Film Reviews by Alphaville

This is one irritating film. Reese Witherspoon sets out to hike the Pacific Crest Trail without even having practised setting up a tent. She’s meant to be ignorant, but surely no-one’s THAT stupid? Any bona fide hiker will find her a cringeworthy screen presence.

Storywise, the film is fatally hampered by incessant flashbacks to her druggy backstory. It’s all based on a true story, and one wishes our real-life heroine well, but it makes for dismal viewing. What is intended to turn the film into a spiritual journey of female empowerment merely turns it into a borefest.

The film doesn’t even capture the magnificent scenery of the PCT because the filmmakers weren’t allowed to film the most jaw-dropping sections. Pedestrian (sic) direction doesn’t help. A Walk in the Woods, about Bill Bryson’s attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail, captures the joys of hiking the American wilderness much better. In A Walk in the Woods everything is an adventure. In Wild everything is an irritating obstacle to be overcome. American critics loved it. They need to get out more.

It seems silly to say that this absurdist comedy doesn’t make sense, but if a film doesn’t stay true to its internal logic it loses its audience. It requires you to buy into so many ridiculous scenarios that you may well lose patience. It might work as a book, but the particular realism of cinema demands a more thought-through scenario.

Given that you accept the basic premise of a hotel where guests have 45 days to find a mate or be turned into an animal, it’s difficult to believe that no one seems that interested in finding that mate. Characters behave more like Monty Python characters than recognisable humans. Main man Colin Farrell seems at times to be channelling the ghost of Dougal from Father Ted. If only. The acting is so relentlessly deadpan that there are few if any laughs. Some critics unaccountably described it as hilarious. It isn’t. There’s also an intrusive, pointless voiceover and an incessant classical music soundtrack, presumably intended as ironic, that doesn’t half grate.

As a piece the film just about holds the attention and the director certainly has an eye for composition that deserves a better film. Unfortunately he also wrote this one.

If you like your cinema to show some style, give this a body swerve. Grainy, hand-held, fly-on-the-wall, documentary-style filming with no soundtrack music makes this portentously-titled film hard to like. Some enthusiastic reviewers have mistaken its lack of style for intensity. Don’t trust them.

The action switches between soldiering in Afghanistan and a soapy family back home in Sweden before spending the second half of the film in Sweden after the soldiers come home. It’s all very heartfelt and well-intentioned and tackles serious issues about the morality of modern warfare, but the in-your-face approach has been done many times before and alienates rather than involves the viewer, making it difficult to empathise with the characters and their situation.

Morality-of-war films have been around a long time and the excellent Good Kill shows how it can still be done. Judged purely as a movie, A War is dour anti-cinema. The trailer tells the whole story, but watch it first to avoid disappointment.

Director Terence Malick began his career brilliantly with Badlands then swapped filmmaking for navel-gazing. Watching this is like being forced to sit through a stranger’s home movie. It would be unbearable even on fast-forward. What happens? Good question. Mostly a boring couple and their two boring kids wander around boringly to a soundtrack of orchestra and heavenly choir. Oh dear.

For pre-teenies and retarded fanboys only. If you like Star Wars, this is the sort of film you’ll like. If you’re new to Star Wars, it’s nonsense. Anyone looking for sci-fi thrills, humour, dialogue, plot and drama of an adult nature, look elsewhere. After showing such early promise in his career, director J J Abrams seems to be going down the George Lucas route into juvenilia.

It’s a shame. The cgi is faultless and the sets are imaginative. Keira Knightly clone Daisy Ridley shows verve as the heroine and Adam Driver (once he’s allowed to ditch that ridiculous helmet) adds some much-needed charisma. As for the rest… All clichés are present and correct.

There’s an anthropomorphic R2D2 update for the pre-pre-teenies. Those silly stormtroopers, like Dr Who cybermen, kill and get killed as boringly as orcs in a Lord of the Rings movie. There are the requisite number of explosions and cartoon-like spaceship fights to zap through on the DVD player. There’s the standard Mickey-Mouse rent-a-soundtrack to bludgeon home every single beat.

Naturally there’s no real ending, because there’s still money to be made out of the next sleep-inducing instalment in this interminable saga.

For the first 45 minutes it’s a dud. Another dystopian urban Blade Runner future, recalcitrant robots and a downbeat investigator. Roberto Rodriguez whispers his lines in such stilted English that you may well need subtitles to understand him. It’s all so depressing, turning what could be an exciting set-up into a world-weary plod.

Then suddenly there’s a game-changer and we’re into a wonderful new film. Baby-faced sexbot Cleo makes an evolutionary breakthrough, the visuals become stylish, there’s a finely-shot night-time car chase and the action moves to a beautifully-realised bleak desert called the ‘sandbox’, all underscored by an exciting percussive soundtrack. Just when you were beginning to give up on it, everything begins to fascinate. There’s even some potted philosophy on which to ponder. Example: ‘Surviving is not relevant. Living is.’

The best scene, which works on many levels, is where Roberto teaches Cleo to dance to ‘La Mer’ (great choice of music, again for several reasons) and accidentally triggers her sexual programming. The plot builds to a gripping Western-style climax with the baddies in greatcoats like Henry Fonda’s in Once Upon A Time In The West. In all, this is a film of two halves: an abysmal first half and a beguiling second half that leaves you wanting more.

Avoid the trailer, which (as usual these days) gives the whole plot away.

Clint’s western was such a good film that this almost scene-for-scene Japanese samurai remake rarely rises above curiosity value. It’s not a bad film but you’ll spend more time comparing it with the superior original than enjoying it for its own sake. Perhaps this explains why critics liked it better than audiences. Ken Watanabe (the Clint Eastwood character) plays it po-faced moody all the way through and this is not helped by a mournful strings-heavy score. The other characters are varyingly convincing and so are the confrontations. Only Charles Bronson lookalike Koichi Sato brings excitement and fun to the piece with his swaggering ‘sheriff’ (the Gene Hackman character). As with multiple American remakes of Kurasawa films, this is a missed opportunity to match or improve on the original. Payback time.

A bunch of sweary charisma-free characters live out their empty lives in a high-rise. An ill-conceived grainy look adds to the ugliness of it all. The pace picks up when a sniper starts taking pot shots at them, and an insistent electro score does its best to rack up tension but, like Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind, it’s hard to give a damn. Attack the Block it ain’t.

This undemanding time-passer recycles the previous three films in the franchise. Dinosaurs run wild? Tick. And that’s about it. With production values as proficient as ever, Spielberg’s Amblin stable concocts its usual airbrushed thrills for the kiddies while adults might pine for something a tad less prepubescent. Whether the film-makers intended it or not, our heroine neatly sums up the whole affair early on when she announces ‘No one’s impressed by a dinosaur any more.’

The final ho-hum fight between peerless cgi dinosaurs produces a less than enthralling been-there-seen-that climax. It’s enough to make the discerning viewer close his eyes and recall happier times of a man in an ill-fitting Godzilla costume stamping all over a miniature Tokyo set. That was more fun on so many levels.

A blast of a motorised chase movie that exposes the Fast & Furious franchise for the macho posturing shell that it is. Forget George Miller’s first three attempts to get it right. This is a step up in class. Thank goodness it took 14 years to get to the screen as this enabled Mel Gibson to be ditched along the way. Tom Hardy is no great replacement but he has little to do anyway. The movie belongs to ice-queen action-woman Charlize Theron. The under-written Max is just along for the ride.

Almost the whole movie is one big motorised chase across the desert. Abandoning any pretence of realism, the more ridiculous and outlandish the action gets the more fun it becomes. It’s easy to dismiss as a glorified video game and it certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste, but this is proper show-don’t-tell cinema. Just sit back with Miller at the tiller and let those sweeping Namibian landscapes and glorious saturated colours wash over you. A feast not for the mind but for the senses.

How can a film about the rave scene in 90s Paris be so dull? What should have been fun and interesting becomes, in director Mia Hansen-Love’s hands, simply disjointed and pedestrian. Who wants to spend two hours with a bunch of boring people who do little but walk around, sit around and feed their nicotine habit in one incoherent scene after another? Where was the editor when he was needed? Mind you, cut out the superfluous scenes and this would be a very short film indeed. Drama is conspicuous by its absence.

Did I say ‘rave’? Was the music scene ever as bland as this? How many shots of nameless people jigging around in samey discos with their hands in the air is it possible to sit through? Don’t believe the unexpectedly warm reviews of critics who would no doubt believe the emperor had clothes. Just fast forward to the nauseatingly pretentious ending. Daft Punk deserve better than this.

Director Sylvain Chomet’s supposed animated homage to Jacques Tati is a travesty. Unlike many comedians, Tati understood the visual nature of cinema. As an actor he was a wonderful visual performer and as a director he filled his films with artfully visual gags. Animation has the capacity to expand and enhance reality but Chomet completely fails to understand this. The Illusionist diminishes both Tati and the medium. Chomet likes to hem in the frame and destroy all sense of wonder. Some scenes even place the Tati character on a stage, forcing us to watch animated theatre. The film deserves one star for a wonderfully intricate final aerial shot, which spirals out from Arthur’s Seat, the hill in the centre of Edinburgh, to encompass the whole city. This shot was tellingly sub-contracted out of the director’s hands.

It’s a crying shame because hand-drawn animation has the power to transport, as with Ghibli films. The blame lies entirely with Chomet, who describes his film as intentionally ‘anti-cinema’. Unbelievable. Watch and weep or enjoy M. Hulot’s Holiday again instead.

This is a tense, closely observed thriller that develops into an enthralling watch. As usual these days, avoid the tell-tale trailer because if you think you know where this is going you’ll be wrong. Minor quibbles are a terrible title and a lack of oomph in places, although a dramatic electro score does wonders to up the ante. There’s also a clichéd family-man-finds-his-mojo subtext, most of which thankfully appears to have ended up on the cutting room floor.

Against this, it’s a pleasure to see Don Johnson still strutting his stuff. He turns up half-way through as a pig-farming private eye and steals every scene he’s in. It’s no spoiler to sat that the climax would be worthy of any western. Jim Mickle made one of the great vampire movies in Stakeland and this is on a par.

A refreshing antidote to the usual creepy filmic view of a relationship between an adult man and a teenage girl (eg the peculiarly overrated An Education). This is a comedy in which the man is the one who is manipulated. Doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs but director Marielle Heller, greatly helped by lead Bel Powley, treats the sexual relationship with the same lightness of touch that Louis Malle did mother-and-son incest in Murmur of the Heart. Warm-hearted, funny and truthful. Going against the grain of standard Hollywood produce, it’s also great to see a film that portrays sex as fun and drugs as seedy rather than vice versa.

Opening with epic landscapes and portentous titles about a Roman legion on the Silk Road, this risible nonsense immediately descends into the usual Jackie Chan play-fighting hokum and from then on it’s impossible to take seriously. All the fight scenes are lengthily choreographed past the point of boredom, John Cusack is difficult to believe in a thankless role as a legionnaire, there are long stretches of east-meets-west détente and the widescreen vistas soon deteriorate into middling cgi. Looks like it would have been fun more to make than watch. Thank goodness for baddie Adrian Brodie, who turns up after an hour to add some much-needed gravitas, but by then it’s too late to save the movie. One star for those vistas.