“If the oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab beaches, I’ll just kind of implode. If none of those things happen. I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death. So yeah. I’m fucked.”
Looking at Ridley Scott’s filmography, he’s made over 20 features films since the late 70s. Of those, I have seen 11. Of those 11, I love Matchstick Men and Black Hawk Down, I kind of like American Gangster and Alien, and I really dislike Blade Runner, The Counselor and Gladiator. The rest are just kind of blurs. Not good enough to remember, not bad enough to hate. All of that is to say, I had zero interest in seeing his latest, The Martian.
Big budget, spectacle movies need a pedigree of actors, writers or director behind them before I get excited. I like Matt Damon, but I already saw him do stranded in space with last year’s Interstellar, so his involvement didn’t really get make jazzed. But, the good reviews for The Martian just on kept coming. And in a year that has so far been pretty thin with really good movies, I was starved enough for good, new release movies, that I took a chance on a director I don’t really like, working in a genre I don’t really like, and I saw The Martian.(more…)
“If the oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab beaches, I’ll just kind of implode. If none of those things happen. I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death. So yeah. I’m fucked.”
Looking at Ridley Scott’s filmography, he’s made over 20 features films since the late 70s. Of those, I have seen 11. Of those 11, I love Matchstick Men and Black Hawk Down, I kind of like American Gangster and Alien, and I really dislike Blade Runner, The Counselor and Gladiator. The rest are just kind of blurs. Not good enough to remember, not bad enough to hate. All of that is to say, I had zero interest in seeing his latest, The Martian.
Big budget, spectacle movies need a pedigree of actors, writers or director behind them before I get excited. I like Matt Damon, but I already saw him do stranded in space with last year’s Interstellar, so his involvement didn’t really get make jazzed. But, the good reviews for The Martian just on kept coming. And in a year that has so far been pretty thin with really good movies, I was starved enough for good, new release movies, that I took a chance on a director I don’t really like, working in a genre I don’t really like, and I saw The Martian.(more…)
“You see that man? You and he are brothers! He depends on you! You depend on him! You never leave a man behind!”
With the last decade plus of Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, there’s probably an entire generation who don’t even realise that the Iraq War of the new millennium was the second Iraq War of the last 20 odd years. The first Iraq War only lasted a short time and there was little in the way of graphic combat footage to fill new broadcasts. I guess there was also little in the way of Hollywood friendly spectacle as well, because there has been very little movie love given to the subject. And the only prestige, award nominated 90s Iraq movie I can think of, is Courage Under Fire.
After a friendly fire mishap sees his best friend dead, tank commander Nat Sterling (Denzel Washington) has his mistake swept under the rug and is put on desk duty. His first assignment is to investigate an incident involving helicopter pilot Karen Walden (Meg Ryan) and determine if she should be awarded the prestigious Medal of Honor. If so, she will be the first female soldier to ever receive the honor. (more…)
“The American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest Movies was selected by AFI’s blue-ribbon panel of more than 1,500 leaders of the American movie community to commemorate 100 Years of Movies”. Every weekend(ish) during 2015, I’ll review two(ish), counting them down from 100 to 1.
“Hell, these guys deserve to go home as much as I do. They’ve fought just as hard.”
For the last 15 or so years, pretty much all war movies have been shot and edited in a very specific way. And not just war movies and big battle scenes, but one on one fights in action movies as well. The camera doesn’t just watch the action now, it’s in it, being rocked by explosions, knocked around by combatants, with shots edited to keep the viewer a little disorientated. When done right, you get cool, visceral action like in the Bourne movies. When done wrong, you get incomprehensible shit, like in The Transformers movies. Right or wrong, they all stole their style from one man and one movie. Steven Spielberg and Saving Private Ryan.
In one of the most famous scenes of the last two decades of movie making, Saving Private Ryan opens with the storming of the beach at Normandy, the beginning of the allies final push to take Europe back from Hitler. I hail of bullets and explosions, we focus on the platoon of Capt. Miller (Tom Hanks). Against all odds, they survive the invasion and are given their next assignment. When a War Department Colonel (Bryan Cranston) back in America finds out that there’s one poor mother in Iowa who’s about to get four telegrams on the same day announcing the death of four of her five sons, he decides the fifth boy will be sent home safely. (more…)
I don’t know why, but last year, I couldn’t get excited, or even manage to give the least of shits, about Interstellar. I’m not anti Christopher Nolan, but I do think I was suffering a little from Nolan fatigue. I like The Prestige and I don’t care how many plot and logic holes people find in Inception, I really dig that too. I think it’s the constant browbeating by fans of his Batman series that made me feel like Interstellar was just going to be too much.
Nolan’s Batmans are perfectly good movies, way above average for the super hero genre, but that’s about the extent of it. I also think their perfect examples of his biggest weakness. Nolan makes over the top, spectacle movies, but he obviously thinks he’s doing something more than that, because he has a message, something he thinks is important to say. The only problem is, those messages are always the most obvious, cliched statements about life and the human condition, juts dressed up under layers and layers of bombast to seem profound and new. (more…)
From TV hunk, to a pretty rocky beginning on the big screen, to legit super star, to respected director, George Clooney’s career has been pretty interesting to watch. Confessions of Dangerous Mind is was the perfect directorial debut to show he was a real film maker with real ideas. Goodnight and Good Luck was a deserved award winner that got plenty of attention at the time, but doesn’t seem to be all that talked about these days. Leatherheads seemed like a bit of a tossed off dick around of Clooney having fun. It was nothing to rave about, but it was perfectly fine. The Ides of March was a return to trying something a little more important, along the lines of Goodnight and Good Luck, but it came and went without leaving much of an impression. But now, Clooney gets his first chance at a big budget, big star cast, big everything kind of movie, with The Monuments Men.
The Second World War is coming to a close and Hitler is on the ropes. But that hasn’t stopped him stealing and amassing the greatest pieces of art on offer as he makes his way through Europe. Now, there are two possible outcomes. Either the Nazis win the war and the art will all be shown in the planned Furher Museum, a massive literal building and even bigger figurative wank. Or, the Nazis lose, and follow Hitler’s orders to destroy all these masterworks before the allies can get their hands on them. (more…)
Until his supposed retirement after Behind the Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh was one of the most prolific film makers in the business. He was cranking out movies at a rate that was hard to keep up with. Even the high profile ones with great reviews, like The Informant and Magic Mike took me a long to time to get around to, because there was just so much Soderbergh out there to see. Then there are the other ones, the ones that didn’t seem to make a big splash, ones like Contagion.
Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow) is at an airport, waiting for a flight home to her husband, Mitch (Matt Damon). She’s a bit fluey, and not long after getting home she has a seizure and pops her clogs. Meanwhile, people all over the world start exhibiting similar symptoms and similar clog popping. Doctors played by Kate Winslet and Laurence Fishburne are first responders, trying to figure out what this mystery, killer disease is, while also trying to stop word getting out and panic spreading.
Determined to spread that news and panic is Jude Law as Alan, a blogger with a dodgy accent that I think is supposed to be Australian. At the same time, there are various other organisations all over the world, all working in different ways to either stop the disease, or at least figure out where it came from. The cast is huge, and the story is sprawling, but never in a convoluted or messy way.
In fact, that sprawl works to intensify the paranoia and fear. Seeing this world threatening event from so many perspectives only makes it that much scarier. There’s the clinical approach of the scientists, the military logic of Bryan Cranston’s high ranking officer, there’s the dismay of Matt Damon’s everyman. And even when they’re actively working against each other, often without even knowing it, it’s hard not to see merit and logic in all of their actions.
Contagion might be the scariest movie l’ve ever seen. Soderbergh has always been one of the best directors out there for conveying reality. For every over the top piece of cool like Out of Sight, or the Oceans franchise, he’s made just as many grimey, so real you can smell them movies, like The Limey and Magic Mike. In Contagion, that feeling of reality makes the idea of this disease seem more than just possible, it comes off as pretty much inevitable.
Apart from Law’s dodgy accent, every one really delivers. And despite the huge ensemble, each character gets their own moment or two in the spotlight. With such a big cast of A-listers, I don’t know why Contagion didn’t get more attention when it came out. Before watching it, all I knew was that Soderbrgh had made it. l had no idea about Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, John Hawkes or the half a dozen other people I’m probably forgetting right now. Even with this pretty full on, very dark subject that could be a bit confronting, the cast list seems like more than enough to get people interested.
“Effective” is a word that can sound a bit wanky when talking about a movie. But it just seems really appropriate in regards to Contagion. I’m no germaphobe and sickness isn’t something I ever really worry about. But now, having just finished watching this movie, it seems like something I should worry about more often, if not all the time. I wonder if sales of hand sanitizer went up when this movie first came out?
From TV hunk, to a pretty rocky beginning on the big screen, to legit super star, to respected director, George Clooney’s career has been pretty interesting to watch. Confessions of Dangerous Mind is was the perfect directorial debut to show he was a real film maker with real ideas. Goodnight and Good Luck was a deserved award winner that got plenty of attention at the time, but doesn’t seem to be all that talked about these days. Leatherheads seemed like a bit of a tossed off dick around of Clooney having fun. It was nothing to rave about, but it was perfectly fine. The Ides of March was a return to trying something a little more important, along the lines of Goodnight and Good Luck, but it came and went without leaving much of an impression. But now, Clooney gets his first chance at a big budget, big star cast, big everything kind of movie, with The Monuments Men.
The Second World War is coming to a close and Hitler is on the ropes. But that hasn’t stopped him stealing and amassing the greatest pieces of art on offer as he makes his way through Europe. Now, there are two possible outcomes. Either the Nazis win the war and the art will all be shown in the planned Furher Museum, a massive literal building and even bigger figurative wank. Or, the Nazis lose, and follow Hitler’s orders to destroy all these masterworks before the allies can get their hands on them.
Cue the Monuments Men, a group of art experts led by George Clooney’s Frank Stokes, and played by Mat Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Hugh Bonneville, Bob Balaban, Jean Dujardin and Dimitri Leonidas. After a brief stint in basic training, these candy assed New York intellectuals are soon landing in Normandy, just behind the D Day invasion, and on the hunt for some of the greatest pieces of art ever created. Matt Damon’s James Granger is deployed to Paris where he meets Claire (Cate Blanchett), a former French resistance member who may know where the Germans have taken the stolen art.
It’s a great story that needs to be told, it’s made up of a great cast, and Clooney’s direction is, well, great. The only problem is, for all its great aspects, The Monuments Men only adds up to be a good movie. In no way bad, it just doesn’t reach the levels it really should. And I put that down to its weird, sluggish pacing.
Almost immediately after arriving in Europe, the core group is split up into four or five little units, all heading to different countries on their own little missions. Add to this the Russians not so well intentioned version of the Monuments Men, Blanchett’s story line and the odd German character, and it feels like Clooney’s biggest problems should have been finding time to fit everything in. Yet somehow, every scene, every story, every event seems to be a little slower than should be, and go just a little longer than necessary. It doesn’t quite ever get the momentum it needs.
When I first heard about The Monuments Men and saw trailers, I wondered how the movie would ever justify the loss of human life just for some paintings. It’s obvious Clooney thought that too, because he shoehorns in three or four different conversations and monologues all addressing that very topic. The only problem is, when the movie wasn’t talking about it directly, I kind of got on board with their mission and the huge risks they were talking, just for some paintings. But whenever the story would stop dead in its tracks to address it, I was taken out of it. Clooney really needed to have a little more faith in his movie and his audience.
After not so great reviews, I really, really, really wanted to prove them wrong and love The Monuments Men. On paper, everything about it made it seem like a sure thing. But ultimately I didn’t love it, I just liked it. Which should be enough, but I just wanted more.
In 2009, Neil Blomkamp had a dream debut in the world of feature film making. After seeing Blomkamp’s short film Alive in Joburg, King of the Movie Geeks, Peter Jackson, helped produce a feature length version that became District 9.District 9 went onto great financial success, great geek success, and most impressively, great critical success. Something as sci-fi and genre-riffic as District 9 rarely gets Oscar recognition outside of technical awards. But here was Blomkamp, one film in and receiving Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture. So now, four years later, in the lead up to the release of his follow up, Blomkamp has been under just a little pressure to really deliver with Elysium. And he does.
If you’ve seen District 9, you know what you’re getting yourself into with Elysium. That’s not to say I found Elysium derivative of his debut, or a rehash. What I mean is, Blomkap made such a real, convincing world with District 9, and has such a unique style and vision, that I feel like the two films are set in the same universe. A Universe where the titular space station that motivates the people of run down Los Angeles in Elysium could almost exist on the other side of the same world as the Prawn populated slums of Johanessburg in District 9.
But enough of the District 9 comparisons. Elysium is its own movie and shouldn’t be stuck under its predecessor’s shadow. Matt Damon is Max Da Costa, a former orphan and former car thief who is trying to stay on the straight and narrow, working a mind numbing factory job, building robots that seem to have taken any other job someone like him might be eligible for. It’s the year 2154, the “Haves” live on Elysium, a Garden of Eden space station of clean air, green grass, crystal clear water and a mansion for every person, complete with medibeds that can cure any injury or illness. The “Have Nots” are stuck with Earth. Dirty, desolate, smelly, slummy, depressing old Earth.
After an accident exposes Damon to massive amounts of radiation, he realises the only way to prove his five day life expectancy wrong, is to get onto Elysium and into one of the all curing medibeds. The local black market and cyber kingpin, Spider, recruits Damon for one lost black market job that will lead him to Elysium and a cure. Damon scores a super sweet exo-skeleton for added strength while also scoring a totally badass nemesis in the form of Kruger, a mercenary played by District 9’s Sharlto Copley. Working for Elysium’s Secretary of Defence, Jessica Delacourt, played by Jody Foster, Copley is one of the most terrifying bad guys I’ve seen in a movie in a long, long time, and a million miles away from the bumbling, reluctant hero he played in District 9.
The story and sci-fi inventions of Elysium are a little complicated and convoluted at times, but in a good way. It’s the kind of movie that makes you work a little, but the pay offs make that work more than worthwhile. Some people have said they were disappointed by Elysium compared to District 9, but I’d put them on par. District 9 made Neil Blomkamp someone who I was interested to see what he did next. Elysium puts Neil Blomkamp on my list of directors whose movies I’ll see regardless of genre, stars or subject matter.
If, like me, you’ve been kept up at night wondering, “What does Scott Bakula look like moustachioed and shirtless?”, the answer is waiting for you in Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra… And the answer is glorious. Liberace is a celebrity I’ve only ever known as a sketch show punch line, so going in, I was more interested in Behind the Candelabra as director Steven Soderbergh’s supposed final film before retiring from the medium, than I was in its subject. Which lead to an awesome surprise… Liberace is an amazingly interesting, tragic and compelling character.
The story of a years long affair between Liberace (Michael Douglas) and Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), Behind the Candelabra is at its core, a cautionary tale built on a famous Liberace quote, “Too much of a good thing is wonderful”. The movie wastes no time getting to the relationship. Racing through their initial introduction and quickly moving the story along to Damon’s live-in status with Douglas, it also wastes no time mapping out what’s to come. No sooner has Damon become comfortable with his lavish new surroundings, than the houseboy who’s seen it all is letting Damon know he’s just the latest in a long line of inevitably replaceable playthings. But before the unavoidable comedown, the first half of the film focuses on two people very much in love, enjoying a life of extravagance and indulgence. The second half gives us the flips side, focusing on two people falling (and eventually completely fallen) out of love, in a lot of ways caused by that life of extravagance and indulgence.
Douglas and Damon are both note perfect in the leading roles, but they’re almost outshone by some of the supporting players. The afore mentioned Bakula is clearing having fun every second he’s on screen and Dan Aykroyd is in form rarely seen these days as Liberace’s manager, that makes you almost forget Blues Brothers 2000… Almost. But the MVP of Behind the Candelabra is, without a doubt Rob Lowe, as the plastic surgeon and distributor of his personally developed and fully pharmacological “California Diet” (patent pending). If I was told Behind the Candelabra 2: The Legend of Liberace’s Gold was in production and consisted of nothing more than Lowe’s stretched face and dead doll’s eyes staring blankly into the distance, I’d be in the cinema opening day.
Will this be Soderbergh’s swan song? For a filmmaker so prolific, he’s had to compete with himself for an Oscar, I’d be very surprised if it turns out that way. But if it is, Behind the Candelabra is an impressive, lavish and more than satisfying end to an eclectic, sometimes brilliant (sometimes, not so brilliant) career. He really has gone out in style. Gouache, tacky, golden jewel encrusted grand piano, over the top style.
There’s the docu-realism obsessed Paul Greengrass of movies like United 93 and Bloody Sunday. Then there’s the balls to the wall action director Paul Greengrass who’s visceral approach to the Bourne series was so effective, it’s been consistently copied by almost every other action director ever since. And that’s the kind of Paul Greengrass at work in Green Zone.
Remember in 2003 when George W Bush went to war with Iraq and justified it by saying Saddam had weapons of mass destruction? Over the course of a few months, the acronym ‘WMD’ went from threatening to ultimately a punch line about how evil, opportunistic or maybe just stupid, the Bush administration was. This is a movie about the men on the ground, searching for those WMDs and thinking they’re the good guys, doing the good work.
Matt Damon plays Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, the leader of a squad of US Army soldiers who have been trying to uncover WMDs that intelligence reports swear exist, though they never seem to actually find any. On the job one day, he gets some inside knowledge from Iraqi local Freddy (Khalid Abdalia) that leads him away from the bogus WMD reports and toward General Mohammed Al-Rawi (Yoigai Naor). On the trail of Al-Rawi, Miller starts to unravel a world of covert operations, misinformation and deception perpetrated by Greg Kinnear’s Clark Poundstone, a Pentagon agent and not so nice guy.
Miller gets caught between his army superiors, the CIA, the Pentagon and the locals as he tries to get to the bottom of it all. He’s the idealist soldier, he truly believes his job there is to help people and save lives. And Damon does a great job of showing the growing cynicism as he realises piece be piece that maybe his superiors don’t have the same sort of idealistic outlook.
Even at his most action-tatsic and testosterone flaunting extreme, Greengrass wants to tell a serious story dealing with serious issues. Green Zone makes sure the Iraqis are more than just AK-47 flaunting urban soldiers there for the good guy Americans to shoot or save. With he character of Freddy, he gives Damon and the audience a local face to sympathise with and connect to. He’s a constant reminder that whatever work soldiers like Damon are there to do, good or bad, in some ways they’re ultimately forcing their one version of help onto many people who never asked for it and never wanted it.
While the story comes close to running of the rails at times, Greengarass manages to somehow keep it all together. You’ve got the army, the CIA, the Pentagon, Saddam’s men, locals, a journalist who could be on either side, double and triple crosses and big, loud action. Yet it never seems overblown or convoluted. There aren’t many directors who could hold the reins so tightly on a movie like Green Zone, but Greengrass really keeps it all together.
In 2009, Neil Blomkamp had a dream debut in the world of feature film making. After seeing Blomkamp’s short film Alive in Joburg, King of the Movie Geeks, Peter Jackson, helped produce a feature length version that became District 9.District 9 went onto great financial success, great geek success, and most impressively, great critical success. Something as sci-fi and genre-riffic as District 9 rarely gets Oscar recognition outside of technical awards. But here was Blomkamp, one film in and receiving Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture. So now, four years later, in the lead up to the release of his follow up, Blomkamp has been under just a little pressure to really deliver with Elysium. And he does.
If you’ve seen District 9, you know what you’re getting yourself into with Elysium. That’s not to say I found Elysium derivative of his debut, or a rehash. What I mean is, Blomkap made such a real, convincing world with District 9, and has such a unique style and vision, that I feel like the two films are set in the same universe. A Universe where the titular space station that motivates the people of run down Los Angeles in Elysium could almost exist on the other side of the same world as the Prawn populated slums of Johanessburg in District 9.
But enough of the District 9 comparisons. Elysium is its own movie and shouldn’t be stuck under its predecessor’s shadow. Matt Damon is Max Da Costa, a former orphan and former car thief who is trying to stay on the straight and narrow, working a mind numbing factory job, building robots that seem to have taken any other job someone like him might be eligible for. It’s the year 2154, the “Haves” live on Elysium, a Garden of Eden space station of clean air, green grass, crystal clear water and a mansion for every person, complete with medibeds that can cure any injury or illness. The “Have Nots” are stuck with Earth. Dirty, desolate, smelly, slummy, depressing old Earth.
After an accident exposes Damon to massive amounts of radiation, he realises the only way to prove his five day life expectancy wrong, is to get onto Elysium and into one of the all curing medibeds. The local black market and cyber kingpin, Spider, recruits Damon for one lost black market job that will lead him to Elysium and a cure. Damon scores a super sweet exo-skeleton for added strength while also scoring a totally badass nemesis in the form of Kruger, a mercenary played by District 9’s Sharlto Copley. Working for Elysium’s Secretary of Defence, Jessica Delacourt, played by Jody Foster, Copley is one of the most terrifying bad guys I’ve seen in a movie in a long, long time, and a million miles away from the bumbling, reluctant hero he played in District 9.
The story and sci-fi inventions of Elysium are a little complicated and convoluted at times, but in a good way. It’s the kind of movie that makes you work a little, but the pay offs make that work more than worthwhile. Some people have said they were disappointed by Elysium compared to District 9, but I’d put them on par. District 9 made Neil Blomkamp someone who I was interested to see what he did next. Elysium puts Neil Blomkamp on my list of directors whose movies I’ll see regardless of genre, stars or subject matter.
Bored and Dangerous 