Die Hard 4.0 - trying too hard

I went into watching Die Hard 4.0 with a clear mind and an open heart, but came out wondering what the point was.  We watched it 'as a house' last night after we cooked a big communal dinner - good times.  Die Hard is a classic film which pits the ordinary cop in the wrong place at the wrong time (Bruce Willis as John McClane) against the number one pantomime bad guy of the era, Alan Rickman as the gleefully nasty Hans Gruber.  Willis makes his way through various floors, air conditioning tunnels and lift shafts of one sky scraper as he attempts to rescue his wife from Rickman's Germanic terrorists and get home in time for Christmas.  Would Die Hard 4.0 live up to this?

So there we were watching Die Hard 4.0.  Immediately I have a question: why the 4.0?  Why not just 4?  Probably because the film has a lot of technology in it, and you know technology often has 'point something'.  The publicity people for the film haven't exactly got off on the right foot with me here.  The film starts off with some techie type people who are obviously up to no good.  A woman who looks a bit like Jessica Ennis is typing away and hacks into a government computer before a bunch of bad guys blow up the house where a dude she's hacking with is working.  The government aren't happy their computer was hacked into, so they want to interview all the hackers that might be capable of doing it, so John McCane is tasked to bring in one of those hackers.  Got it?

From then on the film is a series of set-piece action sequences linked together by scenes in which McClane his hacker buddy (Matt) travel between locations.  There's a car chase in a tunnel, a shoot out in an apartment block, a car crashing into a helicopter, an SUV dangling down a lift shaft, a jet fighter versus an articulated lorry and plenty of bullets flying around without anyone ever running out of ammunition.  This takes place over the space of about a days, during which time McClane doesn't appear to eat or sleep.  The point of Die Hard is that McClane is meant to be an ordinary cop, not Superman or Chuck Norris.  In fact, why call this film Die Hard at all?  Just because it's an action film with Bruce Willis in it?  Apart from that it's got nothing at all to do with the original film and looks more like a feature length episode of 24, several years after the concept of 24 got old.

Comparisons between the bad guys in Die Hard and Die Hard 4.0 leave the latter floundering at sea.  The bad guy here is some utterly wet computer 'genius'; the worst thing he manages to do to McClane s daughter is slap her in the face and when his girlfriend is killed he simply brushes his hand across his table in mild disgust.  What was his motivation?  Something about proving to the government that he's right?  Also where did he get all the money from to finance this criminal enterprise?  Did he steal it?  No one at the FBI seems interested in catching him for that though.  And where do the endless French goons come from?  And why are they all French?!  Sigh.

The film does have a few good points.  The relationship between McClane and the hacker kid is quite well done.  There's a generation gap thing going on between them in that McClane doesn't understand any technology while Matt doesn't do guns and violence.  They're a good double act and thematically the kid is playing the part of a younger audience who might not have seen any of the Die Hard films.  The action scenes should be applauded for their audaciousness if nothing else.  I would have loved to be in the script review meeting where they agreed to go with the scene that involves a jet fighter literally facing off against a truck.  It's a scene that's so silly the film-makers deserve praise for having the balls to keep it in the final cut.

Die Hard 4.0 is an absolute mess of a film, the kind of thing that teenage media students would probably end up making if they had a $100 million budget.  It has nothing to do with the original Die Hard and - despite providing good entertainment value by being so over-the-top - it was a disappointment.

The Clairvoyant

My Dad bought me a LOT of films at Christmas, and I started trying to make a dent on them last weekend by watching The Clairvoyant (normally if anyone says 'The Clairvoyant  to me I think of this). A lot of the films I watch are the ones I missed at the cinema recently; The Clairvoyant is about as far from that as possible, having been released in 1935 and starring Claude Rains (who has been died 10 years before I was even born). Rains is most famous for his role as the captain of the local police in Casablanca, but a quick check of his imdb entry reveals that he was in so much more at and around the time.

Here he plays Maximo, a man who earns a living by playing the part of a telepath on the theatre circuit. He and his wife Rene have a well-rehearsed routine in which they convince a crowd of people that he is able to work out what personal items she has taken from the crowd, despite being blindfolded. It is a trick of course, but during one show Maximo appears to enter a sort of trance state when staring at a beautiful woman in the crowd. While in this state he makes a prediction about a train crash, a prediction that comes true. Soon Maximo is national news, more so when he successfully predicts a 100 to 1 outsider to win the Derby. But he can only make predictions in the presence of the beautiful Christine. Maximo soon realises that this power is more curse than blessing, as not only is the weight of the world on his shoulders to make predictions, but Rene's jealousy towards Christine risks tearing his marriage apart.

The Clairvoyant suffers in front of a modern audience from being made at a time before Citizen Kane when movies looked very stagey, plus the footage seems to have become a little bedraggled before its conversion to digital format. It is difficult these days to work out how impressive a film like this would have looked to a 1930s audience. Was the explosion that happens towards the end of the film an impressive special effect back then or not? So I'm not going to comment on such matters with my 21st century brain. In terms of the story, I thought it was a shame that the ending shied away from becoming a full-on episode of the Twilight Zone. That's hardly too much of a criticism though since the Twilight Zone was still 20 years in the future when this was made. Aside from these minor points the film is a solid piece of storytelling starring one of the great actors of classic cinema.

Films of the Year - 2012

Didn't go to the cinema as much in 2012 as I would have liked to.  As such quite a lot of films that I wanted to see I have missed out on and aren't elligible for this chart.  Mainly I'm thinking of Looper and The Life of Pi.  I'm sure I'll get around to seeing these fairly early in the new year as they become available on DVD / Netflix.

Regardless, I've set myself a tradition of doing a top 5 of the year each January - so here's this year's top films of 2012 that I actually got around to seeing in 2012.

5 - The Hunger Games

A surprise entry here. Earlier in the year if you had told me how much I would have bought into the story of Katniss I would never had believed you. Rather than simply being teenage fodder in the Twilight mould, The Hunger Games is a savvy political thriller that has launched the career of the superb Jennifer Lawrence.

4 - Cabin in the Woods

My horror film of the year isn't really a horror film, but a horror spoof. Proof that Joss Whedon (as a co-writer here) can still be a genius at the same time as churning out Holywood action no-brainers for Marvel.

3 - The Raid

A throw-back to the kung fu action movies of yesteryear, The Raid is an intensely violent action thriller in which the premise is simple and in which when someone gets punched it looks like it actually hurts. Sometimes the best films are the ones in which you concentrate on getting the basics right.

2 - Shame

Michael Fassbender is one of the best actors around at present, and in Shame he gives an outstanding performance that shines a light on the crushing nature of addiction. Not only him, but Carey Mulligan's in it too and appears in my scene of the year!

1 - The Artist

Easily the most fun I had at the cinema last year, The Artist is a wonderful story that shows how the future of cinema doesn't have to lie in the realm of 3D, or even colour or sound. If you've got a great story, people will love it!

Green Zone - now available for DVD rental

Green Zone spent a lot of time on my Lovefilm list as 'currently unavailable' - meaning that it is available for sale, but not for rent. No need to worry, I'm happy to wait. And wait I did, for nearly 2 years. Finally a month ago Green Zone shifted its status on Lovefilm from being unavailable for rent to being a normal film. A similar thing happened to A Serious Man earlier last year. I wonder how much money the distribution companies managed to make out of sales of these two films before they realised that people are much more likely to download them illegally than buy them when they're not given the option to rent? Hopefully not too much. I can't imagine any situation in which I wouldn't want to spent money going to the cinema to see a film but would be happy to buy the DVD immediately upon release. Can anyone imagine anyone doing that?

Whatever the distribution company's business model is, I beat them at their own game and waited them out until their film was available to rent normally. The film stars Matt Damon as a specialist soldier during the recent Iraq war of 2003. The task he is assigned is to visit dangerous locations throughout the nation at which weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) are thought to be stored. The film opens with Damon's character visiting such a site and (once again) coming up empty-handed. This is just the latest in a series of red herrings, and as such he starts to question the validity of the intelligence that is sending him and his team on these missions. His questions to his commanding officer raise the eyebrows of a local CIA agent (played by Brendon Gleeson trying his very best to cover up his Irish accent), who convinces Damon's character to go on a secret mission within Iraq to oust the truth behind their failure to find the WMD. It's basically because the US government made it all up.

Looking back at this period in history with almost a decade of hindsight, it is obvious now that there were no WMDs in Iraq. This was obvious to many of us in 2003, but the leaders of Britain and the USA convinced enough of the world that these weapons existed and set about launching their illegal war. To many, the Iraqi war has now come to an end for Britain and the US and is in danger of becoming a historical footnote. It is important that this does not happen. The blatant lies and propaganda surrounding the 'evidence' for the existence of WMDs in Iraq needs to stay fresh in the mind of the public, because when they try it next time (and they will) we need people to be wise to it.

In that it's trying to sell an important political story to a wide audience, Green Zone is similar to Comrades. In sharp contrast to Comrades though, Green Zone is a film that will succeed by having a mass appeal. Green Zone stars several big name actors, has a big name director, superb action sequences and a big box office draw. Contrast that to Comrades' intricately detailed realism and lengthy depictions of the tedium of 19th century life - giving it a limited appeal. You might argue that Green Zone contains a lot of plot contrivances and certain characters behave in a way that would never be tolerated in the US army, but these are concessions to reality that director Paul Greengrass is prepared to make in order to tell an important story in a way that will engage a wide audience.

Green Zone is a good action film that does well to get a message about political deceit into the public domain.

Comrades - very long

Finally got around to watching this just before I went away for Christmas. Comrades is - according to the information written on the DVD box - a much-maligned classic of 1980s British cinema that details the battles fought in the 1830s by the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Starring a number of well-respected British actors like Imelda Staunton and Keith Allen, the film tells their story in extended detail. We open in rural Somerset, then transfer to the courts of London before moving on the Australia where the men were sent as punishment.

Who the Tolpuddle Martyrs are, what they did and what happened to them are a very important part of British history. A part that has been forgotten about by a lot of people who must think that the rights they enjoy in the modern workplace were handed down by god at some point in the past, rather than being fought for by ordinary people. The kind of person who would fight for a decent living standard in the workplace is George Loveless - played here by Robin Soans - a man of ordinary intelligence who simply asked for a decent standard of living at a time when some had a lot and many had little. For this simple request, he and 5 of his associates were deported to Australia where they worked for several years before a campaign in the UK successfully achieved their release and return.

This is an important story that should be told more widely. Sadly Comrades isn't a film that's going to spread this message beyond anyone who's already prepared to spend 3 hours watching a grim recreation of rural life in the 1830s. It's a life where little ever changes, a life where the monotony of daily routine is broken rarely by the occasional travelling minstrel or circus. It's a life that is recreated in often-numbing detail at some length, I could almost feel the boredom of life at the time permeating through the screen into my living room. That's either great film-making or a case of the bad editing making a film that's paced far too slowly. By all means decide for yourself, but I thought the latter.

What is true is that the story of George Loveless and the Tolpuddle Martyrs needs to be kept alive - Loveless doesn't even have his own Wikipedia page! And though I would love to say that this film will do exactly that, I know it never will.

My top films of 2012 will be coming up in a few posts time...

Cosmopolis - anyone got any ideas what this is about then?

This is my second David Cronenberg film in the space of a couple of weeks; I think I need a lie down. I watched eXistenZ a few weeks ago and that was weird enough. After seeing Cosmopolis last night eXistenZ feels like a breezy walk in the park - at least eXistenZ has a vaguely linear plot running through its craziness.

On the surface, Cosmopolis can be summed up in the following way. Robert Pattinson plays Eric Packer, a highly-flying and extremely powerful businessman who takes a ride in his limo across the city (I guess it's New York) in search of a hair cut. On the way he meets a variety of people, some of whom he talks to in his limo, others of whom he steps out and meets in bars, cafes, libraries etc. Each of these people is quite different, but the connection is that each impacts his life in a different way and speaks to him in quick-fire poetic stanzas about something philosophical. Time moves in strange ways in the limousine as day quickly turns to night. Protesters appear outside the car, but still people appear within it to lecture Packer on the meaning of the modern world. What does it mean to have power? What is money? Why do we think of time the way we do? All these and others are questions that are either posed outright or hinted at in a whirlwind of hard-to-penetrate dialogue over 100 minutes.

It is very hard to watch Cosmopolis. There is nowhere to take an intellectual break from what's being said, hardly a moment of reflection in which to digest what's going on. Visually the film is tough, with odd lighting effects making the world outside the car appear ethereal and distant. At the same time it isn't any fun watching Cosmopolis, as you feel like you're being lectured by someone much cleverer than you, who's constantly watching you, waiting for you to show any sign of failing to understand the full depth of what it is they're saying.

Despite this though, it's a film about which you can have a very long conversation with your fellow movie-goer. Cronenberg seems to be trying to create some sort of treatise on the recent fall of Western Capitalism. I'm guessing that Pattinson's character is a metaphor for American Capitalism, on a journey somewhere for no apparent reason, a violently destructive force that projects power (in the film sex seems to be a metaphor for power) and is in a terminal decline. At the same time he is surrounded by a series of advisers who tell him about the creeping influence of technology on society and how what he does affects so many people's lives, but ultimately they can't actually help him. Pattinsons wife (Sarah Gadon) is perhaps a metaphor for the state, ever-present and stoic, aware of what Capitalism wants and happy to prop it up when it reaches its low ebb, but equally happy to roll over when Capitalism appears strong. Paul Giamatti's character could represent the masses, full of rage about something but not knowing how to use the weapons at their disposal or how to direct their anger if they could; they're desperate to be free of Capitalism but terrified of what will happen without it.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Essentially Cosmopolis is pretentious wank. But at least it's vaguely interesting pretentious wank. Plus it's good to see that Robert Pattinson has no desire to confine himself to a career borne out of the Twilight silliness. I can't bring myself to recommend Cosmopolis, mainly because I didn't actually enjoy watching it. I can think of better ways to spend 100 minutes if all you want to do is come up with fodder for a philosophical debate on the connection between the post-modern world, capitalism and the Occupy protests. This is the sort of film that would have had a tiny release in London arthouse cinemas were it not for the appearance of Pattinson. At least now I'm sure of something I suspected though, that David Cronenberg is a mentalist.

Red State - Kevin Smith makes another mad film

What an utterly mental film this is - in a good way. Red State is another Kevin Smith film in which he explores the madness inherent in taking dogmatic religious adherence to its illogical conclusion. Here the film's title alludes to the conservative deep south of the USA, those states that since the civil rights movement in the 1960s have always voted republican - i.e. the Red States. It is here that the outlandish excesses of America's right wing Christan zealots are often manifested, and as such it's the perfect breeding ground for the story that Smith wants to tell.

The story is of a preacher named Abin Cooper, and his Five Points Trinity Church, which engages in the practise of advertising on line to entice young men into having sexual encounters with a local promiscuous woman. Sadly for these young lads, the local woman is a member of Cooper's congregation, and instead of sex all they get is drugged up and chained up at the church waiting to be judged. Luckily (at least in the short term) for them, they accidentally hit the local sheriff's car earlier in the day, and so the police are on their case. Before long the FBI are on the scene (in the form of John Goodman) and a full scale Waco-style siege is underway.  These FBI aren't all good guys though!

This is an 18 - so be prepared for some chillingly gruesome deaths. This is also a Kevin Smith film, so be prepared for him not giving a crap about killing off characters and playing around with the usual conventions of film. The ending of the film is nothing if not wacky. Basically everyone's an idiot and ends up doing something stupid, mostly for blackly comic effect. The film has a nice false ending and then a bizarre epilogue with a final line that sums it all up as the tongue-in-cheek lark it really is.

I've come up with a new rule of thumbs for watching films, which is that if a film is less than about 90 minutes long I'm prepared to be a lot more forgiving than if it were overly long. If Red State were longer it would end up becoming tedious. At 88 minutes it's just the right length for creating a bonkers world solely for the purposes of dark comedy, without anyone worrying about all the bits holding together. Thoroughly enjoyable.