Hugo - not a typical Scorsese film

I'm very busy at work just now re-writing a whole chunk of Visual Basic code, plus with the Euro 2012 competition on there's very little time for me to watch any films let alone get any reviews together. I did get a few hours the other night though to watch 'Hugo', the Martin Scorsese 3D extravaganza that won 5 Oscars and was billed as a celebration of wide-eyed innocence and cinematic storytelling.  I didn't see it in 3D of course, can't do that with a DVD.

This is a film that looks amazing. It opens with an extravagant tracking shot of Paris in the 1930s, something that in itself is a masterpiece of special effects / model building / however they did it. We fly into a Parisian station and follow the life of Hugo, a boy who lives in the station clock because his Father and Uncle have both died in tragic circumstances. Hugo's dream is to complete his father's unfinished project, which is to restore an animatronic boy to working order and discover the message it hides. To do this, Hugo steals tools and trinkets from the station watch-maker (Ben Kingsley) while avoiding the attentions of the uncompromising station master (Sacha Baron Cohen). Not too much about a celebration of cinema in that plot; but soon Ben Kinsley's character is revealed to have a deep and close connection to the early days of cinema, which Hugo becomes obsessed by resolving.

Lots of good stuff so far, but this is a film that takes an excruciatingly long time to get to its one point, which is that cinema is great. It's trying too hard to be quirky with its depictions of the foibles of the Parisian train station with its community of shop-keepers and busy-body station master. Perhaps Cohen wasn't the right person to cast in the role, or perhaps Scorsese wanted him to ham up his performance, but each time he raises an eyebrow at something wacky or falls over a dog he's chasing the film becomes more unnatural. It starts to feel forced, over-the-top and scripted without much thought for what will actually work on screen.

It's a shame that I started to find the film boring as each quirky moment cumulatively got more and more on my nerves. It was a shame because the plot of the film is actually a neat little mystery that a couple of excited children busy themselves about solving - in other words, the stuff of classic storytelling. There are a couple of nice touches at the end that the film historians out there will probably get very excited about, in particular a tracking shot though a window that takes after the classic Citizen Kane moment, but this kind of stuff doesn't make up for the enforced quirkiness that bored me for the opening hour.

I can understand why the Academy gave it 5 Oscars; they love heaping praise on films that eulogise about the magic of cinema and I agree with them that the attention to detail in the sets and costumes is spectacular. What I don't really understand is why more people aren't underwhelmed by the trite side-plots and crow-barred quirkiness. In conclusion: Hugo had plenty of good points, but I'll not be watching it again.

Submarine - quirky

Here's a quirky film. That's quirky in a good way rather than a Zooey Deschanel 'look everyone I've got it wrong again' irritating quirky.  Set in rural Wales and following the confusing young life of Oliver Tate, 'Submarine' is a story in the mould of Adrian Mole, told from the confused point of view of the adolescent lead as he discovers he knows much more than he thought he did about some things while hardly as much as he should about others.

Oliver is a 13/14/15 (it isn't clear) year-old school kid in an idyllic part of rural Wales who is cursed with the need to over-analyse everything that happens in his life. He makes lists of things and feels compelled to intervene in what he perceives to be his parents' marital problems. He is helplessly attracted to the distant Jordana in his school, but is unable to work out first how to connect to her and then how to get her to have sex with him. After he succeeds on both these fronts, it's clear he has no idea what's expected of him next. When Jordana reveals that her mother is terminally ill, Oliver's idealistic view of how things should be is torn away by having to face the way things really are.

This is a film that does the simple things well. Like telling the story of how a wide-eyed adolescent might struggle to understand how his parents' apparent lack of enthusiasm for love and life is simply a factor of getting old. It's a film that tells us how pragmatism becomes more important than idealism as you age, but it manages to remain funny while doing so. Oliver's nutcase mate Chips has a few brilliantly quotable lines along with pearls of misplaced teenage certainty that Oliver himself comes out with. It's set in Wales but at no point plays on the foibles of that region for comedy, so it's a story for all of us. All this plus a decent cast (Sally Hawkins and Paddy Considine are solid British film actors that need to get their chance to break into the American mainstream at some point surely?) make Submarine an extremely enjoyable and tender film.

Post Mortem

Set in the midst of the US-backed coup against the Allende government of Chile in 1973, this is the story of one simple man's obsession with a dancer who lives over the road, but how everyone around him is consumed instead by the madness of Pinochet's rise to power.

The film is Chilean, and given that I'm currently in the middle of my 'advanced Spanish' course I attempted to watch it without the subtitles. This failed after about 1 minute, such was the speed of the dialogue. I guess it really is a shit load easier to understand a sympathetic speaker who's using simple words. The subtitles went on and I was introduced to the film's main character, Mario. This is a man who works in a mortuary by typing up post mortem reports and lives a rather dull life. We can tell his life is dull because the camera focuses on the numbing minutiae of his existence, things like brushing his teeth or frying some eggs - more of this later.

He spends his time pursuing an ageing dancer who is his neighbour. Then, in the middle of not a lot going on, Mario wakes up one morning to discover scenes of destruction outside his house. His neighbour's place has been ransacked and when he turns up to work there are men with guns bringing in piles of corpses for him to deal with. You see, the US-backed coup of 1973 has just taken place and the Chilean military are now running things. The film tells the story of that coup from a very singular view point, that being Mario's. Mario who lives his life day to day, eats bland food and types reports for a living. Mario and his colleagues then have to perform an autopsy on a man who appears to have shot himself in the head - this man is Salvador Allende.

This is one of these cases where the film really succeeds in painting a picture of utter boredom; so well in fact that the film has shot itself in the foot and become tedious in the extreme. The point might be to build a tension around the inevitability of historical events impinging on Mario's life, and to contrast that defining moment in Chile's history against the mundane and routine - but the film is so slow and boring that it renders all that a moot point. It ends on a silent 5 minute sequence that had me reaching for the fast forward button. Please avoid this film.  If you want to learn about the Chilean coup that brought Pinochet to power I'm sure there are plenty of other much more interesting source materials out there that'll bring the chilling events of September 1973 to life.

Downfall - Actual Subtitles

I tried to find this scene on YouTube a few months back but couldn't because of the ridiculous number of spoofs (many of which were funny originally, but are now getting out of control).  Someone posted it on the Guardian's film blog earlier to day and so I am reposting.

A superb scene from a superb film.  To anyone in the modern world who might look back upon the Second World War and ask 'how did people allow a monster like Hitler to rise?' - Downfall provides an answer: he was no devil, merely a man.  A man like any number of men who would like us to blame our modern troubles on Eastern Europeans / Muslims / any culture they refuse to understand and would rather hate.  The film reminds us that hatred is spread by ordinary people, and calls upon us to challenge it where ever it is found lest history repeat itself.  At least that's what I thought.

By way of an antidote, here's Charlie Caplain's fantastic speech lampooning Hitler and preaching universal peace in 'The Great Dictotor':



Never actually seen 'The Great Dictator', but this speech is an exceptional piece of oration.

Legion - Dennis Quaid in terrible film shock

Whereas Oranges and Sunshine was a little boring because not a lot happens while the camera stares at brightly-lit scenes of Australia / dimly-lit scenes of the British Midlands, 'Legion' is boring for quite different reasons - though it really shouldn't be from what it sets out to do.

This is a film that my housemate Rich had for some reason, and for some other reason that I can't quite put my finger on, we all decided to watch it the other night. Here comes the premise: Paul Bettany is an angel from heaven turned rogue who decides to help humanity rather than bringing about the apocalypse as decreed by god. Cheers god. Rather than showing the colapse of civilisation, the film does a 'Night of the Living Dead' thing and focusses on a single remote location. Thus the whole film is centred on a small desert diner somewhere in rural Nevada. Dennis Quaid runs the place with his son and a local woman who is pregnant; their customers today are a conventient slice of American society ripe for moralising over and killing off at appropriate moments in the story. You see god wants everyone dead because Humanity's gone to shit.  Because we're worse now than we've ever been apparently despite universal sufferage, healthcare, democracy, culture + a bazillion other reasons it's better to be alive now than at biblical times.  God doesn't give a shit about that though cos he's a bit of a vain and doesn't like that we all stopped worshipping him.  Well I guess we can't blame him for not seeing this coming, he's not meant to be omniscient or anything is he?!  Oops.

But despair ye not - it turns out that the baby with which the waitress at the diner is pregnant, is in fact the thing that will save humanity. And Paul Bettany will save it at all costs with a huge mace or a sword or an uzi or whatever it is you fight angels with these days.  For some reason.

It's never a great sign to say that a film isn't the worst you've ever seen, but this describtion is quite apt for 'Legion'. It's a mash up of biblical apocalyptica and horror genre gore with battles out of 'Immortals' and oddly reminiscent of several scenes in 'Terminator 2'. Put simply, it's a mess of film with a Grand Canyon's worth of plot holes.  Avoid.

Oranges and Sunshine

Been a bit slow putting up any reviews recently. A combination of a) actually having things to do at work b) doing a Spanish evening class at Surrey University and c) playing Mass Effect 3 on line every night have conspired to both reduce the number of films I'm watching and my time to write anything about them. At the moment I want to watch Dark Shadows, Cabin in the Woods and The Dictator at the cinema - but with a couple of busy weekends coming up I doubt it's going to happen.

I'll be making time for Prometheus though come June.

I did force myself to watch 'Oranges and Sunshine' on Sunday though, which had recently come through the post from Lovefilm. This stars Emily Watson as a care worker in mid 1980s Nottingham who uncovers a huge scandal involving the British and Australian governments conspiring to deport orphaned children to Australia. This really happened (yet another instance of a government committing a crime and managing to cover it up for many years - conspiracy theories can be true) and was recently apologised for by Gordon Brown and the Australian government. This film provides an emotional insight into the impact that this practise had on the lives of hundreds of thousands of children across the British colonies. Watson's character Margaret discovers a woman who has come all the way from Australia and re-unites her with the mother she thought was dead. Margaret then travels to Australia and discovers hundreds of people in the same situation.

The film opened my eyes to this largely unmentioned slice of history from Britain's imperial past, it also contained lots of shots of the Nottingham skyline and gave Hugo Weaving the chance to appear in a role that required him to emote rather than standing in front of green screens. For this the film should be praised. It is a little boring in places though - I guess I wasn't really in the mood for a chin-stroking think-fest of a film.

Avengers Assemble - terrible name

Extremely hungover on Sunday, but I had salvation in the form of excessive rain that prompted the BAFA National Leagues to postpone the game I was supposed to referee - bonus! So I joined a very large group of my friends at the Bracknell Odeon to see this year's first superhero blockbuster - Avengers.

First a quick anecdote about the Bracknell Odeon. My mates all had pre-booked tickets, so I had to buy one for myself. I went up separately to the counter and asked for a ticket:

Me: "Can I see Avengers please?"
Counter operator / Zombie: "It's sold out."
Me: "Oh, that's a shame"
Zombie: "Unless you only want one ticket?"
Me: (I take a quick look around me, I'm clearly alone) "Erm, that's right."
Zombie: "Well there are about 10 seats left, all by themselves."
Me: "Well I'll have one of those then."
Zombie: "Where do you want to sit?"
Me: (hangover starting to come back at this point) "I really don't care."

And so on and so forth. Then he didn't understand that the card I was trying to pay with was a gift card and that no it wont work in the chip-n-pin device. Do Odeon actually bother to train their staff? Or is it learning by osmosis?

Time to stop being grumpy and tell you about 'Avengers Assemble', which is a terrible title I can only assume they went for to avoid any confusion with the other Avengers - Emma Peel and all that. Joss Whedon wrote and directed the film. Since Joss Whedon is as close a being as I think I've ever come to believing is god, I'm very happy to see him get a break into the genuine Holywood big time and happier still to pay to see his work. Such a shame then that despite several cute touches, 'Avengers Assemble' has been diluted and washed clean of anything interesting, subversive or genuinely affecting - typical aspects of Whedon's usually exceptional work - and is instead an aneamic paint-by-numbers Holywood action no-brainer.

The film is the culmination of many years and several other Marvel films setting up the superheros who will star. We have Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man, Mark Ruffalo as The Hulk (though other actors played Hulk in other films), Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Chris Evans as Captain America, Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury and a string of other more minor characters that I'm sure the Marvel fanboys will enjoy seeing on the big screen.

With this many characters something was always bound to be lost. There are simply too many big names, too many egos and too many back stories to make sure the lay-audience understands. The film could have been a total mess, and I admit that Whedon has done a pretty good job to make it work in any way at all. But there is too much to cram in and no space for any meaningful character development, emotion or real plot. What is the plot of the film? Evil guy wants the MacGuffin and also to kill / enslave all humanity, so he builds a device that makes aliens appear (in New York obviously) that the heros have to bash. This is comic book story-telling at its most painfully simplistic. Where are the lovingly crafted, painfully-tormented evil geniuses of the X-Men or Dark Knight series? It is possible to do comic book stories well, just not when you're dedicating your entire run-time to grasping at disparate plot thread from other films while setting up the next.

The problem with any criticism like this though, is that I eventually ask myself what I was really expecting? The film gave me outstanding special effects, a series of spectacular action sequences, good comic asides and helped develop this Marvel movie world that the Marvel Films is very carefully positioning as a sandbox for all its productions. I'm guessing that the comic parts of the movie - easily the best bits - were Whedon's work, and so if these films are going to exist then a writer / director of his prowess might as well be involved. Whedon's influence wasn't just in the comic department either. Scarlett Johansson spends most of the film in a body-hugging PVC outfit, but I can't remember a single shot that was even semi-leery (obviously I was watching carefully for this). I'm sure a lesser director would have bowed to unspoken Hollywood pressure to include 'something for the lads' like this, but of course Whedon has an excellent track record of respectful treatment of strong female characters in film and that came through here.

Overall then, the action is great but the talking bits are pretty boring. If it wasn't for Whedon's influence I think I would have been very disappointed by the film, but with him there he's made enough of a difference for me to enjoy the explosions and gloss over the plot-lapses. See, I told you he was a god.