Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty 

Director: Kathryn Bigelow 

Written by: Mark Boal 

Photography: Grieg Fraser 

Starring: Jessica Chastain, Joel Edgerton, Jason Clarke. 

Country: USA

Year: 2012

Back in 2009 one movie swept the Oscars beating the even the hotly tipped Goliath, Avatar. That movie was The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal. That dream team have now reunited to bring us Zero Dark Thirty, the story of the decade long manhunt for Osama Bin Laden.   

The movie was originally about the failed hunt Bin Laden, but part way through principal photography he was killed by U.S Marines, which meant that Bigelow and Boal had to fashion a new ending for their film. I would like to know how the original movie was going to end because I just can't imagine how it would have worked. Unless it just ended abruptly which would have sucked. 

We're introduced at the beginning to CIA operative, Maya, who at the beginning is kind of a rookie mocked for her age and gender. We're pitched that this is one woman's fight to capture Public Enemy No.1. As the film takes place over a decade, we see Maya and the approval of those around her develop quite rapidly as the film progresses. The films been criticized for not giving any back stories to any of the characters. That's true off most, but then characters in Zero Dark Thirty are pretty expendable and they go as soon as they come. But Bigelow did something very clever with Maya, in the foreground you have this massive story about the hunt for Bin Laden but if you look carefully at the background; the wallpaper on Maya's laptop, the photos on her desk you'll begin to paint a picture of her past which I thought was a pretty interesting way of going about it. 

Kathryn Bigelow's direction is phenomenal, I've been critical of her in the past, I've said that there are at least half a dozen female directors that deserve the accolades she gets more than her. But I take some of that back now, Zero Dark Thirty is stunningly shot and all the performances are fantastic. Although I'll still stand by The Hurt Locker being very overrated.

Jessica Chastain has been having a fantastic couple of years and it's becoming repetitive to say how good she is, but I can't not talk about her astonishing job in this film, she really does carry it. Other actors, especially Jason Clarke, do great jobs too, but as I said before most of them aren't given a great deal of screen-time. Torchwood fans may be disappointed to learn  that John Barrowman only gets two lines and not good ones at that. 

Zero Dark Thirty, as you probably know, has been the target of much controversy surrounding it's depiction of torture as a means of getting information, some people say that it shows torture in a positive light. It's the kind of insistence when you really have to just see the film for yourself and make your own mind up. But for my money, no it doesn't. It doesn't show torture working to any great effect, they gather more information from straight interrogation and you're not walking out of the cinema at the end with your fist in the air shouting 'YEAH, TORTURE'. Boal and Bigelow decided to tell the story as truthfully as they could and not to whitewash history, which honestly I think was the right decision. 

The film is two and three quarter hours and to say that every frame is gripping would be a lie, the best part of two hours is spent talking in boardrooms and shiftily through papers. Some people will be bored, I know this for a fact because I counted two people walking out and never coming back. Although these scenes help to build a connection between the audience and the story, you're going on this journey with Maya and when she hits a brick wall, you feel her frustration. And if you stick with it you'll find the last forty minutes of the film is the action film you may have been hoping for. 

The film does a great job of being accessible to everyone without dumbing down too much. For a film that focused on the intelligence side of the mission to find Bin Laden, at no point did I feel lost in translation or not understanding what was going on.  

Zero Dark Thirty is a step above and beyond for Bigelow and Boal after The Hurt Locker, fantastically shot and acted, definitely worth checking out.   

Django Unchained

Django Unchained 

Director: Quentin Tarantino
Written By: Quentin Tarantino
Photography: Robert Richardson 
Starring: Jamie Fox, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio.
Country: USA
Year: 2012  

Oooh Djangoooooo!

Quentin Tarantino isn't your run of the mill film school graduate, he's the video store clerk who set up a production company named after a Godard film (much to Godard's displeasure), making throwback films to all the exploitation and spaghetti westerns he loves so much. And Django Unchained  is nothing if not yet another homage to films that came before it, most notably films like Mandingo and obviously Sergio Corbucci's Django films. Tarantino's known for being a massive admirer of the great spaghetti western director, Sergio Leone, and I think everyone was expecting Django Unchained to be the grandest ever love letter to Leone's westerns. But there's a surprising lack of influence from Leone, it was there more in Inglorious Basterds. To me, Django Unchained is a Sam Peckinpah movie more than anything else, not thematically but in style; the slow motion gunfights and the strong violence. Given that he essentially invented movie violence, Tarantino owes quite a debt to Peckinpah.

Many people may be tried of Tarantino's fanboy filmmaking, it's 21 years now since Reservoir Dogs premiered at Cannes and I can see how for some people the joke may be wearing a bit thin. I still find a lot of fun in what Tarantino does. My problem with Tarantino is he's wasted talent, he's undeniably a very skilled director, if he wanted to, I'm positive he could be making films to the caliber of Paul Thomas Anderson's. But he doesn't want to. 

After some of the coolest opening credits ever, the film beings at night with two slavers making there way through a forest carrying a chain line of slaves behind them. Towards them comes a wagon ridden by Dr. King Schultz, a bounty hunter posing as a dentist. It becomes clear that this isn't a coincidental crossing of paths, Dr Schultz wishes to acquire a specific person in the two slavers' company, Django. To cut a long story short, this is a three hour Tarantino movie we're talking about, Django becomes an assistant of Dr. Schultz's in the bounty hunting trade. After a long winter of Bounty Hunting in the mountain, Dr. Schultz agrees to help Django free his estranged wife, Broomhilda from the infamous plantation, Candyland owned by the villainous Calvin Candie. 

Many people have made comment about the run-time of the film, that it's unnecessarily long. The film runs for 165 minutes, which is long and strange for something that's essentially an exploitation film, which tend to run for about 80 minutes. But honestly, I didn't have a problem with the run time it never dragged. Actually, I would have liked it to be longer, I wanted to see more with Dr. Schultz and Django bounty hunting in the mountains. 

There's always controversy surrounding the violence in Tarantino's movies, but this time more so given recent events. I have many opinions on movie violence and it's relation with real life violence, but I'll save that for another time as I don't want to digress. What I will say is that to call Tarantino's films mindlessly violent is an example of looking at a film rather than watching it. Think back to the scene in Reservoir Dogs (SPOILERS) when everybody dies, as the bodies lay cold on the floor,it's at least 5 seconds before it cuts, Tarantino is forcing us to see the consequences of violence. Django Unchained has a sense of humor within it's bloody cathartic violence. But it's depiction of the slave trade is uncomfortably brutal. Tarantino is a much more intelligent director than some people give him credit for. *cough* Mark Kermode *cough* Spike Lee.
     
Perhaps it's hyperbole for Tarantino to be boasting that he's getting people to talk about slavery  like they haven't before. The slave trade's been talked about. But I've seen many films in my time that touch on the slave trade, but I haven't seen any films that depict it's brutal reality as unapologetically as Django Unchained. 

Tarantino is a brilliant actors' director, he can pull performances out of actors that they can't release with any other directors. Jamie Foxx is brilliant, Samuel L. Jackson is great, Leonardo DiCaprio is really good if maybe a little miscast, and Christoph Waltz is basically playing Hans Landa again but who cares because Hans Landa is one of the best characters in recent cinema history. One of my biggest frustrations with Django Unchained is that all the female characters suck. Neither Laura Coyouette or Kerry Washington are never given anything to do. And I know Tarantino can write good female characters; Jackie Brown, Mia Wallace.        

The soundtrack as usual from Tarantino is fantastic. It's a mixture of contemporary R&B and classic Ennio Morricone scores with a Johnny Cash song thrown in there for good measure.   

The film is very long and it has no pace, but it's extremely fun and more intelligent than some people would have you believe. Quentin Tarantino's best film since Jackie Brown.     

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Director: Peter Jackson 
Written By: Peter Jackson, Guillermo Del Toro, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens
Photography: Andrew Lesnie
Starring: Martian Freeman, Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage. 
Year: 2012
Country: USA, New Zealand.  


I was going to be a lot kinder to the Hobbit in this review, but last night I had the pleasure of revisiting Guillermo Del Toro's stunning film, Pan's Labyrinth, and was reminded just what The Hobbit could have been. If you're unfamiliar with the production history of The Hobbit, here' a brief summery: Originally, Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro was set to direct the (then two) Hobbit movies. But after countless delays on a set filming date, Del Toro has no choice but to drop out as director, although staying on as a screenwriter. Ultimately, Peter Jackson was re-crowned as director and scraped all of Del Toro's concept art. 

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, of course, is based on the J.R.R. Tolkien's children's novel and precursor to The Lord of the Rings. Or it's at least on the first third of it, as this 378 pages novel (with pictures) is being turned into three separate 160 minute films. 

As someone who has read and loves The Hobbit, it's enraging to see how desperately Jackson and his team have tried to flesh out the story, by porting over tales and characters from Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion like Radagast the Brown. Or from their imagination created new tedious scenes with Galadriel, although it's nice to have a female presence, if only brief, now in a male dominated story. We'll probably even see Tom Bombadil in the next film. Oh joy! 

It's hard to tell if Peter Jackson actually knows what he's doing, he's made some pretty impressive films like the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and by-all accounts Heavenly Creatures, but he's also been behind the uninspired King Kong remake and The Lovely Bones which is one of the worst directed films I've ever seen.  The direction in The Hobbit is... pretty poor, but not so much that it's unwatchable. 

Speaking of unwatchable, let's move onto the editing. Not only is the film ridiculously long, with many scenes that could and should have been cut out, the actual editing of the film is clunky and occasionally leads to problems with continuity.

The writing is also a pitfall, the book is written mostly in rhyme, is quite comical and is basically written for children. The film takes lines from the novel but doesn't draw inspiration from it for the rest of the dialogue. So what you're left with is a film jumping between two very different languages.     

Martian Freeman is the saving grace of the film, he's brilliant and Bilbo is a much more engaging character than Frodo ever was. Andy Serkis is great reprising his role as Gollum and Ian McKellen is probably the only person who could play Gandalf. The band of Dwarfs are nearly all annoying and other than Thorin, all underdeveloped.

The Hobbit doesn't have the sense of awe that The Lord of the Rings trilogy did mostly thanks to an over use of CGI. The Lord of the Rings films took full advantage of the gorgeous New Zealand landscapes which The Hobbit doesn't. Also the fact that all the Orcs and Goblins are done with CGI is a huge disappointment.  

The problem with Peter Jackson is the same of that of James Cameron, he seems to be primarily concerned with getting himself into the history books. Both men seem to think if they are the one to push 3D or to push higher frame rates, they'll be remembered along Sergei Eisenstein and Edwin S. Porter.   

This review has probably made the The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey sound much worse than it is, it's not terrible, it's okay, if you enjoy the Middle Earth universe you might even enjoy it.  If this review seems rather lack luster I apologize and my only excuse is that this isn't a review of a film, it's a review of a third of a film. 

Top 10 Films of 2012

 We've moved into a new calender year, which means as a film blogger I'm legally required to countdown my favorite movies of the previous year in a hierarchical order.   

 It shouldn't need saying, but obviously, I haven't had chance to see every movie released this year and living thirty miles away from the nearest city and having to put up with a crummy mainstream multiplex I don't get to see as many art-house or foreign language films as I would like. So before you comment calling me a philistine,  that's why Amour is absent from the list. 

 P.S. This is based on UK release dates and all movies did come out in 2012. If you live in the US or Canada some of these may have come out in 2011, or if you live on Guernsey you might be getting them in four years time.

In ascending order: 

10. Jeff, Who Lives at Home 

 Jeff, Who Lives at Home is something you seldom see, and that's an intelligent stoner comedy that takes a realistic and non-partisan look at recreational drug use, but is ultimately a film about family, relationships and destiny.   
  

   

9. The Innkeepers

Ti West's supernatural horror is a slow burner, but what's at the end of the fuse is a huge stick of dynamite. Great characters, great atmosphere, great direction and a great film of 2012.

    
8. Tiny Furniture 


 Take the wit of Woody Allen and mix it with everything that's great about Diablo Cody and what you'll get is Lena Dunham and her courageously honest comedy, Tiny Furniture. Although the film narrowly avoids becoming annoyingly quirky at times, it still avoids it and turns out to be one of the indie gems of the year.   

7. Moonrise Kingdom

Wes Anderson rolls another strike with this bittersweet tale of young love in '60s New England. Beautifully shot, charmingly witty and wonderfully acted from a cast including Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton and Edward Norton. 

6. The Angels' Share 

Four Glaswegians serving community service for various crimes and misdemeanors start to turn their lives around when they discover the world of fine whiskey. Unknown Paul Brannigan gives one of the best performances of the year in Ken Loach's latest social realist comedy.      

5. The Cabin in the Woods 

The Cabin in the Woods is a satire of the horror genre with so many twists and turns you'll never be bored.  Written by Buffy creator and Avengers Assemble director Joss Whedon and directed by Cloverfield's writer Drew Goddard, The Cabin in the Woods is one of the year's most fun filled films.       

4. Cosmopolis 

Many of David Corenenberg's famed themes are present in his 2012 film Cosmopolis, about a young billionaire and his journey though a crumbling city as he makes his way to get a haircut. Robert Pattinson superb in this neon cyberpunk drama. 

    

3. Martha Marcy May Marlene 

 The first of two very different movies on this top ten about cults, this nerve-racking flashback thriller sees up-and-comer Elizabeth Olsen struggle to adjust with normal life after having spent a damaging amount of time living with an abusive cult.     

2. The Master 

It was a five year wait for Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, but boy was it worth the wait, intense drama and stunning cinematography make up for lack of a solid conclusion. Three incredible performances in Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Joaquin Phoenix. Also, the best direction of the year.

1. Silver Linings Playbook 

The film that I went to see with the lowest expectations turned out to be my movie of the year, fancy that. Hilariously funny, charming and sincere. A film that could have been so cynical or offensive given the subject matter is toned perfectly by director David O. Russell given much help by his superb acting cast who deserve Oscar nominations all-round.