Amy (2015)

Amy is a special example of the art of making yourself scarce; something that director Asif Kapadia is exceptionally good at. He makes a few delicate choices about how to present a story, spends the right amount of patience interviewing the right people, and then simply presents his findings in a smartly edited collage of memory and sentiment.

Amy is a picture of the life of throwback jazz chanteuse Amy Winehouse. It is constructed entirely from archive footage, giving it a very naturally progressing arch which begins with pre-fame home video footage, moves to the TV interviews and concert footage of 2003-2007 and finally ends in the news reports and paparazzi blitz that defined Winehouse’s final years.

The images are anchored by the voices of Winehouse’s family, friends and colleagues, all of whom delivering the honesty and insight that only comes with a microphone and the hours of patience that Kapadia clearly invested in the project. These interviews – and the editing of them – are the gem at the centre of the film. Full of people trying to forgive themselves, they drip with desperation and helplessness.

Gratefully, the film neglects to tell us how great Winehouse’s voice was, instead choosing to show it through studio footage and unheard versions of overplayed hits. Lyrics scrawl themselves across the screen as the songs underscore recollections of the events about which they were written. Kapadia’s prime interest is the words of Winehouse’s songs and he revels in the fact that they are autobiographical enough to use as a contributing narrator of the documentary from beyond the grave.

The skill of the film is founded in pure juxtaposition. Almost every image on screen has been broadcast on television before but place one thing next to another and haze it in an interview with an old friend together with a well-placed lyric and it starts breathing sad truths. As with all documentaries, the brain recalculates what it feels to be accurate by cross-referencing what this person said with that person and how that adds or subtracts to what is seen.

Beyond the veracity of the mish-mash of accounts, what the film evokes is a simple grief at a life lived and lost under the super-surveillance of our age’s voracious media frenzy. That it does this without resorting to any kind of sugarcoating just makes it all the more vibrant.

Jurassic World (2015)

I never fell in love with a Spielberg film. It’s difficult however, not to foster a respect for his filmmaking formula when films like Jurassic World roll around – films that beg to be as cohesive a heartstring tugger as E.T, as expertly manipulative as Indiana Jones but fall way short due to lack of care and imagination. Unluckily for it, Jurassic World suffers from having the $1 billion-grossing classic, Jurassic Park (1993) as its ancestor, a solid, well-organised film that does what it does excellently.

The story here is very much the same. Humans have made a theme park full of genetically engineered dinosaurs, the dinosaurs get out and there’s lots of death while everyone evacuates and the threat is neutralised. Many motifs/scenes from the original film are ruthlessly re-exploited:

• There are two parentless kids. There’s a man, there’s a woman and there’s sexual tension between them as they fall into the roles of surrogate parents for the children.
• There’s a big establishing shot of the park with that brassy 5-note theme.
• There’s a bit where a crazy “chaotician” warns us with glee that any control humans imagine they have over dinosaurs is an illusion.
• There’s a bit of hiding under cars and a bit of cowering in cars and a crunch of teeth on a vehicle roof.
• There’s a bit of “hey, you might’ve pushed science a bit too far.”

Spielberg’s original was all about the tech. There really wasn’t much besides running away from dinosaurs because there wasn’t room for anything else. What makes it a bit of an anomaly in Spielberg’s canon is that it sacrificed satisfying character development for the sake of thrilling animatronic puppets – a strange stroke of genius, a choice that focused its concerns solely on being a thrilling ride. Jurassic World, however, suffers a crisis of confidence, assuming that “Wow! Dinosaurs!” isn’t enough for a 2015 audience. That’s the only explanation for the jarring amount of token storylines ignited and then abandoned or awkwardly under resolved in deference to the main issue of Running Away from Dinosaurs.

The subject most criminally raised and discarded is the impending divorce of the boys’ parents (who we see only in short scenes that bookend the movie). Spielberg loves divorced children in his adventure movies; he loves taking them on a journey towards accepting their situation by learning to look after themselves. They work through their domestic problems by being involved in lots of thrilling stuff and come out stronger as a result.

But here, children run from danger, hide from danger, and have it defeated around them. By adults – by male adults – while the female lead quails with them in a van, sitting in its passenger seat, shielding them from watching dashboard-based battle updates. “Your boyfriend is badass!” they squeal as Owen roars by on a motorbike. She smiles and that’s that – the film has betrayed its young characters. The children end up props. Props for the love story and props for Claire’s lesson: ‘tone down your ambition and make more time in your work schedule for spending time with family’ – a dubious lesson and one more forced than learned anyway.

Jurassic Park earned a bomb, Jurassic Park re-released in 3D earned a bomb and no one who wants more money could argue against re-realising the exact same film but with more people in the way of the dinosaurs and all the latest CGI, 3D and IMAX technologies to animate them (the dinosaurs, not the people.) Jurassic World is pretty terrible but (sigh) pretty entertaining. I do enjoy watching prehistoric beasts wreaking havoc as much as the next person. I’d just rather this film didn’t pretend to care about its characters and their lives when it can’t afford to.

“Wow! Dinosaurs!” gets you a long way, even now.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

The idea of a relentless thrust through 2 hours of near-silent cinema with laconic characters who let the cars do the snarling is an enticing one, one that sets its own challenge. How can a film maintain its momentum when every scene is an explosive set piece, stacked-up against the last and precision-engineered to top whatever came before? The fuel needs to be pure and Mad Max: Fury Road certainly draws its own world with a set of bold visual ideas followed through to their absurd conclusions. It’s a great starting point.

Max is the least capable of the heroes we’re bound to. His initial attempts to escape the clutches of the weird-faced tyrant Immortan Joe are easily thwarted and he is still being used as an unwilling blood donor (strapped to the front of a car) even when the film is well on the road. He can’t shoot straight, nor is he particularly adept a driver as far as we can tell. Agency belongs to the females of the piece, in particular Imperator Furiosa whose journey back to the ‘green land’ of her youth provides the film its narrative arch. However, that Max is the eponym – and not Furiosa – rather highlights his philosophy “hope is a mistake” amid all this elusive struggling towards a better place. The film needs to pretend itself a direction, hence the diversionary storyline of Furiosa and the Wives that we, and Max himself, are riding with. But by having the directionless hero at its centre, the hero whose only drive is survival, its makers have nailed their colours to the darker corner of this dystopian nightmare. Hope is a mistake.

The more I think about it, the more I realise that I liked the film despite sometimes feeling on the wrong end of one of its blood transfusions. Everything about its design is immaculately cohesive, from the ridiculous teal/orange colour grading to the grinding gears and grinning martyrs that populate its fiery dust storms. It is a singular vision and gloriously female-led at times. The only problem, on the first viewing, is pacing. 2 hours 10 minutes of this stuff is too exhausting – it mars the final half hour of the film, which in any case is a kind of journey home that should have begun at its midpoint anyway. The editing of the action is expertly done, but add a little more punctuation here and there and we’re laughing (maniacally into the void). ((With silver spray-painted mouths.))

Inherent Vice (2015)

It has me going back because I’m after what Doc is after and none of us know what that is.

We must be getting somewhere.

The camera movement is telling us as much. Slow push-ins over minutes-long conversations imply the truth is just around the corner if only we follow the leads that this guy is giving us. And the leads that follow those leads.

1970 LA is the perfect time and place for a noir. Hippiedom is over. What about it that can be used to sell stuff is being rapidly assimilated into popular culture, whether that be a buzzword like groovy, a fashion choice like shoulder-length hair or a recreational drug like the weed that Doc’s nemesis, LAPD Detective Bigfoot Bjornsen, quaffs at the film’s coda. Anything else countercultural is disposable as a creeping paranoia sweeps through the Californian beach communities soon to be demolished and replaced by high-rises.

If anything makes sense, it’s that a stoner would be trying to make sense of his place in a world on the cusp of leaving him behind.

Inherent Vice drips and aches nostalgia. That’s where it starts and that’s where it lands. Everything that happens in between is a magic trick, precision-engineered to entice you into a riddle you think you can solve even though one jigsaw piece is always missing. Then at your wit’s end, you’re abandoned, and you’re Doc, and you might walk out of the cinema but Paul Thomas Anderson has you where he wants you. Turns out you weren’t here to work out whodunit but to spend 150 minutes feeling both warm and sad and not knowing why.

And you can break it down technically, if you like. You can examine the direction, cinematography, costume, music and performances and find it flawless, if you like. But once you add it back up again, there’s always something extra, extra and elusive, that wasn’t on the ingredients list.

It has me going back and back because I don’t know what it is.

Into the Woods (2015)

The thing about musicals is that they’re melodramatic. I’m not their biggest fan but, the way I understand it, the conceit is this: emotional things happen and excitement swells until the characters involved just cannot keep from spontaneously exploding with all of their joy and sadness into song. Which is fine. I mean, it’s weird, but every genre has its rules, so fine.

When they work on stage, the best musicals have big characters brimming with melodrama. This is partly so audiences on the back row can see what’s going on (and partly because the songs have to be justified somehow). On film, you don’t need to be so big. You have to find ways of communicating the brash audacity of a stage show with devices particular to the medium. That’s how Les Miserables (2012) worked; that’s how Sweeney Todd (2007) worked. Both of these films feel like films. Rob Marshall’s Into the Woods feels like a filmed musical, a throwaway money-spinner.

Les Mis was big in that its characters maintained the melodrama of the stage and were then knowingly filmed in portrait-style close-ups to give audiences a perspective they could never have even sitting on the front row in a theatre. That’s really smart.

Sweeney Todd was big in that, in the hands of a gothic auteur, it was drenched in the visual language of a silent movie and injected with pace by a man who knows a few things about cutting.

As with adapting novels, so with adapting musicals. You won’t offend anyone by blandly covering all the angles and making sure the actors read the script and sing the songs. But it takes a bolder attitude to make it a worthwhile endeavor. The wit of Sondheim and his distinctively angular vocal lines will always be a pleasant thing to sit through but that’s where the good time ends. As a film, Into the Woods just feels exhausting and unnecessary.

The Imitation Game (2014)

“Normal? The world is an infinitely better place precisely because you weren’t.”

That is The Imitation Game in a nutshell. The biopic sets out to reaffirm Alan Turing’s key contribution towards solving Germany’s enigma code during World War II as well as his importance in the field of modern computing. This comes in the wake of very recent royal and governmental pardons for Turing’s 1952 conviction for homosexual acts which arguably led to his suicide two years later.

Turing is painted as a man who measured all communication, even human conversation, in mathematical terms. Indeed many early scenes are built around the punchline that Turing cannot understand puns and jokes. Ironically, for a film about the incomprehension of subtextual language, it is incredible how superficial its dialogue is.

The script is hammy and ridden with clanging sentiments, so much so that the first ten minutes are almost funny because of it. But however ridiculous the lines are, it is equally ridiculous how this problem melts away as the film progresses. At first I thought the writing might be improving but eventually became convinced that I was in fact simply settling into the rhythm of the film and its primary focus – story. And most importantly: telling its story through events rather than believable verbal exchanges.

Because actually, from a structural standpoint, the film is simply immaculate. Every dramatic incident is correctly placed, every scene serves the whole. There is no doubt that a careful plotting of its key moments would produce a line graph with a flawlessly symmetrical arch. I suppose this is apposite for a film about a mathematical genius.

Its central themes of man and machine, secrets and revelation, games and codes, intertwine impressively neatly. We are compelled, at all times, to focus on the parallels between Turing’s work and his private life and his anguish in marrying the differences (and similarities) between scientific formulae and social convention.

The film is all about Turing – Utterly All. About. Turing – and reinstating his reputation at the cost of the depth of any other character involved in his story. The more the film admits it – and everything from the voiceover narration of his own life to the subtitles at the film’s end demonstrates how much it understands itself – the less problematic it gets. The true story is juicy and the film squeezes all of that juice out in just the right way as to make it deeply satisfying.

Helping it along its way is the cast. Benedict Cumberbatch is predictably brilliant; we all know he does sociopath extremely well, but he also rises to deliver the overt emotional gestures that a biopic like this asks for. Deserving of as much praise, perhaps more so for effectively masking much of the script’s problems, are the supporting cast. The likes of Keira Knightley (woefully underused and starved of depth), Mark Strong (always reliable) and Matthew Goode inject just enough life into parts written essentially as ornamental caricatures to elevate what the film considers peripheral into the realms of interesting and beneficial.

I’m a huge fan of careful dialogue and an enemy of unnecessary exposition. As such, I was shocked at how much I enjoyed The Imitation Game. While there will always be a niggling unease at a film that eschews the small matter of three-dimensional characters in favour ‘bigger’ concerns, in this case it is as a result of conscious choice rather than sheer incompetence. I wonder if its makers purposefully attempt to make it as difficult for themselves to understand human behavior as it is suggested Turing did.

More than forgiving the film its flaws, I actually marvel at it and still need to mull over exactly how it pulls off its trick. Not to be underestimated, I think, is how enjoyable it is simply to learn about the achievements at Bletchley Park, which had to be kept secret for so long. The story of Enigma is still fairly fresh, and an important part of history that many of us are still eager to learn about.

As for the film’s depiction of its hero – while the amount of conspicuous reverence bestowed upon Turing borders on worship, this is probably the right way to tell his life story at this point in history. This is a man whose royal pardon only came less than a year ago, an apology that can never really make amends for Turing’s abominable treatment at the hands of the country he helped save.

As Turing’s life and work is reassessed, eventually a grittier account of his life will surface and will likely be more nourishing when it arrives. For now, The Imitation Game begins the process admirably.

Nightcrawler (2014)

It’s difficult to find much information about Nightcrawler’s writer/director Dan Gilroy. With only a handful of writing credits to his name during a career spanning over 20 years he appears both a seasoned veteran and a green upstart. Whatever explains his trajectory in the industry, it led to this film – so it can’t be bad.

Utilising the intense nocturnal-ness that made his performances in Donnie Darko and Zodiac so striking, Jake Gyllenhaal stars as sociopath Louis Bloom, a creepy autodidact intent on cashing in on television news’ insatiable lust for bloody stories with which to terrify audiences and therefore drive up ratings. Armed with a police radio and a video camera, Bloom trawls the night, seeking out violent crime and horrific accidents, often arriving on the scene before the emergency services. Once capturing the debris on film (at any cost), he sells the footage to a news broadcaster just in time to make their breakfast show.

Gyllenhaal gives the performance of his career. He makes Bloom a magnetic anti-hero. What he captures best is the drive and ambition of his character, causing us to be awkwardly awestruck at how passionate he pursues his depraved goals. This, along with the narrow-minded subjectivity of the direction (that’s a good thing), invites us to get behind Bloom and – as the stakes get higher – subconsciously wince when the obstacles stack up against him and smirk with guilty glee when he gets his way.

All 3 central characters are drawn well. It was no surprise to me to learn that the first-time director is an experienced writer. Although this is Gyllenhaal’s moment and he’ll be the one touted for awards, it cannot be denied that both Rene Russo, who plays news director Nina, and Riz Ahmed, who plays Bloom’s protégé Rick, match the leading man at every step with skilled and detailed performances. They deliver characters that are designed for us to measure Bloom’s mental state against. Just how abnormal is he in a world that was already amoral before he entered it?

The reason that Russo and Ahmed’s performances might fly under the radar has something to do with how attractive constructed Lou Bloom’s dialogue is. This is a man who doesn’t let the qualms of others get in the way of his own eloquence and quick wit. Bloom is sharp, he never takes his eye of the ball and Gilroy has a field day with his lines, feeding Gyllenhaal consistently tasty paragraphs, all of which he delivers with those unnervingly bright eyes.

The film is shot as nicely as it is written. For a debut director, it can’t have hurt to be telling a story about a man whose life mission is to meticulously frame the subjects he is capturing on camera; it must have kept Gilroy as focused as his main character. Especially impressive is the ebb and flow of pace during the film’s climactic scenes which is what keeps them thrilling for longer. Some of the personal scenes involving Bloom alone might have been handled a little slower but that’s as much my taste as anything.

It’s a really good film, one of the best of the year.

Under the Skin (2013)

The film opens with a sequence of measured shots, slowly revealing a Kubrickian blackdrop into which colour and shape are birthed over the swirling dissonance of an atonal minimalist score. Reminiscient of 2001, it is a hypnotising draw which expertly settles the brain’s waves into the rhythm of the following 2 hours.

We follow the dispassionate exploits of an alien dressed in a Scarlett Johansson suit whose mission it seems is to ensnare the men of Scotland in a gloopy black honey trap.

The pattern of seduce and destroy is presented in two styles. The first takes the form of a hidden camera documentary in which Johansson crawls the urban kerbs of Scottish cities in her white transit van, soliciting the conversation of unsuspecting members of the public who really were unsuspecting members of the public. It was only once lured into the van that the director Jonathan Glazer briefed the men about the conceit and hired those willing to be a part of the film to take part in the second of the film’s styled scenes in which Johansson takes her victims into a kind of parallel universe and leads them backward into the sticky black abyss where, one assumes, they are either preserved for study by her alien race or just eaten.

I really liked the film. It is slow but it is involving. Johansson’s performance succeeds in the same way David Bowie’s had to in The Man Who Fell To Earth. Her job is to demonstrate a range of ‘emotion’ through blank glances and the stilted misunderstood movements of her alien’s new human shell. Subtler than a silent movie, the measure of her success is how clearly she conveys the alien’s progression from ruthless efficiency through sympathy and towards eventual depression with very little acting tools allowed.

The direction is beautiful, never losing the measured purpose of the opening sequence. Scotland feels desolate and inviting. It’s a cold film and your engagement with it will creep up on you; that’s how it functions. By giving you a limited ‘way in’, the connection you eventually make with the film is a firm one.

Blue Jasmine (2013)

The Woody Allen archetype is one of the most lucid cinematic creations of the last 50 years. It is the big screen extension of Allen’s early stand-up career, the neurotic ramblings of which crossed over successfully onto his filmic characters, drawing knowing laughs from the nervous-wreck component in the psyche of everyone who saw them. Often – especially in his early films – Allen would play these characters himself but, even when deciding to remain behind the camera, fast-talking anxiety-ridden anti-heroes still pepper his work.

Plenty of darkness follows these characters through their tribulations and Allen has always laced shades of tragedy through the scripts he writes – his most celebrated style is a kind of gloomy light-heartedness – but nothing of his I’ve seen explores the back story and motivations of his muse with as much mastery and depth as Blue Jasmine.

The film essentially grabs the psychological turmoil of his lead, Jasmine Francis, from the incidental and thrusts it right into the spotlight before examining it at close quarters. Cate Blanchett is compelling as the eponymous character who is forced into taking refuge in the home of her adopted sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), when her life as a New York socialite married to an obscenely wealthy financier (Alec Baldwin) crumbles as a result of her husband’s downfall and disgrace. There is comedy of course, but this rather seeps through the tragedy rather than vice versa.

Jasmine is at once a terrifying and immensely sympathetic character, eliciting grimaces from the audience the deeper she digs her holes. On the surface, she has an honest effort at rebuilding her life, working thanklessly as a dentist’s receptionist to support her computer classes which she takes with a view to becoming an interior designer. Nevertheless her neuroses won’t yield and, simply unable to adjust to a life lower down in the socio-economic scale, she aids her own mind’s disintegration with a dependency on Xanax and alcohol which deepens the more face she tries to save. (The exact nuances of a person lonely and depressed and how consummately Allen and Blanchett observe them deserve to be written about at length and in depth and hopefully have been/will be elsewhere.)

In the score, the familiar lounge jazz of many Woody Allen films dovetails between scenes in a way anempathetic to Jasmine’s plight but sometimes coming across as a sigh at the inevitability of her decline.

I see three tones balanced impeccably throughout the film, the first is the drama/tragedy that impels the narrative, second is comedy and third is horror. In a way, Blue Jasmine really is a horror film and the laughs are served up and indulged in as a reaction to the terror of losing one’s mind, catching in the throat as soon as they rise. My favourite scene demonstrates this powerfully. Jasmine sits in a café babysitting her two nephews and begins (as she often does) drunkenly drifting into a monologue as if the boys were not present. They sit open-mouthed as she waxes on about the song ‘Blue Moon’ and her life’s ambitions. Suddenly she is present and advises the boys to be generous when they become wealthy. When they respond “mom said you used to be OK but then you got crazy”, the look on her face is more terrifying than her wide-eyed Galadriel close-up in The Fellowship of the Ring with none of that moment’s surprise factor needed. As she finishes “there’s only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the streets and start screaming” the audience’s reaction is a confused mixture of laughter, tears and recoil. That response adequately sums up the film.

July Catch-up Part 1: The Bling Ring & Now You See Me

These two would make a neat double bill on the theme of superficiality. Both deal with appearance and illusion and as such, both leave themselves immediately open to criticism for being somewhat empty and insubstantial films. One of them could actually make a case for being an engaging study of vacuous people; the other, however, is essentially vacuous in and of itself.

The film I’m being fairly positive about is The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola’s heist drama based on the real-life exploits of a group of affluent teenagers who burgled the unlocked homes of Hollywood’s most fashionable celebrities repeatedly over a year-long period beginning in October 2008.

Considering the goldmine of themes that Coppola has the opportunity to exploit and examine, she has little to say in either support or condemnation of the annoying gang of thing-obsessed youngsters at the heart of her film. The script is saturated with so much “like”s “totally”s and “oh my God”s that there is barely enough room for any dialogue that means anything. We learn little about the motives of the perpetrators, see nothing of their pasts that might shed some light on their characters, in fact see nothing beyond the artifice of their shallow concerns. Coppola refuses to be drawn on whether the bling ring are victims of a society obsessed with fame and shiny objects or simply opportunists looking for expensive stuff and an adrenaline rush.

The direction is stylised for sure, with notable heavy use of slow motion which serves to glorify the great time everyone is having. My favourite shot is a static wide (probably filmed from a helicopter) of a huge Hollywood house which is entered by the two leaders of the group, Rebecca and Marc who rifle through their victims belongings, pack their spoils into bags and exit – all in the space of around 2 minutes.

The cast consist of several solid debut performers, with Katie Chang and Israel Broussard being particularly impressive in their first outing. Inevitably, much of the spotlight falls on Harry Potter megastar Emma Watson but – as in The Perks of Being a Wallflower ­last year – she continues to defy the washed-out-ex-child-actor stereotype posting another accomplished portrayal. Her character Nicki Moore has the arrogant swagger at the film’s core and, although she has little screen time compared to some of the others, her presence is a strong adhesion in the group scenes and pure deadpan in the press interview scenes.

However much you might want The Bling Ring to be a bit harsh on someone or something, it isn’t a biting satire. It isn’t a eulogy to glamour either. Clearly Sofia Coppola has made a vapid film in order to depict vapid lifestyles – which is almost a get out of jail free card… as such, it’s difficult to praise or criticise the film beyond saying that her approach is probably the right one. It’s about nothing and has nothing to say about characters who live for glitzy nothings. And that probably says everything.

***

Now for Now You See Me which centres on four illusionists/con-artists (Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher and Dave Franco) whose massive live shows appear to drain the biggest bank vaults of the world and spit the stolen money out into the grateful audience. With the authorities on their tails desperate to prove them as criminals, ‘the Four Horsemen’ – as they dub themselves – put on shows of ever increasing size and ambition. The film is constantly building momentum towards… something… Whatever it is, we never really have it defined for us and by the time the film works itself out, everything ends and a soldered-on denouement offers a tedious explanation, leaving us feeling as empty and unconvinced as a film can.

Riffing on the theme of performance magic and hiring various Christopher Nolan regulars, the film has heavy pretensions of being something like The Prestige – one of the best films there is – but comes nowhere close.

In The Prestige, when Michael Cane says something mysterious about the psychology of magic, it is then backed up by an absorbing array of film trickery and breathtaking narrative misdirection all of which ties plot, character and atmosphere into something approaching the best film of the 00s. In Now You See Me, when Morgan Freeman says something mysterious like “the more you think you see, the easer it’ll be to fool you” or “the closer you think you are, the less you’ll actually see”, what then happens is a few special effects, magic show audiences then say “wow” in an attempt to make the cinema audiences say “wow” and eventually we’re all wowing at how little anything ties together.