Film Review Archives

February 26, 2016

Film Review: Five Cold Films

Our resident film reviewer is writer Harry Casey-Woodward who will be sharing his opinions on things he has watched…

Since the weather at the moment is rather grim, I’ve had a think about what handful of films mirror the British winter chill and would be horrific to be starring in, not just for the cold.

The Hateful Eight, 2016, cert 18, dir Quentin Tarantino

I haven’t seen The Revenant yet, otherwise by the sound of the conditions depicted it would surely get a place here. But the Hateful Eight is another western coinciding nicely with the British winter. Except it’s depicting a Wyoming winter so naturally the weather is a bit more extreme. As in, everything is smothered in snow and looks like a Christmas card, except the very opposite of Christmas cheer and goodwill happens in the film. I just feel sorry for that stagecoach driver stuck on top of his coach the whole time while his passengers are sheltered below him, and the guy forced to walk naked in the snow. Yes that does happen. All in all, this film does a great attempt at showing how cold the American west could get and just how desirable a pot of fresh hot coffee would have been.

The Shining, 1980, cert 18, dir Stanley Kubrick

I know most of the film’s action takes place indoors, but the ominous presence of winter just lurking outside is maintained throughout. Even at the beginning, the hotel manager is warning Jack Torrance how severe the winter can get, what damage it can cause to the hotel and what damage it caused to the mind of the last caretaker who, suffering allegedly from ‘cabin fever’, murdered his family. All the other staff members are hurrying to leave before the roads are snowed in. So while the Torrances are trying to have a relaxed, normal time (besides the ghosts, the kid’s powers of prophecy and daddy’s slide into psychosis), the raging winter outside is cutting down telephone wires, shutting down roads and generally making it difficult for the Torrances to escape or be rescued when things start going down the toilet. Plus Jack Torrance freezing to death outside looks a chilly way to go.

The Thing, 1982, cert 18, dir John Carpenter

For one thing, this film is set in Antarctica, the coldest and remotest place you can get. Not only that, but you’re stuck in a science base with a bunch of experts and one bearded alcoholic pilot played by Kurt Russell, so you could die of boredom as well as cold. Unfortunately, a shape-shifting alien is unleashed from the ice and starts taking over everyone like a parasite that’s really good at impressions. Cue some traumatic 80s prosthetics of human bodies tearing apart and sprouting new alien appendages, but at least the gushing bodily fluids that flood this film might keep you warm. Funnily enough, season one of X-Files did their own tribute/rip-off of this film in one episode about parasitic aliens set in an Antarctic science base, which looked equally cold.

Dead Snow, 2009, cert 18, dir Tommy Wirkola

Let’s bring some world cinema in. Of course, the term does suggest sophistication, not students getting slaughtered by Nazi zombies. Try telling that to HMV, however, whose ‘world cinema’ sections appear to be mostly stocked of all the nasty pulp foreign language films. Anyway, it does look pretty cold in this particular Norwegian snowbound shocker. The constant running away and the brain-bashing of undead fascists would keep you warm though, as would being soaked in the copious amounts of spilled blood from you and your friends. I thought the most unpleasantly cold-looking moments in the film were in the outdoor toilet next to the students’ wood cabin. How did two characters have sex in there? It’s bad enough with the zombies pulling you down the poop chute afterwards.

Die Another Day, 2002, cert 12, dir Lee Tamahori

Honestly I had a hard time thinking of things for this list, but this movie sure looks chilly, especially since the second half is set in some ice palace in the Arctic. They must have had some magical central heating system where the guests didn’t freeze but the palace didn’t melt around them. James Bond even managed to persuade Rosamund Pike to lose her clothes in some icy bedroom. There are many cold scenes throughout the Bond franchise (as in temperature not the acting). I haven’t seen Spectre yet but there is another Pierce Brosnan flick called The World is not Enough, the predecessor to Die Another Day, where Bond and Sophie Marceau lose some baddies in a ski chase but end up buried under an avalanche. Luckily Bond’s array of gadgets includes a bubble that pops up around them and shields them from the evil snow. This doesn’t stop Marceau from having a panic attack and Bond has to calm down the silly woman. At least he didn’t do it the Sean Connery way and slap her.

February 19, 2016

Film Review: Deadpool

Our resident film reviewer is writer Harry Casey-Woodward who will be sharing his opinions on things he has watched…

Deadpool, dir Tim Miller, 3/5

As I’m not a fan of superhero movies, I feel we are saturated with them at the moment. Not only is every conceivable Marvel and DC character being dredged up for adaptation but we are going through an era of multi-superhero films. Franchises like The Avengers are teaming superheroes up and pitting them against each other, criss-crossing story lines in a vast blockbuster market consuming web.

We’ve got Captain America: Civil War, Suicide Squad and Batman vs Superman all coming out this year, and even superhero sequels for next year are being hyped up. It’s like Marvel and DC are in a furious race to get as many characters and storylines up on screen as possible and I’m getting sick of it. I feel like more than ever we need an antihero.
Cue Deadpool. I haven’t read the original comics but I have seen one panel where he shoots dead someone just for admitting they like the Star Wars prequels. After seeing his movie, to me this is a good summary of both the character and the film. There’s humour, violence and more pop culture references than you can shake a stick at. And more violence.

In short, Deadpool could be the first adult Marvel film. I don’t mean that in an erotic sense (although there are fair dollops of nudity) but it’s the only movie about a Marvel character I can think of that doesn’t hold back with the jokes, the swearing or the explicit violence. Often it combines all of these, especially in scenes where Deadpool gleefully dispatches henchmen in a variety of comically gruesome ways.
So yes the film is crude and savage but it’s also smart. It’s refreshing to watch a superhero cracking self-aware jokes not just at the idea of being a superhero but at other superhero movies. Many of these jokes are aimed at Hugh Jackman, which I relished after having to watch him in so many bad X-Men sequels. There were even stabs at Ryan Reynolds, the actor playing Deadpool, so try and get your head around a character making fun of the actor playing him. As for Reynolds’ performance, I think it’s the best I’ve seen out of him. He’s clearly in his element playing a wisecracking anti hero and having immense fun with it.

I expected the jokes and the violence. What I didn’t expect were the moments of seriousness underneath. The plot boils down to an ex-special forces man named Wade meeting the woman of his dreams (Morena Baccarin), getting cancer and taking up the offer from a shifty man in a suit of a cure that also gives him the ability to heal from everything else. Unfortunately it also leaves him with all over body scarring, destroying his fine looks. So he straps on some weapons and a costume, becomes Deadpool and rampages after the British sociopathic scientist named Ajax (Ed Skrein) who performed the process and ruined his life. Not only does he want revenge but he also wants the damage reversed so he can have the confidence to face his girlfriend again. As he tells us in the film, this is both a romance and a horror story. You feel sorry for Deadpool as well as laugh along with him. The scenes where he’s struggling with cancer and his relationship are quite touching, even with jokes.

Overall, what we get is a film that joyfully slaps all the clichés of its genre in the face while still taking its story and characters seriously. It’s kind of relaxing to watch a superhero movie that shrugs off the overbearing moral code that oppresses other such films and instead gives us a guy who likes killing people and cracking jokes, which you can kind of understand. Judging by the film’s box office success, this is what people have wanted. It’s fun, it’s different, it’s outrageous and it comes with a pumpin’ soundtrack. Plus we finally get a comic book character who sees the hilarity in wearing a skin-tight latex costume.

January 23, 2016

Film Review: Slow West

Our resident film reviewer is writer Harry Casey-Woodward who will be sharing his opinions on things he has watched…

Slow West, 2015, cert 15, dir John Maclean, 4/5

If you liked Django Unchained, how about a western shot in New Zealand by a Scottish director? You’ve got to admire a director when they choose a western for their first film in this day and age, when westerns are no longer guaranteed profit makers (unless you’re Tarantino). It must be even more of a challenge to make a good one, now Django has raised the bar and Tarantino’s new western The Hateful Eight is in the saddle. But new director John Maclean has crafted a stunning western for his first feature, which is now out on DVD and Blu-ray.

Slow West has a simple but original plot. The hero is a young Scots lad named Jay Cavendish played by rising Australian star Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Road and Let Me In). Having left Scotland, we find him riding alone across the vast, wild landscape of the American West to find the girl he loves, who has already emigrated west with her father. He bumps into Silas (Michael Fassbender), a lone drifter who agrees to ride with Jay for reasons known only to Silas.

Both are testament to the theory that opposites attract. Silas is a traditional western hero. Even Fassbender acting in his native Irish accent just adds to his rough charm. He’s got the weather-beaten costume, the stubble, the cigars and the gun. The only thing he lacks is a heart. I was worried Fassbender wouldn’t pull off this Clint Eastwood -like character, since I’ve only seen him in well-spoken civilised roles like the android in Prometheus and the English officer/film critic in Inglorious Basterds. But he’s utterly gripping as a cool, cunning gunslinger.

Jay Cavendish, however, is the natural bumbling teenage sidekick. What he lacks in experience and practicality, he makes up for with naivety and romanticism. Whereas Silas has dulled his emotions, Jay remains the victim of his passions which have led him on his epic, dangerous quest to find his love. Kodi Scot-McPhee gives a charming performance as a lovesick, wide-eyed poet horrified by the violence and suffering he witnesses.

The pair encounter a range of western characters. They’re tracked by a shaggy-coated man named Payne and his motley band of outlaws, a cool performance by fellow Australian Ben Mendelsohn who played hot-headed businessman Daggett in The Dark Knight Rises. There’s also a Swedish couple turned desperate store robbers, a travelling writer documenting the extinction of Native American culture and a bounty hunter disguised as a priest carrying his rifle in a smart case (a possible homage to the eccentric antiheros of the spaghetti westerns).

Thankfully Slow West follows a trend that has been cropping up in recent westerns. This is acknowledging the fact that the American West was populated by emigrants from all over the world, thus not everybody spoke in a cowboy drawl (a fact often ignored by even the best westerns in the past). The director admitted that he wanted to make a film about the West from an emigrant’s point of view.

The film also features Native Americans. Some are depicted as deadly and otherworldly, others as very human. The main characters mention the decimation of the Native American civilisation, often cynically, as an irreversible tragedy. It has been a while since any recent western has acknowledged this dark side of American history in such a modern fashion. As well as accurate historical details, the film does a good job of representing genders too. When we finally see the love interest Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius)on screen, she’s a gutsy farm girl who ends up doing most of the shooting in the showdown at the end.

If this colourful cast of characters isn’t enough to attract you, the film is worth seeing for its sheer beauty. Most westerns can boast extraordinary landscapes and Slow West is no exception. Like Lord of the Rings, Slow West could be an advert for New Zealand. We switch from tender flashbacks on the Scottish coast to dramatic New Zealand scenery of forests, mountains and plains which makes a perfect Western backdrop. Whoever went location scouting did a good job. The best thing about filming in New Zealand, as the crew discovered, was the incredible light and colour the beautifully framed shots were blessed with. The colours are especially striking for a western, reminding me of technicolor 1950s classics like The Searchers. As Maclean explains, that was purely due to the quality of New Zealand natural light and he didn’t want to shoot another brown western anyway.

Despite the cool characters, the original plot and striking cinematography, there are two criticisms I would make of this film. One is that it lacked the ‘oomph’ present in other great westerns like The Wild Bunch], Unforgiven and even Django, which stops it ranking alongside these classics. In other words, as nice as the film was to watch I didn’t feel a great emotional impact at the end. The running time is only eighty minutes, which means you have less time to feel involved with the characters than a longer film. However, given the content of the plot I feel there were still opportunities for a greater emotional scope. Moving onto the other criticism, I felt the movie was putting more effort into being strange for the sake of it. The nature of the plot is rather episodic, which leads to several random scenes like Jay and Silas riding past three men playing music in the middle of a barren plain. Jay converses with them in French on the universality of love and death. While it’s nice to see such creative elements in a western, it does reduce the historical realism a tad.

But then Slow West is a different breed of western to the intense, action-packed examples I mentioned above. It’s sparse, lyrical style reminded me most of Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 western Dead Man starring Jonny Depp. Both films are beautifully shot, spiritual journeys through imaginative landscapes of the American West. Both feature traditional Western clichés mixed with modern sensibilities and both balance cynical humour with tragedy and graphic violence.

The presentation of the violence is worth noting in Slow West. Don’t expect the glorified, over-the-top action of Django. It is thrilling and even playful at times, especially during the climax during which Payne fires a bullet to make a weather vane spin round. However, there are other scenes when the pointless, catastrophic consequences of random violence are clearly plain, with little dialogue and visible emotion from the actors needed. Though I have mentioned the lack of emotional impact in this film, I still genuinely feared for the heroes’ survival in the final shootout.

Overall, the film is sparse but not cold. The more I think about it after viewing, the more I admire the creativity involved and the sheer amount of elements that were brought together. This is a cool, lean slice of cinema that looks amazing with subtle depths of emotion and heartache. I respect that such an unusual little gem was allowed to be made and I further respect the fact that it was a British production, having been presented by Film 4 and the British Film Institute. Perhaps this will lead to another wave of European westerns like the Italian spaghetti westerns in the 60s. Shepherd’s pie westerns anyone? More like haggis western, as the director is Scottish. Silliness aside, he has done a remarkable job for his first film and I hope his future efforts share in the poetic, imaginative spirit of his debut.

All opinions of the director are taken from the special features on the DVD

January 8, 2016

Film Review: San Andreas

Our guest blogger is hobbyist film and TV series reviewer and writer Harry Casey-Woodward. On th-ink.co.uk Harry will be writing a series of posts in which he will be sharing his opinions on things he has watched…

San Andreas, 2015, Cert 12, dir Brad Peyton

Why do big budget American filmmakers insist on making disaster movies and expect us to be entertained by them? Even worse, why do they ask us to take them seriously? If you wanted to make a movie about the power of the human spirit overcoming disaster, you could make a documentary about real tragedies like the recent earthquakes and tsunamis in Asia. However there has been a pattern of American disaster movies pitting everyday Americans against fictional natural calamities. The problem with these films is that they try everything they can to get sympathy for their everyday American characters. Nine times out of ten they fail through bad writing. San Andreas is no exception.

The only good point I can think of for this film is that it is based on some real geology, or geology I remember learning at school. The San Andreas fault line is a crack in the Earth’s crust which just happens to sit under the west coast of America. Regions that sit over divisions between the tectonic plates (like Japan, to give another example) have suffered horrendous earthquakes because the plates are constantly moving and rubbing each other, causing tremors. On the San Andreas line, the plates are moving apart and a small piece of the American West coast will eventually break off and become an island. This process is depicted in the film, just speeded up. Somebody clearly read about this theory and thought it would make a great movie.

The fact this film is loosely based on some geology doesn’t save it from being a ridiculous farce. For one thing, the hero is a rescue helicopter pilot played by ex-wrestler Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson. Johnson has made a name for himself as a muscle-bound action hero for the 21st century, being cast in such suitable roles as Hercules and the Fast and Furious franchise. So when I’m watching a film with Dwayne Johnson I expect him to play an action hero. I do not expect emotional drama.

Johnson is playing a heroic pilot but he also happens to be a father going through a divorce. In the middle of his emotional turmoil earthquakes of mighty magnitude strike the San Andreas area, endangering his various family members who he attempts to round up and save. So he performs various action man stunts like pulling distracted drivers out of their wrecked cars and even knocking out a looter with his own gun. But there are also scenes where he has long intimate conversations with his wife about their family situation and a previous daughter who tragically drowned. The screenwriters have clearly gone to some lengths to build some family history for the main characters to get the audience interested. But it doesn’t quite work when the male character is a towering body builder and the female’s hair is always beautifully styled despite said woman surviving collapsing buildings and floods. In short, as hard as the actors tried their characters and their situation just weren’t believable.

While watching the film, I was getting confused about whether I should be paying attention to the good-looking everyday disaster survivors overcoming their marital strife or the spectacular, CGI scenes of tumbling sky scrapers and flooded streets. In fact, I always find it worrying when these disaster movies present earthquakes and tsunamis as excuses for epic set pieces to entertain audiences, when the devastation they cause in the real world is all too clear.

I felt the makers of San Andreas needed to decide whether they were making a tasteless exploitation of natural disasters or an intimate family drama. You can’t really do both. Worse still is to turn this mess into some form of American patriotism. The film begs sympathy for American citizens by placing them through grand suffering and destroying their famous landmarks, then emphasising how great they are with the few triumphant survivors. It felt a little like the filmmakers were creating their own 9/11. I’m not saying Americans don’t deserve sympathy for their tragedies, but I can’t help feeling that the amount of effort and money spent on San Andreas could have been used, as I said before, to raise awareness of real natural disasters or even to provide relief for the victims.

It is unclear what the intentions of the makers of San Andreas were, but they have made an action-packed slice of nonsense you can stick on in the background and vaguely pay attention to while you do more important things. You also get to see Kylie Minogue in a very minor role.

December 18, 2015

Film Review: Blue Ruin

Blue Ruin, 2013, Cert 15, Director Jeremy Saulnier

There’s a film I saw years ago called Shotgun Stories about a war between two American families. The prospect of some rural blood feud excited me, but by the end the message of the film was clearly peace. The surviving members talked it out and mourned their losses. As much as I admired this anti-revenge film masquerading as a revenge film, I felt let down by the anti-climax. I’m not saying I wanted violence over resolution. The plot just felt resolved far too easily.

Blue Ruin is a revenge film that does keep the violence but also its brutality and emotional impact, and nothing is easily solved. Although the creators were influenced by pulp splatter films, they have crafted a stylish, haunting thriller that’s a world away from the superficial gore fests currently dominating the B-movie scene. Although the violence is graphic, it’s not designed to entertain but rather make us clench our seats.
Our vagrant protagonist Dwight, played by Macon Blair, is informed that his parents’ murderer has been released from prison. He sets off a chain of violence that charges beyond his control.

Dwight is no action hero. He is played brilliantly by wide-eyed Blair as a nervous wreck who stumbles through the drastic situations he creates, surviving mostly by luck and his wits. This makes him a compelling and relatable character.
The style of the film is suspenseful and minimalist, with little action and dialogue, relying mostly on atmosphere and the actors’ expressions to build up sudden blasts of brutality. It’s refreshing compared to the constant barrage of noise and rapid editing most action films offer.

Blue Ruin is a gem of independent cinema that both upholds and smashes the conventions of a traditional genre. I dare you to find a better revenge movie this year.