Archive for February 21st, 2012|Daily archive page
Attack The Block (2011)
Attack The Block
★★★★★
Directed by: Joe Cornish
Written by: Joe Cornish
The whole of why I love Attack The Block can be summarized by the inclusion of the following exchange, initiated by Pest, a teenage member of a gang in South London who become embroiled in a battle to stop a horde of toothy aliens from overrunning their housing project:
Pest: I’m sh*ttin’ myself, innit’, but at the same time…
Moses: What?
Pest: This is sick!
In this brief exchange we see with both sadness and delight why the coming generation isn’t the doom of all of us. Because while we may rightfully fret that their acquisition culture of entitlement and narcissism and cynicism is a threat to social constructs, we have to admit that if an alien attack or a zombie invasion were to take place, these are the little snots we want on the front lines, well versed in Call of Duty tactics and Ninja Turtle battlefield confidence.
Attack The Block takes place in a small neighborhood where the gang of teenagers robs a young woman named Sam (played with a pleasant matronly resignation by Jodie Whittaker) on her way home from work. As the robbery is in progress, a car is demolished by a falling extraterrestrial object and a squealing creature wounds the gang leader, Moses (played with striking confidence and growth by John Boyega), who vows revenge. The gang track the alien while Sam flees, and soon they produce a corpse and decide to bring it to a local pot grower, Ron (a stoned Nick Frost), for identification.
At Ron’s, Moses is tapped by the local druglord, Hi-Hatz, to work for him as a dealer but the kids soon discover that there are more aliens arriving, so they hype themselves up to defend their homes. In the process of fighting the creatures, who have glowing blue teeth and fur but otherwise seem to absorb rather than reflect light, Moses loses Hi-Hatz’s drugs and is reunited with Sam such that he must evade the angry druglord, fight the aliens and convince Sam to trust him for protection.
The overall progression isn’t startlingly original; plenty of other monster pictures have followed a similar formula. Where Attack The Block really succeeds is in making what other movies would have as disposable one-scene extras the central protagonists and developing each character and the relationships between them all while still managing to create an atmosphere that is simultaneously exciting, frightening, funny and just plain cool.
This is such an enjoyable movie because there are so few disposable characters which gives the action—and even the horror—a certain emotional heft that is often lacking from genre pictures like this. And the screenplay is masterful at creating prejudices within the audience that it is then able to subvert. More to the point, it achieves something remarkable by making an anti-hero into a legitimate hero and having the heroism come off as cooler than the grittier, darker assumptions up front.
I kind of expected this to be sort of a B-grade movie, but I was surprised that the special effects were really well done, with very little CGI and I had no problem with immersion at all. If I have any complaint at all it might be that the thickly accented and heavily slang-infused dialogue is a bit hard to decipher, such that I ended up watching with subtitles on. Even then some of the slang is lost on my old-fogey USian frame of reference, but the point is clear enough with context and it’s hardly a reason not to see Attack The Block. And in fact, I can’t think of a single reason not to see Attack The Block.
from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — February 21, 2012 at 11:18AM
The Ides Of March (2011)
The Ides Of March
★★★★☆
Directed by: George Clooney
Written by: George Clooney, Grant Heslov, and Beau Willimon
Based on the Play “Farragut North” by: Beau Willimon
A lot of political thrillers tend to descend into non-political thriller territory, sooner or later. You can tell the moment this happens whenever a gun is produced or a car chase looms imminent. It’s not bad, per se, for political thrillers to have stakes high enough for them to be spine-tinglers but politics has its own special kind of tension built-in and I think the exploitation of that facet is under-utilized.
Which may explain why I liked The Ides of March as much as I did. Because this is a movie about the game, the lifestyle, the scope of politics which uses human beings as much as ideas in a frankly chilling battle between the public good (also acting as proxy for morality) and raw acquisition of power. That both are intertwined is merely the reality, not necessarily a philosophical point whose merits or defects are worthy of merit in this context.
So we are introduced to Mike Morris (played with magnetic charisma by George Clooney), a governor in an Ohio primary trying to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for Presidential candidate. His top two aides are Paul (played with volumes of implied character by Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Stephen (played with studly swagger by Ryan Gosling). They have the candidate that ought to win: He’s got good ideas, good appeal; a good chance of defeating whatever candidate the Republicans try to throw at him. But he just needs a bit of a boost to go the rest of the way and Paul thinks a previously dropped-out Senator who holds a significant number of delegates in check could provide that winning boost if he can convince him to throw support to Morris.
While Paul is trying to woo the Senator, Morris’ campaign manager, Tom (played with an affably sinister charm by Paul Giamatti), calls Stephen to set up a meeting. It’s risky for Stephen to meet the other campaign guys; there are regulations and social conventions that limit the kind of direct contact they can have. But Stephen decides to go for it anyway. At the secret meeting, Tom offers Stephen a position on the opposing team. He says they have the Senator already sewn up and they plan to get a lot of open primary support from the Republican voters in Ohio because the GOP worries they won’t be able to take Morris in the main election. Stephen declines but leaves the meeting rattled.
Meanwhile Stephen meets a girl, Molly (played with a not-quite-convincing awkward confidence by Evan Rachel Wood), a staffer on the campaign, and begins an affair with her. But Molly has a secret that threatens the entire campaign and as the stakes ratchet up and the election gets closer, Stephen’s paranoia starts to show signs of being not misguided at all.
What works best is that this never gets into cornball shootout in a parking garage or attempt-on-someone’s-life territory. There is plenty of suspense inherent in the politics and the web of interpersonal relationships that The Ides of March doesn’t need gimmicks like knife fights or stolen nuclear launch codes. The basic plot is riveting and the acting is either quite good or absolutely top notch (Gosling and Wood, notably, hold their own enough to not stand out against wonderful performances by folks we’ve come to expect good things from like Hoffman and Giamatti). The ending is unexpected and strangely satisfying, if cynical and dark overall.
There are a handful of issues here and there: There is a lot of set-up to be done early in the movie and the script is kind of jarringly transparent about it. Stephen’s character is frustrating as a protagonist because as the noose tightens around him he begins to act inconsistently with what we’ve been led to believe about him, going from swagger to outright jerk to mystifyingly ruthless by the final credits. A more accomplished actor (like, say, Giamatti) might have sold the transition better, but I guess it was more important that Stephen be young and pretty than convincing. There are also a few minor plot hiccups—not holes really, just oversights which are noticeable to the audience but not necessarily impacting on the story. Also the chemistry between Wood and Gosling never quite hits the notes I think it was intended. Coming off a recent viewing of The Adjustment Bureau where Matt Damon and Emily Blunt show how to make onscreen magic happen, it feels a little flat.
But there is plenty to recommend The Ides of March as well. Clooney’s direction is really top shelf here, and he makes great use of silence in the film, of unheard dialogue especially, to convey messages by relying on his actors rather than on the dialogue writing. It works remarkably. There are also a ton of memorable speeches by Paul and Morris, among others.
It did strike me as funny that Clooney, as Mike Morris, looked like a genuine political candidate and, in fact, came across as ironically less rehearsed than several actual politicians in the real-life campaigns going on right now often do. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of Morris’ political ideals were mirrors of Clooney’s own and it’s always disheartening to realize that fictional politicians are more inspiring than real candidates at least 95% of the time.
Overall, I enjoyed The Ides of March quite a bit. It’s not without a few issues here and there and I’m sure diehard GOP viewers will disdain what can occasionally sound like a Democratic propaganda film, but it’s a tight thriller that doesn’t cheap out and showcases great direction and some fine acting. Sounds like everything you need for a solid bout of entertainment. Or, for that matter, politics.
from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — February 21, 2012 at 10:29AM
Drive (2011)
Drive
★★★☆☆
Directed by: Nicolas Winding Refn
Written by: Hossein Amini
Based on the Novel by: James Sallis
I get, to a certain extent, what Drive was trying to do. Or, to be more accurate, what it was trying to be. However, the problem that I have with Drive is that it thinks itself exceptionally clever in its design and is therefore often incredibly indulgent.
Drive is about a nameless guy (played with mute inconsistency by Ryan Gosling): a part time stunt man, part time mechanic, part time wheelman, aspiring race car driver. He has a certain set of skills that make him valuable to a certain set of people. We see, early on, how he operates. He’s not a stoic, unflappable kind of guy, but he’s good and that carries a body a long way. We get the sense that he’s maybe trying to find the light at the end of the tunnel, perhaps he’s trying to turn over a new leaf. Perhaps not. Perhaps the line he walks is his comfort zone.
He meets a girl, Irene, a neighbor (played with watery-eyed vagueness by Carey Mulligan), at his new apartment building. She has a son and a husband serving a prison sentence. There are sparks, but he tries to be respectful and she tries to do the right thing, in spite of her feelings. It’s complicated, but perhaps less so than Drive makes it out to be because it tries to express everything in long sequences of unbroken silence. On the periphery of this are some unsavory characters: The driver’s boss, Shannon, (played with talkative enthusiasm by Bryan Cranston), a couple of wiseguys (Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks, both doing much with small supporting parts).
Then Irene’s husband, Standard, is released from jail and he’s in trouble with some toughs he owes money to. The Driver feels protective of Irene and her son, and he has a briefly dealt with but somehow significant connection with her husband as well. He tries to help. At this point in the movie the tone shifts. There is a double-cross. People start dying. Once they start, they don’t really stop. Drive doesn’t have much to use to ratchet up the tension since it seems unwilling to directly threaten the protagonist’s motivating characters (Irene and her son) so it uses brief but often unexpected brutality to serve as a proxy. The Driver’s character starts to unravel here, because we’re so disconnected from him apart from the filter we’ve been given (through Irene), and either the director or Gosling can’t seem to really convey a sense of him.
But then, as if the filmmakers sensed this, they apparently decide to embrace it and just let him be erratic and inexplicable. The movie starts to feel smug in doing so. “Look how edgy this shit is!” is cries. But in the audience we either do that thing, “Oh yeah. I get it. I totally get it. Yes.” Or, we do the other thing: “Wait. What. No. Huh?” And in the end either response is fine because what matters most is that whether we get it (or “get it”) or not, we can’t possibly connect with him. We can’t possibly care all that much. We care through him, for Irene, for Shannon, for Standard, but he is a ghost, a screen that reflects the projections of others but has no function of his own. The signature soundtrack tune plays a couple of times through the movie, embracing this and explaining it in a very clumsy, obvious way by declaring: “A real human being / And a real hero.” So, you see, he may be a sociopath, but he’s a sociopath for the right reasons. Which is totally better. Totally.
Drive isn’t a bad movie, by any stretch. But it’s not necessarily the movie it should have been, either. I cared more about the Driver character before Irene, at which point I cared about Irene but not the Driver. The fact that both exist in the same movie made both of their stories less than they could have been, and that’s a shame.
from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — February 20, 2012 at 04:54PM