Submarine - Review

The opportunities for British cinema goers to get genuinely excited about the offerings from our native land used to come fast and few, lately however we appear to have retreated into the realm of grainy low-budget affairs to great effect. By making our lack of funding and infrastructure a virtue rather than a burden we’ve begun to churn out some unexpected gems at a, still sluggish, but much better rate. Last year we had the comedy crowd pleaser from veteran Chris Morris (Four Lions) and this year another comedy veteran has stepped forward, Ayoade, with his low-key efforts to much acclaim at the Sundance film festival. Submarine follows the youthful exploits of self-obsessed Welsh teenager Oliver Tate (Roberts) whose melancholy demeanour sets him aside from the rest at school; we overhear his running monologue on his life, his love and his attempts to keep his dilapidating family together.

I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t noticed the almost cataclysmic buzz that’s surrounding the film right now, and why shouldn’t there be buzz? It’s not like Ayoade didn’t know what he was doing, the whole film plays directly into the hands of a very powerful, affluent and influential section of British society – us, students. There is nothing about this film that isn’t immediately of the time; a clever trick considering that the film is set, as Ayoade says, ‘vaguely in the past’. Most people theorise 80’s but Ayoade incorporates a myriad of timely styles in order to create the super-past. What’s so devilishly clever is that this super-past is in fact our own time to a lot of people. You just have to walk outside and you’ll see that long woollen coats with big toggles, low cut fringes, cardigans and general vintage have never been cooler. Yes, just so to get the most burning question out of the way, this film is in fact a hipsters wet-dream. In fact I’d actually be surprised if a hard-core hipster didn’t climax at least 3 times during the course of the entire film. It’s not just the clothing and the style however, original songs by Alex Turner should be sufficient to make any discerning student swoon with an over-load of ‘cool’. Not that Alex Turner is astoundingly hipster, if at all, but he’s British, a little mopey and he plays sad off-beat songs on a guitar – I’m sure any hipster could find something to like in that pile. Ayoade incorporates the use of various different cameras, old cameras to be exact (and there ain’t nothing quite as hipster as filming people in vaguely 60’s clothing with old cameras). As mentioned before Ayoade makes his lack of money a virtue with some tremendously charming low-budget special effects, most notably his version of ‘bullet time’ which usually requires million dollar 360 cameras to achieve but which Ayoade achieves by just making the actors stand perfectly still while he moves the camera around them. Where Ayoade’s style ceases to be endearing and starts to become a little problematic however is when you realise that you’ve seen all of this before, in fact you’ve been seeing it for quite a while. I’d be surprised if a student film-lover would be unaware of the work of Wes Anderson, and Ayoade is practically begging you to make comparisons. However, and very sadly, it doesn’t at all feel like Ayoade is challenging Anderson’s filmmaking, or even paying homage to it, he’s just point-blank ripping it off for his own benefit. That’s the saddest thing of all, the most original British film of the year couldn’t be any more derivative. The plot structure split into three acts, announced by large titles on the screen, reeks of Andersons (much copied) use of titling and subtitling as well as his use of chaptering throughout his films. Ayoade doesn’t stop there though, the dialogue, the dead-pan back and forth is so Anderson it hurts a little sometimes. The use of music, the snappy editing to odd, colourful objects dotted around the room. The unfortunate pain continues as it begins to become obvious that Ayoade didn’t stop with Anderson and moved on to the work of his, lesser known, contemporary/collaborator Noah Baumbach. Baumbach’s awkward family disputes are now legendary and the whole plot ends up feeling like Baumbach’s “The Squid and the Whale” set in, ironically, Wales.

Having said all this, I still loved the film. It didn’t make it easy for me, but somehow it felt genuine rather than pretentious. It felt skilled rather than amateur and I was impressed rather than disappointed. It may have just been sterling work of a young cast (especially the wonderful Yasmin Paige as Oliver Tate’s sadistic love interest), and the pangs of early youth and young love returning to me, but somehow it all seemed to work. The weakest part of the story, Tate’s mother (Hawkins) being seduced by a mullet-haired psychic (Considine), ends up still being something very special due to the work of the eternally watchable Considine and the commendable work of two British screen icons (the wonderfully airy Sally Hawkins and the unbeatably awkward and sullen Noah Taylor) as Tate’s parents. Most of all though it’s because at the heart of Submarine there beats an endearing love story that you genuinely want to succeed; and, everything considered, Ayoade does make some lovely little, genuine, homages to Truffaut with some terrific beach scenes. At very least, also, a friend and collaborator of both Anderson and Baumbach – a guy named Ben Stiller (heard of him?) – saw fit to add his name to the producing credits sheerly out of being so impressed. In the end, to return to my first point, you get so many truly great and original British films these days you don’t actually want to question the purity of one as good as this, because no matter where the influence came from Submarine still manages to feel fresh. Like with many things, a little unoriginality shouldn’t detract from Ayoade’s otherwise tremendous achievement.

8/10

Welsh Anderson          

Unknown - Review

We live in a troubling time where studios seem to be retreating further and further into safe territory at the expense of originality and actual enjoyment, cue another pointless Euro-thriller. Following very much in the slightly degrading footsteps of Taken, a wholesome American tourist (Neeson) visits scary evil Europe (where bad things are guaranteed to happen) and, after a car crash coma, must proceed to bust heads and have car chases to reclaim what is rightfully his; in this case his identity and his wife, played by Mad Men’s January Jones, who seems to have no recollection of him and has shacked up with an impostor doing a very convincing impression.

The plot attempts to justify itself with some half-arsed ironic tragedies, like he can’t prove he is who he says he is because he loses his passport at the airport and The US government would normally be all over the situation but it’s Thanksgiving weekend and the embassy’s closed. Thus there is no choice but to play the “let’s solve the mystery ourselves” game with Diane Kruger’s, thoroughly unconvincing, Bosnian cab driver coming along for the ride. The film supplants Taken’s Paris-centric plot with a romp around Berlin, sadly the production team point-blank refuse to use any of the wonderful sights in Berlin and instead fill the screen with generic side-streets that could be from anywhere. Opting to show the city blanketed in snow ordinarily would be a nice touch but instead seems to only emphasise the sluggishness of the narrative. Taken managed to justify its wholesome stupidity and racism by fuel-injecting itself with some brutally wonderful action, Unknown on the other hand is neither a puzzle-solver nor an action film - with about three action set-ups, the world’s most useless assassins and a plot-twist you’ll get halfway through if you’re smart enough. Save a little dynamite scene between veterans Frank Langella and Bruno Ganz, this is straight-to-DVD banality.

3/10

You’ll know it all too well.    

Battle: Los Angeles - Review

At this point, in the history of storytelling, the tale of the full-scale alien invasion seems as old and institutional as Arthurian legend. Thus so it was that the most beset upon city in the entire world, according to Hollywood, is once again subjected to alien nasty’s who are after something that is never fully explained and decide that killing everyone and everything is the best way to go about getting it. Lo’ our heroes, the ass-kickin’ U.S. Marine Corps (Ooh-Rah, Semper Fi etc. etc.), shalt step in to save us all, never leave a man behind and be the first to engineer a way to defeat a super intelligent race of space-travellers. But no-one sees these movies for plausibility, do they? All you really desire is to be evoked on the most basic level and watch things that go boom. All things considered, one thing you can never really accuse Battle: LA of not having is things that go boom.

Director Jonathan Liebesman set the record straight in the build up to the film’s release – all he wants is to make the most realistic alien invasion movie ever. However, the concept itself is grounded so much in fantasy it’s like saying “I want to make the most realistic Harry Potter movie ever” it’s only capable of getting so real. This in mind, though, Liebesman does a fairly good job on this front of the battleground for hearts and minds – Battle: LA is choc-a-bloc with military procedure and its Green Zone inspired, shaky, handheld camera style puts you in the thick of it while some nice wide-shots show the devastation of a city undergoing alien Shock And Awe. The realism backfires a little bit with the characters though, as our soldier heroes become a little too real, meaning they’re thoughtless meat-heads who you find difficult to actually associate with. The introduction is impressive enough and some nice use of subtitling introduces us to our squad of defenders. Sadly, the first 20 minutes or so of expositional backstories turns out to be completely pointless on almost all counts. There’s the one getting ready to marry his sweetheart, the 18 year-old virgin dweeb who just signed up, a moustachioed wise-ass who genuinely looks like he was ripped straight out of Predator, while Michelle Rodriguez gets her butch-thing on once again to display her two classic emotions - anger and sneering at stuff (if that counts as an emotion). And of course our protagonist, veteran soldier Aaron Eckhart, (who’s only one day from retirement!) has some leadership issues after a fatal mishap on his last tour. Naturally Liebesman just wants you to feel for his characters, but you can’t shake the feeling you’d care a hell of a lot more if you were given room to breathe instead of being spoon-fed how fraternal and caring they really are. This is the core of all Battle: LA’s problems, it might just be the most derivative movie ever made. It’s hard to pin-point exactly which movie it rips off the most, you could say it’s like Independence Day by way of Black Hawk Down, or perhaps Saving Private Ryan meets District 9. Of course this won’t be such a bad thing to most people, it only rips off great movies, and we’re not exactly expecting Shakespeare, are we? But the script is so hideously awful you begin to view Battle: LA’s unoriginality as less harmless referencing and more raping your favourite films. Eckhart’s troubled Staff Sergeant is the most coloured of all Battle: LA’s cardboard cut-outs but sadly he’s coloured in with children’s crayons. The never ending epic speeches water down your empathy for the tenacious warriors; there’s only so many times you can be told the virtue of duty and the Marines-Never-Give-Up spirit before you want to just slap them all.

The plot, initially, seems linear enough as our meat-heads must rescue a small group of civilians, who are even less developed, and get them away from the coast before the Air Force blows it all to kingdom come. On top of this the action is actually pretty good, not biblical, but certainly good urban warfare. Explosions abound and you may even jump a couple of times as our Marines battle through the streets and do their best to figure out how to kill a completely unknown enemy. This is the films true element, which it should have stayed in more - procedural shoot-outs which bring the film as close to gritty realism as it ever gets. An extended shoot-out on the freeway is particularly notable and the finale ain’t that bad at all. It never reaches the kinetic levels of a truly great actioner, but its efforts are definitely admirable. You get the feeling that this could have been something great, there may even be a very good film in there somewhere, an all-American District 9 perhaps; however the blood and guts of a full on war movie are culled in favour of a 12A rating while the fun absurdity of a Michael Bay-style blockbuster is lost through an almost painful lack of chemistry and humour. That’s not to say that the script doesn’t try to be funny, emphasis on “try” in that sentence. Even the realism of the action gets a bit spoilt by the relentless in-your-face heroism of the soldiers who make 300’s Spartans look like poets. The films tagline, however, promises us that “This is only the beginning” – and judging by the success at the US box office it may very well be. The prospect of a sequel isn’t horrific either as the film touches, very briefly, upon some interesting ideas: the motivation of the alien invaders (they seem to be interested in our water) as well as their nature and biology. With some improvements made, this could turn out to be something good. Right now though this is just a juvenile attempt at making Independence Day for the Call Of Duty generation. Except Call Of Duty actually has better writing.

5/10

Battle-Weary                

From a dark night of Insomnia, a Memento of defence from someone Following The Prestige of Christopher Nolan’s films from their very Inception.

It’s 3am and I have once again found myself unable to control the fury at yet another fan boy who lives under the ever-growingly popular belief that if you insult Christopher Nolan or call Inception “actually not that intelligent at all” then it will instantaneously make you look more intellectual, film-literate and “edgy”. Let the tirade begin.

First things first, in defence of poor old Inception and its beleaguered fanbase – we’re aware that’s it’s not Plato’s fucking symposium. We’re aware of the fact that when Nolan finished the script a beam of light didn’t emanate from the fucking paper, shooting off into the cosmic mass of God somewhere in the universe because a mere mortal man had somehow, in one fell swoop, solved the crises of the human condition and discovered the answers to all dreams and perceptions of reality. As with just about every, and all, good things in the litany of human fucking existence it was simply just a really good story. That’s it. Of course a perception that this is a problem hinges upon your misguided belief that “it” just being “it” makes “it” meaningless. If you care to gander over a millennia of human self-documentation then I’ll think you’ll find that some other well told stories that were, as all stories are, plagued by plot-holes and inconsistencies and have grown to become as important to people as well…. I don’t think anything is quite important as they are (yes I’m talking about the Bible, shock fucking horror someone said it’s all made up).  Of course people are allowed to not like things that I like, as they so often do, but it’s the pure venom that people go after it with that gets to me. What has it done so horribly bloody wrong that it deserves this amount of animosity thrust into its well-meaning face? I refuse to believe that it’s because of loyalist Nolan-ites like me. I mean for Christ sake we all let you go about your Potter-mania bullshit way with little hassle even though it’s a dramatically unoriginal, bland ground-up humus-like, mush a franchise. But it seems to make everyone else happy. It can’t be because people didn’t get it; I mean I can see the affecting nature of some its aesthetics (particularly the ones about moviemaking) sailing comfortably over most people’s heads, but I’ve become certain that the people who were so monstrously stupid they couldn’t even follow the bloody plot were so ashamed of themselves that they kept quiet and occasionally mumbled something in a bashful manner into their shoes – perhaps along the lines of “well you know I just like happy movies, I guess it wasn’t for me”. And I’m pretty sure it can’t be a backlash to hardliners who perhaps did come out swinging a bit too hard from early screenings; you know the ones, the guys who clearly had nothing greater than a GCSE Religious Education grasp of philosophy, declaring it a missing testament from the Bible. Perhaps that’s what really gets me about the anti-Inceptioners, the same level of poorly thought out hatred. It’s the irrationalness of it, an insistence that it isn’t just their personal opinion, it IS an abomination. The worst one I find is the sheer indignity that arose from the anti-Nolanites when he got a few Oscar nods. For starters the man didn’t even get a nod for Best Director – but that didn’t stop the mob from listing, in detail, why he shouldn’t get the gong anyway. I mean for the love of shit people if you’re not going to give it to a man who wrote and directed his own original concept film with a, literally, international super-cast whilst constructing methods of filming in zero-gravity and making fucking buildings BEND then who the fuck are you going to give it to? Tom Hooper!? The man dressed up Colin Firth and shot him wandering around some misty soundstage back-lots which, apparently, constitutes “recreating war-time London”. The Kings Speech was a terrific film, don’t get me wrong and very possibly even deserving of the best picture gong, but best Director is surely taking the absolute piss people. If not Nolan for constructing, and deconstructing, an entirely new world then surely fucking Fincher, but no, and nobody batted a damn eye-lid for longer than 2 seconds and merely went “well that was odd, but British cinema and all that; Slumdog spirit”. If you’re going to endorse anyone as a poster-child for British cinema then why not Nolan? It surely can’t be because of some odd sense of national authenticity and pride, i.e. because he’s never really worked in the British studio system. If people genuinely gave a shit about working in the British studio system then they’d make sure there actually was a system for our artists to work in, not just FilmFour and BBC Films (when and if they feel like it, and if it looks like it’ll tie in with the Dr Who fanbase). Let’s be fair to ourselves here, if British people can’t make ourselves internationally appealing then realistically we’ve got just about fuck all. Just a rainy island that has zero cinematic infrastructure and the ability to still look puzzled when the world doesn’t give a shit about the BAFTA’s. Oh, and Dr Who. In case you haven’t noticed essentially our entire old guard of actors and actresses have been solely employed by the Harry Potter franchise, and the odd Direct Line car insurance advert, and when that’s over they’ve fuck all else to do. The call for Brit baddies isn’t as strong as it used to be as the nation appears to be growing somewhat of a feeble backbone as of late and demanding that it’s actually Cool Britannia after all. But what’s so wonderful about people like Nolan is that they simply couldn’t give less of a fuck about any of that. The man is just a story-teller. If we’re going to be pedantic and cling only to those artists who stick it out in Blighty then we’re going to be left with Shane Meadows…..and that’s about it. Danny Boyle has been making international pictures for quite some time now if you think about it, The Wright brothers (Joe and Edgar – no actual relation) aren’t coming back, we never really had Matthew Vaughn, Guy Ritchie’s gone, we’ve even bloody lost Kenneth Branagh. The formula is if you’re talented you work your way out of Britain, much in the same way an actor works their way out of theatre and into film. So is that what we’ve become as a nation – the decaying theatre of the world that is refusing to quite except that cinema kicked the living shit out of us over a hundred years ago? We’ve become so obsessed with this idea of British purity that we might as well club ourselves over the fucking head, put on a balaclava and join the EDL. I’m sick to death of this incessant whining over Brits making films abroad and therefore why we’re refusing to support them. The amount of times I’ve heard “yeah I’ve loved every single thing he’s ever done [Edgar Wright] but It’s in Americaaaaa”, actually it’s set in Canada, “same thiiiiing” and of course there is the classic “It’s in America now, they don’t get the subtle British humour” – it’s enough to make me want to rage-vomit.

But I digress. It’s not that I feel Nolan is the be-all-end-all of International cinema but, as tired as the comparison is, the man is like Hitchcock before him. His success-to-quality ratio is pretty much unrivalled, if you want to achieve the kind of figures that James Cameron or Michael Bay pull in you’ve usually got to sacrifice a hell of a lot for spectacle and let’s be honest here (whilst Inception is a veritable bonanza of awe-gasmic treats) his most successful picture, The Dark Knight, is a slow-burning talkie that builds to a kinetic, and harrowing, finish. Nolan’s Gotham is far removed from the Disney, pastel colour, dream-worlds of Cameron’s Titanic or Pandora instead presenting a cold, monochrome and sometimes even dank metropolis, this is not the eye-candy that usually earns you a billion box-office. In the simplest terms people slag off the man for the exact reason that makes him great, because he’s noticeable. He is a distinguished name that has become, very quickly, a quality mark. Are films like The Prestige or Inception flawless exercise in mind-bending philosophy or existentialism? No, not really. They’re flawed, as essentially all things are. But people seem to be convinced that they claimed to be flawless entries in the canon of human progression, when in fact we all know that they didn’t.  It would appear all Christopher Nolan has to do to piss people off is exist. Following Christopher Nolan is not a religion, as it has unfoundedly been dubbed, but rather it’s like following Hitchcock – it’s an admiration and an affinity. Do I think he’s my best friend? No. Do I think he understands me better than anyone else ever could? No. Do I think he’s good at making films and getting his own view across? Yes. Do I sometimes agree or learn from his view? Yes. There’s something so incendiary about an auteur (yes I called him auteur, because he is one), something that inspires such vast amounts of both adoration and hatred. There are many responses to a Nolan movie, but they’re rarely ever “meh”. I think Lars Von Trier, a man it took me a long time to love, may have weirdly put it best (as he so often seems to in his cryptically weird and semi-offensive manner). When standing amid the storm of fury conjured up by his film “Antichrist” at Cannes he stood perplexed at why so many people bade for his blood, why everyone seemed so personally insulted by what he’d done. Von Trier responded, if somewhat garishly, that “I don't have to justify myself. I make films and I enjoy very much making them. You are all my guests, it's not the other way round.”. At first I despised the sentence as I despised the man, but after a while I came to see its irrefutable validity. We are his guests, as we are the guests of any filmmaker, they didn’t strap us down and force us to watch it; in fact in this day and age there appears to be nothing harder than getting someone to sit still for 2 hours and pay attention to one thing. The truth is you can hate a filmmaker all you like but they never did anything to you. Didn’t get what you expected? Should have watched more trailers and read more info before paying for it (if you indeed did actually bother paying for it). So if Christopher Nolan really does bother you THAT much, how about when The Dark Knight Rises comes out you piss off and don’t watch it; and leave, blatant, philistines like me to enjoy it for what it is.

Mark Birrell