Sons, Knights, Tights and Bat-nipples: The Best and Worst of Batman and Superman

Posted on March 25, 2016 by Sam S-P

With BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE finally hitting theatres, I thought I’d take a look at some of DC’s two most iconic heroes’ cinematic outings of the past – the good, the bad, and the mishandled.

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Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010): Warner Home Video

Best Batman: BATMAN: UNDER THE RED HOOD (2010) In which Batman soul-searches and confronts a ghost from his past. You know, it pained me to not choose something with Kevin Conroy – the best Batman – in, but Bruce Greenwood does a fine job in his place. His Knight is a force to be reckoned with, and bring an appropriate melancholy and nuance to proceedings. Michael Keaton remains the definitive Bruce Wayne thanks to his recognising the comic in addition to the tragic side of the character, but unfortunately Tim Burton’s Batman kills people. This is all about the Knight not being infallible, making mistakes and living with them. The performances and animated choreography consistently impress, but the film is made by two powerful scenes bookending the story that debate, perhaps in the most cogent fashion we’ve ever seen, how and why Batman is trapped in the most vicious of circles.

I am vengeance, I am the night, I am: A fascinating exploration of Batman’s demons and flawed code.

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Superman (1978): Warner Bros

Best Superman: SUPERMAN (1978) In which Kal-El is saved by his parents from his dying planet and sent to Earth to become the hero humanity needs to become the best they can be. Christopher Reeve is charming, unironic and otherworldly, we know this. His complete embodiment of the Last Son of Krypton makes him one of the canniest pieces of casting in cinema history and for many he remains the only true Superman. Reeve is also adept at slapstick clowning and wholeheartedly embraces the “aw shucks” corniness of Clark and has killer chemistry with Lois (Margot Kidder). The Krypton opening manages to be both grand and pulpy and the rest is an adventure of pure joy that doesn’t require Superman to fight anybody, only to sit through Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) talk real estate and try to save everyone he can. Note: This is only my favourite Superman if you don’t let me count Richard Donner’s cut of the sequel.

For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you: The template for the hopeful superhero movie.

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Batman & Robin (1997): Warner Bros

Worst Batman: BATMAN & ROBIN (1997) In which Batman tries to thwart Mr Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Poison Ivy’s (Uma Thurman) scheme to freeze Gotham with the help of Robin (Chris O’Donnell) and Batgirl (Alicia Silverstone). This was the first, but certainly not the last superhero movie with far too much crammed in. An embarrassed George Clooney is restricted by a comical suit and deeply uncomfortable with cracking wise. Clooney looks even more embarrassed with his face fully exposed and doing his damnedest to look sad at the right prompt.I know everyone harps on about Schwarzenegger’s puns, but the real foot-dragger is Thurman, who looks like she’s reading cue cards and hasn’t noticed that Ivy’s stake in the plan makes less than no sense (a new ice age will help plants…how?). This is almost bearable if you’re watching inebriated or if you’re under 10, but is rightly derided by everyone else.

I am vengeance, I am the night, I am: An amusement park ride with a tone-deaf script and sinful performances.

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Superman III (1983): Warner Bros

Worst Superman: SUPERMAN III (1983) In which Superman goes up against a tycoon (Robert Vaughan) and a misguided hacker (Richard Pryor) and struggles to remain himself when he is poisoned. Here Supes is either helping people out with mundane everyday problems or acting like a superpowered schoolyard bully (“evil” Superman never convinces). He famously pushes the Leaning Tower of Pisa straight and nearly outright murders people after a lengthy session as a barfly. Also Superman grows a five o’ clock shadow to demonstrate just how far he’s fallen (snigger). Reeve doesn’t do well as a bad guy and looks bored with Clark’s storyline and his re-connection with school sweetheart Lana (Annette O’Toole) back home in Smallville – what should be the heart of a film with a mostly absent Lois – lacks fizz. The Big Blue Boy Scout should never be an afterthought in his own movie, and someone should have told Richard Lester returning from re-shooting most of Donner’s SUPERMAN II just how badly he was handling this material. 

For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you:
An ugly pile of discarded Richard Pryor skits, plus Superman, I guess, if we must.

But what about THE DARK KNIGHT I hear you ask? I’m not denying the quality of Christopher Nolan’s middle chapter in his Bruce Wayne chronicle, I just consider it more a crime thriller that happens to feature Batman than a Batman movie per se. Looking at the other end of the scale I actually think SUPERMAN IV has a certain charm. See you all after we see whether Zack Snyder’s royal rumble was worth it. SSP

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Review: The Survivalist (2015/16)

Posted on March 19, 2016 by Sam S-P

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Who needs an expository text dump to establish your film’s world? The state of the future in THE SURVIVALIST is illustrated as simply as it could possibly be with two coloured lines representing oil production and the human population steadily climbing and inevitably falling. It immediately grounds the story, sets up what has been and gone and what is at stake, plus nobody has to explain the situation to you.

In the near-future human society has collapsed. In a world where all that matters is living another day, a lone survivalist (Martin McCann) comes across a mother and daughter (Olwen Fouere and Mia Goth) begging for shelter. But can he really trust anybody in such a harsh, dog-eat-dog world?

In this future the simple things are all that matter. Fire is more important than religion or love, as illustrated by the protagonist burning a bible and family pictures with only the slightest of hesitation. His distrust of everyone he meets is only natural. He has been alone for a long time and there is no room for compassion when living to see the next dawn hinges on keeping your meagre allotment-for-one well-tended and your shack in the woods as warm and dry as possible.

The main character doesn’t say anything in the first 20 minutes of the film so has to convey a lot with a look or a change in posture, a challenge the lean and unfussy Martin McCann is well up for. Even after he (we never learn his name) speaks he doesn’t say all that much – this is an inhospitable world full of cruel people and words would be wasted. There’s a great moment where he realises with a look of abject horror just how vulnerable he is and another where non-verbal human comfort after a harrowing night morphs seamlessly into grim acceptance of what is necessary for continued survival.

I don’t know where he gets fuel for his cigarette lighter or why he bothers to maintain designer stubble after the world has come to an end, but everything else in the film feels genuine and believable. Caveman regression meets modern bushcraft is the order of survival here and I was particularly taken with the demonstration of a primitive but ingenious way of sweating out a blood infection. There’s uncompromising, unglamorous and brutal imagery throughout and it can be a difficult watch, but it always keeps you riveted, or at least cruelly fascinated.

The finale is tense but brief – just three shots and a crossbow bolt fired in the final skirmish – and it rounds off such a measured film nicely. A hail of bullets or the sudden appearance of an army would feel out of place, and appropriately it just comes down to our tiny core group coming across a slightly larger and better-armed band. The minimal action the film has feels immediate, kinetic and nasty. Cinematographer Damien Elliott is equally comfortable with naturalistically capturing human behaviour documentary-style as he is with composing a beautiful sweeping crane arc to link hunter and hunted who are both hiding in tall grass.

Science fiction doesn’t have to be big, but it does have to be clever. All you need is a good idea (I say all like it’s easy…), a distinctive style and something to say about the world today and the world to come. A shed, some woodland in Northern Ireland and three talented main actors prove to be a winning combination in the hands of writer-director Stephen Fingleton. With Hollywood becoming ever more excessive and wasteful, it’s so refreshing to see what can be achieved with modest resources, and it’s my hope that The Survivalist does well enough to allow other talented filmmakers like Fingleton get their work out there. SSP

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Review: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016)

Posted on March 13, 2016 by Sam S-P

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In 2000 audiences and critics across the world were blown away by CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON. The product of international co-operation between studios and directed by Ang Lee, an auteur celebrated both in his native Taiwan and China and in the West, Crouching Tiger became the martial arts film loved by people who didn’t like martial arts films. As well as distinctive fight scenes it had painterly landscapes and poetic melodrama in abundance in addition to cementing Lee’s position as one of the most in-demand directors in the world. A decade and a half later Netflix and the China Film Group have produced a sequel, SWORD OF DESTINY directed by Yuen Woo-Ping which doesn’t come close to escaping its predecessors imposing shadow.

Sixteen years after the death of her master, Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) returns from self-imposed exile to Peking to once again protect the legendary sword the Green Destiny. Young prodigy Snow Vase (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), old flame Silent Wolf (Donnie Yen) and Hades Dai (Jason Scott Lee), a powerful warlord seeking to control all of Martial China with the Green Destiny, await her…

Great effort has been taken to replicate the look of Ang Lee’s Oscar-winner. The vibrant colours, sumptuous costumes and floaty action with bursts of speed and dexterity are all present and correct. Those worried about Netflix original productions looking cheaper than big screen releases need not worry such is the level of craftsmanship on display. A fight on a rapidly disintegrating frozen lake has to be up there with the top action scenes of the year – it’s thrilling and beautiful to behold. The only time the cracks start to show is with iffy CG set and background extensions, but these thankfully only come with establishing shots when the story shifts location.

There’s a lot more comedy this time round too – Silent Wolf’s recruitment of an honourable band of warriors to defend Shu Lien’s compound riffs on SEVEN SAMURAI and each fighter’s demonstration of their preferred methods of combat in a wood-splintering tavern brawl is creative and pretty amusing (though basically a re-tread of a similar scene in the first film). I hate it when movies are dismissed by lazy critics as looking like video games, but parts of this film do feel like a Role Playing Game. RPGs usually require you to bring together party members with different skills and contrasting personalities and the film’s campfire gossiping scene certainly has the air of the conversations you initiate with characters between missions in Bioware games like DRAGON AGE or MASS EFFECT.

The key problem is they’ve named this Crouching Tiger sequel after the MacGuffin of the first film. Last time it was a tale of passion and self-discovery that just happened to involve the battle for possession of a special sword. This time it’s the same stakes, only the person trying to take the sword is a much less interesting. Gone is the conflicted and layered Jen and in comes Hades Dai who is such a two-dimensional antagonist he makes the baddies who faced Stallone and Schwarzenegger in the 80s look nuanced. The film is lucky to still have Yeoh’s sturdy performance at its heart, and Yen playing his character like a wushu Man with No Name works but comic relief aside the rest of the newcomers have very little to add.

It’s all perfectly watchable and you’ll rarely be bored but director Yuen (a choreographer who has worked with Jackie Chan, Jet Lee and Quentin Tarantino) seems much less interested in giving his film any heart than he is in constructing eye-popping action. It’s in English presumably because Netflix hasn’t taken off in China yet, which is a little weird but you soon get used to it. The concept of big films being financed and premiering on streaming services is still a new concept but I hope it catches on for the sake of accessibility and the potential for more interesting projects than Sword of Destiny finding an outlet. SSP

 

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Review: Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Sam S-P

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The problem when you have a really good run is that even the slightest stumble becomes very noticeable. Over the last decade NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, A SERIOUS MAN and especially INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS made you forget that these are also the guys who also ham-fistedly remade THE LADYKILLERS. HAIL, CAESAR! has its moments for sure, but it’s not quite in the same league as the rest of the Coen Brothers’ recent works, all of which were funnier, smarter, deeper and more consistent in quality.

Los Angeles, 1954. Eddie Mannix’s (Josh Brolin) job of making sure everything runs smoothly at Capitol Pictures becomes considerably more challenging when one of the studios’ most valuable stars, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is kidnapped by persons unknown. But of course time is big money in this business and Mannix toils to get ambitious epic Hail, Caesar! completed with or without his star, in addition to keeping the rest of the talent happy and the press of his back.

Until reading about the film afterwards I had no idea Eddie Mannix was a real person. I’d obviously forgotten that Bob Hoskins played him in HOLLYWOODLAND, a film that shares a lot of DNA, if not its tone, with Hail, Caesar! Mannix serves as a stand-in for most scary producer-types from Hollywood’s Golden Age, as well as acting as gumshoe for the film’s noirish plot. Brolin is fantastically assured in the role; another of the Coens’ serious men, but considerably more appreciated than Larry Gopnik or Llewyn Davis. Just because people know how powerful a figure he is in Hollywood doesn’t mean Mannix has an easy ride – he has a lot riding on his shoulders and his roundabout journey to discover whether he would prefer to keep doing a hard job he loves or take on something easier but less fulfilling is a relatively compelling one. Elsewhere the ensemble play comic takes on real stars and archetypes – Clooney is a mega star like Richard Burton or Charlton Heston; Tatum is essentially playing Gene Kelly and Ralph Fiennes represents every classically-trained theatre director who managed to make it in the artistically frustrating Hollywood Studio System.

Speaking of Kelly and the Studio System, as clever and well put together as the film’s skits lampooning the genre factory of mass-produced filmmaking are, none of them can hope to compare with the satirical brilliance of SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN. Everything worth saying about the flawed hegemony of Hollywood in the 1950s was already said in that superlative musical. Hail, Caesar! does have the benefit of hindsight in talking about a filmmaking boom period we know is on the verge of collapse, and it also makes for a pretty amusing companion piece to films like THE MAJESTIC or TRUMBO because it incorporates Cold War paranoia as a plot point in almost exactly the opposite way that they do.

Being a Coen Brothers film it sounds good when people open their mouths and looks even better when they don’t because the Coens got Roger Deakins back to film it for them and work his usual magic.

When all’s said and done though, the connective tissue of film isn’t quite there. Individual sequences work – Alden Ehrenreich’s rootin’ tootin’ Western star getting to grips with lavish Broadway adaptations; Mannix getting a focus group of religious leaders to give their seal of approval to his movie’s depiction of “The Christ” – but outside these set pieces, jokes fall flat and the narrative lacks direction. Even if you treat Hail, Caesar! as a character piece where plot is less important, only a couple of the ensemble get any real arc and some players are introduced then forgotten about again almost instantaneously.

Diverting in part and with moments of usual Coen-y brilliance, but underwhelming as a whole, Hail, Caesar! goes straight to the middle of the pile in terms of the Two-Headed-Director’s oeuvre. SSP

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If Batman v Superman somehow bombs, what then?

Posted on March 6, 2016 by Sam S-P

Batman-v-Superman

It’s almost unthinkable, I know, but what would it mean if BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE bombs critically and/or commercially when it is finally released later this month? At the very least it might sound the death knell for Warner Brothers producing anything superheroic not featuring Batman and no one else front-and-centre. Batman sells and Batman is critically appreciated in the hands of the right director – he’s a safe bet.

Warner Bros has put all its eggs in the film industry’s biggest basket. The budget, including marketing, is reportedly around $400 million, so the film not only has to do well at the box office but go stratospheric. If this venture doesn’t justify itself, say goodbye to JUSTICE LEAGUE for the forseeable future. SUICIDE SQUAD is in the can already, and WONDER WOMAN well on its way, so they’re safe, but everything else without bat-ears will be dead and buried.

What has got me so worried about one of the most anticipated movies ever? I’ve sort-of just answered my own question. As a fan of massive blockbusters based on comic books, and as a card-holding geek in general, I tend to get carried away by sheer anticipation. But having written film reviews for just under a decade now, I’m also conditioned for disappointment.

It was recently announced that the film would get an R-rated director’s cut released on DVD. Since DEADPOOL proved that more adult superhero fare can make money, the news that we’ll be getting a more brutal version of the film later on home media might make the more cynical audience members snort with derision. If this cut adds something worth seeing then why aren’t we seeing this cut on the big screen, especially if it would still make money? Because with the amount riding on this release Warner Bros don’t just want to make money, they want to make all the money! Someone at the studio clearly noticed that Peter Jackson has made a nice little nest egg from selling his movies to us twice for 15 years now, so there’s that as well.

The trailers we’ve seen so far (they’re still coming with three weeks to go) indicate that Warners have once again got Batman right despite what Ben Affleck’s detractors might say. It also looks like Jeremy Irons’ take on Alfred is pretty spot-on – sarcastic, supportive and far more hands-on than previous iterations. We’re finally seeing Wonder Woman’s big-screen debut with Gal Gadot and she certainly looks the part, though I still don’t get why she couldn’t get her own film out there before she had to tag along with the boys. Actually, scrap that, I know exactly why this is the case. Warners, as well as knowing Batman sells, also “know” female superheroes don’t. They cynically wanted to give WW a test drive as part of a “sure thing” before they trusted her with her own vehicle.

Everything else that I’ve seen makes me a little uneasy. It all looks mirthless, and very dark and psychoanalytical because that what worked (mostly) for Christopher Nolan’s DARK KNIGHT trilogy. Everyone seems to have realised all-of-a-sudden that Superman destroyed a city in MAN OF STEEL and maybe that was a bad thing. Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor could go either way. The rest of the Justice League are supposed to get at the very least a cameo (possibly more for Jason Mamoa’s Aquaman). Genetically-engineered Superman-killer Doomsday is in it because there apparently wasn’t enough going on already.

Look, it’s probably all going to be fine. I like Zack Snyder’s work, but we’re long past the expiry date for brooding superhero epics and at some point this bubble has to burst and destroy a film studio through pure hubris. But who’s to say this will be the movie to do it? We’ve got a 2-part Justice League and ditto for AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR in a few years to complete that challenge. SSP

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Review: Pan (2015)

Posted on February 29, 2016 by Sam S-P

Pan

The first stretch of PAN combines the orphans and workhouse of OLIVER TWIST with the WWII setting and fantasy bleeding into the real world of THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA. . Then things go all Terry Gilliam but with less verve as a pirate ship swoops through the London Blitz and we’re off on a thoroughly uninspiring adventure.

The latest “so you think you know this story?” retelling of a classic follows orphaned Peter (Levi Miller) as he is scooped Roup by pirates and transported to an otherworldly island. There he finds the tyrannical Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman) who is forcing an enslaved workforce of children and outcasts to mine crystals imbued with fairy magic to maintain his unnatural eternal life. Peter soon finds destiny calling, and with the help of warrior princess Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara) and dashing rogue Hook (Garrett Hedlund) he sets out to unlock the power inside himself and free Neverland.

There are some terribly inventive visuals on show here – oceans suspended in bubbles in the clouds; the bark on a tree shifting to tell the story of a war between tribespeople and pirates. The crocodiles look great too for the very brief time they’re on screen. Other parts of the film’s aesthetic are decidedly less impressive, with fake-looking environments and “Neverbirds” that look like the animation software hasn’t finished rendering them yet.

I was sold on Hugh Jackman’s Blackbeard from the moment he minced out to address the crowd chanting Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit (because why not?). He’s a firework display of high-camp and Child Catcher sinisterness. His powdered and bewigged look and playing-to-the -back-row performance is also entirely in-keeping with Peter Pan’s theatrical origins and continued popularity as a pantomime. There’s also zero reason why he couldn’t just be playing Captain Hook other than origin stories being all the range these days. Garrett Hedlund is awful as a young Hook. He plays him like Han Solo without a drop of charm, plus a nails-on-chalkboard voice that sounds like a British actor doing a bad American accent (despite Hedlund actually being American). He also tends to forget about his crocodyliphobia from scene to scene. Levi Miller is fine, but doesn’t make the biggest impact as Peter and Rooney Mara is given nothing to work with but her incongruous Doc Martens as Tiger Lily.

The film thinks it’s funny and endearing but it sadly isn’t either. Gags are either based on men and boys falling over or getting hit in the family jewels, clumsy references to the source material (“The boy is lost?” / “Yes he is a lost boy”) or non-jokes like Peter exclaiming on his arrival to Neverland “Is this…Canada?”

The action is by-the-numbers and every demise in battle inconsequential – I know this is a family film, but pirates falling out of shot or into holes and tribespeople becoming puffs of brightly-coloured dust when they’re shot or stabbed means nothing. You couldn’t really be graphic with the intended audience in mind, but you can acknowledge that people die when swords and guns are involved.

By the end of the film we’re not even finished with Peter Pan’s origin. The key characters still have some way to go before they reach the point in their arcs we find them in JM Barrie’s play/novel, so you find yourself thinking, what was the point? If you’re going to depart from your source material, there has to be a good reason for doing so, and it at the very least has to be memorable.

When we first heard that Blackbeard’s slave miners sang Nirvana and The Ramones and Peter, Hook and Tiger Lily would all come from different periods of history, I though Joe Wright was going to do some really interesting, distinctive stuff with the concept of time, with Neverland existing outside the traditional linear concept of its passing. Infuriatingly, nothing is done with this idea. There was controversy when Mara was cast as a character usually portrayed as Native American, but it didn’t bother me when I realised the tribe in the film was a patchwork hippie commune rather than anything culturally based. Nothing is done with this idea either – where do these mixture of people and fashions come from and how did they construct their society? Nobody making the film seemed to care so neither should we.

Pan wastes talent and potential throughout and continues straight on until morning. It’s dull, apes better films it wishes it could compare to and in the end feels entirely unnecessary. By all means come for Hugh Jackman’s hypnotic flamboyance, just don’t hang around for anything else. SSP

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20 Years On: Trainspotting (1996)

Posted on February 24, 2016 by Sam S-P

Trainspotting

It’s that time again: enough sand has passed through the hourglass of eternity to discuss another classic in retrospective fashion. This week marks the 20th Anniversary of TRAINSPOTTING, Danny Boyle’s striking adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s game-changing novel about Edinburgh heroin addicts.

It’s Edinburgh in the late 80s, and Renton (Ewan McGregor) is trying to kick a bad habit. Try as he might to quit, the lure of one last hit with his mates always brings him back under the influence of his cruel and terrible mistress.  The world of heroin addiction fueled by petty crime is all he knows, and soon he must chose between being happily enslaved by his addiction or cleaning up and taking on whatever else life throws at him. 

Danny Boyle’s regular screenwriter John Hodge respectfully adapts Irvine Welsh’s story, lifting key scenes (“The Worst Toilet in Scotland”) and memorable dialogue (these remain the most articulate, swearily poetic addicts you could ever hope to meet) completely intact, but he isn’t afraid to streamline things elsewhere for the screen either by combining characters and omitting extraneous scenes. The result is zippy and to the point, perhaps missing a little of the detailed richness of the novel but always with what our protagonists are going through and how their world is changing for better or worse pushed to the forefront.

The casting could hardly be better, from Ewan McGregor’s would-be-moral compass Renton to Ewen Bremner’s affable moron Spud and Robert Carlyle’s volcanic and utterly terrifying Begbie. Renton has arguably had a few of his rough edges removed by casting the charming McGregor in the role, and I miss his benefit fraud scheme from the novel, but Bremner feels like spud lurched straight from page to screen and it was a stroke of genius to cast the diminutive, wiry Carlyle as a character envisioned as tall and broad – somehow Franco feels so much more chilling and unpredictable this way. Every cast member gets their moment to shine with hints at promising careers to come, and all convincingly covey humanity warts and all.

Boyle and editor Masahiro Hirakubo recognise the potential for surrealism in a story where its heroes are so often tripping. Renton’s dive into an ocean through a hellish, bottomless toilet to retrieve his recently ejected opium suppositories and his sink into the oblivion of a shag carpet following an overdose from a bad batch represent  two of his very lowest points juxtaposed with beautiful and bizarre imagery. The filmmakers don’t avoid the upsetting realities of drug addiction, and certainly don’t glamorise it as some commentators so wrongly claimed (you have to wonder if they even saw the film) but it can be a powerful tool indeed to marry horror with beauty, the real with the surreal.

Trainspotting is like a time capsule of pop culture and societal concerns in the late 80s/early 90s – the old guard of underground rock music (Iggy Pop, Lou Reed) giving way to electronica and rave culture (Leftfield, Underworld); unemployment, drug addiction and AIDS mere headlines for many and inescapable everyday life for others. It certainly looks like a film made two decades ago, but the energy, self-awareness and sheer style on show keeps it from feeling too dated. Grimy bedsit sets and the clever use of Glasgow as a cheaper stand-in for Edinburgh helps Trainspotting overcome its budgetary limitations, keeps our focus on the characters and steadfastly avoids a glamourous tourist’s view of “Embra” (the kind that poor Fringe-goer came looking for before our heroes follow him into a bathroom to ruin his day).

Much like with Welsh’s novel, the film is witty and very funny, alternating between being emotionally crushing and uplifting as Renton and co bounce between choosing heroin and choosing life. It’s left pretty ambiguous what the characters will make of the rest of their time on Earth – we’re apparently going to find out in a film sequel very soon – but you have to be optimistic for Renton as he leaves his old life and friends behind and begins a new one, reprising his opening monologue almost word-for-word, but with a decidedly different tone in his voice. SSP

 

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Review: Slow West (2015)

Posted on February 21, 2016 by Sam S-P

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SLOW WEST is a bit of a stunner. It’s been an interesting few years for the Western, with few traditional examples but plenty of sideways looks and genre hybrids making noise and proving there’s still life in this (very) old horse.

Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) finds himself journeying from his native Scotland to the American frontier in search of his young love Rose (Karen Pistorius) whose family has fled across the Atlantic after an accident puts a mark on their heads. To help him across a strange land full of dangers, Jay employs the sardonic Silas (Michael Fassbender) to escort him to his intended in one piece.

This is a story that shows the mercilessness of frontier life, but also acknowledges the humour in some of these bleak situations. Jay and Silas have a tough journey into the unknown ahead and are always a mere moment away from certain death, but they still take a night to get sloshed on absinthe and awake staggering up and falling over themselves in the middle of a flash flood. They’re duped, shot at, robbed of their clothes in the wilderness and there’s a great throwaway tree-felling gag as well. It’s nice to see Fassbender getting to show off his comic chops (particularly following the bleakness of MACBETH) by bringing Silas’ pragmatic world view into conflict with that of his idealistic young charge, usually in the form of a withering comment or despairing look.

My favourite scene by far takes place early on and has the pair stopping at an unremarkable-looking shack for supplies. The inside of said construction has everything the weary traveler could possibly need to buy from guns and clothes with bloody bullet holes in them to hooch and green bacon. It’s a sequence that starts as a bit of light relief and gets dark real quick when some other travelers arrive.

It’s a beautiful film throughout. New Zealand makes both for a convincing idealistic rural Scotland and an imposing Colorado. The scenery is big and bold, the character moments detailed and intimate. One stylistic trick employed by first-time feature director John Maclean (one to watch) I loved was drawing your focus by placing key objects off-centre in the foreground as the action takes place in the background, like when Jay ditches his unwieldy boots and sprints to the back of shot to rescue his friends. The film also contains one of the most on-the-nose but thematically perfect visual representation of a metaphor in film.

This is the second recent Western after THE SALVATION to deal primarily with the experiences of European expats. For once Michael Fassbender’s accent-on-tour doesn’t matter – everyone’s from everywhere! This certainly helps mark it out from the crowd and provides a different, and arguably much more desperation-fueled motivation for these wanders wandering where they’re wandering.

Despite mixing things up and self-consciously twisting away from convention, Slow West still ends with a classic Western shootout with our heroes hold up in a cabin and a gang of bad guys coming at them from all directions. You expect some sort of last stand in a classic of this genre, but I’m sure there are other ways to cap off a Western than a quick-draw duel or wave after wave of baddies queuing up to get shot. I would have also liked a few more flashbacks to Scotland, more of a development of Jay and Rose to give the film’s final act even more emotional impact than it already has.

America’s favourite genre is becoming decidedly less American. That’s not a criticism, just an observation. The myth is starting to slip and lose its romance but the story and what it means to people is becoming no less interesting. If we have more Western reinventions like Slow West on the horizon, this genre could hang around in one form or another for a long old while yet. SSP

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Review: Deadpool (2016)

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Sam S-P
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Perfecting the walk in spandex: 20th Century Fox/Marvel

DEADPOOL is exactly what it should be. It’s not big (by superhero standards) and it’s not clever but it’s lewd, violent and supremely self-aware, just like its titular scarlet-clad antihero.

Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) makes a dishonest living as a gun for hire, and is perfectly happy doing so until a terminal cancer diagnosis forces him to sign up for a shady medical experimentation programme designed to unlock latent mutant genes. Wade hopes his cancer will be cured so he can spend the rest of his life with Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) and the process does allow him to heal any wound, but it also leaves him scarred, angry and fully aware he’s in a superhero movie. Now Deadpool sets out to take revenge on his torturers and to tell a different kind of superhero story.

Reynolds is Deadpool. He can handle the physicality and motor-mouthed requirement of being a living adult cartoon character, but more unexpectedly he also makes Wade Wilson a vulnerable, passionate and tragic character. Much like Keira Knightley, who is name-checked in a gag, he has range. Deadpool the character may not be a fan of Reynolds the actor portraying him (they used a similar punchline in the video game he headlined a couple of years ago with regards to Nolan North) but this is the actor man who could conceivably bring this character to life in live-action. Hollywood rarely seems to know what to do with Reynolds and as such he has been stuck as the best thing in a long line of bad movies, but his passion and enthusiasm for projects like Deadpool and THE VOICES is obvious. Morena Baccarin gives as good as she gets as Vanessa, Wade’s sweary love of his life and TJ Miller deadpans with the best of them as sidekick Weasel. I really hope they give Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Briana Hildebrand) more to do in the X-Men universe as her surly teen attitude and explosive powers have interesting action potential.

Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have packed the screenplay to an inch of its life with great gags, usually at the expense of Hollywood heavyweights. In reference to Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic being the sole mutant heroes tasked with putting a leash on ‘Pool we have him quipping to camera “Almost like the studio couldn’t afford any more X-Men”; in another scene we find him glancing sorrowfully at a battered action figure of his previous insult of a screen incarnation in X-MEN ORIGINS:WOLVERINE. You have plenty of crude asides and rapid-fire cruel comebacks, but if there was one thing I wasn’t expecting from Deadpool it was Monty Python jokes. A skit that we come back to several times is essentially a re-jigged version of the iconic comedy troupe’s “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch with characters trying to one-up each other on bad life experiences and Deadpool’s insistence on carrying on fighting despite losing the use of his limbs reminds me of a certain Black Knight.

The film might eye-roll at most superhero movie conventions, Weasel commenting that Wade should go and talk to a shady guy in a bar simply because it might “advance the plot”; Deadpool gleefully spotting that Angel Dust (Gina Carano) is about to jump from a height and do a “superhero landing”. Despite this, the film still ends with a big scrap with the main baddie Ajax (Ed Skrein) in a monolithic scrapyard. The villains are probably the film’s weakest element, but Deadpool as a character doesn’t really need them – he’ll find someone to fight and annoy wherever he goes.

The film’s budgetary limitations are in many ways an advantage. It’s not peppered with excessive action, Deadpool admitting at one point “we didn’t have the budget for that” and he doesn’t sound sorry about this. The violent car chase seen in the trailer and test footage and a couple of smaller brawls are more than enough, and the no-frills plotting and pacing allows the movie to call it a day at a brisk 1 hr 48 minutes.

My biggest hope for Deadpool’s next outing is that he is allowed to be a bit more deranged. He’s entertainingly wacky and unconcerned about inappropriate behaviour in his solo debut, but you get very few indications of his schizophrenic nature. This is a balls-out and tonally fitting origin for Wade Wilson, but you can always make him madder and badder. SSP

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Review: The Martian (2015)

Posted on February 15, 2016 by Sam S-P

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Almost Ridders, almost. This is undoubtedly the best thing Ridley Scott has produced in over a decade. For me though, THE MARTIAN doesn’t quite justify the plaudits it has received, but yeah it’s good. That’s pretty much it. You want a full review? Fiiine…

In the near future a manned research mission to Mars ends in disaster when an astronaut is lost in a freak storm and presumed dead. As his team leave for home, Mark Watney (Matt Damon) must try and make contact with Earth and survive alone on the Red Planet for however long it takes for help to arrive.  

Nobody makes technology look quite as good as Ridley Scott. Either it’s real mind-blowing space tech in action or it’s tactile and convincing enough for you to believe it’s real. Sooner or later he’s going to run out of ways to make space suits look like sexy fashion accessories, but these aren’t quite as egregious as the disco numbers we saw in PROMETHEUS. The film looks good in general as Scott’s films tend to, with the imposing landscapes of Jordan standing in for Mars and the action polished and convincingly realised throughout.

Matt Damon gets to play an egotistic tool with great elan, but it’s fortunate he’s such a charmer as well since we spend so much of the film’s runtime with Mark Watney talking straight at us either deploying gallows humour at his latest setback or getting increasingly livid at the awful music selection he’s been left with as his only company. I think the non-Watney scenes were intended to be an ensemble affair, but unless you’re Jeff Daniels, Jessica Chastain or Chiwetel Ejiofor then you’re not given a whole lot to do. You couldn’t accuse the cast or characters of being non-diverse, though you do have Ejiofor playing a man with an Indian surname that is clunkily explained away and Mackenzie Davis as a character with a Korean surname that weirdly isn’t discussed at all.

Drew Goddard’s screenplay is annoyingly a little inconsistent. Nothing’s badly written, but one moment we’re told exactly how Watney has solved an impossible problem in minute detail (particularly of note is how he waters his martian potato crop) and the next we skip past anything that was too difficult or boring to explain (where is NASA getting all its money from?). I think you either do one or the other – either every detail matters for the sake of immersion in your film’s world or none of it does for the sake of the fluid telling of your story. In its final form the film is a good-looking space adventure movie with tech-y asides but little else. There’s jeopardy sure, but it’s well signposted and romanticised threat to a large degree, and are we ever really in doubt that it’ll all be alright in the end?

The Martian was awarded the Golden Globe for Best Picture (Musical or Comedy) this year. I’m not going to deny the film has moments of levity, but classing it as a a comedy film is quite frankly ridiculous. Picking three genre pictures off the top of my head – JURASSIC PARK; JAWS; TOTAL RECALL – all have a roughly equal number of gags as The Martian, so are they all comedies? Basically, The Hollywood Foreign Press Association wanted to show an almost-back on form Ridley Scott some love, but felt that THE REVENANT was a worthier choice, so they bumped him down to the lighter runner-up prize.

If The Marian is an indication of things to come from Ridley Scott, especially where his sci-fi projects are concerned, then colour me optimistic. Prometheus got bogged down in mythology and delaying tactics to bring audiences back next time for the real revelations. If the next Prometheus/ALIEN movie remembers why we watch movies like this – memorable characters trying to survive whatever fresh hell the universe throws at them – as well as presenting everything with Scott’s superior level of craftsmanship, then we could be in for a much more satisfying affair. The Martian is nothing if not conventional, but it’s a solid and entertaining version of a story we know and love. SSP

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