Film Reviews by Alphaville

Castaway Paul Dano finds a dead body (Dan Radcliffe) washed ashore. Using his farting body as a jet ski, he escapes to the shore of Humboldt Redwoods. That’s not the talking body’s sole usefulness in this surreal comedy, which amazingly manages to maintain the conceit for 94 minutes. It’s a challenge for the Daniels (writer/directors Scheinert and Kwan) to keep such a two-hander interesting for so long, but the film really works.

In the excellent DVD extras (making of, behind the scenes, interviews, film commentary etc.) they explain how they wanted to make ‘a celebration of friendship and collaboration’ as well as ‘a beautiful and heartfelt movie about a farting corpse’. Incredibly, they succeed on all counts. It’s a film in which you never know what’s going to happen next, which is unfortunately rarer than ever these days. Watch and wonder

Josh Hartnett stars in a Korean film and chooses the wrong one. This is one of those thriller that has no thrills. The plot goes nowhere as director Tran Anh Hang gets bogged down in one longueur after another. Worth dipping into for an eccentric score (including Radiohead) and the charismatic screen presence of Lee Byung Hun. At his moody best as a Hong Kong gangster, he effortlessly steals every scene he’s in with barely any dialogue.

This travesty of a film takes all the tropes of a thriller and turns them into clichés. Bank heist, sassy girl gang leader, suave sadistic adversary, confusing rapid-edit fights, Morgan Freeman as a corrupt senator (who literally phones in his performance from a different country). Tick.

It’s not long before all that pointing of guns at each other starts to grate. You’ll not care a jot about any of it. Typical dialogue: ‘You’re really starting to piss me off’ and ‘I’m fed up playing your games’. People still write this sort of stuff?

Writer/director Matt Ross doesn’t put a foot wrong in this absorbing tale of a man bringing up his children in the backwoods as personable and literate. Every barb directed at the establishment and consumerist society hits home, from governmental failings to obesity and processed food. But the kids are also socially inept, and the film doesn’t shrink from portraying that.

It’s a wonderful film to watch, never flagging for a second and constantly entertaining and surprising. With the picturesque sheen of an escapist hippy fantasy, it both tugs at the heart and makes you think, which is no mean feat. The performances, including those of the six children, are flawless and there are some great dialogue exchanges. A sure-fire winner.

If you like Mama Mia, for reasons best kept to yourself, you might even like this. Who knows? Who cares? The pre-titles dance sequence is well choreographed but to the most dire non-song you’ve ever heard. It’s downhill from thereon, with increasingly amateur hoofing to muzak of which even an elevator would be ashamed. At least Mama Mia had some ABBA tunes to ruin.

There’s even some bad jazz. The hero tries to explain his love of jazz to our heroine, which only succeeds in confirming a jazz-hater’s worst suspicions about it. Our heroine, meanwhile, is into the film business, hence the film’s Oscars (Hollywood loves to stroke itself).

One star for competent camerawork and production values. West Side Story it ain’t. Cabaret it ain’t.

What sounds like a fun concept becomes bland in the realisation. This is a by-the-numbers retelling of P&P with a few zombies shoe-horned in to occasionally attack the principal characters. It needs to be anchored in Austen reality, but the cod-Austen dialogue never rings true. We never care about these cardboard characters so the zombie attacks soon bore.

Charles Dance strikes the right note as the straight-faced Mr. Bennett, while Matt Smith makes a fair stab at a humorous Mr Collins, but Lily James as Lizzy and especially Sam Riley as Darcy never convince. One of those films that seems to have been more fun to make than to watch.

A 2009 Korean spaghetti western set in the Manchurian desert by talented director Kim Jee-Woon. It has its OTT cringe moments thanks to a Jackie-Chan-type character (the ‘weird’), but the ‘good’ is suitably heroic and the ‘bad’ is brilliant, thanks to Lee Byung-Hun’s usual charismatic screen presence.

Above all, the set pieces, as in all Kim films, are glorious. He revels in the power of visual cinema, playing with the image in an almost Godardian way. The opening train heist is flamboyantly filmed with swooping fly-cams and travelling shots. Even better: a sweeping 12 minute chase sequence across the desert that is part of a brilliant last half-hour paying homage to Sergio Leone.

This Kim Ji-Woon film from 2005 was one of his early actioners and all the elements are in place. Beautiful cinematography and an engaging score that is part epic and part ironic keeps the viewer glued to the screen even between the set-pieces. Lead Lee Byung-Hun makes a charismatic Alain Delon lookalike who carries the movie. Just to wallow in the image as he drives around Seoul to a mesmerising score makes you realise the magic that only cinema can produce.

The film is let down by an uneven pace and a climax that stretches incredulity, but the set pieces are explosive. This is not Kim’s best, but it’s still better than most so-called action thrillers.

Called Kilo Two Bravo in the US, this is a riveting war movie about British paras trapped in a minefield in the 2006 Afghan War, with casualties mounting. It’s hard to criticise when it’s so well staged and based on a true incident, with profits from the cinema release going to charity. Nevertheless, judged purely as a piece of film, it’s certainly not a feel-good night’s entertainment.

It’s filmed with documentary-style naturalism with unknown actors, naturalistic drama and no score. The first half-hour is full of male banter and military jargon that’s hard to follow. The attempt at authenticity is laudable but it’s more of a filmed document than a great film in its own right. However, it certainly keeps you glued to the screen.

Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence are stuck on the spaceship Avalon, the only passengers to have awoken early from suspended animation. For the first half-hour this is one of the most evocative portrayals of man alone in space since Kubrick’s 2001. This is despite the fact that we know Lawrence is going to appear because her picture’s on the poster. Note: make sure to avoid the awful tell-all trailer.

The remainder of the film focusses on the relationship between the two. It would be a corny love story were it not for the exotic location and the deftness of its handling. The set design and visuals are stunning throughout. Unfortunately the last act degenerates predictably into the standard explosive nonsense.

Like 2001, Passengers proves that you don’t need Aliens, Predators and other monsters to make an engrossing space movie. It looks amazing and it deals with moral and existential issues that, for most of its run-time, add a much-needed grown-up feel to current Hollywood output.

Unaccountably loved by critics, this Charlie Kaufman piece was, in his own words, ‘designed not to be seen’. It was conceived as a stage-read radio play and should have stayed that way. Even worse, it’s realised in stop-motion, that least imaginative of all animation techniques. Even with the addition of 3D-printed faces, it’s stylised and flat.

There’s not even any substance to the trivial tale of a mundane man soul-searching in a hotel. Critics have read cod-philosophy into this but it’s as mundane as the whole misconceived enterprise. Around an hour in there’s some perfunctory puppet sex, but even that just makes you pine for Team America.

One can only assume the critics loved it because it’s a Charlie Kaufman film, and he does indeed need to be encouraged, but not with made-for-radio films. One star for the DVD extras, in which he talks about the current state of Hollywood, where it’s the marketing department that now decides which films get made. Mind you, they were sensible enough to turn down Anomalisa.

At last a grown-up sci-fi film arrives. If only it was better. The first half-hour of this first-contact story, before we meet the aliens, is the usual scriptwriter’s plod through the set-up of a three-act structure. Linguist Amy Adams then has to figure out how to communicate with the aliens. It’s not without interest, but it’s more about linguistics than compelling sci-fi ideas. Unfortunately the sudden jump to understanding the alien language is poorly explained. The viewer just has to accept it, which would be fine if we hadn’t just watched Amy working on the basics in painstaking detail.

The attempts at communication do pull you along but none of it would bear a second viewing because there’s nothing else going on. It’s not exciting, not dramatic, not beautiful, not moving. All energy seems to have been drained out of the acting and direction. It’s almost mundane, which is a cardinal sin in a sci-fi film.

Director Denis Villeneuve confesses in the DVD Extras that he was initially concerned about the material’s dramatic possibilities and its ending. He was right to have doubts. The confusingly edited third act, even if you can make sense of it, just seems ridiculous. Without giving away any spoilers, Nietzschean scholars will realise it’s based on the principle of Eternal Recurrence, but it’s presented in such a cursory, haphazard way that it veers into the realms of meaningless fantasy. You may well need to study the DVD Extras for enlightenment.

Being able to see every second of an inevitable future would be like being trapped. Knowing a car will hit you but still having to walk out into the road? In any case, how can knowing the end of a film not affect your viewing of it? Arrival does make you think, but only about its philosophical flaws. Don’t the aliens know what’s going to happen?

This is what’s known as a tour de force. That is not a good thing. Our man Saul is a prisoner in a Word War 2 concentration camp. The camera follows him around in close-up, documentary-style. Everything else is out of focus or out of shot. Often all we see is the back of his head. Perhaps the intent is to make the horror all the more poignant by only catching blurred glimpses of it. Instead, the technique merely becomes wearing. A whole film in handheld close-up with no score? No thanks. Eventually, when the camera operator runs, the image inevitably degenerates into wobble-cam.

The content is of course important, as in ‘this film must be seen’ etc. It was an ‘official selection’ for Cannes, which is always a bad sign. It’s director Laszlo Nemes’ first feature. He intended it to be visceral, but it’s the opposite. It commits the cardinal sin of making the viewer bored with the cinematic image. On the DVD Extras there’s one of his earlier short films. It uses the same technique. He needs to change his style.

An unwatchable mess of a film. The kind William Burroughs might have made using his cut-up technique. A mish-mash of confusing timelines, narrative non-sequiturs, disjointed close-ups and random editing. Like a talentless art student’s attempt to be different.

Apparently it’s about the investigation of a missing girl, but it makes no narrative or dramatic sense. It’s a mystery how it ever got released. Most viewers will have already given up on it before the opening credits appear.

Remember the long conversational scene at the start Inglorious Basterds? Tarantino has turned it into a 160min film. It feels longer. It begins slow, it continues slow, there’s a half-hour gory section, it fizzles out.

The endless chat about the Civil War and racism does little to advance character or plot. It’s self-indulgent, ponderous and tedious. Because it’s Tarantino, you may sit through it waiting for something to happen. You’ll wait a long time. This is a film made by someone in love with the sound of his own dialogue and little else. If he was a student scriptwriter he’d fail the course.

The opening snowscapes augur well but we’re soon inside a stagecoach, then a staging post, for the rest of the film. It’s like an Agatha Christie locked-room whodunit with stereotypical characters, none of whom we care about. Why film in Super Panavision 70 when it’s no more than a filmed play that nearly all takes place in confined spaces?

Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson etc, go through their usual paces. Ennio Morricone’s musical choices are ridiculous (White Stripes?!). Tarantino’s camera direction is banal. He needs someone to tell him.