Butter Side Down: A Note on ‘Valkyrie’

By way of warning the dispossessed Colonel Stauffenberg about the consequences of his embryonic scheme to eliminate Adolf Hitler in 1944, General Erich Fellgiebel states that ‘When the S.S. catch you, they will pull you apart…’ Like dogs tearing at a piece of meat, all sharpened teeth and gristly violence? ‘…pull you apart like warm bread,’ finishes Fellgiebel. It does not help that the line is delivered by comedian Eddie Izzard, whose decadent camp dressed up in a Nazi uniform is the closest Valkyrie gets to examining the aristocratic, fascist excesses of these men. Unfortunately, after his threat that the mostly unseen and entirely unthreatening S.S. will turn Tom Cruise into a complementary appetiser at an Italian restaurant, Izzard is relegated to the sidelines of this effective but highly simplistic ‘based on true events’ tale. Cruise is his usual stolid dramatic self, sans – but not on the poster, natch – a hand, eye, and several fingers, and little is asked of him or the other characters in Bryan Singer’s slick but bland production other than to be cogs in the machine. Rather than impart the piece with an air of impending tragedy, this clunkiness only serves to reveal much of Singer’s conservatism and narrow focus. This is a movie about Hitler’s attempted assassination, and nothing else – the villainy of the man and his party is taken as read, and the only dramatic idea of note developed is that of the struggle for the soul of a country (perhaps a relevant idea in the U.S. of late). It may have been out of Singer’s remit to include anything but the slightest nod to the wider social reality of wartime Germany, but when this extends to a depopulated and stage-set like Berlin it begins to seriously hinder the work. In hindsight, Fellgiebel’s warning seems rather appropriate: Valkyrie is lukewarm entertainment which won’t spoil your dinner.

Round-Up of 2008

Two lists: 1)the best, and 2) those of which much more was expected, and so are more deserving of listing than “the worst” (the prize of which goes to Redacted); neither list is in any particular order.

The conclusion of this year of cinema-going? I need to be more adventurous. Only one foreign-language film, no documentaries, not even a plucky ham radio trying to make out with an iPod. Despite temptations to rename the list (“Large-Scale Hollywood Establishment Products Round-Up of 2008”) I chose to stick to my guns, and take the flak.

No honourable mentions here, but it should be said that Tropic Thunder nearly made both lists, and so got caught in an un-listed purgatory: the blame, for both, belongs to Ben Stiller. Also hovering between the brilliant and the banal was Quantum of Solace, in which director Marc Foster seemed to make up for the wholesale surrendering to Bournestyle by filling the margins of the film with unexpected delights: the regional fonts, the pill-peddling of Giancarlo Giannini, the sleekly swampy sound design and the J.G. Ballard-bothering desert finale to name just a few. (Please note that while Gone Baby Gone was only released in the UK mid-’08, it is a true 2007 film, and so is not included here as one the very very best).

The Best:

The Dark Knight
What can one say about this film that hasn’t been said a dozen times by reviews, articles, and conversations in coffee shops? A superb jumble of ideas and philosophy which somehow struck a chord with the entire country, being openly adored by people for whom the superhero genre is normally a punchline.

Appaloosa
Not only a showcase for some of the most majestic performances of the year, but also a literate and unusual film about semantics and specificity. A warmly affectionate piece of work which addresses Western mythos with an understated charm.

Franklyn
Due for a release in the UK soon (late February), Gerald McMorrow’s debut feature is at times stilted, but manages to create some rich and sombre alternative realities, and then just about keeps all the plates spinning as these begin to crash into on another in the final act.

Shine a Light
For the collection of incredible cinematographers working at their peak. For the unexpected explosion into full-screen twenty minutes into the IMAX version. For the witty, if stage-managed, prologue. Most of all, though, for the sheer elevating joy of the thing.

No Country For Old Men
For some a 2007 film. Also, for some, an excruciating exercise in cool detachment. To its fans, however, it’s an excruciating exercise in cool detachment. Simultaneously too faithful to Cormac McCarthy’s novel and not faithful enough, this is a brave, swiss-watch-accurate piece of film-making, only falling down in the more metaphysical tenets of the story.

In Bruges
Martin McDonagh’s debut as a film director was one of the unexpected gems of the year. Balancing darkly abrasive humour with metaphysical guilt and outright surrealism, In Bruges also boasts fine location shooting and three fantastic central performances.

The Chaser
This strange, hypnotic Korean film about an ex-cop turned pimp frustratedly trying to find the third of his girls to go missing is well worth seeking out both for the atmospheric visuals, and a script which is rich in subtle ironies, if not psychological depth.

The Missed Opportunities:

Taken
Liam Neeson playing Jason Bourne – what could go wrong? Plenty, it appears. Choppy film-making, a strong Europhobic streak, and some of the most unfittingly bizarre narrative choices of the year make Taken a frustrating and insulting watch when it could have been a first-class guilty pleasure.

Hellboy II
Included here only to mark the nailing of the coffin into my enjoyment of Guillermo del Toro’s cinema. Every time I get excited, and every time I get the same melancholic doomed love, extended central sequence of astonishing banality, clock-and-cog aesthetics, and irrational characters. Enough, I say. But that’s just me.

Max Payne
How do you screw up a heady brew of noir plotlines and apocalyptic aesthetics? Here’s how. That the unremarkable Constantine did it better tells you all you need to know, really.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
A film which, the more I think of it, the less I think of it. In telling the story of a man’s unusual life it succeeds finely, but in saying something more, something fresh, something sweeping, it fails. Perhaps this was intended, but for a Fincher film to evoke Robert Zemeckis seems like, well, a missed opportunity.

Body of Lies
William Monaghan, shame on you. We’ve come to expect poorly conceived but richly executed films from Ridley Scott, but your writing for him here is like an after-school exercise in Middle East suspicion.

Pride and Glory
Firmly in the tradition of other (both lesser and greater) corrupt cop thrillers, the crime of Pride and Glory is to offer so much and then deliver so little. Barring a completely unnecessary expository scene the first hour is bracingly shot entertainment, culminating in a fiercely believable confrontation between a seething Colin Farrell and a polite drug dealer in a frostbitten backyard. Then it all goes pear-shaped, and not even the brilliant closing shot can save it from ignominy.

The Myth of Central Control: A Review of 'Eagle Eye'

There is something deeply unpalatable about the ability of characters in recent Steven Spielberg films to survive. Thrown, bashed, lodged, stretched – they always come out with nary a bruise. Of course, this is no different to the action films of many other directors, but there is a delight and glee in Spielberg’s work of the dangerous robbed of danger. He only executive produces Eagle Eye (the directing duties left to the beige DJ Caruso), but his fingerprints are all over the whirling-dervish car pile-ups and conveyor-belt shenanigans – the only difference here is that they make a fiendish kind of sense.

We can maybe believe Jason Bourne’s survival through numerous collisions and falls because he has been trained for what may as well be an eternity and has the spatial awareness and physical prowess of a robotic big cat; it frays the imagination when James Bond throws himself into another fight by literally falling off a rooftop in Seville, smashing through a glass skylight and landing with a lucky thud on internal scaffolding; when Jerry Shaw, the hero at the heart of Eagle Eye, is told to jump from the interior of a car being swung across a dock by a wrecking crane and lands on a passing barge it is completely beyond comprehension. But this film has discovered a canny stand-in for the maniacal demands of a laws-and-physics challenged action-world – Jerry is being guided by someone that knows everything. It knows when the barge will be there, it knows when Jerry needs to jump, it even knows the tone of voice to use to make him leap at the right moment.

The discombobulated voice, portrayed with an amusing matriarchal streak of disapproval by an uncredited Julianne Moore, guides both Jerry and his fellow layperson-caught-in-massive-conspiracy Rachel through car chases, downed power lines, prison breaks and fighter jet attacks, keeping them safe as they drive eighty miles an hour through a busy urban street and somehow don’t crash; she insulates them from the things other action stars avoid through sheer dumb luck (and isn’t one of pleasures of these films the look of staggered bemusement on the hero’s face as the helicopter crashes inches away?). Through this simple conceit, Eagle Eye is able to ratchet up the absurdity of its near misses while also, laughably, giving them the sheen of plausibility.

In other areas to the film goes so far over the top as to launch itself from the planet like some kind of Baudrillard-inspired mockery of modern cinematic disbelief. The parodic casting of bombshell Rosario Dawson as an Air Force Investigator and hard-case Michael Chiklis as a pacifistic Secretary of Defence; the instant “witty” banter between the young leads thirty seconds after they meet and in the midst of fleeing several dozen police agencies; the grandly incomprehensible plot which shoehorns in Islamic terrorism in the most bizarre manner possible; yet all these pale in comparison with the race-against-time finale, which (seriously) involves preventing a ten year old playing a musical instrument. Thankfully, lead Shia LaBeouf has the right look of stern panic for this kind of business (the same cannot be said of the oddly drifting Michelle Monaghan), and the script is smart enough to keep him in the dark and obeying perverse orders for much more of the running time than one would expect.

It’s certainly not for everyone, and I find it hard to conceive of a situation when I would excitedly sit down to watch it again, but the very disposability and inconsequence of Eagle Eye may be part of the point, and perhaps supremely ridiculous fictions such as these will serve as a kind of tonic and re-adjust the focus of solid Hollywood fare away from exhausted trope of dangling, landing, lithe American bodies and back towards something with an investment in character and an awareness of the unpleasantness of injury, rather than the glamour of its narrow escape. Then again, perhaps not.

Nobody Politic: A Review of ‘Body of Lies’

Like the son I never really had an opinion one way or the other about: the script by William Monahan for Body of Lies depicts yet another post-Oedipal, woman-free zone of masculine friendships and apathy.

Shortly before departing the house for what turned out to be a private viewing of Body of Lies (evidently even Peckhamplex’s “bargain Tuesdays” have failed to beat the credit crunch, or indeed the lacklustre reviews), I saw the opening segment of the December 1st Daily Show: in it, Jon Stewart and John Oliver discussed the recent terrorist attacks in India, and concluded that the perpetrators were “motherfucking motherfuckers”. This alternative news show, normally quite willing to dig deeper and more acutely than major US news networks, responded emotionally and crudely to the tragedy. Ridley Scott, director of this new but by no means fresh geopolitical thriller, fails to engage either emotionally or intellectually with the subject, and concludes much the same as these pseudo-journalists, only without the slight hint of grace required to illicit laughs in light of a massacre.

It is difficult to in the film down, it spins away in so many lacklustre directions. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a CIA operative in Iraq who is frequently mis-handled by Russell Crowe’s overweight strategist back in Langley. Between them they manage to balls up seemingly every operation they come into contact with, preferably utilising missile-laden helicopters. It turns out that, while this sort of thing is permissible in the war zone around Baghdad, it doesn’t fly so well in Amman, where DiCaprio’s Ferris initiates a hesitant yet doomed friendship with the self styled king of Jordanian intel. As the script later spells out, trust is the overriding factor in cross-cultural co-operation involving Arab nations and organisations, and Uncle Sam seems inherently unable to show all his cards.

With the casual detail and atmospherics that come as standard with a Scott production (from either brother, for that matter), it is at first a pleasure to watch an Iraq depicted as a real place, rather than the dramatic borderland of DePalma’s Redacted, or the bomb-stricken dysfunctional state viewed nightly on BBC news. However, the more destinations the film visits, the more they each feel the same, as though every Middle Eastern country had the same roads, architecture, bakeries, and slums. For all the absurdity of James Bond’s latest sojourn around the globe, at least every place he visited felt alive with its own customs, weather, people, and even introductory font. The people moving in front of this background don’t liven it up much either: protagonist Ferris orchestrates his existence as if he is writing the screenplay of the film himself, while Crowe’s Analyst Ed Hoffman serves little purpose than to provide a counter-image of America: the packaged sushi-eating bad father to DiCaprio’s do-gooding cultural nomad (although, if he loves the Middle East so much and has worked there so long, why does he make such rookie mistakes as offering a new inamoratas his hand to shake while being watched by so many purist locals?).

Amongst the anonymous score by Marc Streitenfeld and unremarkable Pietro Scalia editing, one of the few pleasures to be had is Mark Strong’s performance as Jordanian intelligence chief Hani. Walking a fine line between several cliché characterisations, all of them a million miles away from each other, he lends dramatic weight and intellectual curiosity (if not believability) to all scenes in which the character features. William Monahan’s script fails to provide the same taste and refinement for the other characters, while the narrative he crafts follows a similar sons-impressing-their-father’s trajectory as his work on Kingdom of Heaven and The Departed, but is tellingly free from the bracingly unique statements of personality and individual identity that made those so sly and rewarding.

The film is watchable enough, and were it a movie of the week imported to this country from HBO, it would be little more than an uninteresting diversion. However, with the calibre of much of the talent, and the indication from many of those involved from previous projects that they have an interest and sensitivity towards a more compelling and progressive depiction of geopolitics than one finds in the latest Bruckheimer production, Body of Lies is a sore and unwarranted disappointment.

Confirming Suspicions: A Review of 'Max Payne'

The Unbearable Boredom of Characterisation: Wahlberg plays the titular cop like he's sitting down playing the original videogame, only with less emoting.

It snows a lot in New York. Unless it’s raining (and then it’s raining a lot). Or if it’s in a caramel-tinted flashback where the dipping sun seems to be positioned just outside every window of happy, family-oriented detective (!) Max Payne’s house. But this glowing, treacle-like existence was a long-time ago, and now Mr Payne is a tortured soul, the city around him evoking his emotional and spiritual frostbite with oodles of pathetic fallacy. Emphasis on the pathetic.

Yes, we’re firmly in hollowed-out-dour-renegade-cop territory with Max Payne, based on the apparently very successful videogame of the same name. As with other such adaptations, the film succumbs to a workmanlike hyper-kineticism and a forgettable blue-black-chrome colour palette which, originally an invocation of ‘serious’ drama, has now been appropriated into the realm of cheap teenage thrills (recent exhibits being Shoot Em Up and Death Race). In fact, much the same slippage could be applied to star Mark Wahlberg, a man not serviced well by playing characters without a sense of humour and constrained to keep their lingo suitable for a 12-certificated crowd.

Investigating his family’s massacre, as well as the subsequent disembowelment of several other unremarkable characters, Wahlberg’s Max Payne uncovers a dangerous pharmaceutical designed for application within the military which turns you into either an invincible super-soldier or leads to the taker suffering visions of apocalyptic fire and brimstone (memories of Constantine’s similarly digital hell-on-Earth). These hallucinations, all swooping devils and searing sparks, occasionally pull a viewer from their stupor, but in making both the screeching judgement day and everyday New York equally stylised and embellished the film surrenders its most original conceit to the deadening onslaught of plot-predictability and slow-motion shotgun blasts (the latter of which continue over the closing credits, magnified to fill the entire screen, the much smaller actor’s names indicating something of a hierarchy of priorities). One need only look to the upcoming Franklyn to see how the wildly strange can mix with a brittle everyday existence far more effectively.

Featuring some unfortunate acting from those from some perversely cast actors (true, we might not expect better from Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to discover anyone desperate for the return of Chris O’Donnell to our screens, while at least Beau Bridges has the excuse of following in his brother’s recent Iron Man footprints), Max Payne seems like a labour of apathy for all those involved, a tired and unnecessary film walking glumly down a well-worn path.

Losing Yourself: A Review of 'Franklyn'

'It's not you it's me' - Franklyn depicts four very different world views, all of them fantastical and embellished in their own way.

A little over an hour into Franklyn, things start to becomes clearer, if not entirely make sense; strands which seemed disparate unexpectedly link up, and earlier events which seemed disconnected turn out to have everything in the world to do with each other. It’s a rewarding moment, the pieces of the puzzle falling into place, but it also carries with it the whiff of screenwriter contrivance: in the world which has been presented to us, it seems a far more honest conclusion would involve those links remaining tantalisingly out of reach.

The four story-strands themselves are all interesting in their own right: a father looking for his lost son, a suicidal college student trying to communicate to herself, a yuppie having a jab of nostalgia after being ditched at the altar, and a masked vigilante in a strange metropolis of religious zeal and towering church spires called Meanwhile City.

The latter is certainly the most immediately arresting, gothic visual clutter lifted from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil mixing with what seems like a semi-parody of Wachowski vigilantism. Ryan Phillippe also manages to sketch deeper insight into his character than the bizarre facial accessory and ornate production design around him would seem to allow.

It is part of the success of Franklyn that this nether-world becomes less captivating in comparison with the other, seemingly more mundane stories the more they are all fleshed out. Eva Green’s frustratingly egocentric Emilia becomes increasingly sympathetic despite the odds being stacked against her, before Bernard Hill’s seemingly dead-end story evolves into a quiet tragedy all of its own. It’s a shame, then, that Mark Riley’s pining romantic never quite convinces, his part in the dramatic crux of the film edging too close to mawkish astrological pre-ordainment.

The director describes the film as a ‘modern fairytale for cynical times,’ and it certainly carries a hard edge to it. Dealing with abandoned, abused, and psychologically unhinged individuals, it is successful for the most part in pulling an audience into four different visions of the world, all of them seriously skewed and – in their own way – shockingly self-involved. Whilst the conclusion suggests that such egocentrism can be all too obliquely solved by external agents of unknown origin, Franklyn nonetheless deals with some compelling themes and, if not transcends then certainly side-steps being overly derivative.

Faithless Hearts: A Review of 'Appaloosa'

Shooting the breeze: Appaloosa plays by its own rules, but, if challenged to, probably couldn't tell you what those were.

What on earth is ‘Appaloosa’? This difficult question concerns the viewer long after the opening moments of the film, which establish Appaloosa to be the name of a small town of 1881 in dire need of some law and order to counter the bathetic violence of local tradesmen Mr Bragg, and it lingers into the closing credits, with their strange whiskey-advert aesthetics of soft American rock over tactile, almost haptic images of Western lore. This film both stars and is directed by the great actor Ed Harris, and it’s everything one would expect the man not to be: quirky, inconsistent, and overly concerned with matters of the heart.

Appaloosa gets the heroes it deserves in the shape of Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, who immediately begin to shoot any man not conforming to the new laws they have themselves put into affect. However, their arrival is concurrent with that of Ali, a prettily formed widow who catches the eye of the steady-handed and inexpressive Cole. Whilst her presence could never be described as the linchpin of the drama (no matter what the final voiceover tries to convince us) it is from her that the film seems to harvest all its most striking ideas. Though it is Bragg’s arrest by Hitch and Cole and his inevitable escape which forms the backbone of the story, Ali’s responses to the ebbing and flowing of this masculine tide leave the strongest mark.

Ignorant to the blunt social portraiture of James Mangold’s 3.10 To Yuma recent remake, the single-minded methodology of Kevin Costner’s Open Range or even – and most unexpectedly – the moral mire of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, Appaloosa begins a strange beast and only becomes more odd as it goes on, edging dangerously close to absurdist parody at times. This ever-present sense of humour is by turns spiky and soft, simple and high-minded, and reminds one at times of Sergio Leone’s cock-eyed view of the American frontier. Almost upended by these laughs, the film is nonetheless able to sneakily express a deeply unsettling image of American humanity and a highly cogent undercutting of Western mythos: corruption is endemic, genderless, and such a part of human character that it lugs around no sombre somnambulism nor visual viciousness, instead being a rarely negotiable and ever-present obstacle to one’s own advancement.

Despite this agenda, the film is certainly not immune to providing some of the expected generic pleasures, albeit with twists: the one gunfight of any substance is thrillingly built-up to in a beautiful Mexican town, a saxophone stretching itself out on the soundtrack in anticipation: although, when the shooting happens, it lasts the blink of an eye (Hitch comments ‘that was fast,’ Cole laconically replies ‘yeah, they could shoot.’) White picket fences and references to European trade make an appearance, but the most affecting expression of the suppression and taming of the frontier occurs on a verbal level, as characters vie with each other to express themselves with as much circumlocution as possible and ensure that laws, no matter how hastily assembled, are written down before they are enacted (even though, as Cole says, legality is just a way of making him feel better about what he would likely do anyway).

What is Appaloosa, then? It is an experience which, for the most part, absolves Renée Zellweger of her cinematic crimes to date, as she delivers an earthy and air-headed yet somehow gracious performance as the widow Ali. It is also a perilously complex re-evaluation of Western cliché which remains, for much of its running time, regrettably uninvolving, despite its strengths. Finally, Appaloosa (the town and the film) is a literate place in which expediency, companionship and consistency are all examined, and seen to be as bafflingly absurd as each other.