American Hustle - quite a caper

Second cinema experience of the year already on Saturday, and with a few decent-looking trailers beforehand I think there might be a few more trips coming up.  The trailers for American Hustle did a good job of making me interested without giving any substantial clue on what the film was actually about.  Aside from it being some sort of hustle of course, I wasn't really sure what I was going to watch.  The reviews are pretty good all around though, and with that cast it didn't really seem to matter too much.  So it was that American Hustle became my second cinema experience of 2014 - only 4 days in!

Before we go any further, the most important talk about in American Hustle is the cast.  What a great cast!  Even though Christian Bale and Amy Adams play the lead roles, it's very much an ensemble with Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Jeremy Renner all giving captivating performances of very weird characters.  It's a film that's very much about characters, the deceptions they're each trying to pull on themselves and others and the effect that deception has on their lives.  The plot itself is about Bradley Cooper's federal investigator Richie DiMaso forcing the scamming duo of Irving Rosenfeld and Sydney Prosser (Bale and Adams) into working for the feds to entrap an increasingly large group of high-powered politicians who are on the take from shady businessmen and organised criminals.  As the circle of people DiMaso is trying to entrap becomes ever-wider, our scammers realise that it will be them rather than the FBI whom the mob come after when they find out they've been the target of an FBI sting.  So they'd better do something to cover themselves...

It's a film that's part crime-caper and part straight comedy set in the 1970s.  The opening scene invites us to watch Christian Bale awkwardly glue down an ageing comb-over before donning a terrible velvet jacket, before Amy Adams wanders in and unironically complements him on his appearance.  This sets the precedent for the rest of the film.  The attention to the detail of this 70s aesthetic is played for both comic and nostalgic kicks in the film.  From Bale's awful jacket to the garish colours of the opening credits to Bradley Cooper's chest hair and Jennifer Lawrence's inability to understand her newfangled microwave oven (or 'science oven' as she calls it) - it's the 1970s, a simpler age.

You would have to be watching this film with your eyes closed to not notice that there are a hell of a lot of boobs in it.  Almost every outfit Amy Adams is wearing reveals a lot, similarly so for Jennifer Lawrence when she gets out of her domestic setting.  Obviously there's nothing wrong with this, but it's a very clear demonstration of the cinematic trend that permits male leads to be chubby and have bad hair while our female leads must be pretty and ooze sex appeal.  Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper are both attractive guys, but the make up department for American Hustle does its best to play this down to comic effect (witness Bale's awful comb-over and much-expanded stomach - if ever there was an actor who gave their body up for their craft, it was Christian Bale).  Admittedly Amy Adams has a few scenes where she's made up to look a bit bedraggled, but that's definitely the exception rather than the rule.

One slight criticism would be that the film drags a bit in the middle.  Some scenes could have probably been trimmed even though they do add to the characterisation of the people involved.  It feels like you're coming to the end several times before you finally get the final denouement, but at no point did I ever feel bored or wish the end was coming.  It's 100% a caper in the original sense of it, everyone's out for themselves, no-one's trustworthy and the central relationship between the characters played by Bale and Adams is one in which you're never quite sure who are the scammers and the scammed.

Though American Hustle is a very enjoyable film I don't understand its extremely high rating at present on IMDB or the awards season talk that it seems to be getting.  Its plot is entertaining, its retro 1970s look is an amusing throwback and its cast it very good, but it's hardly Goodfellas (despite a number of moments when it really looks like it's trying to be a spoof of that film).  This is a very entertaining film that I should think anyone will enjoy, but the Academy should probably look elsewhere come Oscar season.

The Spirit of 45 - My kind of propaganda

Ok so this might be the first time I've ever posted 3 reviews in a day, but it's only the second day back in the office after Christmas and my boss isn't here - so I can really be expected to do any work can I?  The second film I watched at my parents' place over Christmas was The Spirit of 45.  It's a documentary directed by Ken Loach in which he uses primary source interviews to discuss the social changes that took place in Britain after the end of the Second World War.  He focusses on the election of Clement Atlee as British Prime Minister and the Labour government's programme to create a welfare state and nationalise all of Britain's infrastructure and industries.

The second world war was with the hindsight of history a terrifically strong driver of social and economic changes throughout the world.  In Britain the entire population was mobilised to defeat Fascism.  When that population returned from the war, people rightly thought to themselves - why can't we mobilise this strength to do something good at home?  When Britain's wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill was voted out of office in a landslide less than 2 months after the end of hostilities in WW2, it was a seismic event in British politics that demonstrated the depth of feeling ordinary people had.  Truly it was Britain's working class speaking as one.

Unsurprisingly Loach's interviews conclude that the creation of the welfare state was one of the greatest things to have ever happened to the British nation.  The nationalisation of the industries was - though flawed - a programme that had the right intentions and was aimed at getting services and jobs to the people who needed them.  He finishes with a discussion of the dismantling of that programme from the 1980s onwards, and how the privatisation of Britain's infrastructure and industry has led to falling real-term wages and asset stripping of what should be national property.  As a film this is a little slow, but as a documentary it is very interesting.

Some might say that it's typical of someone with my attitude towards work to be in favour of social security, welfare and societal safety nets - I know that Bill O'Reilly would hate me.  What I know is that I can see plenty of people in the world with power and money who are working hard to gather more power and money for themselves and their friends.  So why would I want to work to help them do that?  Instead I think I'll sit on the fringes and quietly mess with their system in whatever small way I can.  And if that means writing blogs when I should be working, then so be it.

A Field in England - What's happening!?

Watched two films while I was back at my parents' place in Ilford over the Christmas period, the first of which was A Field in England.  This film has had an experimental release, in that it was released on multiple formats all at the same time.  It was released in cinemas at the same time as it was put out on DVD and made available for download.  One presumes that the point of this is to test out a new model of cinematic distribution, and to find out if the studios can beat the pirates by undercutting them at source.  Having seen the film though I wonder if the point was to cynically generate a bit of hype for a film that otherwise doesn't have much going for it.

A Field in England stars Michael Smiley (who will always be Tyres from Spaced) and Reece Shearsmith; Smiley is noble soldier who has absconded from his English civil war regiment and Shearsmith the investigator sent to find him.  They come across each other just after Shearsmith's character has escaped with a small band of soldiers from a bloody battle.  What happens next is a monochrome trip through the mind as Smiley's O'Neil forces the soldiers to hunt for an unspecified treasure in a field surrounded by strange mushrooms.

And that's kind of it really.  The characters have a bit of banter, O'Neil looks mad and evil, there's some mystical stuff and at the end it isn't completely clear what has happened - or if in fact anything has happened at all.  Just like Susperia, A Field in England is a bit like experiencing someone else's bad dream.  Perhaps the characters are all dead on the field of battle and lingering in a black and white English purgatory?  Perhaps the characters all ate a stew made with magic mushrooms and are on a 90 minute long bad trip?  Who knows?  I don't, and the internet doesn't seem to either.

On the Mark Kermode film show one of the public emailed in recently to opine that their favourite moment of cinema this year was Reece Shearsmith coming out of a tent - a reference to a moment in A Field in England when Shearsmith's character emerges from O'Neil's tent tied up and grinning madly.  Why this is in any way a 'great' moment of cinema is beyond me.  Perhaps if you buy into what is happening as some sort of existential journey across medieval England then this scene has significance, if you don't buy it then it becomes just another mad moment in a mad and baffling film.  By all means watch A Field in England, but don't tell me I didn't warn you.

Anchorman 2 - First Film of the Year

New year's day was on a Wednesday this year, the perfect excuse to start the year off with an Orange Wednesday trip to the cinema.  Lots of new films out at the moment, so which one to choose?  Well I ended up going for the one that my housemates wanted to see - Anchorman 2.

The original Anchorman film is a cult classic, in which Will Ferrell plays Ron Burgundy, the egotistical and misogynistic bequiffed newsreader on local 1970s Southern Californian television.  Anchorman is one of those infinitely quotable films, littered with frat-boy lines and silly visual gags.  It features a number of celebrity cameos from Ferrell's Holywood mates and an excellent performance from Steve Carrell.  This new film comes almost 10 years after the first, set a similar time after the first and tells the story of Ron Burgundy's news team getting back together, fronting a 24 hour news TV station and accidentally coming up with all the tired tropes that constant news coverage bores us with in the modern age.  Ron Burgundy invents the pointlessly patriotic news item, the heart-warming animal tale, the car chase from a copter, the news anchor desperately speculating about information they would have no way of knowing - all those things that Sky news does so well and have become so commonplace that they are accepted almost unthinkingly by a modern audience.

In terms of poking fun at modern news coverage, Anchorman 2 is on the mark.  While the original film 10 years ago was more concerned with being a gag-infused caper about the character Ron Burgundy, this film is trying to be a bit more satirical.  This is a good thing.  Where the film goes wrong is that it isn't as funny as the original, over-does it with the celebrity cameos and quite often steps well beyond the bounds of what should be considered racist.  Ron Burgundy is presented as a racist in the film, unable to cope with the idea of having a female black boss.  When he meets her family we get an extended scene in which Burgundy is just about as racist as it's possible to be.  Now though I get that it's the character who is a racist and not the film, and that we're supposed to be laughing at the character's awkward archaic attempts to ingratiate himself into a part of society he if frightened of - but this stuff goes on for ages and ages.  If I wanted to cringe listening to old people's out of date racism I can go and talk to old people, I don't find it that funny to see Will Ferrell playing a character who does it too.

Anchorman 2 is a funny film, but I think fans of the original will end up wanting something else.  It's a film that ends in a slightly odd way too.  After nearly 90 minutes of silliness and bumbling around, Ron Burgundy has a mishap crowbarred into his life, goes into self-imposed isolation, nurses a baby shark to health (seriously), then discovers his love for family life and goes to his kid's piano recital.  It feels like the writers wrote a bunch of silly sketches poking fun at Newscorp, then realised there wasn't any sort of pathos and so felt required to bolt something on to the end.  Some of the funniest bits of the film involved Steve Carrell (again) and Kristen Wigg in their bumbling attempts to go on a date together.  Even here though things are far from perfect.  There was a moment of what looked like really bad editing, where Wigg appears to be about to crack up laughing at the end of a silly back-and-forth between her and Carrell, just before we cut away to a different angle.  If that is the case then it's really sloppy editing, proper amateur stuff.

In conclusion, it's fairly good, but I doubt it will be a cult classic.

Hummingbird - Jason Stafam plays a hard case

Another instalment of the 'films I didn't see in the cinema cos I was being even more geeky than normal' series - Hummingbird.  It's a film which was meant to break the mould of Jason Statham's career to date, he plays a well hard geezer of possible London origin who is a bit of psychotic sometimes but has a heart of gold if only a kind-souled woman could coax it out of him.  Indeed.

The Stathe plays Joey, an ex-army soldier who is now living on the streets of London destitute with his friend Isobel after absconding from the army following some kind of terrible incident in Afghanistan.  After a short encounter with a couple of hoodlums on the street that result in Isobel being murdered, Joey stumbles into the house of a man who is out of the country for the best part of a year.  Joey decides to steal his money, clothes and identity and uses them to be a different man, using his army training as a hard-case enforcer for a Chinese human trafficker in London's underground crime network.  Hardly becoming a new man is it?  But anyway, Joey befriends a young Polish nun Christina who is working in a food kitchen.  He gives most of his money to them, but what he really wants is to take revenge against the people who killed Isobel.  Will he get his revenge on the London criminal underclass?  Or will Christina's kind heart convince him to get his revenge in a roundabout way, by helping London's street-sleepers like she does?

It's fairly derivative stuff that isn't told that well.  It presents a picture of homelessness on London's streets and post-traumatic stress in the army without really offering any ideas or solutions, rather they're an excuse to give The Stathe some crims to punch.  The opening half hour of the film is slow-burning but largely wasted, presenting us with Joey's character and hardly telling us anything about him.  Scene to scene we swing between The Stathe doing his hard man thing and crying his heart out at the humanity of it all.  It's all a tiny bit forced, as if these scenes had different writers who weren't paying enough attention to the overall arc of the film.

To be fair to Hummingbird, I've seen plenty of action movies that have a lot less heart than this.  Most Jason Statham movies fit into that category quite easily.  What Hummingbird tries to do is give you a bit of everything, but although it's sort of ok it's never really that good at any of it.  I think the film wants The Stathe's character to be sympathetic, but at the end of the film when you find out what happened in Afghanistan it kind of makes that impossible.  The film wants to be about redemption, but there isn't really any redemption and the use of a nun as a character who instigates that redemption is a bit too literal for my tastes.  The film also wants to say something about how people can change, but that gets mishandled towards the end too when it turns out The Stathe hasn't really changed at all.  Oddest of all is the character of Christina, who reveals a history of abuse at the hands of an overpowering man - yet for some reason opens up to The Stathe, yet another alpha male who's throwing ill-gotten money around.  Perhaps the idea is that she's also being redeemed from her self-imposed chastity as a nun by seeing men as people rather than beasts.  But given Joey's character I'm not really convinced that's too realistic.

Maybe I'm reading a little too much into the symbolism of this, after all Jason Statham films are supposed to be about The Stathe rushing around hitting things.  But Hummingbird is clearly trying to be something more than the average Jason Statham film so I'm going to give it a little more thought than some of his other films warrant.  Hummingbird is a good watch, but tries too hard and too unsuccessfully to be a lot more than it is.  If you were a fan of The Stathe then you should definitely check this out to see what he's doing with his career.  If you're not a fan of his, then you need to get off your high horse and check out Crank - I dare you to tell me it's not so silly it's awesome.

World War Z - 3 films for the price of 1

Slowly working my way through many of the films of 2013 as they come out on DVD at the moment.  Last week I watched Brad Pitt's latest movie World War Z - in which Brad plays some sort of ex-UN special adviser guy who the military have to keep safe and then send on a daring mission to mince around the world until he stumbles upon a way of ending the zombie apocalypse.

The film starts in a way that will be strange to anyone who has ever spent much time in Glasgow, as I am reliably informed that the open scenes of zombie carnage are filmed across one of Glasgow's main squares - a city that's meant to be Philadelphia in the USA.  We see Brad Pitt with his all too perfect family stuck in traffic, then something a bit weird happens, then something very weird happens and before you know it we're in a full-on zombie chase across Glasgow / Philadelphia.

What happens next would be fairly typical for a zombie film, were it not that the film seems to be self conscious of the fact its a zombie film.  We have a scene in which Brad Pitt gets some zombie blood in his mouth, so he has to wait on the verge of killing himself in case he turns into a zombie. It's almost as if the character Brad Pitt plays has seen one too many zombie films himself, or was in a zombie apocalypse in the past and it waiting to see which 'type' of zombie apocalypse this is.  Are we in 28 Days Later or Night of the Living Dead?  It feels like the makers of the film are far too aware of the fact that they're making a zombie movie and feel the need to identify World War Z in the spectrum of zombie genre movies, establishing early on that these are fast zombies and that they have to bite you to transmit the virus (it's a virus btw).

With that opening the film starts promisingly but immediately stops you suspending your own disbelief by reminding you about all the other zombie movies you might have seen.  The second act begins with Brad Pitt and his family being whisked off on to a US warship and sent on a mission to save the world from the zombie apocalypse.  Quite why he's qualified to do this is never made clear, people make a lot of statements about how he used to be some sort of special adviser with the UN - but little more.  With this information in hand the film settles down into its mincing around phase, plenty of fluff and action sequences but nothing actually advancing the plot.  The mince involves Brad Pitt going to Korea, then Israel and then trying to go to India vaguely on the trail of a cure, but at no point during any of the journey actually doing anything to find a cure.

When Brad Pitt fails to get to India, he ends up in South Wales and we move on to part 3.  This is where the film becomes most baffling of all and it was little surprise to discover that this final act was in fact created as part of a re-shoot after the film was originally finished.  The action moves to a research facility where Malcolm Tucker is working on a cure and then Brad Pitt comes up with an idea to make that cure work.  Although at the start of the film the zombies are brutally fast whirling dervishes of death they are now shambolic Romeroesque semi-individuals who carefully check Brad Pitt out before deciding if they should eat him or not.  Mostly baffling of all is perhaps the film's dramatic change in pace from action slasher to CSI-lite drama in which no one gets killed and Brad Pitt works out how to get the MacGuffin to save his family / whole world.

This is making a film by committee at its worst.  It looks like there were three entirely different writer / director partnerships in charge of each of the three acts of World War Z.  Despite this being a pretty major criticism, scene-to-scene  World War Z is a rather enjoyable watch.  There are some good action sequences, especially when the zombie shit hits the fan in several different locations around the world, and the early-film zombies are pretty scary at times.  Plus there's loads of explosions and zombies scrambling over each other to get to people - all that good zombie movie stuff.  In the end I don't think World War Z will be remembered much long after this year's summer blockbusters have come and gone.  I suspect the film was originally conceived with good intentions that got lost when the money men and test screenings got involved.  Watch it if you like, but apart from the effects there's very little to recommend.

More Goodfellas

My housemate suggested to me at the weekend that we need to watch Goodfellas again.  This seems unlikely given the number of times that I've seen that film, but it's possible there might be some scenes I've not yet remembered off-by-heart.  Better watch it again to check.  While I'm thinking about it here's another scene to enjoy:



"Go get your fuckin' shine box!".  Brilliant, terrifying, Joe Pesci.

At some point I'm going to do some work today...