in others.  The opening episode last year raised the bar extremely high, by creating a wacky story in which a terrorist group kidnap a member of the royal family, and promise to release her only if the British PM performs an act of bestiality live on TV.  Yep, that's right.

Now though it takes someone with the darkly labyrinthine mind of Charlie Brooker to come up with this stuff, it isn't there just for the shock value.  The opening episode is a layered commentary on the nature of 24 hour news, on how the issue of the day is built up to be the be all and end all of news by the dedicated news channels - but is forgotten quickly afterwards.  Though to the people involved, its impacts last for years to come.  It's also about the fickle nature of public opinion, and how the public are as complicit as producers in all the shit that ends up on our TV screens these days.

The second episode of last year's series was my favourite.  It imagined a post-modern version of 'The Machine Stops' in which people live in virtual isolation from one another, interacting through online avatars and working long hours pedalling bikes or playing computer games to an unknown end earning credits to spend on facile entertainment.  The epitome of success in this society is to earn enough credits to appear on an X-Factor style show in which the panel - aka the Twittersphere - judge your act / worth.  To succeed here is to succeed in life, to fail here is to consign yourself back to the treadmill.  It's a wry look at modern popular culture extrapolated to an extreme.  But also it's a warning about a nightmare future where the entirely of culture has been sold out to Simon Cowell and the value of human labour has been diminished to almost nothing.

Monday night's episode was startlingly simple yet extraordinarily powerful.  It felt like a 21st century version of the Twilight Zone as it detailed the story of Martha (played by Hayley Atwell), a woman who loses her husband and seeks solace in the remnants of his life that exist out there in his now-dormant twitter and Facebook accounts.  It's drama and science fiction rolled into one, looking at the potential for technology to help us while at the same time making us less human.

It was bloody brilliant.  I'm looking forwards to next week's episode, something about a woman waking up and finding out she's being hunted by people.  Sounds mental.

Lawless - total meh

A film that came out last year with a pretty decent cast, Lawless is the latest in a long line of films of 2012 that I missed because I've got much more into playing online computer games in the last 12 months.  The film tells the story of the Bondurant brothers, who were bootleggers in Virginia during the prohibition era of the early 1920s.  They ran a rural bootlegging empire that competed with the big boys of the major US cities and appeared to be largely ignored by the authorities because of its small-time and relatively unviolent nature.  That is until the uncompromising big city fed Charlie Rakes gets involved (Guy Pierce), who makes it a personal mission to take the brothers down.

I said that Lawless has a 'pretty decent' cast, and while the inclusion of Gary Oldman, Guy Pierce and Jessica Chastain gives a healthy heap of gravitas to proceedings, the problem is that they don't really get to do a lot.  Instead we have Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy (aka Bane) going full redneck as they run around the dusty scenery shooting guns, fighting with small-time criminals and buying off the cops.  I've not been impressed by LaBeouf's acting to date, and though it would be harsh to judge Hardy by the incomprehensibility of Bane in Dark Knight rises, his character here rarely gets out of a rough rumbling gurgle of speech.  Maybe that all he can do?  What I'm saying here is that I felt a little cheated out of what was a potentially brilliant cast.  Gary Oldman stands around looking menacing for a bit but has literally no impact on the story, Guy Pierce gets to be all evil - but it's nothing more than cardboard cut-out 2D evil - and Jessica Chastain just stands around cleaning glasses and looking angelic.  It's a serious waste of talent.

There's not much more that gets on my wick in films than female characters who are there for window dressing.  Here our lady characters are played by Chastain and Mia Wasikowska (she was Alice in Tim Burton's recent Alice in Wonderland).  As I've already said, Chastain does little more than have big eyes and white skin and stand around representing purity.  Wasikowska plays an innocent country girl who's there to tempt LaBeouf's character away from his family and into the non-criminal world.  I guess the point of her is to show the audience that despite being a 'master criminal', LaBeouf's character isn't actually a bad person.  Rather he's a nice normal guy driven to extremes by absurd government regulation.  Fair enough, but I can't shake the feeling that both these characters were added after the first draft of the script went through editing, and someone said "hey, there aren't any women in the film - better add some...".  And so we end up with a couple of entirely flaky female characters, ethereal-looking creatures waiting to be rescued from their torment by our 'heroes'.

The film gets bonus points for being relentless in its bloody action when the action finally gets going, there's a lot of blood and pain and general terror when people are shooting guns at each other.  This is about it though.  The superb cast is underused and the film feels like an 18-rated pantomime complete with unrealistic characters and even an "it's behind you" moment.  I'm not upset I missed this at the cinema.

Winter's Bone

Recommended to me at Christmas by someone in my family (see I do listen to you guys, I just can't remember who said it), a rental copy of the DVD of Winter's Bone entered my possession late last week.  Winter's bone is the story of Ree (played by Jennifer Lawrence) and her small family.  Ree is 17 years old, but her father is a drug dealer gone AWOL and her mother has lost her mind, so Ree is responsible for herself, her mother and two younger siblings.  When Ree's father vanishes after putting their house up as bail money, the bailiffs tell Ree that she has only a week to get out.  That is of course unless she can find her father - alive or dead.

This is clearly the film that landed Jennifer Lawrence the role of a young lifetime in The Hunger Games.  In Winter's Bone she plays a very similar character in a similar-looking world.  She is young, innocent-looking but mentally tough and wise beyond her years living in an uncaring and harsh rural environment.  As Ree starts to search for her father she quickly comes to realise that he was involved in some nefarious business deals in the local community - a closed place where blood is thicker than water and you pay a heavy price for betrayal.  Ree receives a number of beatings, both physical and psychological, as she tries to penetrate this community in search of the truth about her Dad.  It's a journey that takes incredible strength, all at the same time that she's trying to be a parent to her young brother and sister.  Lawrence plays the role by giving a calm inner strength to her character, it's an excellent performance that clearly went noticed amongst Holywood casting directors.

It's a compelling story that's about how you don't have to be waving a sword and giving grand speeches to be a hero.  Ree does neither of these things, and the crux of the film comes when she goes to an army recruitment centre to try to sign up for the $40,000 bonus advertised on posters.  The recruitment guys tells her that the army wont be any good for her, and that she needs to be strong and brave to stay with her family.  It's a scene that feels a little awkward (apparently it was filmed using a real army recruitment officer rather than an actor) but is important - there's nothing easy about running a gauntlet of fear set up by local gangs in search of a better life, and equally there's nothing easy about being a single parent.

Timecrimes (en Espanol - Cronocrimines)

It's a very long time since my friends and I organised a 'weird film night', but in that tradition stretching back several years we watched the low budget science fiction oddity Timecrimes on Tuesday evening - or in its original Spanish, Cronocrimines.  As indicated by the title, Timecrimes is a time travel film in which a simple man stumbles into a situation that makes no sense, then ends up travelling backwards in time half a day and committing a bunch of crimes.  The strange events of the day begin to make sense as he experiences them from a different point of view, and Hector (pictured) slowly learns more than he ever wanted to about himself and travelling in time.

Hector is a funny character.  He's a bit of an idiot who gets things wrong and bumbles around not understanding what's going on.  The film's quite funny because of him and doesn't feel like a lot of science fiction films where the characters get all worthy when they realise the cosmic enormity of what's happening to them.  Hector acts like he's never heard of time travel before the scientist guy running the time machine tells him not to disturb anything that happens during the day he's about to relive.  He then flips between doing everything he can to make the events of the day pan out precisely the way he remembers and trying to stop bad things happening.

The most interesting thing about Timecrimes is that the film is probably the only completely internally consistent time travel story I have ever seen.  By internal consistency  I mean that though as a viewer we experience events in the film multiple times (from the point of view of Hector), nothing actually changes.  Basically it would be possible to re-cut the film in strict chronological order and everything would still make sense.  The opening scene would be Hector emerging from the time machine and then we would see the day's events unfold as multiple versions of Hector run around doing things that only make sense once you know what happens in the future.

Though this seems like a fairly obvious concept, the fact that I can only think of time travel films in which a protagonist changes something about the past means that it must be novel.  The story challenges the typical human concept of causality, and idea that we are free to change and do what we like in the world.  After Hector travels back in time he spends ages trying to do things exactly like he remember seeing them earlier.  What would have happened if he had done things differently or deliberately tried to mess things up?  Perhaps the answer is that it's impossible to do things differently.  Does a world in which time travel is possible negate the concept of free will?  The film suggests that the idea of multiple worlds (so beloved by time travel story tellers who want to have their cake and eat it) is bunkum, and that time only happens 'once'.  If you travel in time you simply get to experience events from a different point of view.  Therefore the question 'what if Hector did things differently?' makes no sense, because events only happens once - free will as we think we understand it ceases to exist.

After the film ended a healthy but heated argument broke out between two groups of people in the room, those who agreed with me and those who thought the opposite.  The fact that this 85 minute long film with limited dialogue and a weirdo for a protagonist can generate such a high-brow debate is big kudos for it.  It comes to you recommended.