Film Reviews by AM

Oh, this is good. Not ground-breaking, outstanding, but just really good story-telling. And the story is worth recording. Even if you don't listen to hip-hop, rap, or any of the various sub-sets that spin off this, if you are under 50 you will have heard at some point music (produced written or performed) by the central 3 performers in NWA. Their rise, with accompanying controversy (in spades), deaths (several), and old fashioned rocknroll excess is lovingly detailed here. It holds the attention, entertains, and at the same time reminds everyone where race relations where in the US in the 80's and 90's (I'll leave it to you to judge how far things have progressed since).

The three central actors are astonishingly good. They are playing icons, yet they've barely the beginnings of a career between them. Two have a collection of bit parts, while Ice Cube is played by his son, who is making his film debut.

If the film has a flaw, it is that it is produced by Dre and Ice Cube, and I can't help but feel it maybe shows in the script. In the film, NWA's genius is clear - Dre does the tunes, Ice Cube the words, Easy-E is taught to perform by Dre and the rest are bit players. Was it quite as clear-cut as that?

Shot in one take. 4 of the 5 reviews mention this. It seems to be the only thing anyone knows. It's an outstanding technical achievement (this isn't a film set in one place, it moves location constantly, and the camera has to move with it), but it's also a great decision as it helps drive the film forward, and to lock my attention in. There are, unquestionably, one or two points where the decisions Victoria makes are odd (particularly early on) and I knocked a star off for that.

Alphaville mentioned Run Lola Run - also a really good film, and with undoubted similarities. Watch both.

I find it odd that no reviewer thus far has cited Orwell or Kafka, for the entire set-up seemed to me to be a Kafka style plot set in a 1984-style society. The set design I really liked, borrowing from the 1950's through to the 1980's. I was absorbed the film throughout, so yes, I enjoyed it. Deep-down, I can't shake the feeling that it wasn't quite as good it hoped to be. But I'd rather watch this than standard Hollywood fodder.

I must track down the book.

Right at the start of the film, you are told this is Quentin Tarantino's 8th film. Which it is, if you strip out the partial films, the producer films etc. lets have a look:

Reservoir Dogs - brilliant cult hit, violence, unpleasant characters, sparkling crisp funny dialogue

Pulp fiction - the crossover film, violence, unpleasant characters, sparkling crisp funny dialogue

Jackie Brown - where he tries something different, less swearing and violence, more plot, a good film but disappointed some fans

Kill Bill 1 & II - the cartoon films - violence, unpleasant characters, sparkling crisp funny dialogue

inglourious basterds - Quentin does a war film, violence, unpleasant characters, crisp dialogue, questionable approach to history

Django Unchained - Quentin does slavery, more violence than ever before, unpleasant characters, some crisp dialogue

The Hateful Eight....

Can you see a pattern? Maybe it's me, but Tarantino has been doing his blood and gore with clever words schtick for 8 flims now, and I'm a bit bored. The violence ramps up, but the humour is decreasing. And there is a commonality of ending too, which means you've a fairly good idea of how the film will end before you start. The hateful eight continues the theme (this time, it's a western). Kurt Russell is worth watching, he's a vastly underrated actor and the best bit of the film. But I've reached the stage where I don't get excited about a Tarantino movie. I'd really like to see Tarantino go back to what he tried with Jackie Brown and do something slightly different. But this just a film where he rethreads his past glories into a new setting. Maybe if you are 18, and have never seen any of the first 7 films you'd be blown away (pardon the pun). But I can't see anything new here.

Laos is a narrow landlocked country which borders Vietnam to the west. In the Vietnam war, the Vietnamese ran their chief supply line through Laos - the Ho Chi Minh Trail. As a result, Laos was heavily bombed by the Americans.

Set not long after the Vietnam War, the Rocket follows a young boy who is seen as bad luck cure due to the circumstances of his birth. With Laos struggling to recover from the aftermath of the war, his family are forced to move around to survive, looking for a home. The boy is blamed for some of this and, alienated, he makes friends with two outsiders.

This is a story about family, redemption, recovery from tragedy. It's excellent. Watch it.

Jon Krakeur's original account (Into Thin Air) of this true story, where he was a journalist being taken up Everest as part of a guided expedition, provoked a furious response in the form of another book 'The Climb' from Anatoli Boukreev, a guide who felt Krakeur's book had unfairly criticised him and other guides. It would be interesting to see what Boukreev, who has since been killed, made of this film. Having read both books, and having some sympathy for Boukreev's perspective I was curious to see whether this film would take sides. I was also terrified they would try and ramp up the action, ignore the tragedy and try and turn it into Cliffhanger. Thankfully, I think it's pretty well balanced, and indeed well-made. The script writer appears well aware of the controversy and tries to tread a middle ground.

If I have criticisms (and obviously I do at 3 stars) it's that it perhaps lacks the heart to truly engage - the characters (sorry, real people being portrayed on screen) lack empathy and the attempts to do so don't really take for me. (unlike Touching the Void, for example)

But if you watched it and want to know more, read both books - not just one.

A website called the dissolve ran a feature, the best films of the decade so far, in 2015. My wife and I added a lot of films from it, and when they come through our letterbox, we scratch our heads and try to remember what the film is. This is how I came to watch 'We Are The Best'. The synopsis didn't sound great on re-reading - a Swedish coming of age film, set in the early 80s. But it's so so worth watching.

It centres around 3 girls who don't fit in with the girls around them. They are obsessed with Swedish punk music and all they have is their mutual friendship. A dud performance from any of the three actresses playing these girls would kill the film, but the opposite holds here. They make you laugh, and care for them. A gem. Swedish drama isn't just Scandi-noir.

Like most Scots, especially those from Edinburgh, I've a soft spot for Trainspotting, and also the earlier Danny Boyle film Shallow Grave. They have a lot going for them. Young actors (Eccleston, McGregor, Kerry Fox, Robert Carlyle) on the cusp of bright careers, a director (Danny Boyle) and screen writer (John Hodge) also with huge things ahead of them. Restless Natives have none of these. A couple of the actors went on to BBC sitcoms, or to sell washing up liquid - that was their limit and it shows. But it's hard not to sit Restless Natives, made over a decade before, alongside Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. It shares so much in common. It could be seen as blazing a trail - they share the same energy and enthusiasm. While the soundtrack is great, reminding me that Big Country were actually pretty good.

While Trainspotting was a lovingly accurate early 80's period piece, Restless Natives is accurately early 80's because that's when it was made. From the early shots of Adidas Sambas, it delivers. The script is entertainingly daft - take Trainspotting and swap the heroin for Robin Hood.

It's hokum, but it's great hokum, made by a cast having the time of their lives (and in retrospect, they high point of their careers).

I was looking forward to this, but it left me disappointed.

Apparently, the first time this book * was adapted, it was as a tv mini-series in the 70's. Having watched the film, the expanded tv format seems more appropriate. Too often, it feels as though we are watching a key scene from the book (or even two scenes combined). The story takes place over a number of years and some scenes are months apart. There is little to link the scenes together, and we are left to puzzle over the actions of the characters which seem out of character from before.

Another fault is the casting (not the acting). At the start of the story the central character is a schoolgirl of perhaps 14, by then end she is not yet 22. She is played by Agyness Deyn (with a Scottish accent which wobbles to say the least) who was 32 when the film was released. Both she, and the actor playing her brother are simply too old for the parts they play.

It's a huge shame, because when the film spends long enough on a subplot to let it breathe, it is excellent. A courtship and wedding are really well-done. But for the most part, it feels like a very long book has been excavated leaving just the core plot events, but the heart and lungs have been removed.

* disclaimer - I have not read the book.

I first heard of this film on Radio 4's Today programme. The news item was that this film, which had gone down well in America, had failed to find a cinema distributor in the Uk and looked destined to go to straight to DVD at best. The inference was that the UK film industry was failing to serve the black community in the UK, and indeed, failing to see how this film would appeal to a wide audience. The programme played some clips which made the film sound very, very funny so it was duly added to my list of films.

To cover the news angle first, there is no reason why this film shouldn't have had a cinema release. It's no better, or worse, than many films I've been forced to sit through in the past. It reals with the racial issues it seeks to highlight in a fairly straightforward, out of the box way, without ever threatening to become thought-provoking or original. But there are buts, and here they are. I'm not the target audience, not because of race, but age. I'm in my forties, and I stopped habitually watching films set in US colleges twenty plus years ago. The acting is wooden, the script plodding. Ultimately, it's just not very good.

This is a worthy film. It seeks to relate the tale of America's civil rights struggle through the eyes of a man who served eight presidents at the White House. Now there is nothing wrong with this per se. It is a history worth recording, reinforcing and remembering. But if you are going to do this, it needs to be done accurately. Schindlers List sets the bar here - it takes some dramatic licence, but the facts of the story are true, and the attention to detail elsewhere makes this acceptable. Another example, closer to this subject matter, is Malcolm X. For me, the Butler fails to get the balance right - in fact it gets it very wrong.

I watched this film understanding it was a dramatisation of true life events. Throughout the film, there were plotlines which puzzled me - they seemed to far-fetched to be true. Without giving away spoilers, I found it difficult to believe the activities of his son would not have consequences for the Butler's employment prospects; they certainly would today. Afterwards, I went to see how much of the film was actually true. Well, there was a man who worked at the White House for eight presidents. Pretty much every other event in the Butler's life was a fiction.

It saddens me. There are films to be made here, great stories to be told, that deal with complex histories and simple truths. Films like the butler make them less likely, and demean the history they seek to relate.

It's difficult to know where to start. So I will start afterwards. After we watch a film, my wife and I will ask each other what we thought, and after Stray Dogs, I didn't really know where to start explaining what I thought. It's very much a film directed by an auteur. This is probably the point I state I have not seen any of Ming-liang Tsai's other films. Each scene is beautifully shot, enigmatically so - and frequently they are long scenes with no dialogue (A man stands in the rain as the traffic lights go through their cycle; you have no idea who he is.) A fortnight later, it is these scenes which linger in the mind - but if you asked me what else I had to say about the film, I wouldn't know where to start. I've seen a review since which suggested this was one of his more difficult films and I wouldn't disagree with that.

I would watch another of his films, but by the same token I haven't gone rifling through his back catalogue add the rest to his list. One a year is probably my limit.

This film was adapted from a book, a book I have not read. I wondered while watching it if it was an adaptation and if so, if it was a film, for instance a small independent French film.

A (good) small independent French film would take the story of a woman's decline into Alzheimers and show the darkest side of it, the reality of watching someone you love vanish before your eyes, gradually being replaced by someone else, a helpless other. There would be humour, and a study of the effects of the inter-familial relationships.

Hollywood would adapt this film by first of all making sure that the lives of the family were near perfect, with only specks being the slightly wayward youngest offspring. The part of the person developing Alzheimers would scream 'Oscar', and be allocated accordingly. The slightly wayward youngest offspring would go to a young upcoming actress with a need show off her acting skills in a more serious film. the remaining family members would be reduced to walk-on parts, interesting sub-plots concerning them ignored. Schmaltz and pathos would be turned up to ten.

This is Still Alice. The good news is that Julianne Moore is excellent, Kristen Stewart shows she will probably be around a good while. And I'm delighted that Alzheimers, a horrible horrible condition, is receiving the attention. one star for each of these good points.

It seems odd to say this about an actress with a very short acting career, but this is very much a star vehicle. This is very much Agyness Deyn's film. Best known for her modelling career to date, with only a couple of previous minor roles, this film stands or falls on her acting ability for she is in virtually every scene in a film which revolves entirely around her character. The good news is she sparkles, the bad news is the script (based on a novel) does not. The story has too many implausible events (strangers being taken into homes for example) to resonate. Miss Deyn's has 4 films in the can since then, and based on this evidence will have many more. With a bit of care in choosing her scripts, she could go far.

This is not a film for everyone. Fans of the book apparently don't like it. The giddy delight it has in twisting normality will maybe irritate. But I loved it. With subtitles you can't look away, but with this film, every moment can surprise. The doorbell ringing, marriage vows, clearing the table, anything and everything is fair game. It's frothy, silly, yet wonderful. The cast appear to be having a ball as the surprises unfold. Brilliant.