Skyfall

So there’s a new Bond film out.  And it’s pretty good.  I’m a bit of an odd Bond fan, because I kind of like the idea of Bond films more than I like pretty much any of the Bond films themselves.  Probably the first time I paid any really attention (showing my age a little here) was with the 1995 relaunch of the franchise GoldenEye, which probably colours my opinion a lot, but when I went back to watch the much-praised earlier films, I oddly found very little to like.  I never really took to Connery as Bond, probably because he didn’t fit the way Roger Moore had shaped the character in later versions; conversely I also couldn’t stand either Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton‘s run because of the smugness and the slightly twee production values of the 70’s and 80’s.  It seems people tend to fall for the first Bond they see, which – in my case, slightly embaressingly – was Pierce Brosnan.

Then, in the post-Nolan era of gritty reboots of well-loved franchises, we get Daniel Craig, recalling Connery’s rugged features, but with that touch of the suave sophisticate about him.  Despite the gumbling from purists, Casino Royale was a hit (a whacking 95% on Rotten Tomatoes), and Quantum of Solace two years later was a flop (okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but was greeted with more apathy).  What do we get from Craig’s third outing, the enigmatically named Skyfall?

Silent House

There’s an argument that imposing restrictions on the filmmaking can actually enhance the creative process.  Probably the most explicit proponent of this idea is Danish arthouse darling Lars von Trier, for whom it was one of the guiding principles of Dogme 95’s vow of filmmaking chastity, drove to the abstract brilliance of Dogville, and underlay the experimental film project The Five Obstructions.  But there are also plenty of examples where slightly less willing restrictions on the creative process pushed innovation and creativity, such as Kevin Smith’s shoestring-budget debut, Clerks (filmed in black and white because that was the only film stock he could get his hands on, and was filmed after hours at the convenience store Smith worked in.

There is a fine line, however, between putting legitimate restrictions on filmmaking that advance the film, and a gimmick that’s just designed to catch the viewers eye.  Let’s see how Silent House holds up.

Safe

I didn’t have high hopes for this film, but hey, it had A Perfect Circle on the trailer and featured Jason Statham hitting people.  How bad could it be?

Avengers Assemble

It feels like the summer blockbuster season arrived early with The Avengers (or should I say, “Marvel Avengers Assemble”, which the Guardian film blog regards as possibly the worst movie title ever – and I’m inclined to agree with them).  Arguably the most anticipated film of the summer (although with this years line up featuring Chris Nolan’s conclusion to his Batman trilogy the Dark Knight Rises, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, Will Smith’s Men in Black 3 and a reboot of The Amazing Spider-Man, there’s plenty of anticipation to go around), I’ll confess to being a little nervous about this film in the lead up – anticipation leads to inflated expectations, which is always going to lead to some hard disappointments.  Still, the critical rumbling over the premiere was generally very good, and I have to say, the film by and large lived up to the hype (although the discrepancy between the scores on Rotten Tomatoes good-bad and Metacritics rating based aggregation might give a little pause for thought).

Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy

Last week, I overheard the following conversation between a couple walking to their screen at my local ‘plex.
“Who’s Irvine Welsh?”  A girl asked her male partner.
“The guy who wrote ‘Trainspotting‘,” he replied.
“Oh,” she said.  “So it’s going to be about drugs and stuff then.”
Her companion paused, before responding: “Well, the film is called ‘Ecstasy’…”

However amusing his partner’s lapse might have been¹, it does sort of highlight one of the immediate flags this film raised before even knowing anything about it.  Why in particular did the film feel it necessary to include Welsh in the title?  Aside from Trainspotting, Ecstasy is probably his most successful work (it’s subtitle – not that this is particularly relevant to anything – apparently inspired the name of alt-rock band My Chemical Romance), and has already spawned a well received stage adaptation, so it at least speaks to a degree of insecurity in te filmmakers that they feel the need to attach the authors name, in case people failed to make the connection.  Well, turns out that that suspicion was justified.

Gone

I sometimes wonder whether I like films for completely different reasons to everyone else.  I guess that’s not particularly surprising; some people may value plot over acting, or cinematic spectacle, or fight scenes, or tone, or general message.  But I kind of get hit by this knot of peer-pressure induced anxiety when I come home from a film that I really kinda liked to see that it has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 10%.  “Are you crazy?”  chuckles the entirety of Metacritic in my head.  “This film sucked!  What kind of a film reviewer are you, if you can’t tell how much this film sucked?”  Obviously, part of preparing these blog posts allows me to work through the arguments different people make for or against a film, and either adjust my opinion or (hopefully) dig up the courage to tell the consensus to get stuffed.  This, I think, is probably one of the former.

Lockout

I’m kind of having to fight a touch of hypocrisy here – while I was quite critical of the lack of acknowledgement of Drew Goddard’s contribution to his directorial debut in favour of fitting it into Joss Whedon’s filmography, I’m having to fight pretty hard not to do much the same thing to Lockout.  In my defense, Goddard at least had Cloverfield to his name; the directors of Lockout – James Mather and Stephen St. Leger – don’t really appear to have achieved much to distinguish themselves.  Mather has a reasonably long filmography as a cinematographer, although mostly for shorts and TV.  Both he at St. Leger directed the Matrix-esque short Prey Alone (available to view here), on the basis of which they were apparently snapped up by Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp.  Their first project is the Besson-produced, Besson-inspired and Besson-cowritten Lockout.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

After a slow couple of weeks – allowing me to spend the best part of a week repeatedly beating my head against the Cabin in the Woods review – four new films have turned up in my local multiplex at once, and all from radically different genres.  We have a sci-fi, a thriller, a gritty drug-scene drama, and a romantic comedy.  So this week is going to be an interesting one on the review front.  Our first offering is Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, a romantic comedy with Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt.

Cabin in the Woods

I’m coming to this review with a little bit of trepidation.  Most of my reviews thusfar have been pretty casual about spoilers – kind of the point of the exercise is to let me draw comparisons and work out my thoughts on the films that I’ve seen (which is why I’m acutely aware that it might read a little like a lot of narcissistic name-dropping at times), rather than particularly about giving people insights about whether to go see a film or not like a film critic in a newspaper might.  The fact that I’ve suddenly developed a compunction about it now is probably down to two things: first, while I’m not sure yet whether I’m going to rate it as highly as Tideland, this is certainly the film that I would most highly recommend of all those reviewed so far.  Second, this type of film – a witty and clever horror film – will benefit from a viewing with the barest minimum preconceptions.  So if you think you’re likely to watch this film, please stop reading, and go see it now!

Battleship

I think you can tell a lot about a film by how it advertises itself relative to other films.  There’s an advertising trope that runs along the lines of “from the [involved party] that brought you [some other film]”.  Sometimes these connections are valid and make me perk up – hearing that Charlie Kaufman wrote a film, or that Jean Pierre Jeunet directed it is enough to make me block off my diary for the premiere.  Hearing that Weta Workshop did the special effects is likely to pique my interest.  You kind of get the whiff of desperation when the ads start linking to non-creative staff (Jason Segel vehicle The Five-Year Engagement bills itself as “from the producers of Bridesmaids“).  I’m well aware that producer is a crucial, demanding, and largely thankless job, but as a rule of thumb, if there isn’t an Oscar category dedicated to it, I don’t really want to know about it as a link.

Then we get to “From the Makers of Transformers” – meaning Hasbro.  Okay, the fact that anyone is positively comparing anything to Transformers is setting the bar pretty low.  Linking via a toy producer tells you that this is going to be something stupid.  Finding out that the toy in question is Battleship you know it’s going to be REALLY stupid.  Add into the mix my current least-favourite actor Taylor Kitsch in the lead role, and… well, all bets are off.  This is going to the the stupidest thing you’ve ever seen.

I have to say, I’m a big fan of judging films by what they are trying to achieve (which is why I disagreed with the negative criticism of Mirror Mirror, for example), and from the outset it’s clear that Battleship is a Big Dumb Action Film with a capital B-D-A and F – so really.  It’s also self-aware and is happy to poke fun at itself, which is always a big plus.  The upshot of all of this is that saying that this film is likely the stupidest thing you’ve ever seen is probably not an automatic fail.  It also – although it grates me to say it – means that Taylor Kitsch’s big dumb acting style fits right in.  So you’ve found your niche, Taylor.  Please stop appearing in comic book movies and Andrew Stanton sci-fi flicks.

You can actually glean almost the entirety of the plot from the trailer – during the biannual RIMPAC exercise, a small US Navy fleet is confronted with a superior alien force on the water, and an hour and a half of retinal-haemorrhage-inducing special effects ensue to an AC/DC soundtrack.  With the exception of a minor plot arc about extrasolar planets, and another about Taylor’s plot point with tits love interest climbing a mountain with an amputee who can’t act for shit, that really does make up the entire movie.  Although oddly, there’s a lot of stuff in the trailer that didn’t make it into the movie – you would have expected to see more from Liam Neeson, for example – so I can’t help wondering whether the story was hacked apart and stitched back together during editing, or whether they just recorded a few badass lines specifically for the trailer.

The fact that virtually no background at all is given for the alien antagonists is kind of mixed.  On the one hand, I quite like not being spoonfed  background details like that, but the film doesn’t make any effort to explain their motivations at all.  I can’t help feeling that maybe there was more story here that got cut out to make room for some more explosions, which is a little sad.  They seem to be going the Predator/Jurassic Park route of having the aliens unable to see the humans under certain conditions, but never explain what those conditions are particularly.  Something to do with daylight and metal components (hence the subplot with an amputee with artificial legs, which turns out to be a pointless red herring) – but because it’s never spelled out, applied consistently, or even particularly plot relevant on the whole, it ends up being a weird and nonsensical deus ex machina.

One thing that I was very pleased to see was that the aliens weren’t set up as invulnerable at the start of the film (unlike, for example, Independence Day).  In fact, the first thing that happens when the aliens arrive is that one of their ships accidentally hits a satellite, explodes, and crashlands in Hong Kong.  Later, the sailors recover a body that fell into the sea, not because of their military action, but because one of their transports accidentally crashed into something.  The idea of a technological enemy which is a formidable challenge, but not immune to the occasional error really appealed to me, and it’s a relief to see someone breaking the invincible-until-the-third-act trope.

Being a big dumb action film in the style dominated by Michael Bay, I’m actually impressed how almost right some of the science is.  The aliens come from extrasolar planets around a star referred to as Gliese (I don’t remember whether they called it “Gliese” or “a Gliese system” or something like that, and I’m not inclined to watch it again to check, but it definitely didn’t have a number).  In reality, the Gliese catalogue of nearby stars – given really poetic names like Gliese 581 – are the nearby stars that we really are finding extrasolar planets around, and are probably the best candidates for life that we stand a remote chance of ever making contact with.  Pointing a really strong signal at it to communicate is actually a scientifically plausible way of communicating – the nitpicker in me would like to point out that the closest Gliese star is 14 light years away, so our signal (within the film, sent in 2006, with the aliens returning in 2012) would barely be halfway there, but that’s kind of like complaining that the film features three destroyers and a battleship, rather than an aircraft carrier, battleship, submarine, destroyer and patrol boat like the board game.  The science goes out of the window in favour of plot MacGuffins as the film wears on, but put it next to Armageddon and Battleship looks like an episode of Cosmos.

The acting is okay, I suppose.  Taylor Kitsch has yet to master anything beyond “vaguely intense” and “smug”, but that’s all his role really calls for.  Rihanna’s acting debut is passable, but less than stellar writing lets her down.  Liam Neeson is Liam Neeson.  I weep bitter tears for Tadanobu Asano’s career.  (You were made for better things than this and bit parts in Thor.  Please go back to making films like Last Life in the Universe and collaborating with Takeshi Miike.  Please.)  Brooklyn Decker was obviously hired because she looks good in a bikini.  Real-life double-amputee veteran Gregory Gadson is also cast as a poorly-integrated bit part, but his sullen delivery is gratingly bad at times.  In it’s defense, the film seems to recognise this – in response to a grumpy one-liner, another character is prompted to ask “who talks like that?”

Since Rihanna never meets the plot point with tits Decker’s character, and they’re the only women in this film, it does fail the Bechdel test, although given a) the film takes place almost entirely against the background of the US Navy, so comparatively few female roles are to be expected and b) Rihanna’s character manages to avoid any gender stereotypes at all – she’s in every action scene, she’s never reduced to her gender, and her role is written indistinguishably from an equivalent male character, so praise where it’s due.

As a whole, the film is a bit of a flawed mess.  While it manages not to be hopelessly patriotic like many films featuring US armed forces, it does slip into a kind of Navy-porn at some points, and being a scientist by training the “Army jocks are heros, scientist geeks are craven cowards” typecasting was a bit grating at times.  But hey, that’s what you’d expect from a big dumb action film.  While many action films don’t take themselves fully seriously, the humour is dry and sharp, and actually edges into satirising itself, which is certainly a change from the kind of slapstick and wince-fest I’m used to from the likes of Bay and Emmerich.  Given director Peter Berg is also responsible for the positively acerbic Hancock, this is probably no surprise.  Ultimately though, I think the film shows signs of numerous rewrites and some brutal re-editing, and suffers badly for it – I can’t escape the feeling that there are large chunks of this film missing.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

IMDb

Rotten Tomatoes

Bechdel Test: Unsurprising fail.