In a nutshell, Bored & Dangerous says: “For all its harsh realism, it never let me forget I was watching a prestige movie.”
“I will not fall into despair! I will keep myself hardy until freedom is opportune!”
Slavery is bad, you guys. Did you know that? If not, you should probably watch 12 Years a Salve. Because it’s really determined to teach you that. So determined in fact, it’s willing to forgo all subtly, all nuance and all attempts to surprise you in any way. Because it really, really, really wants you to know that slavery is bad.
I don’t want anyone to think I’m making light of slavery. I’m making light of this movie and it’s oh so earnest approach to this Issue (with a capital “I”). It doesn’t matter how important the subject matter of a movie is, that’s no excuse for bland, predictable, box ticking film making. (more…)
I only remember a few things about Adam McKay’s 2010 buddy cop comedy starring Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. Its opening death scene was hilarious, I don’t think I laughed a single other time after that, and the end credits involved a PowerPoint presentation describing the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. I guess one underwhelming comedy with that it its core wasn’t enough to get his disgust about the GFC out of his system. Because now McKay is back, with a much more grown up and direct take on the issue, with The Big Short.
Michael Burry (Christian Bale) isn’t your typical Wall Street trader. He wears old shorts and t-shirts with no shoes around the office, he listens to classic, thrash metal years Metallica, and he notices things that other traders don’t. Like the fact that the American property market is on the verge of collapse. With property being one of the few sure things in the history of US finance, he finds it hard to convince anyone else of his findings. But one other trader sees the value in Burry’s theory, and soon Jared Vennet (Ryan Gosling) is pursuing the same idea. (more…)
“They cry. They plead. They beg. They piss themselves. They call for their mothers. It gets embarrassing.”
Why are movies about bad guys doing bad things so appealing to audiences? It can’t really be escapism if were watching these people who we’d never want to be, committing acts we’d never want to commit. And with a lot of them, we know going in there’s not gonna be some idealised ending where the bad guys pay for their sins and the good guys win the day. Buggers me what it is about these movies, but I do know that I love them. Including the undeservedly overlooked at the time, and kind of forgotten already, Killing Them Softly.
A few years ago, Markie (Ray Liotta) organised the hold up of his own illegal card game. He was the prime suspect, but managed to throw everyone off the scent. Recently, he spilled the beans, but enough time had passed that he got a pass. Which makes him an obvious patsy and fall guy if anyone else decides to rob his card game. Which is exactly what happens when Johnny (Vincent Curatola) hires low level scumbags Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) to do just that. (more…)
From the writer of some of the greatest American novels of the last half century… From the director of several genre redefining blockbusters that only get more acclaimed as the years past… A cast including Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Brad Pitt and Cameron Diaz… Al Gore should make a documentary about the horrific squandering of resources that went into making one of The Counsellor.
Michael Fassbender is the titular Counsellor, a lawyer mixed up with some bad dudes. Bad dudes like Javier Bardem as Reiner, and his wife Malkina (Cameron Diaz). They’re on the verge of a massive drug deal and the Counsellor is getting more and more mixed up in their world. While Reiner is all big hair, outlandish, flashy clothes, pet Leopards and extravagance, Westray (Brad Pitt) is his opposite. The quiet, calculating professional who calls it like it is, and has made all the sensible choices that he hopes will lead to a quiet retirement from the drug game.
When a sewage truck full of coke goes missing, the Counsellor is the prime suspect, and the world of drug cartels starts to close in around him and everyone he knows, including his fiancé, Penelope Cruz as Laura. There are a lot of characters and really, their only defining characteristics are where they fall on the prick-o-metre. I barely kept track of what was going on, and even then, only by remembering how much I hated each character in relation to each other.
Like a lot Cormack McCarthy stories, The Counsellor takes place in a weird limbo between the United States and Mexico. The borderlands populated by the worst people from both countries, with the legal protections of neither. When your world is populated by these corrupt, bottom feeding, narcissistic sociopaths, you’re never gonna have a character to relate to or cheer for. I guess Penelope Cruz’s Laura is kind of an innocent we can sympathise with. But on the other hand, the movie never gives us a chance to really know her, sho why care about what happens to her, innocent or not.
Also like a lot Cormack McCarthy stories, he comes up with new ways to kill people, new ways to degrade people and new ways to make you question why we should even bother if this is the kind of world we live in. Sure, McCarthy has never shied away from darkness, brutality and horror in his novels, like The Road, No Country for Old Men and especially Blood Meridian, but somehow, it felt like it had a point in those stories. When The Counsellor indulges in some new decapitation methods, or has Diaz mount the windscreen of a sports car, it seems more like some hack trying to write like McCarthy, with all the shock and none of the substance.
Did The Counsellor suffer from too much pressure and expectations based on the pedigree of everyone behind and in front of the camera? Maybe. Would it still have been derided as being pretty terrible even if it was made by anonymous nobodies, Ha, you bet. At best, it’s worth watching as a bizarre curiosity. It’s almost like a riddle, how did so many talented people all collectively shit the bed so bad?
The huge leap in zombie popularity has been pretty amazing over the last decade or so. Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright kicked off their feature film careers with Shaun of the Dead. George Romero, the Godfather of the genre came back in a big way with Land of the Dead, and The Walking Dead went from being one of the world’s biggest comic books to being one of the world’s biggest TV shows. So, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood got involved with a massive movie star, a massive budget and massive special effects. And all of that adds to a pretty decent movie with World War Z.
Traditionally, zombie movies concentrate on a small, isolated group of survivors in one location. With World War Z, the scope is just a little bigger. On a perfect suburban morning, in a perfect suburban home, surrounded by his perfect suburban family, Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) sees a report of some sort of virus outbreak on TV. His daughter delivers a piece of handy expositional dialogue to let us know this current house husband used to have some sort of high end gig with the UN in war torn countries. The family then sets off and gets stuck in traffic in downtown Philadelphia. The traffic jam is soon revealed to be an all out riot as the entire city loses its shit.
Gerry uses his UN connections to get evacuated by helicopter and his family is soon safe aboard a US Navy ship. Here he learns the virus he saw on telly has basically spread worldwide, turning the afflicted into zombies. This then sets off a globetrotting romp as Pitt travels to Korea, Israel and Wales in search of the cause of the virus and a hopefully a cure.
As far as big budget actioners go, World War Z won’t go down in history as a classic, but it’s perfectly fine. Pitt’s a believable enough hero and the story moves along at a cracking pace. Maybe a little too quick. The constant changing of locations and mini missions give is it a bit of video game feel. Stage 1: Escape Philadelphia. Stage 2: Korea. Stage 3: Jerusalem. Stage 4: Wales.
But the major letdown is the special effects. World War Z proves that CGI technology still isn’t good enough to seamlessly integrate computer generated people with real people in the same shot at the same time. They just don’t move right, like they’re not subject to the same laws of gravity. And even after the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on this thing, they still just look like cartoons.
Before it was even released, there was a lot of negative buzz about World War ‘s major rewrites and reshoots. While I generally really liked the ending, I think the rewrites seem more obvious in earlier parts. Things get set up, but don‘t have a pay off. Pitt’s family basically adopts a small boy after his family his killed, which seems like it will probably lead somewhere. Instead, you just see the kid in the background here and there, hanging around like a bad smell. Pitt’s family is sent away from the navy ship and you think this might play into the story somewhere, until it doesn’t.
But even with those small quibbles, there’s a lot more to like than dislike in World War Z. Especially the ending. In a movie that indulges in massive action sequences from the second it starts, the relatively subdued final obstacle was great surprise. The downside of that ending? It’s a clear setup for a sequel that just doesn’t seem necessary.
Slavery is bad, you guys. Did you know that? If not, you should probably watch 12 Years a Salve. Because it’s really determined to teach you that. So determined in fact, it’s willing to forgo all subtly, all nuance and all attempts to surprise you in any way. Because it really, really, really wants you to know that slavery is bad.
I don’t want anyone to think I’m making light of slavery. I’m making light of this movie and it’s oh so earnest approach to this Issue (with a capital “I”). It doesn’t matter how important the subject matter of a movie is, that’s no excuse for bland, predictable, box ticking film making.
Chiwetel Ejiofor is Solomon Northup, a husband, father and free black man in 1841 New York State. He’s tricked into a drunken night out and wakes up from his hang over in chains. He’s been kidnapped and sold into slavery in New Orleans. Paul Giamatti plays a slave trader, Benedict Cumbabatch plays a nice owner (well, as nice as anyone who thinks they can own people can be), Michael Fassbeneder plays an evil owner, Paul Dano plays a racist prick and Brad Pitt plays a Canadian with a terrible beard. This is an amazing cast that never really amounts to what you would expect from such a pedigree.
The pacing and economy of 12 Years a Salve is surprisingly brisk. At just on two hours, it gets right to the point, with Northup tricked into slavery within about the first 10 minutes, and there he stays until a brief reprieve in the closing minutes. And I think that pace is part of the problem. While losing freedom and being forced into slavery is obviously a terrible fate for any person, it would have been nice to spend a bit more time with Northup living his life as a free man first, to make the impact of having that all taken away hit a little harder. It’s hard to miss characters, like his family, who you never got to know in the first place.
The hero is the personification of will, determination and a spirit that cannot be broken. The villains are there to be evil racists and twirl their moustaches. And Brad Pitt is there to be the token open minded, forward thinking whitey. Within seconds of each character being introduced, you’ll be able to predict exactly what their part is to play, what they’ll do and when they’ll do it, so this story can stay on the most predictable of rails at all times.
Where 12 Years a Slave is most successful though, is in its brutality. There are several physical, verbal and emotional attacks of whites against blacks that made me squirm in my chair while I watched, and that’s a good thing. Seeing these things be said and done, and the racial intolerance that motivates them, should make people feel uncomfortable in 2013.
But for all its harsh realism, it never let me forget I was watching a prestige movie. At one stage, when a slave woman is being whipped, at first I was surprised by how horrific this act seemed, based on the mists of blood that would spray into the air with each crack of leather. Then a second later, I was thinking about the amazing dental plan Fassbender’s character must have for his slaves, because the victim’s teeth were so perfectly white and straight. Somehow, I don’t think that’s what director Steve McQueen wanted me take from the scenes, but that’s what I remember.
Bored and Dangerous 