Side Effects - very good but flawed

After failing to find anyone to go with me at the weekend, I went to Reading Showcase solo on Saturday afternoon and made use of the last of my Vue cinema vouchers (cheers Mum!) to see Side Effects.  The Vue in Reading is stuck on top of a lot of generic high street eateries, but is very nice inside.  It has some very large seats with huge cup-holders, large enough even to hold my M&S smoothie - and they come in wide bottles.  I always enjoy myself a little more in the cinema when I eat / drink something that I didn't buy in the cinema.  £2 for half a litre of M&S own brand vanilla and maple syrup smoothie or the same price for watered down generic cola?  You decide.

Side Effects is an intriguing film starring Jude Law as mental health practitioner Jonathan Banks.  He treats a young woman named Emily (Rooney Mara - aka the English-speaking Girl with a Dragon Tattoo) who's husband Martin (Channing Tatum) has recently been released from prison after being convicted for some sort of white collar crime.  After she attempts suicide she is placed on a series of different medicines that are designed to help her fight her depression.  These seem to be making a positive impact on her life, but they have the side effect of making her sleepwalk.  Then something bad happens.

A quick aside before we continue.  Why is it that many people in cinemas are unable to spot when something weird is about to happening despite having countless visual and audio clues presented to them?  You would think people these days would be so well-attuned to the visual tricks that cinema and TV play on us that everyone would be able to spot what's happening from a mile off, but I guess some people don't pay attention.  The moment when something bad happened was greeted in the auditorium by sharp intakes of breath from the amassed Readingites.  So despite the sudden change to shaky-cam, the close-up of a knife and the change in music telegraphing it, many people were still shocked by something bad happening.  Is this evidence that when watching films (and any moving images for that matter) people aren't really watching, rather they're just allowing the images to happen in front of them?  I guess people really do turn their brains off when they go into the cinema.  Or maybe I think too much.

Anyway, back to the film.  Before the bad thing happens Side Effects looks like it's going to be a deep psychological drama about mental illness.  For example there are a few weird camera angles which I think are designed to try to convey what's going on inside Emily's head and make the film look like it's reaching for some sort of artistic angle.  There's a lot of soul-searching going on from all involved as Dr Banks tries to work out what it is about Emily's life that's making her depressed.  After the bad thing happens the film becomes a procedural crime drama as the police and courts get involved and we get dragged into a story about the evils of big-pharma.  Then it becomes something else entirely; which is where things got a little weird, the film stopped taking itself seriously and the flaws crept in.

After an opening act that makes the film appear to be about one thing, then a second act that turns the film into a legal drama, the final act comes along and starts twisting things up.  I'm not going to drop any spoilers here, but it drifts into Chinatown territory where everything you thought up till now isn't the whole truth, and something else is really going on.  This is fine, but at the same time the film slides into cheesy cliché and has a bizarre test-screen feel to its ending.  Imagine if at the end of Usual Suspects instead of Keyser Söze vanishing into the aether "And like that... he's gone"; the police all run out of the interrogation room, spot him slowly getting away, arrest him, and the final scene is of a grinning Chazz Palminteri telling the incarcerated Keyser Söze "I told you I was cleverer then you didn't it?".  Wouldn't the film instantly lose its cult status?  You probably wouldn't even remember it now nearly 20 years after release.  That's sort of how I feel about Side Effects.  The film had the potential to drag Jude Law's character kicking and screaming through a Hitchcockian mystery a la North by Northwest, then at the end throw a twist in the faces of him and the audiences that would leave us all gagging in bewilderment.  Instead for some reason the writers decided it would be better if we had some out of character titillation and then the bad guys all got their comeuppance.

None of this would be an issue if the film wasn't any good to start with, but because there are so many good things about Side Effects I feel like it's a good script wasted.  Was the ending adjusted after a screen test maybe?  Was it darker / more mysterious in the original screenplay?  This isn't information I've been unable to find in a brief internet search.  Perhaps more will come to light in months to come.  More likely though this film will be forgotten about quicker than anyone can be bothered to find out what went wrong - it ain't no Usual Suspects.

Despite me sounding like a slightly disappointed reviewer, I would still recommend that people go and see Side Effects.  Rooney Mara has to channel a lot of different mental states at various points in the film and is very good at doing so with more than a little realism.  It also has the rare honour of being an American mainstream film starring a British actor who retains his accent and isn't evil!  Plus the story itself is an absorbing mystery.  So in conclusion, go and watch Side Effects, but don't be surprised if the finale has you thinking "Seriously?  That's the ending?".

The Master - Masterful?

The Master was released to a huge amount of anticipation in art house circles last year.  This was to be another masterpiece from director Paul Thomas Anderson.  After the critical and commercial success of There will be Blood the film literati were expecting great things.  With interesting ideas and a strange trailer that included great music from Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood and seemed to hint at themes of religious indoctrination and cult behaviour, plus with a great cast, I was eager to see it.

I missed it in the cinema as I thought it was going to end up being very long and so I stayed away.  Turns out it was only just over 2 hours long when I watched it on DVD last week.  The Master stars Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie Quell, a loner, drifter, layabout and drunk who after emerging from WW2 in the Pacific embarks on a series of dead-end jobs before unwittingly stowing aboard a ship heading through the Panama canal for the US east coast.  On board are Lancaster Dodd, aka 'The Master' played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, his much younger wife Peggy (Amy Adams) and entourage - all of whom are followers of Dodd's mysterious 'Cause'.

It is quickly revealed to us that The Cause is a kind of self-help method, in which Dodd claims that all people are merely vessels for souls that have lasted trillions of years.  He claims to have a method that allows people to search through their past lives and through it understand their current situation.  Quell appears fascinated by these ideas, and quickly submits to being 'processed' by Dodd, which involves Dodd asking him a relentless barrage of penetrating questions while drinking copious quantities of some sort of home-made hooch that Quell has conjured up.  Quell becomes an integral part of Dodd's organisation, and it is the tension between Dodd, his family, Quell and the various people that they interact with through The Cause that forms the major arc of the film.

The film left me with a distinct feeling of 'what happened?' and 'what was that all about then?'.  This is despite it having a lot of interesting themes, a strong one being the power of the cult and the misuse of science.  Dodd's cause is more cult than science, and there are clear allusions to the cult of Scientology.  There are a lot of snippets that different people might pick up on in The Master.  It's possible that the film is a comment on the dangers of traumatic stress disorder, or maybe about the nature of power in cult-like organisations, or perhaps even it's warning about the dangers of substance abuse.  It's very similar to There Will Be Blood in that there are lots of themes you could probably make a coherent case for each film being 'about'.  The difference between this and There Will Be Blood is that the latter has a gripping storyline with some amazing-looking cinematography, whereas this doesn't really have anything like that.  Don't misunderstand me here, The Master is a very interesting and thought-provoking film, but it isn't much fun to watch.  Which is something I normally like my films to be.

What is beyond doubt is that Joaquin Phoenix provides an acting master-class.  His performance is full of weird facial tics and vocal outbursts that make him at one moment look like a man on a mission, then the next a hopeless waster.  It was no surprise that he lost out to Daniel Day Lewis at the Oscars, but he should have won and hopefully will be back.  After three nominations now they have to give him to top prize eventually.

Next up will be my latest cinema trip - Side Effects.

Badlands - apparently this was an 18 certificate back in the day

Part 2 (or perhaps 3) of the films I got as Christmas presents from my folks, this is Badlands.  The DVD I have has a very simple front cover - matching the simplicity of the film's premise.  Based on a true story, Sissy Spacek plays Holly, a girl in her later teenage years who is swept off her feet by the dashing Kit (played by Martin Sheen).  Kit is 25, a loner and stranger, mysterious and interesting.  When Kit defends Holly from her father with terminal intensity she looks on uncaringly and becomes uncontrollably swept up in his aura.  They immediately take off together across the great western American plains.  There they embark on a life of self-imposed hermitry, making their own shelter, finding their own food, enjoying their freedom and killing anyone stupid enough to come looking for them.

This was Sissy Spacek's first proper film role and for those of us used to seeing Martin Sheen as the West Wing's sage-like US president he looks almost impossibly young here as Kit.  They both give good performances, hinting at the successes each would enjoy as they grew up.  The film is very well shot, with vistas of the great US plains looking both inviting for the freedom they offer while at the same time terrifying in their isolation.  It's a very grim film, presenting a view of the world that has a shallow regard for people - disturbing of course but not far from a view that many in acceptable society espouse.  It's a "shoot 'em all and let god sort 'em out" mentality taken to an extreme. 

Badlands is definitely a 'good film'.  It has two very interesting characters, some nice cinematography and a bit of senseless violence.  Certainly worth a watch.  Something that interested me about my DVD copy of the film is that it has an 18 rating on the box.  It turns out that when Badlands was originally released it was rated as an 18.  This seems a little high.  The level of violence in the film is minimal at best, and with very little bloody or gore shown in the aftermath of the small number of killings that take place it seems positively tame by modern standards.

Even now the film retains a 15 certificate, but after looking at the BBFC website I can understand the reasoning behind it.  They argue that the main character is portrayed as a sexy archetype, a man of virtue.  The fact that a character like that would engage in the cold-blooded murder of a small number of people means that it gets the same rating as a film like Expendables 2 - in which 100s are slaughtered by stupid action film caricatures.  I.e. context is important.  It's the same basic reason why Stoker gets an 18 certificate despite showing minimal blood and containing very few killings.  It's the conflation of sex and violence in the film that gives it the rating.  Again - context.

Next on the Christmas DVD merry-go-round I'm going to start on my new collection of post-war London movies.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

After being somewhat critical of Daniel Radcliffe's first attempt to generate a post-Potter film career last year with Woman in Black, I was eager to see what had happened to Emma Watson - who played alongside Radcliffe for nearly a decade as his straight-laced teacher's pet chum Hermoine.  Radcliffe has made a stuttering but promising start in his new career, so it would be good to see if Watson could hit the ground running.  After all, she got steadily better as the Potter films progressed.  By the end of the Octrillogy (is this a word?) she looked like a proper actress rather than someone who had been cast as a 10 year and was doing their best to make as good an effort as possible.  Like Rupert Grint.

And so on we come to The Perks of Being a Wallflower, in which Watson and Ezra Miller (who was Kevin in We need to talk about Kevin) play a couple of High School seniors (which I think is American speak for upper sixth form) who take the new boy under their wing.  Watson and Miller play Sam and Patrick, half siblings who along with their friends have a labyrinthine history that new boy Charlie (played by Logan Lerman) only gets the briefest of glimpse at and has a tough time understanding.  Charlie has problems of his own, a personal history of mental issues, death, tragedy and abuse that I wont reveal details of here for fear of spoiling anyone's enjoyment.  These depths make these characters very life-like, very real people with real histories.

The depth that the film's characters have and my eventual enjoyment of it surprised me, because after about 15 minutes of watching I wasn't enjoying it at all.  I found Charlie to be annoying, I was struggling to cope with Watson's American accent and couldn't stop imagining Miller as Kevin.  The film looked like it was going to be very shallow; yet another drama-lite in which white middle class American teenagers over-obsess  about their own self-importance and discover alcohol, drugs and sex while crying a lot and having to go to university.  All that money, choice and opportunity - the pain of it all!

Luckily though that only lasted 15 minutes.  I quickly got used to Watson's accent and Miller's presence on screen when I realised she was actually pretty good at it and he was just - you know - acting and not really a mental case.  Rather than go down the much-trodden path of eye-rolling teenage introspection, the film found a much more interesting route through the mire of teenage life.  It's depicted as a voyage of discovery and learning, in which all things are possible but in which there are still difficulties to be overcome, most of them involving the expectations that you have of yourself.  It's a film that revels in wonderful moments of discovery - like hearing a David Bowie song for the first time - and allows its characters to enjoy them as we all did when growing up.  I worked out that that Charlie wasn't an annoying character at all, rather it was my expectations of what teenagers should be like that was annoying me.  Once I'd sorted this out in my mind I enjoyed the film a whole lot more!

The film is simply a beautifully told story.  It's got lot of different things going on in the background, each one of which you might want to fixate on an proclaim that it's 'about'.  There's stuff about abuse, homophobia, coming of age, love, loss, mental illness - some of it overt and some less so.  There's a lot there for anyone who wants to give it a chance to play out to the final scenes.  In reality though I don't think the film is about any of these things, rather its about how everyone is made up of a patchwork of memories and experiences, some good and some bad, but all of them part of who we are.  The double-plus bonus is that Emma Watson is very good.  Unlike Daniel Radcliffe, Watson seems to have an agent who understands that she needs to get away from the fantasy genre and prove her acting if she's ever going to be taken seriously.  By taking a role in a film that many will see as arthouse and playing a character with a foreign accent there's no doubting she's done that.  Hopefully that'll continue - though a quick look at her imdb entry reveals that she's going to be in this .  Starring and directed by Seth Rogan.  Hmmm.

Stoker - Park Chan-Wook goes all English

I saw the trailer for Stoker when I went to see Django Unchained unchained the other week.  It's a long time since I saw a trailer that made me as excited as this one did.  On Wednesday evening this week I went with some friends to the Bracknell Odeon to see the film, the first in English by auteur South Korean director Park Chan-Wook.  With just 6 of us in the cinema and the lights mostly turned off, I settled in expecting to enjoy myself.  As we shall see, I was not disappointed (even though the occasionally mistimed munching of popcorn from my friends did mildly irritate me - sorry guys).

Stoker is sort of an adult fairy tale / psychological thriller, in which a young woman undergoes a sexual awakening when the uncle she didn't know existed turns up at her father's funeral.  This man (Charlie - played by Matthew Goode) is tall, dark, mysterious and captivating to young India (Mia Wasikovska) and her widowed mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman).  India is immediately fascinated by Charlie, yet repulsed by him at the same time as she realises her mother's obvious attraction towards him.  India comes to realise that there is a connection between herself and Charlie, a connection that she struggles to understand.  Is this connection simply the result of a hapless teenage inability to cope with her own awakened sexuality?  Is it something deeper?  As India begins to discover disturbing snippets of information hinting at Charlie's past, her responses will surprise even her.

Stoker is a film that uses a slow pace and a simple score to generate atmosphere.  There is time while watching the film to look at the small character set and try to understand what they're thinking, time to get inside their heads.  It's a film littered with metaphors and symbols which I admit some might find irritating, but I was fascinated by and thought added depth to the story.  A spider crawls up a girls leg then later over a dead man's body.  A pair of sunglasses are passed from one character to another.  India's father's belt is used to do several different things.  A lot to get your teeth into when chatting about it in the pub afterwards.

Hopefully you can tell by now that I liked this film - a lot.  But it's not all about metaphors and layers of atmosphere and subtext; there are some outstanding individual scenes in Stoker.  India plays a duet on the piano with Charlie - or does she?  It's a powerful scene that's jarringly edited together and reflects India's jumbled emotions towards her uncle.  Better still is a scene later when she showers after being attacked by boy from her school and is rescued by Charlie.  We see the events of the attack in flashback as she showers.  At first it is seems clear that she's washing herself clean of the horrific experience of nearly being raped; then the scene changes tone in both the present and flashback and we realise that something far stranger and disturbing has happened.  It's a moment of realisation for the audience and awakening for India that's brilliantly presented.

There is one small strange thing I'd like to bring up about the film.  And that is the possibility of a supernatural subtext to the story.  There is nothing overt in the film that says there is anything supernatural about what happens, but I think the film is littered with suggestions that there is.  The film is called Stoker, raising the possibility of Bram Stoker and Dracula.  India defends herself by drawing blood after stabbing a boy with a pencil - is that a stake?  Charlie doesn't ever seem to eat and knows without being told that India has extraordinarily good sight and hearing.  She is able to hear him whispering at a distance of 100s of yards in the film's opening scene - supernatural senses being a classic part of the vampire mythology.  The concept of the hunter is an important theme too; India is taught hunting by her father and told that she must sometimes do bad things to avoid doing worse things.  Does her father know that she's likely to do bad things?  Is he trying to help her contain an otherworldly evil?  What did they really get up to on those hunting trips?  All this points strongly towards the idea that India and Charlie are vampires or somehow touched by creatures of the night.  At the very least they share a connection - be it genetic, psychological, mystical or something else otherworldly - that inexorably attracts them to one another.

The ending will perhaps come as little surprise to anyone who is used to the traditional Asian horror trope of the girl with the long dark hair, or anyone who's paying any attention really.  But this isn't a film you watch to find out what the twist is a la Oldboy, it's a film that asks you to soak yourself in its atmosphere and look into the soul of someone else's psychosis.  If there is a problem with the film, then it could have avoided overdoing the sexual awakening metaphors that are littered all over the place - but this is a minor thing.  Also it's possible that you might think the film rather linear and pedestrian if you're not prepared to immerse yourself in the potential for deeper meaning in what you've seen.  For me though the film is superbly acted, Wasikovska especially, interestingly shot and edited and a joy to spend time thinking about afterwards.  It's flying high in my mind at the moment and I want to see it again.

Snow White and the Huntsman

Before I get into Stoker - plenty of time for that at work tomorrow - here's a quick review of Snow White and the Huntsman.  This retelling of the classic Snow White fairy tale came out about a year ago now, coincidentally at the same time as another modern reinterpretation of the same story.  I seem to remember there being indifferent reviews about both those films when they came out, but that the review of this were slightly better.  Slightly.

Snow White and the Huntsman is a rather bland and linear update on the classic fairy tale.  In this version, the evil queen (Charlize Theron) killed the king years ago and has held his young daughter (Snow White - played by Kristen Stewart) captive for years.  The queen is obsessed with being the prettiest in the kingdom (queendom?) and maintains her beauty by consuming the souls of those younger than her.  Until Snow White's coming of age she was the prettiest - according to the "mirror mirror on the wall" anyway - but now she's dropped to second place.  It is at this point that the queen suddenly decides she'll be better off with Snow White dead.  But a botched attempt to kill her results in her escaping and fleeing to the hinterlands where a rebellion against the queen is just waiting for someone to lead it.

Which is sort of it really.  The film is very linear, with hardly a subplot to speak of.  The queen is evil and she has toadies following her.  Snow white is pure and at one with nature.  There is a rebellion, then a battle, then the end.  Chris Hemsworth is the Huntsman sent to recapture Snow White but who decides he would rather rescue her and join the rebellion.  He does a lot of standing around growling at things and swinging an axe.  The film is punctuated by some good special effects, most notable of which are the 7 dwarves played here by several very well-known British actors like Bob Hoskins and Ray Winstone.  The special effects that allow them to become dwarves are quite convincing.  In addition to that there's the effects that are used when the evil queen turns into a flock of crows, which is good but I wonder if someone in the SFX team had been holding on to that one for ages and was looking for an opportunity to put it up on a big screen.

The best thing in the film by some way is Charlize Theron, who with her epic over-performance as the evil queen looks like she's having a brilliant time.  I understand that performances of this nature are generally categorised as 'chewing up the scenery'.  Other than that though it's a very flat film that isn't helped by Kristen Stewart's blank inability to emote.  It's a real shame that she's been type cast now as a sort of ashen-faced blank slate female archetype, because she was good in The Runaways and can clearly act.  I just think she needs to take charge of her own career and get involved in some roles that'll challenge her.

In conclusion, Snow White and the Huntsman isn't that good.  But then you weren't really expecting it to be were you?

Oldboy - corridor fight scene

In honour of Park Chan-Wook's first English language film Stoker - review to come later - I present to you my favourite scene from his classic shock-thriller Oldboy.



Oldboy is a brilliant film with a lot of shocking moments, brutal fight scenes and a wickedly evil twist.  I was hoping for more of the same from Stoker last night.  There was much less brutal action than Oldboy, but the motivations of the characters are just as twisted and the brief moments of action are properly blood curdling.

Review later today hopefully.

The Pact - a great horror thriller

I assume it was a Mark Kermode review that pointed me in the direction of The Pact (it normally is), and how glad I am that he did.  I watched The Pact last week when I was home alone for a few evenings.  That was a bit of an error, since the film is one of the scariest I have seen in some time.  Being home alone in the dark with the lights off does wonders for generating an exciting atmosphere in which to watch a horror film, but it doesn't help you get to sleep later on.

The Pact starts off with a neat opening in which a woman - Liz - goes back to the house in which she grew up to sort out her recently dead mother's affairs.  She has a Skype conversation with her daughter who asks "who's that behind you?".  Not put off by that, she decides to sleep the night there, hears weird noises coming from behind a cupboard door, goes to investigate and... cut to black.  The next day her sister Annie (Caity Lotz) arrives, but Liz is nowhere to be found.  Annie stays in the house and has a series of paranormal experiences, that result in her leaving the house vowing never to return.

The film then moves along at a nice pace as it switches smoothly between straight horror and mystery thriller.  A series of neat twists and turns come and go before the story comes to a head in a way that's rather satisfying and crucially doesn't make a mockery of the rest of the film.  You want scares too?  Well there's one fantastically effective shock moment when Annie sees a vision of death in the motel room where she has sought refuge after fleeing her mother's house.  In that respect it's as good a horror film as any I've seen in recent years.

There are a lot of small pleasing things about this film.  The first is that Annie acts like a normal person would!  When she gets thrown around by a poltergeist in the house where her mother died - she runs for the hills (note the contrast with Daniel Radcliffe's character in the uninspiring Woman in Black)!  When she goes back she's got back up in the form of the police and then a local psychic she knew at school.  Secondly - she's an attractive woman, but there is no romance subplot.  It's something that could easily have been crow-barred in between her and the nice friendly policeman.  Instead the film concentrates on the mystery / horror / thriller story line with Annie searching furiously for clues that will set her free from what she has unleashed.  Admittedly she does most this wearing little more than pants and a vest top - but I don't see anything wrong with a strong independent female protagonist looking good while she's being strong and independent.

To conclude; The Pact is a superb, simple thriller.  It's terrifying, has a number of stand-out moments of pure horror and a great performance from the relatively unknown Caity Lotz.  Anyone with any passing interest in horror cinema needs to watch this movie.