Gangs of New York

It’s been a couple of years since my last viewing of Martin Scorsese’s historical epic, Gangs of New York. It’s a movie I’ve seen several times since I first saw it in 2002 as my first ‘18’ rated movie at the cinema. It’s a film I’ve always had a lot of affection for. I found it strange then that on this particular viewing, the movie had lost a lot of its charm.

Loosely based on the 1928 book of the same name, Gangs of New York is a dirty and blood-soaked account of the various gangs which vied for control over New York City’s Five Points in the middle of the 19^th Century. Focussing specifically on two characters, it takes historical context and real names, mixing them into a world of fact and fiction with some glorious set pieces and cinematic design. Having witnessed his father’s death at the hands of Bill ‘the Butcher’ Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis) as a young child, Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo Di Caprio) comes back to the Five Points as an adult to reap revenge. He finds the Points much the same as he left it; a squalid and rat infested mismatch of languages and races, the very thing which Cutting despises about the area in which he is King.

Inglourious Basterds

Set in Nazi occupied France, Inglourious Basterds is a film that took Quentin Tarantino over a decade to write and produce. Multiple plot threads, an ever expanding script and difficulty with the movie’s conclusion meant that from first to final draft, a decade had elapsed. The completed script is one of pure Tarantino penmanship. Featuring ideas of revenge, duplicity and malice while scattered with pop references, albeit from a different era, Inglouious Basterds is as Tarantino as a Mexican stand-off in a Big Kahuna Burger Restaurant. Nominated for eight Academy Awards and taking over $320 million worldwide, it is also one of the director’s most successful to date.

Split into five chapters, the film focuses on the efforts of two sets of people to bring down the Third Reich. Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) is a young Jewish woman who, early in the film, escapes death at the hands of the gifted ‘Jew Hunter’ Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). Having dodged an early grave, Shosanna relocates to Paris where she runs a small cinema which we shall come back to later. Meanwhile, elsewhere in France, the Basterds, a group of American Jewish soldiers, led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) are scouring the countryside in search of Nazis to bludgeon and scalp. When the Basterds hear that the entire Nazi high command will be in Paris for the Premier of Goebbels latest propaganda film, they set in motion a plan to end the war the very same night.

The Railway Man

The memoir of Eric Lomax, a man held as a Prisoner of War and forced to work on the Thai-Burma railway, had the potential to form the basis of an excellent movie. Unfortunately in the hands of director Jonathan Teplitzky it’s a flaccid hodgepodge of sentimentalism and redemption with an overbearing amount of romance crammed in to satisfy its grey haired target audience. The film goes to great lengths to show the impact that those harrowing years had on the central character but in doing so waters down its effects. Over and over again we are shown Lomax as a reserved, quiet man who is screaming on the inside and the more we see it, the less it holds sway. Instead of focus, Teplitzky meanders through the aging Lomax’s mind, boring his audience when he should be shocking them.

The film works using flashback to show tantalising glimpses as to what happened between 1942 and the end of the war and this is when the film is at its strongest. The numerous scenes in later life do little to add to the story before a terrific climax in which Lomax is reunited with the Japanese soldier who tortured him while a prisoner. The elder Lomax is played by Colin Firth who while always watchable, sometimes looks as though on auto pilot. His younger self is an excellent Jeremy Irvine who captures the mannerisms and speech of his older co-star. The remainder of the film is miscast with a doe eyed and wooden Nicole Kidman as Lomax’s long suffering wife and Stellan Skarsgård as his Swedish sounding superior officer. Skarsgård makes no attempt at affecting an English accent despite the strong and pronounced accent of his younger self (Sam Reid). Tanroh Ishida is capable but hardly threatening as the young Japanese torturer who is played by Hiroyuki Sanada in the later scenes.

12 Years a Slave

Considering the ferocity of Steve McQueen’s small but impressive oeuvre and the subject matter of his latest film, I never expected to be in for an easy ride with 12 Years a Slave but nothing, not the trailer, the word of mouth nor my own imagination could prepare me for both its excellence and the horrors to be found within it. The director’s third feature is based on the memoir of one Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free black man from up-state New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841. The film charts the following decade and the unimaginable ordeal that is daily life for a slave.

It’s rare these days that I can report to have sat through a film screening in a packed cinema without seeing at least one or two phones light up in front of me. Talking and popcorn rustling are two other offenders which take one out of a film and back to the annoying reality of the fact that there are other humans around you. Throughout the two and a quarter hours of 12 Years a Slave however I didn’t hear a peep from the audience besides a few sniffles and yelps. The film gripped one and all from its opening frames and touched myself at least (but I suspect most) with a profound sense of heartache, perplexity and dare I say it, guilt.

Following a brief few scenes which outline Solomon’s life as an accomplished and well respected musician, living in middle class surroundings, side by side with blacks and whites, the film takes the turn you know to expect. Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt presses his camera uncomfortably close to the actors during these scenes in a trend that continues during Solomon’s kidnapping. The screen becomes claustrophobic and seems to envelop the audience as though we too are being taken against our will. I struggled for breath and my palms were clammy, as they remained so long passed the credits began to roll. The camera is unflinching, not allowing the audience to avert their gaze from both the kidnapping and the horrors that are to follow.

In Darkness

Based on true events, 2011 Polish film In Darkness focuses on life in Nazi Occupied Poland during the Second World War. Leopold Socha (Robert Więckiewicz) is a sewer worker and part time thief who hides his horde of ill gotten goods in the sewers beneath the streets of Lwow. While in the sewers on day he comes across a group of freshly escaped Jews who have bored a hole through the ground from their Ghetto above. After threatening to turn them in for a reward, Socha instead agrees to help them in return for an even larger fee. For over a year he attempts to keep ‘His Jews’ hidden while living off the funds they provide him.  

In Darkness was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Oscar and was met with wide critical acclaim upon its release. The film is deeply harrowing and manages to create well rounded characters in both the Jews and Poles but unfortunately it lives in the shadows of Schindler’s List which has covered most of the ideas before.

Shenandoah

Shenandoah is a late period James Stewart Western set against a back drop of the Civil War. Charlie Anderson (Stewart) is the patriarch of a large Virginian family whose sons he is desperately trying to keep out of the war. Anderson is fiercely independent and although against slavery is equally against war in any form. As such his farm is caught in a no man’s land of peace, surrounded on all four sides by the sounds and smells of war. As the war begins encroaching on his farm and on his family he battles hard to remain neutral but when his youngest son is mistakenly taken as a prisoner of war by the North he is forced to act and sets out with his other sons to bring his youngest home.

It took me a while to get into Shenandoah but by the end it was the closest I’d come to crying in a film since I last saw Schindler’s List. The film’s final act is incredibly emotional and without going into spoiler territory, shares some similarities with the plot of Saving Private Ryan. I was moved by Anderson’s steadfast attitude but change of heart when someone he loved was affected and Stewart is sublime in the lead role.

Lore

Lore (pronounced Laura) is an Australian-German co production set in the Spring of 1945. As World War Two comes to an end, a young woman finds her world turned upside down as everything she believed to be true, turns out to be false. Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) is the teenage daughter of hard-line Nazis whose parents leave to go into hiding as the Allies tighten their net around Germany. Lore is left to look after herself and four younger siblings in a Germany in which their Aryan superiority is now a handicap. As the children set out for the weeks long walk towards their Grandmother’s house in Hamburg they are followed by a young man called Thomas (Kai Malina) who occasionally helps them but turns out to be a Jew, recently freed from a camp.

I’d never heard of this film until two nights ago when I was watching last week’s Film 2013 and it got a glowing review. Knowing my girlfriend and I were heading into the city centre the next day we decided to see it at our local art house cinema on the recommendation of the TV critics. I’m glad that we did. I found Lore to be a compelling coming of age drama and a fresh story set in a micro world around a much farmed era of film making.

A Royal Affair

In Eighteenth Century Denmark a new Queen (Alicia Vikander) arrives from her native England to meet her new King, Christian VII (Mikkel Følsgaard) for the first time. The King instantly fails to live up to his reputation and the Queen is shunned by him and infuriated by his temperament and apparent madness. What’s worse is that Denmark’s outdated censorship bans many of her favourite Enlightenment era books which are returned to England. In a small Danish colony in Germany, two ex Court favourites persuade a local Doctor to apply to be the King’s physician in the hope that they will once again gain favour with the Court. The Doctor (Mads Mikkelsen) is an instant hit with the King but with few others. The Queen slowly learns of their like-mindedness and they begin a slow seizure of power from the lame duck Monarch as well as embarking on a risky sexual affair.

It always annoys me when I miss a critically successful overseas film at the cinema but I simply couldn’t find anywhere showing A Royal Affair on its theatrical release. The film has since been Oscar Nominated and just the other day won a couple of converted Kermode Awards so I was thrilled when my online DVD rental service sent me the film. A Royal Affair is pretty much all I was expecting of it. It’s a lavish and pretty costume drama with a political heart and save for a run time I would happily shorten, I really enjoyed it.

United 93

I saw United 93 about three years ago and was well and truly shaken by it. I hadn’t seen such an emotional and harrowing film since Schindler’s List and wasn’t prepared for just how realistic and terrifying it was. I think I was expecting a sort of Independence Day-esque USA! USA! Saves the day! type film but what I got was a beautifully made, onslaught on my emotions. I watched it again last night to introduce it to my girlfriend. The film had the exact same impact on her and bought a tear to her eye. I found it just as traumatic the second time around and the fact that we are flying to Newark with United in a couple of weeks probably didn’t help our emotional state. The film left us both feeling drained and depressed.

United 93 tells the real story of the forth ill fated aircraft on 9/11. Almost brushed aside or forgotten about on that day and in the years afterwards, the plane was hijacked by four terrorists and heading for Washington (the film suggests The Capitol) when news of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon reached the passengers. Realising that this was a suicide mission, some of the passengers got together to try and force their way into the cockpit and a single engine pilot volunteered to attempt to land the place safely. History tells us this was unsuccessful.

C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the Confederate States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all white people, Amen"

Have you ever wondered what the world would be like if the Southern States had won the American Civil War? Well, this film takes that idea and runs with it. C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America is a ninety minute feature masquerading as a History Channel type documentary, charting a fictionalised world in which the American Civil War was won by the South with the help of Britain and France. Delivered with a mixture of talking heads, re-enactments, readings, documentary footage (real and fake) and interspersed with infomercials, just like American television, the film charts the history of the C.S.A from its inception at the outbreak of war in 1861 to the present day.

What you get is a sometimes interesting but often uninspiring look at a fictionalised world which has a solid anti hate message at its heart. I’d wanted to see the film for months as the American Civil War is something that interests me but I won’t be recommending it to most people unless they have a particular interest in American history or social studies.

The Duchess

Based on the life of Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire The Duchess is set in late Eighteenth Century England. It follows Georgiana’s life from a teenager on her family’s estate and through her life as the wife of the Duke of Devonshire. Before the film I was unaware of her but her story is fascinating. Married to the Duke at a young age with the promise of bearing him a male heir, Georgiana settles in to a life in the spotlight with great ease, charming everyone she meets. Behind closed doors though, life is very different as her husband becomes increasingly angrier that despite three children, none are male. He looks elsewhere for a male heir, eventually inviting Georgiana’s closest friend in to their house as a second partner for himself.

Keira Knightley is well cast as the Duchess and gives grace and poise to the role. She is an equal match for the men around her and shows both great strength and vulnerability. She looks the part of an Eighteenth Century aristocrat, helped in no small way by the fantastic costume and makeup. It is not surprising that the film won an Oscar for its costume design. Each outfit looks wonderful and of the period. It must have taken months to design and manufacture the hundreds of dresses seen in the film.

Ralph Fiennes does a good job playing Knightley’s husband, The Duke of Devonshire. No one is better than him at playing an arrogant, grumpy bastard. Where the casting falls down I believe is in Dominic Cooper’s Earl Grey. I think that Cooper is a solid actor but here he seems out of place and hidden by the great performances around him. 

No one does grumpy like Ralph Fiennes 

I enjoyed The Duchess much more than I expected to. The story of a spoiled aristocrat played by an actress who I am not particularly keen on had little promise for me but the film makes the audience feel very sorry for Knightley’s Duchess, something that I believe is not easy to do. The story is interesting and the setting and costumes are impressive.

7/10   

War Horse

I’d been looking forward to Steven Spielberg’s War Horse for months and had squeezed my girlfriend’s hand each time I’d seen the trailer in the cinema. Unfortunately I left the film feeling disappointed. For me, a person with a deep fascination with the First World War, I felt there was a lot of Horse before we got to the War. I understand that the film is called War Horse so would obviously contain a lot of ‘horse’ but being unfamiliar with the source material my only knowledge of the story was the films trailer which was more Saving Private Ryan than Black Beauty.

The film however was not terrible and for me the touching scene featuring barbed-wire in No Mans Land was a standout. I felt that the film could have lost one of the strands which made up the story. Instead of the story with the old French man and his granddaughter, I’d have preferred to have seen more of the trenches, but this could well be due to my interest in the war.

One of my main problems with the film and which spoiled it for me was that the French and German characters all spoke English. This is a particular bugbear of mine and I think that the sorts of people who go to see War Horse are not the sort of people who would mind subtitles. It is not Ratatouille. This became even more stupid when two German characters were speaking English to each other while a German officer in the background spoke German.

I can understand why many people have found the film sad but as someone with no particular love for horses I felt indifferent towards it and didn't spend enough time with any ofhe hman characters to feel anything for them either.

War Horse is not a bad film but I found my excitement of the trailer nowhere near matched my enthusiasm for the film as a whole.

6/10