mick-137 Reviews

A Quiet Place (2018)

Dumb show

[3/10 · 20 August 2018]

The narrative premise of this film is brilliant---the characters are forced to remain silent, so the audience has to work out most of the background and exposition for themselves. And there are some nice touches, such as the resolutely unlooted vending machine full of potato chips in the supermarket.

So you're brain is constantly engaged in working out what's going on--for example, that the reason the family are all so fluent in signing is because the daughter is profoundly deaf. But this high level of mental engagement means that you are also constantly spotting the multiple inanities in the plot.

Suspension of disbelief is all very well, but this film mounts such a reletless assault on common sense and logic that it is impossible.

Perhaps best seen a cinema where you too have to remain silent and can't voice or hear an objection every few seconds.

Inherent Vice (2014)

The Big Lebowski meets Chinatown, but they don't get on

[2/10 · 19 November 2017]

It must have seemed like a good idea to translate 1940s noir to the 1970s, replacing Marlowe and his quart of Old Forester with Doc and his quarter of Red Leb. And in the right hands it might have worked.

Sadly it doesn't work here. The film has its moments, but a lot of the devices are too literary to work on the screen. The characters aren't interesting or engaging and there just isn't enough entertainment in the moment by moment unfolding of the plot.

At the end of the film the problem is not so much that you don't know what happened as that you don't care.

Wiener-Dog (2016)

Not very shaggy

[2/10 · 27 August 2016]

To call these stories vignettes would be an exaggeration. The first is the best, as a sickly child learns about mortality through his pet. The dog then plays a peripheral role in a road trip in which the main interest are some gloomy Mexican hitchhikers. How the dog gets to its next owner is glossed over by a self congratulatory intermission which seems to assume the film will achieve cult status. Wee spend some time with a grumpy film professor, then the home straight sees the dog united with an old woman who regrets her her life. And that's it. It's a lot less eventful than this summary suggests and I can't think of a single reason why you should go and see it. You'd learn more about people's lives walking up and down the street for an hour.

Sucker Punch (2011)

Imagine a collaboration between Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch and Paul Verhoeven...

[1/10 · 10 April 2012]

...but instead of a script all they have to work from is the doodles at the back of a fourteen-year-old schoolboy's notebook.

It's very strange to see so much money wasted on such a weak premise: the plot, if that is what you can call it is as follows: misunderstood adolescent girl is incarcerated in a mental asylum by her wicked step- father, but "escapes" by imagining she's a misunderstood adolescent girl incarcerated in a brothel. Where she does interpretative dance while fantasising that she's part of a crack team of scantily-clad steampunk commandos.

Why? One can only surmise that Snyder wanted to make his steampunk- pole-dancing-commando movie but couldn't come up with a plot to fill in between the action sequences. So they were inserted into the brothel scenario, which was then inserted into the asylum bit to make it all look really "deep"--to anyone who was stoned enough.

I'm sure I've seen worse films, but never one that was so pointlessly well filmed.

What Just Happened (2008)

Not much happens

[1/10 · 4 September 2009]

Two weeks in the life of DeNiro, a Hollywood producer struggling with all the usual issues--studio butchering his film, prima donna "English" director(by Keith Richards out of Dick van Dyke). His ex-wife may have moved on and if it all goes wrong he may be positioned too far to the left in the forthcoming Vanity Fair photoshoot.

Sadly there's nothing here that would surprise anyone who's seen any movie ever made about Hollywood (although it all sees to come as a complete shock to the characters in the movie). But on the basis Bruce Willis'turn in the trailer, it looks like we're in for an entertaining if predictable romp full of whacky star cameos and off-the-wall comedy crises.

What we get is an extremely dull and predictable saunter through some very tame situations, and the Bruce Willis cameo--well, that's your lot. No funny scenes, no witty dialogue, just a sort of continual low-level grumpiness, with every plot point made over, and over again.

It's no surprise to learn this was written by a producer, and if listening in to someone grumble about having one of the most glamorous and sought-after jobs in the world is your thing, then go for it. There's a lot about ordering the wrong carpet, and even more about recovering a couch, should your interest flag.

If only this had been directed by someone like Barry Levinson, ho could have injected life and quirky humour into the dialogue and made the ensemble playing sizzle. Oh wait it was. What did just happen?

The Good German (2006)

Third Men Don't Wear Plaid on a Night in Casablanca

[3/10 · 30 September 2008]

Unforgivable pastiche of some infinitely better movies. George Clooney is a journalist sent to cover the 1945 Potsdam conference and in typical movie journalist fashion somehow manages to do no work whatsoever while being drawn into a web of mystery and intrigue. He's possibly the least effectual thriller hero of all time, more Holly Golightly than Holly Martins, and one of the few pleasures the film offers is wondering who will be the next character to jump him from behind and beat him senseless. Will it be the double amputee? The little boy with the bicycle? Absurdities abound, there's unforgivable misuse of narration and all the moody black-and-white photography in the world couldn't make up for a plot more full of holes than the buildings of post-War Berlin. All this could have been redeemed by a bit of chemistry between the leads or some lively pacing but everybody involved seems to be half asleep, possibly numbed into submission by the dreary sub-Elgarian score. The only good thing about this movie is that you leave with a greatly enhanced respect for the skill and sophistication of the bygone filmmakers whose work it so singularly fails to emulate.

American Gangster (2007)

A missed opportunity given the resources assembled

[6/10 · 29 September 2008]

A well-crafted film with great performances, but which lingers on the unimportant details and then strangely rushes the crux of the story. It's a bit like a Grandpa Simpson anecdote. The early sections of the film amble along at the pace of a six-episode TV show, filling in enormous amounts of the characters' back stories, much of which is simply not relevant to the plot. By the time the two main characters lives finally begin to converge, there's no time left to explore how and why their relationship develops the way it does--which is the really interesting part of the story. This has the odd effect of making the denouement, even though it is based on fact, seem somewhat unlikely.

Atonement (2007)

The decadent fag-end of Briitish cinema

[3/10 · 6 August 2008]

Atonement is a sort of compilation of all the besetting sins of British cinema: the obsession with class and sexual repression, the endless retreat to the past, the fetishistic recreation of "period" detail.

The story, such as it is, is about an intense interaction between just three characters. But these lives all but disappear against the backgrounds of teeming London streets, country house vistas and the chaos of Dunkirk. This last scene is both the film's best and worst moment. A triumph in cinematic terms it adds little or nothing to the story and in retrospect is made to look even more of an overblown gesture. Every scene in this movie appears to be aimed at an awards jury--the ordinary viewer can't help feeling a little left out.

The initial conceit of the story--a confused adolescent misinterprets the actions of two adults and ruins their lives--isn't really worked through. Instead the action is driven by a chain of melodramatic and increasingly unlikely coincidences and chance discoveries. Bryony's "atonement", when it comes, is at first overdue and inadequate, and ultimately vastly overdue and incredibly inadequate. Her final reduction of everyone, including herself, to mere characters to be manipulated forms a heartless coda to a heartless film.

McAvoy is his usual superb self, but his foil is today's porcelain clothes horse of choice Kiera Knightley, a sort of stretch limo to Helena Bonham Carter's Mini Cooper. Here she who displays her complete acting range, which basically consists of narrow eyes (icy-but-indifferent) and wide eyes (loyal-and-loving). Ultimately Knightley is a metaphor for the whole film: lovely to look at, well put together but devoid of any meaning.

Layer Cake (2004)

To clever by half.

[6/10 · 17 June 2008]

Yuppie drug dealer XXXX believes he can walk away with his ill-gotten gains but his supplier has some tasks for him to perform. Unsurprisingly enough nothing is what it seems and soon XXXX is running around like a blue-arsed fly trying to keep a variety of plates in the air as Serbian drug-lords, East End crime barons, Scouse pushers and a variety of other low lifes threaten to disrupt his equilibrium. Even with the endless narration it's all a bit much to keep track of, but the film is rescued by fine ensemble acting from a dream cast.

Sadly none if it is very convincing and as the mayhem reaches its climax you realise why real criminals don't behave like this: they'd be too busy robbing, murdering and double-crossing each other to get any crimes done and in six months they'd all be dead. This is a film where everyone's trying to be too clever, both characters and director, and it's a shame because the ingredients are there for a splendid movie.

Still it's easy to see from this why Craig got the Bond role and he could do well to bring a bit more of XXXX to it.

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Another long movie from a short story

[6/10 · 23 May 2008]

Two gay cowboys conduct a long-distance affair over 20 years but fail to get it together or achieve much else in their lives.

Actually they're bisexual shepherds, but let's not quibble.

You can polish off the Proulx short story, write an essay about it and still have time to clean your house in the time Ang Lee takes to bring this one into harbour. It even manages to lumber on for half an hour after the major plot issue is resolved, but the story offers so little hope from the beginning that you've not exactly been on tenterhooks waiting for Ennis and Jack to elope to San Francisco.

They do age well though, probably better than I did during this epic. Ledger becomes a stockier Robert Redford, Gyllenhall into a more muscular John Waters. Sadly we'll never know how one of those guesses worked out in real life. Gyllenhaal is his usual revelatory self, every tic and muscle emanating conflict desire and emotion. Ledger, as the less self-aware character, has less to work with and plays every scene as though he had a sock stuffed in his mouth.

But it's still way too long: Proulx manages to cram a novel's worth of insights and epiphanies into 10,000 carefully chosen words. Lee seems to be making the film's length itself a statement of it's "seriousness" but even though it's a very close and probably over-respectful reading of the story, fails to add anything to it or even capture many of its nuances.

The Wings of the Dove (1997)

Painting over Henry

[6/10 · 16 April 2008]

When the film came out a lot of people commented on the way the adaptation shifted the action forward in time to 1910.I was puzzled too but on re-viewing the film it was clear that this was to enable the filmmakers to draw on the more socially aware painting styles of the time. Essentially Kate and Merton are two people who are stuck in the oeuvre of Walter Sickert and want to move upmarket into Whistler territory. But they fail and are doomed to spend the rest of their lives in squalid Camden Town scenes. Incidentally this means there are artistically valid reasons for Helena Bonham Carter getting her kit off--the final scene is pretty much Sickert's "What Shall We Do for the Rent?" with live actors. While this visual metaphor is superbly played out, it is at the expense of James' intricate verbal edifices. The film grates when anyone opens their mouth: as animated paintings, the characters are literally two-dimensional. This is a film which is at its best when no-one is saying anything, and would have worked much better as a silent movie.

Babel (I) (2006)

Only connect. Or not, in this case

[5/10 · 14 April 2008]

This is in many ways a beautifully photographed and acted film, but fails in its quest to achieve any kind of meaning or significance.

The film attempts to show that we are all intimately connected and our lives interwoven no matter where we live on the planet. Unfortunately, pretty much all the events in the film are driven forward, not by the influence of distant events but by seemingly random by individuals in the film. Characters who have shown that they are reliable and are in positions of trust suddenly start behaving in stupid and dangerous ways for no apparent reason.

Worse, the supposed interconnections between the stories are often slight and imbued with happenstance rather than any sense of tragedy or inevitability. One segment--the Japanese story--is so detached as to be pretty much superfluous and could easily be deleted from the movie.

I can sort of see what the makers wanted this to be, but unfortunately they never got beyond the stage of good intentions.

Velvet Goldmine (1998)

Stunningly fails to evoke period or place, people or process

[1/10 · 11 February 2008]

What happened to popstar Brian Slade after his fake death and fall from grace? Does anyone care? Based on the more salient aspects from the life of David Bowie (bisexual wife, mod beginnings, stage alter-ego) this hollow move signally fails to include any of the aspects that might make such a figure fascinating, or even mildly interesting to fans or intimates. Instead Rhys Meyers' Slade is a total cypher,more Gareth Gates than Ziggy Stardust. Indeed, the whole movie plays as if all the key scenes--the ones that establish the characters and their relationships with each other--have been left out.

The movie is also largely clueless about what '70s Britain was like and how glam rock fitted into it. Labouring under the impression that glam was some kind of countercultural youth movement on a par with punk or even New Romanticism, it misses the only truly curious thing about glam--its mainstream appeal.

Crushingly, that movie also strikes numerous false notes when it comes to the music. Any project of this sort faces a devil's choice between reusing the music of the period or pastiching it. Goldmine attempts both. The reassignment of old Roxy Music, Steve Harley and Brian Eno numbers to news performers jars,and undermines some fine songs. And the original numbers are all complete clunkers. The only time this comes close to working is when the Suzi Quattro clone covers the New York Dolls, and Ewan MacGregor--as Iggy Pop-alike Curt Wild--confusingly gets to do an actual Iggy song.

There are compensations--MacGregor's Iggy impersonation is spot on in everything but physique, and Christian Bale demonstrating again what a cruelly underrated and underused actor he is. But--like Absolute Beginners and Moulin Rouge--the movie is crippled by its own artifice. The attempt to rope in Oscar Wilde as a posthumous dialogue writer makes all the characters into identikit posturing bores. And the regular nods to Citizen Kane only underline how utterly non-enigmatic the howling void at the centre of this movie really is.

The Penalty King (2006)

Life's a bitch and then it goes to penalties

[8/10 · 27 May 2006]

Suffering from the double disability of being both blind and a fervent Leeds United supporter, social worker Lee longs for nothing more to ease the frustrations of daily life than "a damn good kick-about". His unhinged colleague Charlie decides to make his dream come true, and inveigles him onto a local works football team. But will Lee ever get to exercise his preternatural talent for the penalty kick?

"The Penalty King" is an eccentric tale with a dark underside, although still more "Strictly Ballroom" than "Kes". Played by Nick Bartlett as a tightly-wound knot of barely contained aggression, Lee invites neither pity nor sympathy—more the impulse to duck behind a pillar when you see him coming. It's fair to say blindness is the least of his problems.

One senses writer/director Chris Cook went to some pretty dark places in his life for the raw materials for this fable, leading to an unsettling blend of truth and fantasy. For example, the portrait of the dank, dysfunctional social services depot where Lee works is both grotesquely over-the-top and strangely accurate. There's also a depth to the rest of the characters which is unusual in a comedy. Played with relish by a strong supporting cast, they're all pretty much bent or damaged too, and there's a violent and bitter edge to their relationships which undercuts the whimsy.

"Penalty King" might never achieve the crossover success of "Bend it like Beckham" but it still has all the makings of a cult favourite. It may lack a cart-wheeling Keira Knightley, but there are compensations, notably in the shape of the delightful but underused Clare Grogan (as Lee's bossy-boots boss), who still has the ability to make men of a certain age go weak at the knees. Her drunk scenes alone are worth the price of admission.

The film takes its own time to get going, and occasionally over-indulges itself, but can nevertheless sit alongside classics like "Sideways" and "Withnail and I" as an exploration of less creditable sides of the male psyche. An agreeable if not totally uplifting movie then, and, while something of a rough diamond, a gem all the same.

Mystic River (2003)

Flawed attempt at a tragedy

[21 March 2005]

Three men whose lives were marred when one of them was abducted by paedophiles are brought together again when the daughter of one of them is abducted.

This attempt at a sort of modern day Jacobean revengers' tragedy is marred by a complete lack of narrative cohesion. The childhood incident turns out to be less than marginally relevant to the modern-day drama, and there's loads of happenstance and frankly implausible off-stage incident. The resolution is as devoid of significance or meaning as the film's pretentious title.

The film is only held together Sean Penn's performance. Only he could have held together the somewhat surprising evolution of his character from shopkeeper to Shakespearian monster. If he'd started addressing the camera in iambic pentameters I wouldn't have been surprised. Marcia Gay Harden's twitching, eye-popping turn nearly sinks it though--did she think she was in a horror movie. Bacon's performance as a man with no apparent internal life may, or may not be deliberate.

Once again Eastwood serves up a slice of badly-lit gloom, in the (apparently justified) hope that anything downbeat will immediately be hailed as a masterpiece. Hollywood norms may be oppressive, but simply turning the formula upside down does not make for a work of moral complexity or artistic quality.

Million Dollar Baby (2004)

Flawed and therefore overrated

[11 February 2005]

Eastwood's film about a veteran boxing trainer who reluctantly takes on a female fighter starts slowly, builds in excitement, then abruptly runs out of ideas. I won't give away the ending (I've heard that if you do Eastwood comes round and personally beats the crap out of you), but I will say I found it clumsy, contrived and (worst crime) far too drawn out.

The film works fine in the claustrophobic atmosphere of Eastwood's gym, but when Eastwood and Swank move out into the wider world it gets lost. Eastwood is preparing Swank for a world title fight, but where are the promoters, the agents, the TV crews(the fights appear to televise themselves, the lawyers, for goodness sake? Why doesn't anyone offer Swank sponsorship (for example Everlast, who get their logo into every other frame in this movie)? There's a bit where Swank mentions "magazine articles" but we never even see her talking to a fan, let alone a journalist. Her entire career seems to take place in a vacuum, when common sense tells you anyone who looked and performed like her would be an instant media sensation.

The problem seems to be lie with the time-frame of the film. It's nominally set in the near-present (Eastwood waves a VHS cassette at one point) but its heart is in the '40s or '50s, or rather a sort of non-specific past mythical past you get in "The Shawshank Redemption".

There's much to enjoy here in the way of dialogue and cinematography, balanced by some major longeurs and lapses of taste (such as going totally OTT in its determination to stick it to welfare claimants). It's not so very bad, but I can't see where the Oscar nominations are coming from.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

So it was all a Dr.

[6/10 · 17 January 2005]

David Lynch once again shows his immense but ultimately annoying talent for starting any number of fascinating hares and then failing to round any of them them up again. In this tale of an encounter between an ingénue and an amnesiac femme fatale (but which is which?)he clatters along merrily for an hour and a half and is then forced to take a surreal left turn to wind everything up quickly, like a schoolboy caught short writing an exam essay. Is Lynch just another "art" director who thinks he can easily wing it in the low-brow genre of the thriller, only to fall flat on his face? Maybe. But there are some great scenes here too--if Lynch would only learn to discipline himself, to lay down some ground rules and stick with them, he could make films to rival and maybe outclass Tarantino.

The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

Absurd hagiography

[4/10 · 13 January 2005]

This movie couldn't have wallowed any more in ridiculous sentimentality if Che had walked across the river and cured the lepers with his bare hands. If you read the diaries Che's own portrait of himself is much less impressive--he basically comes across as a self-important prig with grandiose dreams but little in the way of guts. This makes him at least a far more honest man than the film makers. You would have thought that after all these years the left would be able to come to terms with the contradictions and shortcomings of its heroes. How did such a bright and idealist young man turn into such a flawed adult? The clues are in the diaries, but you'd never know it from this idealised and idolised portrayal.

This is the film of the Che the bedsit poster, not Che the man.

Lost in Translation (2003)

So much footage, so little film

[1/10 · 12 January 2005]

A disaffected American actor making a whisky commercial in Tokyo teams up with a young American guest in his luxury hotel. As the trailer shows this isn't a bad premise for a film but unfortunately the writer/director has NO idea how to structure a narrative or pace a film. There's not one arresting scene, memorable line of dialogue or three-dimensional character in the whole thing. I may be exaggerating but if you took out all the scenes where someone stared moodily out of the window the thing would probably only last 25 minutes. You will take away from this film the amazing knowledge that people in foreign countries a)do things a little differently and b) often don't speak English. Why either a veteran movie star or a Yale philosophy graduate would be fazed by this I don't know but those remaining 25 minutes would pretty much consist of their slack-jawed astonishment at the antics of those crazy Japanese (who--hold the front page--sing karaoke and can't tell their "Rs" from their "Ls"). The most overrated film since "American Beauty". My wife had to laugh when she saw there was "bonus material" on the DVD. "Bonus to what? There's no movie on there!"

Gangs of New York (2002)

Big hats do mot a great movie make

[10 September 2003]

An orphan returns to the New York gangland of his youth to avenge his father. Unfortunately he cocks up his first go and the return fixture clashes with some riots. Something odd happens to this movie about half-time through. For the first half, for all the bloodshed and slowness, it's a strangely comfortable experience, like getting on a suburban train and finding yourself in a Pullman Car. Even though the pace is slow, you spend the time admiring the sheer quality of the experience. You can even bear the pointless diversion of the Diaz/di Caprio romance...

(Spoiler ahead...) ...then, after Vallon's first attempt on Bill the Butcher's life it all goes pear shaped and horribly rushed (much like, it occurs to me, the latter stages of David Lynch's Dune). After a few applications of the magic sponge by Cameron Diaz, the disfigured and humiliated Vallon gets his looks back and, in a magical evolution, becomes the leader of all the Irish immigrants in New York. Then as the epic draws to its close the whole plot gets eclipsed by the New York draft riots, which seem to have barged in, Blazing Saddles style, from a neighbouring sound stage. The closing song by U2 suggests that it was petty thieves and thugs who were the "Hands that Built America" rather than, say, the black folks who make cameo appearances in the movie hanging from lampposts.

I suspect the major problems with this film stem from the effect that Irish themes have on American directors and actors, which is rather similar to putting a powerful magnet next to a piece of sensitive electronic equipment. You'd have thought Scorsese might be immune to this brain-scrambling, but at some point he must have said: "Diaz? Di Caprio? Perfect for our Irish leads!"

None of this should be taken to detract from the wonderful performance of Daniel Day Lewis (even if he does have a touch of the Michael Palins every now and then). But then he's not really in the movie--he's more like a piece of natural scenery they filmed it in front of.

Oh, and don't miss the one-second Titanic parody.

Small Time Crooks (2000)

Cheerful undemanding comedy that highlights Allen's lesser-known talents...

[11 January 2001]

...specifically his knack for physical comedy (check out the safe-cracking scene near the end) and near-genius for assembling ensemble casts: Ullman is spot on: homely enough to be credible as loser Allen's long-suffering wife yet with enough glamour and intelligence to convince both as the former topless dancer and aspiring culture vulture. Elaine May is superb as Frenchy's dim cousin and Hugh Grant proves how well he plays against his romantic-lead typecasting as an archetypal British bounder. Cast him as a Bond villain!