Silver Linings Playbook - weird and brilliant

I'm hardly alone in predicting big things for Jennifer Lawrence, but when she appeared as Katniss Everdeen in last year's outstanding near-future science fiction teen thriller Hunger Games and many (including me) lauded her performance - none could have imagined that she would be picking up an Academy Award within 12 months.  To even receive a nomination at the age of 22 was an achievement, to win the award was almost unthinkable.  There are those who might say she is too young to receive such an accolade, and that the Academy should have waited for her to mature as an actress before putting her on such a pedestal.  But we can hardly complain at the Academy recognising pure talent for what it is, rather than waiting for the years to pass before feeling as though it has to give someone an award long after their best work is past them.  Look at how the Academy treated Martin Scorsese.  After ignoring his great works for years they finally awarded him the best director statue for The Departed, simply because it would be unthinkable for one of the signature American directors of his generation to go unrewarded by the Academy.  So why not Lawrence and why not now?

Thus it was that Jennifer Lawrence won the Academy award for Best Actress in 2013 for Silver Linings Playbook.  Lawrence and co-star Bradley Cooper put in outstanding performances as Tiffany and Pat, two people who develop a friendship when Pat is released from a psychiatric hospital and tries to re-integrate himself into the world before reconnecting with his estranged wife Nikki.  The catch here is that both Pat and Tiffany have recently had to (and continue to) deal with their own mental problems.  Pat has a form of Bi-polar disorder that manifests itself as anger when he becomes stressed, he was put into the hospital after he discovered Nikki in the shower with a local teacher and severely beat the man up.  Tiffany's husband has recently died and she has lost her job after sleeping her way around her office, Tiffany reveals that she is a nymphomaniac to Pat but he then spurns her advances.  Later Tiffany agrees to help Pat re-integrate his life into normalcy, so that he can get back together with Nikki.

Now you might think you know where this is going, what the film is going to feel like and how it's going to pan out.  You might be right on some levels, but on others you would be very wrong.  Though on the surface this sounds like something of a chick flick, it's quite far from it.  It's an exceptionally odd and funny film about family, friendship, relationships and social convention.  The film asks questions about society's definition of 'normal', constantly juxtaposing the 'normal' behaviour of Pat's obsessively superstitious and occasionally violent father (played by Robert De Niro) against Pat's own behaviour.  The film is set in Philadelphia and is constantly referencing the fortunes of the Philadelphia Eagles, and how Pat's father is convinced that the behaviour of his son is directly responsible for their form.

At the centre of it all though are the actors.  Cooper and Lawrence are outstanding in conveying the lovestruck bewilderment of each of their characters, as they struggle to work out what the world expects of them while breaking every social convention in the book and not appearing to notice.  After the trash that Cooper broke into the mainstream with (The Hangover, The A Team), who would have though he could have been involved in something this spectacular good?  Not every film that ends with a ballroom dance and a kiss is a trashy chick flick, Silver Linings Playbook is a great modern romance story with interesting characters that says something about what society considers 'normal'.  It's brilliant.

Cockneys v Zombies - bloomin' hillarious

I can't quite remember where I got the idea for watching this film from.  I don't know if there was an advertising campaign last year at some point or if I saw a trailer on the internet, but I'm glad I put this film on my LoveFilm list at some point in the recent past - because last week I had a bloody brilliant time watching Cockneys versus Zombies.  A film that does exactly what it says on the tin, it pits a family of Lock Stock rejects against a  growing horde of zombies from the Romero school of shambling intestine-eaters.  This machine gun-wielding group of cor blimey ne'er-do-wells escape on a Double Decker Routemaster, but not before stopping off at their Grandad's old people's home to rescue the old folks in the middle of a right ol' knees up (mother Brown).

The film stars a number of well-known East Londoners including Michelle Ryan (who stared in Eastenders for 6 years), Alan Ford (played Bricktop in Snatch) and Honor Blackman (please don't tell me I have to explain who she is) of all people.  Cockney clichés litter the dialogue aplenty in a film that has borrowed a lot from Shaun of the Dead and references a number of contemporary issues affecting Britain's deprived inner city areas.  The 'gang' robbing the banks aren't hardened Cockney criminals, rather they're a group of chancers who are trying to save their Grandad's old people's home by stealing enough money to save it from Cameron's austerity.  Granted they come from a family of petty thieves, have a cousin who can pick locks and know a total nutter who keeps an arsenal of heavy weapons in a container on Docklands - but they're robbing the bank for a good cause.  Honest guv!

The 80 minute long film is a silly comic romp that goes through the usual zombie clichés and adds a lot of funny touches.  It's impossible not to laugh at a moment when a character tries to save a baby, but then realises that the baby has turned into a zombie and so drop-kicks it into a huge bill-board warning against child abuse.  When it all comes down to it though, even if you're not into cheesy comic zombie piss-takes at least you get to see Honor Blackman swearing.  And that in itself is cinema gold.

Star Trek into Darkness - is it wrong that I'm annoyed I enjoyed this?

Anyone who has had any conversation with me about the J J Abrams-sponsored rebooting of the Star Trek series will know that I am vocally opposed to the idea.  To me, the concept of taking a successful series with hundreds of hours of television, film and print to its name, ripping up the canon and starting again is utterly ridiculous.  It's indicative of the dearth of ideas in modern mainstream cinema that a studio is able to simply appropriate a well-known franchise for its own purposes, throw away the lore and start over.  Note that what's happening to Star Trek is different to what's happened over and over again to comic book franchises like Spiderman and Superman.  Rather than simply adapting the original series into a new one, they have written a storyline that tells us how the whole original series never actually happened!  By doing this they don't have to introduce any characters (we all know who they are), develop the relationships (we all know them) or tell us any background story.  Instead they can just lazily fire a bunch of special effects at the screen, drop the occasional sound byte to keep the fanboys happy and watch the dollars roll in while taking a huge great dump on top of a series that - for all its faults - really was something special.

Let's put all this to one side for a moment.  Because despite all the reservations I have and anger I'm harbouring over this "it never happened" approach to the entire Star Trek series - Star Trek into Darkness is an annoyingly good film.  Action, characters, fast pace, set pieces - this is how a good swashbuckling action space adventure should look.  The film is superficially about politics and the persistent conflict between militarism and diplomacy - which keeps things true to the way in which Star Trek has always been an allegory for contemporary politics.  Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise have to hunt down a terrorist.  Tasked with killing him on sight Kirk must decide if this is the right thing to do, and then has to deal with the fallout of that decision.  The film telegraphs itself quite a lot and if you are a Trekkie (as I am) the revelation that the antagonist is called Khan should telegraph almost the entire plot.  Therefore this review will continue with some mild SPOILERS.  Though I don't really think you can have spoilers when a film is based on an already existing film.  Can you?

It's a film that maintains an exceptionally high pace.  There is little time to sit back and appreciate what's going on.  In the space of the opening 20 minutes Kirk is disobeying the prime directive, demoted to commander, saving the federation then is re-instated as the Enterprise's captain, handed a gun and told to save the galaxy.  While you don't have time to think about it everything seems fine, but once you stop it isn't hard to see a lot of cracks in the plot.  Most Star Trek fans will likely weep at the relentless raping of the canon that goes on throughout.

When the film's antagonist (played masterfully by Benedict Cumberbatch) reveals his true name to be Khan, this should set off a chain reaction of thought processes inside the mind of any Star Trek fan.  The film begins to parallel the events of Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan quite closely, even coming to a final finish in which Khan and Kirk face off against each other on stranded ships and someone has to make the ultimate sacrifice - but this time with a Chekov's gun providing a dirty great cop out.  This is something that I would have expected to hate.  It's one thing to 're-boot' Star Trek and effectively cancel all the Trek that has existed up to now, but it's another thing entirely to mine the plot of an existing Star Trek film for ready-made plot points that you then shy away from when a major character might get killed.

But it turns out I don't hate it - and even as I write this I feel dirty for thinking it.  The reason why I don't hate this film is because it has a script that understands the central relationship of Star Trek, which was the Kirk / Spock relationship and how it represents two sides of the coin that is the human psyche.  Here are two characters that are perpetually on the same side, looking to resolve conflict and explore the world around them, yet each of them constantly disagrees with the other about how to do so.  Kirk represents the reckless animal instinct that resides inside everyone, the desire to lash out at enemies and do what 'feels' right.  Spock is everyone's alter-ego, the person we know we should be but understand we can't, the person who uses reason, intelligence and logic even when doing so defies every instinct.  The film is all about the clash of approach between the characters, and how by working together eventually a little of each rubs off on the other - arriving at compromise.  By the film's conclusion Kirk understands and uses Spock's logic, while Spock realises that Kirk's has its place.

In a sense then the film has boiled one of the most interesting relationships in 20th century science fiction down into a quick 2 hours for the popcorn-going cinema crowd.  And that is a shame.  But at the same time the film is so well made, contains nice nods to the original series, funny moments and comes at you at such a pace that none of it seems to matter as it brings Star Trek to a new audience.  Apart from the utterly mental over-use of lens flare distracting the shit out of every single scene.  But then that's J J Abrams!

I still don't think Gene Roddenberry would approve of it, but that in itself doesn't make Star Trek into Darkness a bad film.  It is a good film as long as you don't think about it too much.  So I'm going to stop thinking about it before I change my mind.

Review ends.

Sightseers

This is a film that would have totally passed me by were it not for the recommendation of my parents.  I know they read this blog (Hi guys) so I should be careful how I word this - but I'm sure I've suggested more good films to them in recent years than they have to me, so they owed me one.  With Sightseers they did a very good job.

Sightseers is a low budget British production in which a couple go off on a caravanning holiday around Britain, with what appears to be the intention of visiting a top 10 list of twee British tourist attractions.  One of these is the pencil factory in Cumbria - which I am lead to believe is in fact very interesting.  Tina and Chris have only recently met, and Tina's Mum is worried to the point of psychosis about her daughter going away with this strange man - though we get the strong impression she's just sorry for herself that she wont have anyone around to look after her for 2 weeks.  When Tina and Chris stop off at the National Tramway Museum and Chris is annoyed by a man dropping his ice cream wrapper on the floor of a tram, it seems like uncanny misfortune when later in the day the very same man is run over by Chris in a terrible accident.  Or is it an accident?

The film then ventures into some very dark comic territory, a world in which Chris is something of a mental case who tends to right society's wrongs with terminal force and - stranger still - Tina seems ok with it.  It's very funny stuff involving the theft of a dog, a cyclist with his own custom-build space tent, a bowl of pot-pourri, bad underpants, a bit of traditional British keeping up with the Joneses and a lot more besides.  The story takes something utterly mundane - a traditional British caravanning holiday - and turns it into the kind of psychotic rampage you might expect to be set in the great American plains involving hundreds of police cars and automatic weaponry.  Half the joke is in seeing this kind of film set in rural Britain for a change rather than the mean streets of Bogotá (or wherever).  In this sense it has something in common with Hot Fuzz as well as director Ben Wheatley's other recent film Kill List - both films that I enjoyed a lot.

In conclusions then, Sightseers is a very funny film which takes a lot of unexpected turns and will probably ruffle the feathers of anyone used to the traditional way in which stories like this are told.  Congratulations to the folks though, who came through with a win this time.

Dean Man's Shoes - threats

One of the most intensely acted scenes I can remember is the confrontation between Rich and Sonny in Shane Meadow's sometimes overlooked revenge thriller from 2004 - Dean Man's Shoes.  The film stars Paddy Considine as a British soldier who returns from action overseas to find that his younger brother has got in with the wrong people, very wrong people who have treated him very badly.  After Considine's character Rich tries to intimidate the local criminals by breaking into their leader Sonny's house at night, the gang go looking for Rich the next day.  Here, Sonny finds Rich hanging around on a street corner and tries to scare him into staying away from them...



... he utterly fails to scare him in the slightest, instead backing off himself in realisation that he's dealing with someone who holds no fear of his criminal underclass.  I have fond memories of the film as I saw it at Nottingham's Broadway cinema when it originally came out.  It was then and remains now quite rare to see films set in the East Midlands with actors doing appropriate accents.  Plus the film has a masterful final twist.

For anyone who thinks the East Midlands doesn't have its own accent that's distinct from the West Midlands or South Yorkshire - it does, and this is it.  Though most conversations people have up there generally don't involve this much posturing.