Cold comes the night - Bryan Cranston in a film!

Rented this largely on the basis that Bryan Cranston is in it.  For those not in the know, Bryan Cranston played the main character in Breaking Bad.  Even though I only ever watched the first season of this series, it was clear that he was playing an excellently-written character - and doing it with some aplomb.  Cranston is due to appear in the latest incarnation of Godzilla (due out in the spring) and so his movie career is clearly on the up.

Cold Comes the Night eh?  Well it's not the greatest film ever committed to screen.  The plot is extremely contrived and yet somehow simple at the same time.  Cranston plays some sort of gangster - named Topo - of generic Eastern European origin who is slowly losing his sight.  When he rocks up at a sleazy motel run by Alice Eve's Chloe for the night and his partner in crime kills himself in a drunken rage with a local hooker, he decides to kidnap Chloe and her daughter, forcing them to be his eyes as he tries to get his illicit stash back from the local corrupt cops.  Contrived indeed.

I guess that the people who wrote this were hoping to make a character drama.  You can tell that they had something like that in mind as they try to develop Chloe as a character who is tough - after all, being a single mother is tough, gangster-tough even.  Then they try to give Topo a bit of soft side, as just a guy who delivers packages for a living in a world were you have to be ruthless to survive.  It doesn't really work though.  The hints that are made to Chloe's possibly dodgy background - including her uncertain relationship with corrupt cop Billy - go unused.  Topo's eventual soft side is a odds with everything we learn about his character throughout the film.  So ultimately you either have a character drama without sensible characters, or a crime thriller minus the thrills.

It's no real surprise to find out that Cold Comes the Night scores a very mediocre ~5 on imdb.  Hopefully the new Godzilla rip-off wont be as bad as all the others, and Bryan Cranston will have a film career worthy of his TV work.  Hopefully the new Star Trek franchise will become something more than just a check-list of things you might remember from the TV series, and Alice Eve's movie career wont just consist of her gratuitously removing her top.  I wish these actors well in their careers, because when they look back they'll want to have more than Cold Comes the Night on their cvs.

Prisoners - Crime-by-numbers

If you found a box that said 'well-executed crime thriller' on it, and pulled out a reel of film, it would probably be a copy of Prisoners.  Hugh Jackman plays Keller Dover, a father who's daughter has vanished, presumed kidnapped by local weirdo Alex Jones.  Jake Gyllenhaal is the police officer who is on the case, on one hand trying to find the girls, and on the other hand trying to stop Dover from taking justice into his own hands.  Dover though, is a bit of a gun nut.  One of those self-sufficient nuclear-apocalypse-preparing-for oddballs who exist in the states, so when the law turn up and tell him to get off Jones' case, he isn't going to listen.

So this is all pretty generic stuff.  We've got a classic case of child abduction that everyone assumes the weird paedo-looking guy is responsible for.  We've got a gung-ho father taking the law into his own hands.  We've got the classic law versus vigilante thing happening.  We've got a twist at the end and a nice moral comeuppance to round things off.  We even have the tiniest sliver of an open ending.  I'm not trying to say that there's anything wrong with Prisoners for being a little generic, just pointing out that it isn't really doing anything new.

In fact, beyond that I don't think there's anything to criticise.  There are a few holes you could pick once you realise the twist, the stuff about DNA evidence just after the kidnapping doesn't make any sense for example, but overall its characters are ok, it's solid on a scene-to-scene basis and sets up interesting moral dilemmas.  For a film like this, it's basically about the twist, deceiving the audience and misleading them into making a few assumptions too many and then breaking the reveal at a suitable point late on in the final act.  And in that sense, Prisoners is absolutely solid.  Unremarkable, but solid.

Safety not Guaranteed - quirky, American, indie

Been looking forwards to Safety not Guaranteed for over a year now.  When I first heard about it, a tale of a reporter who goes in search of a man who put an ad in the paper looking for time travel buddies, it sounded like exactly the sort of film you want to seek out in a tiny art house cinema to watch with a small cadre of 5 other film nerds.  As it happens Berkshire doesn't really do arthouse cinemas, so DVD via Lovefilm (or possibly Amazon these days) it is.

The story is exactly as billed.  In quirky Seattle a reporter and his two interns go to a remote location on the pacific coast to investigate a man (Kenneth) who has put the mysterious ad in a local paper asking for a companion to travel in time with him.  The advert states that you will have to bring your own weapons, your safety is not guaranteed and that he has done this only once before.  The lead reporter Jeff has an alternative agenda though, which is to hook up with an old girlfriend of his and try to get nerdy Indian intern Arnau laid.  So it falls to the constantly-baffled Darius to do the real work of the story.  As she investigates Kenneth though she finds that he is more than just a conspiracy theory weirdo with a strange fixation on time travel.  As the mystery of what is really going on deepens, Darius struggles to work out who is telling the truth, and if Kenneth really can do what he says.

One of the best bit about Safety not Guaranteed is that the film is very coy about its own genre.  Although the premise promises a touch of science fiction, the film is pretty much a quirky comedy that relies on the interplay between the 3 reporters to get its kicks.  When the story occasionally and suddenly brings you back into possible scifi territory, it's jarring - but in a very good way.

The only real criticism I have is that it was clearly filmed on a very low budget on a digital medium that wasn't really capable of dealing with the low lighting they wanted to use.  There is a least one scene when everything becomes very blocky as the digital technology struggles to cope with the night time setting.  I don't think there's any real excuse for this, since even though it's an independent production the film-makers are hardly unknowns in the field and should be capable of using suitable equipment.

Such technical nit-picks hardly detract from the fact that this is a very funny film.  It feels a bit like the American Office, constantly reaching for gags and one-liners with plenty of well-timed pauses.  More often than not it hits the mark.  The characters are fun and interesting, and there's even a time travel theme going on in the subplots about longing for the past, what you might do if you could change the past, taking opportunities and making the most of your youth.  To discuss the film's ending would be to court accusations of spoilers, but there is certainly room for debate as to what was really going on.  And at only 80 minutes too, there's literally no reason why you shouldn't watch this excellent piece of independent American film-making.

Gravity - In glorious 3D

Finally - finally - got around to going to visiting a silver-screened room last Friday to see Gravity projected in 3 glorious dimensions.  Cinemas are now-a-days doing a nice thing where they bring the Oscar-winning films back for a second running around awards season if they do particularly well.  With Gravity's British-based visual effects department hoovering up almost every award it could, it makes sense that it should be out again and available to see one more time on the big screen before it hits the DVD and downloads market.

Gravity - you know the story already, it's a classic disaster movie, but in space.  Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are astronauts making adjustments to the Hubble Space Telescope when an exploded satellite sends high-velocity debris into orbit and right into their direction.  In an astonishing opening scene that takes about 10 minutes, we see a slow reveal of a vista of Earth from space, then the tiny space craft comes into view and slowly gets larger until we see Sandra Bullock's face through her helmet visor.  A report of potential danger comes in, then everything goes to hell when debris from the explosion rains in on the shuttle.  Bullock and Clooney are each thrown off into space, their fate uncertain...

I have to say, I did predict how the film would end long before having seen it, but that doesn't matter.  Also, despite claiming to have scientific accuracy, there are a number of moments that are definitely wrong - mainly stuff involving momentum and the actual orbit of the international space station.  This doesn't matter either though, because Gravity has two things that stand out so brightly that all criticism is rendered muted, 1) outstanding visual effects and 2) a genuinely human story.  It's a trope that goes back so far I'm not sure anyone could claim to have invented it, but Sandra Bullock's character here is the classic everyman (woman?).  She's a normal woman, sent up into space as a technical specialist, not as a hot-shot pilot.  She lost her daughter at a young age in a meaningless accident; she's no hero, doesn't understand what's going on and is just desperately trying to stay alive in an environment that's trying to kill her.  She's there as the audience's guide on this awe-inspiring journey through space, we discover the mechanics of space travel with her, we're literally inside her helmet experiencing her low oxygen and via the power of 3D we feel the nausea that she does as the world spins around her in zero-gravity.

It's not rocket science, but it works.  Throw into this set up some of the most impressive visuals anyone's ever seen inside a movie theatre, add in dramatic highs and lows, repeated metaphors for birth, pregnancy and the circle of life and you've got yourself a winning formula.

It's edging dangerously close to being the perfect film.  At only 90 minutes long, it packs in a gripping story, with two character arcs that are introduced organically and flower to conclusion without any flash-backs or inner monologues or any other tropes of bad story-telling.  I'm now much less upset that Steve McQueen didn't win the Oscar for 12 Years a Slave, Alfonso Cuaron clearly deserves it for Gravity.  After making one of the most interestingly directed films in recent years (Children of Men) and saving the Harry Potter franchise (HP3), there's no reason anyone should be surprised to see the Mexican director walk away with the top prize.  It's a real shame I didn't see this last year, as I think it would have been my top film of 2013.

Lars and the Real Girl - heart-warming

Here's another film that's been sitting at the edge of my film-dar for ages.  On my Lovefilm list for years and finally released into the rental market just the other week, but lent to me by a friend recently so I don't have to wait for them to send it.  In your face Lovefilm / Amazon.

Lars and the Real Girl stars Ryan Gosling in a role before he was super-famous.  Here is plays a socially introverted young man living in the garage of the house that was left to him and his brother by their dead parents.  His elder brother and wife live in the main house, and despite their constant badgering of him to move in with them, he insists on his hermit-like existence in the outhouse.  We see him going about his life, working in an office bookishly shying away from people and not talking to the girl who's obviously interested in him.  Then in a strange turn, Lars spots an advert for blow up dolls, and before you know it he has ordered one and introduces 'her' to his family as his new girlfriend.

This is a film about community and human spirit.  We first see Lars' family first react very badly to what he has done, but then on the advice of his doctor they agree to put aside their awkwardness and play along with him for his own benefit.  The whole town eventually gets behind him, pretending that 'Bianca' is real.  They invite her to parties and pretend to get drinks for her, hoping all the time that Lars will eventually come out of his shell.  Where it goes from here, I will leave the reader to find out for themselves.

It's a touching film that wants to be about community and how people can bind together and help each other out in a crisis.  That's all very noble, but at the same time though it's a film felt more about people needing to conform to the norm, and that Lars needs 'help' to get him to do that.  Lars' behaviour is always portrayed as outside of the normal, disruptive and something that needs correcting.  Let's not forget either that Lars is being played by Ryan Gosling, who by most peoples' standards is a very good-looking guy.  Perhaps if all social introverts looked like Ryan Gosling they'd all have much more success getting society to change its ways around them.  The trouble is that most people like Lars look like an untalkative version of Bill Gates on a really bad hair day, and I doubt that the whole community would rally around that person if they started parading a blow up sex doll around the street in a wheelchair.

So overall, Lars and the Real Girl is a nice idea and it's well-executed.  The feel of the movie it spot-on - all the scenes in the small northern US town look suitably cold in the exteriors and equally homely in the interiors.  My reservations are about the contradiction between what the story seems to want to say, and what I feel it's actually saying.  One that's definitely worth watching though.