REVIEWED BY CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK

PLACE: Dendy Civic, Cinema 2

PIC:  Gone Girl

PEEPS: About 2o present

Dendy, so lots of short ads for food, fashion, jewellery, giftware, hair products and the like.  An ad promoting the niceness of a union-based club to female sport in Canberra*.  No #$%^ing meerkats, so common sense may have hit, or maybe the thing has won some award and no-one has to worry about showing it any more.  Previews for The Captive (family etc deal with aftermath of a child being abducted) and A Walk Among the Tombstones (Liam Neeson as a PI manque, traumatised by what he did as a cop, and now dealing with an abduction).  No prizes for guessing that the feature might be about an abduction.

Gone Girl is one of the more extensively promoted films of the year.  For those who haven’t seen a preview, an ad or a proper review, the setup is pretty simple.  Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) is married to Amy (Rosamund Pike), nationally known as Amazing Amy, her parents’ fantasy account of her childhood.  They are not doing well, in life or in their marriage, a parade of low-grade hostility and resentment over pretty much everything, including moving from New York to Missouri**.  On their fifth anniversary, Amy disappears, with some signs of a violent abduction and Nick is Suspect No 1, the Most Hated Man in America, because he smiled for the cameras***.  Things get worse for him as more of the story emerges and his life becomes every day more of a performance for a ravenous media.  He’s supported by his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon) and Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry) a flamboyant lawyer with a flair for domestic homicide and media management.  On his tracks are Detective Boney (Kim Dickens) and Officer Gilpin (Patrick Fugit), as well as about  thousand media trucks, network news and commentary and his increasingly disenchanted in-laws.

The plot has a distance to go from there, but that should be left to be revealed in the film or the book****.   There’s enough substance already for a film with some ideas about the compromises inherent in marriage and, more dramatically, the extension and intrusion of the media into private lives and complex investigation.  There’s a display of the ugly phenomenon of the uninvolved appropriating the emotional strain of those at the centre as if it were their own.  There’s enough material for the amusing exercise of trying to work out which of two essentially unappealing main characters, one mostly absent or in flashback, would be less palatable as a colleague or fellow-passenger.

Three flat whites.  A good cast and some interesting ideas, plus a large budget ($US61m*****) for a conventional film, probably should have qualified for a little more.  So the coffees are large, but there are still only three of them.

FPB

 

* – recently voted the Most Liveable City in the world.  I think it may be a question of scale; Sydney and Melbourne have their charms, but they’re focused in a few relatively small areas.

** – where most of it was filmed.  A pretty place in a small town with some big features way.

*** – and because, let’s face it, a lot of murders seem to involve spouses and partners.

**** – which one of my co-viewers suggested was not as engaging as the film.

***** – I couldn’t guess at what Gillian Flynn got for the film rights, but it was probably heaps.

The Hangover III

 

FILM REVIEWED BY CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK

PLACE:LImelight Cinema 2

PIC: The Hangover III

PEEPS: 2 present

LImelight ads are sort of different.  Foxtel this time, plus a couple of ISPs.  Previews for The Heat (ill-matched cop buddy movie with women), Fast and Furious 6,   Grown Ups 2 (I’ll just say it includes Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock and David Spade before disinfecting the keyboard) and and Superman:  The Unpteenth Remake or whatever it’s called*.

“When I became a man, I put away these childish things**”.

This is number three in the franchise, as the title suggests, and it looks like it has run out of steam***.   Alan (Zach Galifianakis) has been off his medication for a while and is clearly becoming an ageing embarrassment to those around him.  Essentially, he’s a  non-too-stable 13-year-old in a chubby 42-year-old body.   So, naturally (this being the USA) his friends arrange an intervention where he is prevailed upon to enter treatment.  They (Bradley Cooper as Phil, Ed Helms as Stu and Justin Bartha as Doug) have all started to act like adults, and they offer to take Alan to the treatment facility.  Meanwhile, Lesley Chow (Ken Jeong) has staged a Shawshank Redemption escape from prison in Thailand.  Can we see where this is going? …Because if we can’t, we’re probably the target audience for a film like this****.

It’s not as vile as some reviews may have suggested.  There are some OK sight gags but they are overpowered by the racial/sexual overtones surrounding the treatment of Mr Chow***** and the mental condition of Alan.  It sets out to be a movie about Alan’s much delayed attainment of maturity.  By definition, this forces the other members of the group to emphasise safe, caring, suburban values.  In a way, the discomfort shown by Phil at some of the things said and done is as much about the fact that Bradley Cooper’s career has moved on and up and that returning to this particular bowl of nonsense isn’t likely to do him any good.  Ed Helms has a growing status as a character actor but it is difficult to see where Galifianakis can go next.

 

Two flat whites.  The thing cost $62 million.

 

FPB

 

* – ok, I checked.  It’s called Man of Steel and gives Our Russ an opportunity to intone in a voice that could sell drinking chocolate to anyone.

** – I Corinthians 13:11

*** – with that said, even I could see a couple of start points for another one.  Don’t. Go. There.

**** – grubby minded teenagers fed up with constraints and having to do homework, and such.

***** – hint.  The fact that someone is Asian and effeminate does not make everything that person says or does funny.  And people with mental illness have not been used as sources of amusement for many years in some societies.

Hitchcock – A Film Review

REVIEWED BY CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK

The local baseball club ad is really awful and I want to attack my eyes with a sharp object when I see it*. Previews for The Impossible (scarily real tsunami-stuff with Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts playing roles occupied in real life by Spanish people) and Zero Dark Thirty (interrogators nearly as brutal and effective as parents, leading to the death of Osama Bin Laden).

[Corpulent old guy appears on screen similar to though better dressed than your scribe. Speaks fluidly as one would imagine an unfit beagle speaking, if it could, in a palimpsest of an East End accent.]  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight’s production tells the tale of a prolific director, no longer young, and his well-organised wife as they develop a new film for presentation to the public. There is also some ambiguity about the nature of their relationship, and you may notice some references to the work of the late Mr Hitchcock”.

What follows is a fine piece of work setting the context in which Alfred Hitchcock directed Psycho. Serious film historians can debate bits of the story – the extent of studio support, the extent of Alma Hitchcock’s control over the creation – but most of us will see it as sound storytelling. That story is of a self-centred auteur with a flock of personal demons and an unshakeable faith in his own specialised genius, who realises he needs to recover from some relative failures. He receives support from his long-suffering wife Alma, who manages what he cannot, and who acts as the mother figure which so troubled the director**. He fights the minions and titans of the corporate film world and outflanks the naysayers of censorship who inexplicably object to possible scenes of a naked woman being hacked to death with a knife. His most consistent ally is not always Alma, but the spirit of Ed Gein, the perpetrator of the macabre crimes which inspired the book and the film.

The performances are strong. While Anthony Hopkins (Hitchcock) and Helen Mirren (Alma) should receive most of the praise, they provide only a robust structure. There is sound work putting flesh on the bones by Scarlett Johansson (as Janet Leigh), Toni Collette (as Peggy Robertson, the assistant director), James D’Arcy (as Anthony Perkins) and Jessica Biel (as Vera Miles). The settings are limited, but attractive (the Hitchcock home being a semi-Gothic masterstroke). “In Hollywood, you are only as good as your last film”, Hitchcock at one point intones. Hitchcock’s last film, in real life, was Family Plot, a poor example of his work (I saw it in 1976 or 77, and do not want to repeat the experience. Ever). This is a much better memory.

Three flat whites and a babycino, with a 1960-style chocolate eclair.

FPB

* – no objection to baseball, for those who can’t understand cricket and don’t care about their duty as Australians.

** – look at Psycho, and at this film’s references to betrayal by actresses who preferred to be mothers and its depiction of Hitchcock’s direction of actresses.

Django Unchained – Film Review

REVIEWED BY CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK

11 am Hoyts for Django Unchained with a pretty blokey 30 or so viewers.

A new homewares ad and an appealingly funny one for being sane when one’s friends are drunk. A few previews – Hansel and Gretel: WItchhunters looks as stupid as one can imagine a film to be that is  based on a revenge theme, an unlikely buddy pairing and dialogue a couple of centuries wrong.  Then there was Zero Dark Thirty (dealing with Osama Bin Laden, for revenge) and, bizarrely, The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann, anachronistic music, a spot of iconoclasm).  Would we be seeing a movie that involved a good deal of revenge but also featured unlikely buddies and a spot of time-shifting in attitudes and speech?

Of course we were!  All up something north of three hours of it.

The unlikely pairing is Schultz; a bounty hunter masquerading as a travelling dentist (Christoph Waltz) and Django (Jamie Foxx); a slave whom he liberates from a chain gang being marched across some of the less hospitable bits of Texas in 1858.  Schultz is German, so can get away with accented irony and a killer raised eyebrow.  They seek out and kill some routine criminals for reward* and then set out to rescue Mrs. Broomhilda Django (Kerry Washington) from the clutches of crazy Calvin Candie (Leonardo Di Caprio**), his Uncle Tom of a butler, Stephen (Samuel L Jackson***) and a number of supporting actors.  That’s pretty much it.

Stylish?  Certainly, though some of the music was bizarre and the casual dialogue from the 1970s.  The credits and the theme music were a genuflection to spaghetti westerns with a great deal of violence.  Violence of every sort – considered, unconsidered, generic and personal –  much of it in extreme and visceral detail****.   There is lots of swearing and a great deal of (presumably accurate in 1858) use of a despicable term for black people.  Did I mention the violence?

An Oz cameo towards the end by John Jarratt, and one by Tarantino using an accent that sounded like Dick van Dyke’s Mary Poppins cockney coached by a Korean who’s trying to sound South African.  A genuinely hilarious intervention by a forerunner of the Ku Klux Klan.  Oh, and the violence.

Did it mean anything apart from the obvious?  The obvious being that slavery is a Very Bad Thing , an appalling infliction of indignity and the cruel subjection to the whims of another because of the happenstance of race.  Not a contentious proposition. There’s an attempt to shoehorn meaning in by telling a truncated version of the German Brunnhilde story.  I was looking for a more contemporary political message to go with the dialogue but couldn’t really see much to support it.

Four flat whites.  I don’t think my stomach could keep a pastry down.  And real blokes don’t do sweet stuff anyway.

 

FPB

 

* – Schultz takes a pragmatic view of the “wanted: dead or alive” concept.  Dead men, presumably, challenge no warrants.  Plus they don’t try to escape and they don’t need to be fed.  They would, I suppose, start to smell after a day or so but most people stank in those days.  Django just seems to like shooting white people and it’s a bonus to be paid.

** – This is a really weird role and Di Caprio plays it straight.  Candie is simply an appalling human being of limited intellect and some beliefs that could be called eccentric.

*** – There are not many actors who could play Stephen and bring any subtlety to the role, but Jackson does so.  Some of his lines were painful for an ageing liberal white person to hear.

**** – Yes, it’s over the top in quantity and its graphic depiction.  Yes, it’s probably clever and ironic, Tarantino being one of the few cinematic geniuses.  But, if someone does not view realistic depictions of pain, humiliation and violence with equanimity, it’s probably a film better avoided.

 

Life of Pie – Film Review

REVIEWED BY CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK

 

10:15 am, Life of Pi (3D).  About 20 present.

 

We were spared the usual ads for Kmart and local baseball because someone was trying to get the technology right.  For the same reason, we were spared previews, one of which would probably have been Jack Reacher , so we should be grateful for small mercies.  But it meant that we had no hints of what the great minds who run cinemas thought might appeal to people there to attend Life of Pi .

I had been in some doubt about whether this film could be made to work.  Yann Martel’s book, though quite slender, has some subtlety to it and modern cinema and subtlety tend to get on as well as a porn festival in Teheran.  Ang Lee does better with the material than many would have managed, and even sets out the dilemma at the core of the book without hammering any particular answer.  To do this, he creates a framework, not reflecting the book, where a frustrated author spends time with Pi* and hears his remarkable story of survival.

Unvarnished, the scenario is that Pi and family leave India on a freighter accompanied by the animals from their zoo, heading for Canada.  A storm claims the ship and months later, the survivor (Pi) and his lifeboat come ashore in Mexico.  Beyond that, there is a contest of beliefs in different versions, paralleling the contest between religions that Pi has experienced.  Does one prefer a probable but ugly truth or a claimed truth so remarkable it would be difficult to invent?

 

As would be expected from the previews, the film is a visual treat.  Some elements have obviously been added to distinguish and use the 3D format to advantage and it is probably worth a few extra bucks to see the 3D version.  A great performance by the novice star, Shuraj Sharma and general quiet competence all around the cast**.

It has “award winning” all over it.

Four flat whites.

FPB

 

* – originally Piscine Molitor Patel, born in Pondicherry and an enthusiast for several religions simultaneously.

** – even Gerard Depardieu.

 

 

The Words – Film Review

REVIEWED BY RESIDENT CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR

F.P. BLUCK

This is one I really wanted to see, and that I really wanted to be crunchingly good to the last mouthful. The usual weekday morning scatter of older folk, better dressed because this was, after all, Manuka. There were no choc tops.

The previews were about as much help as usual i.e. quite a lot. The Intouchables – rich but paralysed French bloke has his life turned around by a tough black carer and some of what one could call “the action” in The Words did, in fact, occur in France. Safety Not Guaranteed, an amusing-looking thing which seems to combine time travel and learning to be a writer. The Words had a bit of a time-ago thing and a disturbingly large amount of stuff about the Craft of Writing*.

Bradley Cooper plays Rory Jansen, a struggling young writer who is still parasiting off his old man for the rent while he tries manfully to produce the Great American Novel or somesuch in between hanging around New York like a ‘writer’. He describes himself at one inconsequential point as an angry young man which is sort of funny because anger would require a bit more acting. For heaven’s sake, his unbelievably tolerant girlfriend loves him because he is so serious all the time which probably says a fair bit about her and even more about Mr Cooper’s** dramatic stretch. He does, however, have intense eyes.

Without giving away more of the plot than the preview did, young Rory finds a beautifully crafted manuscript (so much better than his Great Work) in an old satchel and undertakes the heartbreaking task of putting it through the keyboard onto a screen. He becomes a literary superstar and is accosted by an angry*** old Jeremy Irons who claims to have written the thing. Uh-oh, Rory! Dennis Quaid ties it together nicely as a literary lion who has written about the thing****.

This could have had some cute tricks in it – but it didn’t. And that made it a little better than it was. Or it could have used its space and the minds of its audience to ask some really gristly questions about artistic ownership/borrowing/reflection/parody/tribute and maybe the possibility that we all steal from others every time we use a cliche or, indeed, use a word or a gesture we have learnt from another.

If it had jumped into the deeper water, it might have been a better movie.

*-the capitalisation is deliberate, sort of like the pace of the movie.
** – Breadley Cooper… Gary Cooper (famous for saying things like “yup, ma’am” with all the expression of something from Bunnings). Coincidence?
***– yes, he can do “angry”, and resignation and pathos and, pretty well, whatever is needed.
****– OMG! Quade/Quaid and Cooper. Cue the X-Files music and the weird green lights.

RUBY SPARKS

REVIEWED BY RESIDENT CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK

After so many duds, and so many opportunities to be cruel, it is sometimes necessary to be nice.  And this note is nice, well, mostly.  Ruby Sparks is worth the expenditure of a modest amount of time and money.

Twenty plus minutes of ads – count ‘em and realise that’s three times as much time as all the worthwhile bits in Total Recoil, Hot and Runny and The Botch put together .    Two spurts of Andrew Gunsburg, against a Hollywood backlot,  trying to drum up interest in the latest Madagascar and The Botch and Paranorman , a piece of animation.  Previews for Twilight: Breaking Wind or somesuch, featuring more people with red eyes than an Adam Sandler/Vince Vaughan buddy movie, and for a truly woeful Glee-goes - to-Carlaj thing called Pitch Perfect and for Fun Size , another film somehow related to American youth and their amusing irresponsibility.  Life of Pi looks interesting, though I would have thought the book close to unfilmable. There may have been more but by this time I was checking my mobile phone and hoping for a message from someone trying to interest me in getting money out of Nigeria.

Anyhow, Ruby Sparks is not a big movie by any account.  Four recognisable faces – Annette Bening, Antonio Banderas, Elliott Gould and Steve Coogan – going through the motions as, respectively, a ditzy hippy chick mother, her current partner*, a kindly shrink and a sleazy novelist.  Also, the girl who played Maeby on Arrested Development , playing a lit-fan of limited moral fibre or vision.

The leads – Paul Dano and Zoe Karzan – twinkle with almost as much star power as the second burger preparer from the left in a recent McDonald’s commercial.  They act about as well as Mitt Romney maintains consistency, which is to say that they appear to have learnt their lines and that they are determined to say them.  The dog is cute, and pivotal, and performs as well as anyone else.

Anyhow, Dano plays Calvin, a lonely bespectacled boy-genius writer whose second novel is more blocked than a colon on a fibre-free diet.  Kazan is the funky girlfriend he dreams up.  The budget for the whole exercise was probably less than the muffin budget for Total Recoil but the film is about a hundred times smarter about using an interesting idea.  Could have been made anywhere** and would have looked much the same.

 

The script plodded a bit at times and a lot at other times.  I won’t spoil the ending, other than to grumble about Americans always going for the soft option.

 

* – a Hispanic “artist” who makes things using a chain saw

** – remove Banderas, add Bryan Brown.  Remove Gould, add Jack Thompson.  Remove Bening, add Jackie Weaver.  Remove Coogan, add Sean Micallef.  Remove leads, add recent NIDA grads.  Make changes as necessary for UK, Canada, Uzbekistan etc.