Showing posts with label 2005. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2005. Show all posts

Saturday 9 February 2013

The Black Dahlia



The Black Dahlia is a neo-Noir film Directed by Brian De Palma and based on the book of the same name by James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential). The film was a critical and commercial failure on its release in 2005 and I first saw it on DVD in about 2007 but on a really small TV in my girlfriend’s university flat. We both fell asleep so didn’t remember much about it. There were two reasons why I wanted to see the movie again. The first was that it was featured in a fantastic Sight & Sound article about post 2000 Noir and the second was Scarlett Johansson. Any excuse to watch one of her films. Having seen it properly now I’ve come to the conclusion that I probably didn’t need to see it again and there’s a reason I didn’t remember much of it. The Black Dahlia is overly confusing and the time I spent trying to piece things together took me away from the plot and the excellent period world that the film created.



Placed shortly after the Second World War in Los Angeles the movie is set around a real life murder case but everything else is fictional. Former boxers turned cops Dwight 'Bucky' Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) take part in a fixed fight which earns everyone in the Department an 8% pay rise. They soon end up as partners and following the grizzly murder of a young wannabe starlet (Mia Kershner) Blanchard begins to obsess about catching the killer, leaving the rest of their work and his girl (Scarlett Johansson) on the outside looking in.

Tuesday 15 January 2013

The Island



I saw The Island a few years ago and noticed that it was on TV again so decided to give it a second watch. It didn’t make a huge impression on me the first time around but I remembered being interested by the opening act and Scarlett Johansson is in it so… I had a vague recollection of her in a tight, white jump suit so had to watch it again. As it transpired I was correct about the costume and Johansson looks incredible. I also correctly remembered the opening half an hour and it was still an interesting concept even though it was slightly diminished due to knowledge of any potential twists. What I’d forgotten though were the seemingly endless car chases and explosions which accompany the second hour of the movie. These were almost unwatchable due to the quick cutting and despite everything going on, felt really boring.

In the years following an untold natural disaster the world has become too contaminated for humans to live outside. The few survivors live in a deeply regulated and controlled facility in which every aspect of their life is measured and organized by those in charge. One of the few survivors is Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) who begins asking questions about his surroundings and the rules he is forced to follow. He becomes friendly with Jordan Two Delta (Johansson) who is the winner of a lottery to live out the rest of her life on ‘The Island’ the last uncontaminated place on Earth. Lincoln is worried though that not everything is as it seems and tries looking for answers.

Friday 5 October 2012

A History of Violence



I first saw A History of Violence at the cinema in 2005. This wasn’t because it was the latest David Cronenberg film but was rather because the nineteen year old me thought it would be cool to see the new film “with that Lord of the Rings guy in it”. I’ve changed substantially in the last seven years and have since grown to love film but for me what was great about the film on my first naive viewing is still great but unfortunately what is poor, remains so.  The film was released to universal critical acclaim but for me at least it is nowhere close to Cronenberg’s best work.

Tom Stall (That guy off of The Lord of the Rings) is a mild mannered diner owner in a small town in Indiana. He has close ties to the community and a loving family which includes his wife (Maria Bello), son (Ashton Holmes) and young daughter (Heidi Hayes). One day two crooks come to town and try to rob Tom’s diner but after fending them off in an act of self defence Tom gains a little local celebrity. This attracts the attentions of East Coast gangster Carl Fogarty (Ed Harri) who seems convinced that quiet, shy Tom is a former gangster called Joey.

Sunday 23 September 2012

Brick



I usually write a review almost immediately after seeing a film and due to time constraints generally write just one draft. Thankfully I’ve waited until the following morning to write something about Brick as the extra few hours has allowed me to work it around in my head and appreciate some of the finer details of the film which last night I just thought were confusing and dull.

High School student Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a bit of a loner these days after breaking up with his girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin) and reporting his friend to the School’s Vice Principle. Brendan receives an unexpected and garbled phone call from Emily who talks about items such as a brick and a pin and something about Frisco before abruptly hanging up. Concerned for her safety Brendan goes about tracking her down but finds he is too late to help so then sets out to discover what the pin is, who or what is Frisco and what it all has to do with Emily and a brick.

Tuesday 3 July 2012

Breakfast on Pluto

"Well, fuck me pink with a hairy arse!"

A boy is born in conservative 1940s Ireland to a Priest (Liam Neeson) and an unknown woman who flees to London after the birth. Bought up by a strict Catholic foster mother he shows signs of difference at an early age when he is caught in a dress and heels. By the 1970s the teenage Patrick ‘Kitten’ Braden (Cillian Murphy) is a proud and open cross dresser, still living in the small, conservative Irish town. As he gets older he wonders about his mother and discovers that she fled to England. He decides to try to find her and along the way joins a glam rock band, has brushes with the IRA, turns to prostitution and comes close to death on a number of occasions.

The entire film is set against the backdrop of the ‘troubles’ in Ireland during the 1970s. Kitten comes face to face with both sides of the war on a number of occasions and the conflict forms a major stand throughout the story. Another stand is her struggle to fit in with a world that tends to reject her choice of lifestyle and her difficulty with everyone taking life so seriously. The film is cut up into thirty or so chapters. Each is numbered and titled but the plot flows smoothly throughout. This mostly worked well to set up a scene but did become a little tiresome after a while.


Sunday 6 May 2012

Kingdom of Heaven

"I once fought two days with an arrow through my testicle"

Ridley Scott directs an all star cast in a story about the Crusades and in particular the 12th Century battles in which Muslims attempted to recapture the city of Jerusalem from the Christians. Balian (Orlando Bloom) is a blacksmith in rural France. A Knight (Liam Neeson) visits him and informs him that he is his father. After Balian kills a Priest who mocks his dead wife, Balian is given the chance to join the Crusades in the Middle East. While there he learns the ins and out of the Politics and Religion of the region and ends up in a prominent position in the defence of the Holy city of Jerusalem against a Muslim invasion.

This was the second Ridley Scott film I watched today having watched Alien for the first time this morning. Kingdom of Heaven is not anywhere near as good as that. The first thing I’ll say is that the sets looked sumptuous and were well dressed. The costume also looked good and the special effects were on the whole excellent, despite the odd dodgy shot. The acting was also generally quite good. Charisma vacuum Orlando Bloom was actually alright but still far from the screen presence that a role like this requires. He is joined by a fantastic cast which includes Eva Green, Jeremy Irons, David Thewlis, Brendan Gleeson, Michael Sheen, Ghassan Massoud and an almost unrecognisable Edward Norton. Had I not looked at the cast beforehand I honestly wouldn’t have known he was in the film. Marton Csokas was a bit of a let down on the acting front.


Tuesday 10 April 2012

Grizzly Man

"I will protect these bears with my last breath"

Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Into the Abyss)’s 2005 Documentary takes the footage taken by Timothy Treadwell, who lived with and was killed and eaten by bears in Alaska in 2003 and tries to assemble his reasons for doing what he did. Although the film has the look of a nature documentary, it is in fact the study of a man and perhaps mankind as a whole. Herzog compiled the film from 100 hours of footage, shot by Treadwell over the thirteen summers he spent studying and living with the bears.

Many of Herzog’s feature films carry the theme of an obsessed man who sets off on high risk journeys in order to accomplish seemingly impossible feats. This trend continues in Grizzly Man. Treadwell even has a similar haircut and manner of Klaus Kinski’s Fitzcarraldo in the film of the same name. Treadwell openly shuns the outside ‘human’ world and believes it is his duty and right to live with and protect the bears. He feels as though he is the only one who can save them despite the fact that they live on protected park land. It is obvious from the film’s outset that Treadwell is much more at home in the wilderness, surrounded by bears than in human society and it often comes across in his footage that he believes he is a bear or can, at the very least understand and be understood by them. Herzog states that he believes Treadwell was wrong in this respect and sees in the bear’s eyes nothing but the disinterested look of nature.

Herzog does not use footage of Treadwell’s death in the film, instead allowing the story to be told by a mixture of friends, relatives and experts. These interviews allow us to get to know Treadwell and help us to understand why he shunned humanity in favour of a dangerous life with bears. Herzog is seen on camera listening to the footage of Treadwell and his companion Amie Huguenard’s deaths and is seen to break down, asking for the audio to be stopped. In this emotional and deeply distressing scene he then tells Treadwell’s friend Jewel Palovak never to listen to what he has just heard and urges her to have the tape destroyed. In the next scene we see footage taken by Treadwell of two male bears locked in an incredibly ferocious fight in which fur is ripped from their skin and floats away on the wind. This scene is perhaps as powerful as if we had heard the footage ourselves as the bears’ strength and ferocity is obvious to behold. Their power is terrifying yet Treadwell stands just feet away. It is a chilling and upsetting scene.

Amie Huguenard, the woman who died by Treadwell’s side is somewhat of an enigma. To maintain the idea that he was alone in the wild, she only appears on camera on two occasions, both times with her face quite eerily but unintentionally covered as if she never wanted to be seen. Her reasons for staying with Treadwell despite her open fear of bears and need to get back to LA for a job remain one of the many mysteries of the film and of Treadwell’s life as a whole.

Herzog delves into Treadwell’s psyche and provides opinions about his subject. He comes to the conclusion that Treadwell may have had a death wish towards the end of his life, a theory that is supported by some of Treadwell’s piece to camera footage. What is clear is that Treadwell was a deeply disturbed man who had a belief that it was his job to protect and even befriend the bears despite the obvious danger they posed to him. He also had a quite obvious hatred of humanity and its excesses.

The film is quite a shocking study of two people’s demise. From the very first minutes you can tell that it is only a matter of time before Treadwell is attacked. The whole world can see it but him. He was blinded by his love of the animals and believed wrongly that they loved him in return. Herzog does a fantastic job of presenting Treadwell’s footage, some of which contains great beauty but much of it, great sadness. There are obvious parallels between Herzog’s obsessions and Treadwell’s which gives the film an extra angle with which to view it. This is a somber piece but one that I’d recommend wholeheartedly.    

8/10

Sunday 18 March 2012

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Tommy Lee Jones’ Directorial debut is a modern day Western set in Texas and Northern Mexico and is about the death of Mexican cowboy Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo). Before his death he made his friend Pete (Tommy Lee Jones) promise to bury him in his small town of birth, Jimenez, across the border in Mexico. Pete kidnaps the boarder patrolman Mike Norton (Barry Pepper) who shot Estrada and the two of them set out in search of Jimenez.  

One of the films strengths is that it sometimes shows the same incident from two different character’s perspectives which help the audience to decide who they believe is in the right or wrong or build up a better understanding of proceedings. This however helps to add to one of the films downfalls which is the non-linear way the plot unfolds in the first act. I found myself confused for the first half an hour or so until I worked out who everyone was and what their place in the movie was. Once I’d figured out who everyone was, I then had trouble understanding what anyone was saying. The Spanish dialogue is subtitled but I could have done with subtitles for the mumbled Texan accents that were prevalent. At times I honestly had no idea what was being said.

The story is kind of interesting but I didn’t have enough love for Tommy Lee Jones or Julio Cedillo’s characters to really care either way and Barry Pepper’s Mike Norton is made out to be quite a nasty character so I certainly didn’t care what happened to him. His partial redemption towards the end wasn’t enough for me. I think that there was another film in there, based on the relationship between Barry Pepper and his wife January Jones. The acting on the whole was very good. Tommy Lee Jones as usual was great and Barry Pepper showed greater range than I’d witnessed from him before. Even January Jones was acceptable, the best I’ve seen from her too. Melissa Leo stood out but her role was very small.


Tommy Lee Jones gave me no reason to think that he couldn’t or shouldn’t direct again but there was no wow factor. He manages to get good performances however and the locations are pretty. The film in general is fine but I wasn’t very interested in the plot.  

6/10