Cinema 2011 #73: Arrietty

With Arrietty, the latest animated feature from Studio Ghibli, perhaps the last great animation house still working in the laborious realm of hand-drawn features, the Japanese studio finally realises the 40 year-old dream of founder Hayao Miyazaki to bring Mary Horton's much loved children's novel The Borrowers to the screen in their distinctive animé aesthetic. Directed by the youngest ever director in Ghibli history, 36 year-old Hiromasa Yonebayashi takes the helm after rising through the ranks having worked on such classic Ghibli gems as Princess Mononoke, My Neighbours the Yamadas and Howl’s Moving Castle, to here present a joyfully sweet and artistically assured mediation on nature and man’s impact on endangered species.

The film is a visual masterpiece, with Arrietty’s miniaturised world a triumph of finding the beauty in the small scale. Indeed, the design and animation of these 10-cm critters’ world is the film’s biggest success, with protracted scenes in the garden playing out like a hazy dream when accompanied by Cecile Corbel’s Breton-influenced score (just don’t mention the sickeningly sweet Arrietty’s Song from the opening credits). Anyone doubting Yonebayashi direction need only look at the set-piece in the kitchen to witness his masterful use of animation. Playing brilliantly as it does with ideas of scale and distance, Arrietty, voiced in the UK dubbing by Irish star Saoirse Ronan, and her father Pod (Mark Strong) try to nab a sugar-lump in a suburban Tokyo kitchen that looks like something akin to the Grand Canyon in terms of its dangerously vast empty space. 

Cinema 2011 #72: Captain America: The First Avenger

The Irish summertime was designed for a movie like Captain America: The First Avenger, a genuine summer blockbuster that wards off the chills and unseasonal rain with shamelessly fun entertainment and way-to-go-little-guy glee. This is popcorn escapism and big budget action that is pitched perfectly as the superhero movie that brings a bit of colour back into the comic strip fold.

The film, directed by Joe Johnston of Jumanji fame, is the final piece in the assembly line leading up towards next year’s Avengers, the superhero team-up epic single-handedly keeping the spandex industry afloat by combining Marvel’s cavalcade of comic-book champions into a dream-team of box-office smashing proportions. But the focus here in on this all-American hero, played by two-time superpower alumnus Chris Evans, whose Captain America is stars and stripes success, and feels so fresh for one simple reason: he’s rather old fashioned. 

Cinema 2011 #71: Cars 2

Much has already been made of the efforts by Pixar Animation Studios’ 2006 feature Cars, the only dent in the perfectly polished fender of arguably the finest working studio in America today, which was rather unfortunately parallel parked into the gaping space between their near perfect The Incredibles and melt your heart love letter to dreamers everywhere, Ratatouille. The story of a bunch of autothromorphic vehicles living in a Capra-esque dragsville off of Route 66, hotshot racing-car Lightning McQueen’s dalliance with the dandy shoop-shooping sedans of Radiator Springs and learning to appreciate life by slowing down is not regarded as classic Pixar. Instead, its behemoth merchandising tie-ins and director John Lasseter’s love affair with classic cars are the driving force behind this sequel, that combines the better parts of the bookending films that everyone, but particularly the critics, preferred.

To wit, Cars 2 now finds tow-truck Mater, voiced by Larry the Cable Guy, propelled into poll position as an incredibly bumbling spy in romanticised global locations such as a rat-free Paris, a wonderfully camp and visually popping Tokyo, jolly London and sunny Italian Riviera, as McQueen and team take part in a Global Grand Prix to find the world’s fastest car and promote renewable fuel Allinol. Abominable autos and gas-guzzling goons, jalopies self-identifying as Lemons, plot the demise of the racers in a richly played-out espionage plot, but help is just around the bend from British superspy Finn McMissile (Michael Caine), a suped-up Aston Martin DB5, and rookie analyst Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer), whose shapely curves may well set Mater’s pistons a-pumping. 

Cinema 2011 #70: Cell 211

Cell 211 is an extremely tense and uncomfortably violent film. Opening with a distressingly visceral wrist slitting with a shiv in the dank and miserable titular prison cell, writer-director Daniel Monzón here brings together a twisting and dangerous film that makes for compelling, if occasionally overwrought, viewing. A winner of eight Goya Awards in its native Spain, the movie is based a simple yet endlessly surprising plot device, and makes extremely good use of its limits in budget and scale to construct a dark and frightening study of how far a man is willing to go to survive extraordinary circumstances, and how far those circumstances will wrench him from the man he is.

The story centres around newly employed prison guard Juan Oliver (Alberto Ammann), whose aw-shucks-everyman qualities don’t seem to be particularly suited for his new gig in a high security prison. Taking the job to help support his heavily pregnant wife Elena (Marta Etura), Juan decides to make a good impression and tour the big house the day before he’s supposed to start. One ill-timed prison riot and a nasty bump to the head later, and Juan awakens to find himself slap bang in the middle of the inmates’ insurgency, and makes the split-second decision to pretend to be a prisoner who’s just as convicted in rabblerousing in order to hide his true identity and save his life.

Cinema 2011 #69: Bobby Fischer Against the World

1972, Reykjavik. A media storm descended upon the Icelandic capital, with two world stars about to take part in one of the fiercest sporting battles of the Cold War.  Their contest would last months, played out against the clock, with the eyes of the world scrutinising every move. The power of democracy was aiming to crack the dominance of communism, pressure was intense, and conspiracy theories still abound in the results of the contest. In the red corner, the reigning world champion, Boris Spassky. In the blue corner, a 29-year old enigmatic American by the name of Bobby Fischer. Their game: chess. 

Oh look, another one...

Available here.

Cinema 2011 #68: The Guard

He’s good. He’s bad. He’s also kind of ugly. But Most of all, Brendan Gleeson is slyly brilliant in John Michael McDonagh’s feature film debut, The Guard. Something of a comedic contemporary Western, albeit taking place amid the dry stone walls of Connemara on the wesht coast of Ireland, Gleeson is Sergeant Gerry Boyle, a Garda officer dealing with the looming threat of an international drugs cartel, a pencil-pushing FBI Agent (Don Cheadle) flown over to solve the case, and the crushing apathy of his own professional ennui.

Shrewdly perceptive of the criminal underbelly, cruelly dismissive of his fellow officers, Boyle concentrates his detective skills on finding money in murder victim’s wallets, ordering prostitutes from the big city, and deliberately undermining his superiors for his own amusement. Gleeson is dryly arresting and dominates every scene he’s in as Boyle, layering this country Garda with enough sharp intelligence and underhanded charm to win the audience over to a man who’s so comfortable in his public service job that he won’t consider cancelling his day off in the middle of a full-scale international investigation. His Boyle is enigmatic, annoyingly brilliant and with surprising integrity and balls in the big blast ending. 

Harry Potter and the Shameless Plug

To be found here.

Cinema 2011 #67: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II

So here it is, the final chapter. Ten years in the making, millions of dollars spent, billions of dollars reaped. The most successful film franchise in the history of cinema, a decade-long gravy train that comes chugging up to Platform 9¾ for the last time. It’s all led up to this, this moment, this ending. A battle between the forces of good and evil, a choice between what is easy and what is necessary. There will be tears and deaths, breath-taking battles and the resolution to some long awaited romances, one you didn’t know was coming. There’s even a bad word. Harry Potter, a superstar in his world and in ours. The boy who lived. Can he possibly defeat Lord Voldemort, a wizard so infatuated by cheating death that he’s split his very soul apart? Or will the answer to this Riddle prove impossible to overcome?

Come on, it’s not 2007. You know exactly how it ends.

Indeed, that’s been the problem that’s plagued Mr. Potter all along, just how could the boy who lived live up to expectations of millions of fans who know him inside and out? For the most part, he hasn’t, with the opening movies bogged down by a constant need to razzle-dazzle audiences with quaint magical puns and protracted origin stories for every piece of bedazzled brickabrack found on Diagon Alley. This Bertie Bott colourfulness required a complete tonal shift round about number three, where they turned down the saturation and learnt that the series would need to get some edge before it could pack a critical punch. Their solution, make each subsequent movie darker, both thematically and literally, than the one that came before. And again, mixed results. 

Cinema 2011 #66: The Conspirator

The Conspirator, directed by Hollywood’s legendary golden boy Robert Redford, is the first feature film from The American Film Company, a production studio aiming to push aside the vagaries of fiction and make movies about American history that are historically accurate. The failure to change the title to the more accurate conspiratrix aside, Redford’s film, with a big-name cast made up of James McAvoy, Robin Wright, Tom Wilkinson, Kevin Kline, Evan Rachel Wood, and many more, does a fine job at factually detailing the precision behind the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, as well as the political injustices carried out against Mary Surratt, the only woman to be tried as part of the plot.

Cinema 2011 #65: The Tree of Life

Don’t bring a large popcorn and coke in with you – it’s not that kind of movie.

With The Tree of Life, reclusive director Terrence Malick here presents his long awaited treatise on the nature of life, love, death, religion and the very origins of the universe. A series of interconnected and non-linear fragments of the innocence of childhood, and its loss in adulthood, the film is a singular work, a piece of art unlike anything else you’ve ever seen. A mosaic of short cut scenes, detailing the very minutiae of prehistoric cellular mitosis to the sharp glass architecture of contemporary cityscapes, and the transience of life in between, the film poses many questions, offering few answers. There are no big reveals and twists. There is no orderly plot nor rational conclusions to derive. What you do get for the price of your admission ticket is a representation of life on the screen, in its spiritual and twisted forms, and it is beautiful to behold. 

Cinema 2011 #64: Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is blockbuster cinema at its worst. It’s a lifeless film with a convoluted plot laboured for a punishingly tedious runtime, populated by forgettable characters whose names you won’t remember and a convoy of alien robotic cars that are, for the most part, entirely indistinguishable. It’s a film in which its director, Michael Bay, believes that any scene can be improved with the presence of large explosions or large breasts, and who takes racial stereotyping to near uncomfortable levels for the sake of a laugh. It is so poorly edited that in spite of the sterling work completed by its visual effects team, it is nearly impossible to actually separate the swaying mass of pixels into identifiable characters. It’s just awful.

It’s made about half a billion dollars in a week.

The story, insofar as any Transformers film has been driven by a coherent plot, revolves once again around Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky, by now an unemployed post-crash college grad bumming around Washington DC with his British girlfriend Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley). Sam’s grown tired of living the civilian life, and pines for the days when he and his friends the Autobots, along with their leader Optimus Prime, could just keep on truckin’. Instead, he finds himself driving a floptimus prime jalopy and at the bottom of the career ladder in the mailroom of a corporation that may prove to be important to the plot.

Peddling my wares...

To be found here...

Cinema 2011 #63: Bad Teacher

There’s a scene, about halfway through Jake Kasdan’s Bad Teacher, in which John Michael Higgins’ Principal Snur is sitting on a toilet in the gents while a fellow teacher evacuates his bowels like a percussionist on the last night of the Proms. Therein lies the problem with Bad Teacher, a film that’s far too broad to be the sly little black comedy it could have been.

The material sounds promising, with Cameron Diaz playing the carefree Elizabeth Halsey, a 7th Grade teacher in an American Middle School and who has absolutely no interest in being there. It’s somewhat refreshing, after years and years of inspiring dramas about the power a teacher can hold in the classroom and how they too can learn to grow, blah blah blah, to come across an educator who’s waiting for the school bell just so she can go out to her car a smoke a joint. After being dumped by her loaded fiancé, Halsey sets her sights on substitute and grade-A doofus Mr. Gettis (played by Diaz’s former flame Justin Timberlake in a solid, if disappointing C-grade performance), whose interest and family wealth will only be piqued by the medium of large boobs. And so, Halsey swindles and rips off everyone she can in order to gain the cup-size advantage over fellow teacher and love rival Miss Squirrel (Lucy Punch).

The battle for that one really twisty Twisty Fry was on

It’s all a shame that the script doesn’t live up to its premise, as Diaz is devilishly fun as the teacher who couldn’t care less. Jason Segel is underused as a jaded gym teacher, and surely more could have been made of the class of oddballs Halsey inherits over the summer holidays. Diaz is consistent, and doesn’t go through a moralising U-turn as the film fades to black, it’s just a shame the black side of this comedy couldn’t have been more consistent too.

Could do better.

2 ½ Likes

Cinema 2011 #62: Bridesmaids

After sitting down and mulling over Bridesmaids, easily the best comedy so far this year with a star-making performance from its writer Kristen Wiig, I got to wondering just why this female ensemble of funny girls, dressed in couture, and talking about love, life and sex worked, when their New York neighbours failed so spectacularly, and twice, to carry over small screen critical success to the cinema? It’s because Bridesmaids, for all its projectile vomiting and food poisoning incontinence, is clever. It’s a brilliantly funny script that speaks volumes on the petty nature of competition and jealousy, on the value of deep-rooted friendship and connects better with a generation who can believe the self-destructive flaws of a woman who’s life post-boom means a dead-end job and moving back in with her mother. Sex and the City 2, on the other hand, had its star walk down a private beach in Dubai while her Indian servant carried a parasol.

Bridesmaids is the story of Annie (Kristen Wiig), and her attempt be the perfect maid of honour to friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph), but whose efforts are hampered by circumstance, her own self-destructive tendencies and a fierce rivalry with other bridesmaid Helen, a wealthy society wife played by Rose Byrne, who knows she can do a better job. There will be an itinerary of events to plan and enjoy, from dress shopping to the bachelorette party in Vegas, but will Annie be able to cope with the financial and emotional strain of the wedding while she tries to piece her life back together after the foreclosure of her bakery business in downtown Milwaukee?

Cinema 2011 #61: The Beaver

Mad Mel, beyond Blunderdome. Where’d it all go wrong, eh? From charming A-list movie star and multi-award winning director of challenging historical epics to anti-Semitic alcoholic sexist who allegedly beats up his girlfriend.

Perhaps that’s why his performance in The Beaver, a dramedy about a man’s struggles with marionettes and melancholia, directed by long time friend Jodie Foster, is all the more poignant. Opening with a sweeping prelude through the life of Walter Black, a depressed toy company CEO having tried every method from drumming to medication to self-flagellation to ease his emotional burdens, we see Mel Gibson, a man with all the weight of the world on his shoulders, floating silently in a swimming pool, arms outstretched in Christ-like anguish. A cockney voice, later revealed to be the Beaver himself, tells us of his troubles, how he doesn’t want to be like this, how his family can no longer cope, how he’s become a joke professionally, how alcohol offers his only respite. It’s hard to draw the lines between fact and fiction. Well, at least until Walter starts communicating solely through the medium of a plush puppet on his left arm.

Cinema 2011 #60: Green Lantern

Those poor Warner Bros. With their annual profits courtesy of the Daily Prophet and its scar-faced subscriber about to come to an end, and with the competition suiting up a cavalcade of costumed heroes to near endless critical praise and packed out theatres, the brothers eyes have been turning green. It seemed only logical to option out another comic book character, some flashy guy with cosmic powers and a tacky sovereign on his right hand. Do it right and they’re talking a trilogy, at least. Isn’t he even part of some sort of team, as well? Some sort of unionised superhero book club, or something? That could make money. Just throw lots of money at it, you have to spend it to make it, right? Why not make the whole thing CGI while they’re at it, 3D too, obviously, and throw a handful of plot threads and a host of characters at the screen and just see what sticks, yeah? Green Lantern, that’s his name, right? This could work… this could work… Right? Right?!

No, boys, it didn’t. It really really didn’t.

The difficult second album...

Can be found here...