The Two Faces of January

The Two Faces of January is an interesting little film written and directed by Hossein Amini, a man best known for penning the script of Drive. Here Amini delivers another taught script set in early 1960s Greece. American tour guide and part time swindler Rydal (Oscar Isaac) gives tours to unsuspecting travellers in the Greek capital Athens and one day comes across an American couple with whom he strikes up conversation and a brief friendship. The tour guide is charmed by the couple and drawn to their wealth and beauty but when it becomes apparent that the couple aren’t quite as well refined and put together as they first appear, Rydal helps them to evade those hunting them before becoming embroiled in their strange and murky circumstances.

There were two things that attracted me to this movie. The first was the name Amini. I was curious to see the screenwriter’s directorial debut and was interested in his script. The second factor was Viggo Mortensen. At this stage in the actor’s career I feel as though I can pretty much trust that if he’s agreed to be in it, it will be good enough to see. Mortensen does indeed impress and his choice of role is once again solid. The movie is about surface and sheen and the attraction that bright and beautiful things hold while under the surface bubbles something more sinister. There’s an uneasy feeling which envelops the film and it stabs through the false surface from time to time in a wonderfully calm but out of control manner.

Inside Llewyn Davis

As with any new Coen brothers film, I eagerly anticipated the release of Inside Llewyn Davis and the good things I’d heard from America before its UK release only added to my excitement. The fact that it’s taken close to a week to write something about the film though, might tell you something about my reaction to the movie. Unfortunately I left the cinema feeling disappointed. I’d go so far as to say that I didn’t really like or even enjoy the film and the last week or so has found me struggling to find a spin on it so that I could reward it with a favourable review. Alas I’m out of time so here’s what I think.

To put it bluntly, the film did little for me. I wasn’t entertained and was rarely amused. I didn’t get much from the story and disliked the central character. It left me feeling cold and uninterested and I never got on board with Llewyn, willing him on to succeed. Instead I just thought he was a bit of a dick. His misfortunes were often his own and his undoubted talent was clouded by his personality. Although the Coens’ attempt to present other characters even less favourably, I still wanted nothing to do with him and was only happy when he was singing.

W.E.

W.E. or Wallace and Edward or Woefully Excruciating, What Ever, Without Evidence, Worse than Empty, Withering Exacerbation or Wasteful and Erroneous is a film by Madonna that desperately seeks parallels between a modern day love story and that of Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII. It’s rubbish, like really rubbish.

In 1998 a lonely wife called Wally (seriously, Wally) (Abbie Cornish) is obsessing over the life of Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) the woman behind the sensation of the century who met, fell in love with and married King Edward VIII of England. Simpson was not only a colonial commoner but was also twice divorced and it was inconceivable that a woman of her standing could marry a Royal let alone the man that would become King. This film tracks Wallis and Edwards’s love affair and the controversy it created while drawing comparisons to a modern day tale of love, suffering and redemption. And did I mention it’s rubbish?

The Bourne Legacy

Running parallel in time to The Bourne Ultimatum, The Bourne Legacy stars Jeremy Renner as black ops operative Aaron Cross. After completing a gruelling hike across the Alaskan wilderness, Cross arrives at an isolated cabin where he meets a fellow operative (Oscar Isaac). Due to events elsewhere, linked to the plot of the first film in the series, the people running the secret Operation Outcome of which Cross is a member decide to shut it down by killing all staff involved. A drone attacks Cross but he manages to escape and tracks down scientist Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz) who he hopes can lead him to stocks of the pills he needs to remain a superhuman.

With a plot that I didn’t fully understand and some decent action set pieces, The Bourne Legacy is a film that is not without some merit but overall I could probably have lived without seeing.

Drive

"... I don't sit in while you're running it down. I don't carry a gun. I drive"

A Hollywood stunt driver / part time wheelman for L.A’s criminals (Ryan Gosling) gets embroiled in a crime that puts him on a collision course with the Mob after taking a job in order to protect perhaps the only two people in the world that he has any feelings for. The cool and unflappable Driver seeks out those who have wronged him and attempts to save his own and his love interest’s lives.

This was easily one of the top 10 best films of 2011 and possibly inside my top ten of the last several years. The film and its central character are effortlessly cool and both have become both instant classics and cult favourites. Although the film’s time period is never specified it seems to have a foot both in the present and in the 1980s. The style, design and music reminded me of the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City as it has that kind of 80s Miami almost art deco style-stucco style. The colour palette is beautiful and dominated by the colour gold, perhaps in a nod to its L.A setting and also the Driver’s nostalgic view of L.A with its strong silent movie stars and dames in need of rescue. The whole film has a very Noir feel to it. The gold is most noticeable in Gosling’s wardrobe as he sports golden shoes and a fantastic gold scorpion jacket. More subtlety though the sun kissed L.A streets also glisten gold.

Sucker Punch

I really don’t know where to begin with this terrible, misogynistic excuse for a film. The plot is as good a place as any but I don’t even know how to put it into words. As far as I could tell, Emily Browning (seen here in Sleeping Beauty) plays a girl who after the death of her mother, accidently kills her sister and is committed to a mental asylum. The asylum is populated entirely by good looking women in their early 20s. She is told that she will require four items to escape the asylum before she is lobotomized and for some reason enters a fantasy world where she attempts to find them. There are two fantasy worlds with one inside the other. In the first she is, for some reason a kind of lap dancer/prostitute. This world is populated by young women dancing around in their underwear. Why a 20 year old woman’s fantasy would be to be trapped in an evil lap dancing club I don’t know. The second level of fantasies occurs when she starts to dance. During these, Browning is transported, along with four other girls to some sort of battle scene where they must defeat the bad guy to get the map/knife/whatever they are looking for. During these scenes, the girls wear different skimpy outfits. And other than some borderline rape scenes, that’s basically it.

The film is massively over stylised. Zack Snyder well is known for this and although it worked ok in Watchmen, here it just looked stupid. The opening five minutes felt like a music video and from there on in it was a mixture of a computer game and a fourteen year old boy’s daydream. There were far too many slow motion shots which all zoomed in slowly. It was repetitive and unnecessary. The film dragged on and the slow motion made it feel even longer. By the time Browning’s character went in to her third fantasy featuring a Lord of the Rings style Orcs vs Knights battle, I let out a grown as I realised we were only about half way through.

This is the most video game like film I’ve ever watched. Each fantasy acts as a level which the characters must complete before moving onto the next and the CGI was like watching a trailer for a fantasy game. Browning’s character even dressed like a Japanese girl in one of those platform-fighting games.

Like all women, the cast wear their 'sex clothes' to coffee mornings

The film seems to suggest that the objectification of women is somehow empowering or makes them stronger. I find this assumption to be disgusting. I’m a little surprised that the film was even made given its clearly misogynistic tones. Why if the female characters are constantly on the brink of being raped are they seen in their own fantasies as fetishised versions of themselves? I would have thought that the fantasy versions of themselves would be as un-sexual as possible but instead we see them dressed as ‘sexy school girls’ in more up skirt shots than you’d find in the Daily Star. This film’s sexual politics are so unbelievably skewed that I am surprised that the actors agreed to appear in it.

The acting isn’t atrocious but when all the actors have to do is dress as sex workers and fight imaginary monsters, there’s not much you can do wrong. The Very Hungry Caterpillar probably has more dialogue than this film and that story is more compelling. The actors spend half of their time posing in their underwear and the rest of the time kicking giant Samurai warriors or German soldiers with red eyes.

For a film that contains so much action and titillation, it is incredibly boring. I think its astonishing that I was bored by two hours of scantily clad young women hitting monsters but I didn’t care what happened or when or even why. There is one nice moment towards the end where I thought to myself “Ahh that’s why she…” but for the other 108 minutes I was left feeling bored and angry. I don’t know why the film was made. If people want to see near naked women, they can go online. If they want to play a video game, they can. If they want to watch a film, they should avoid this pile of nonsense crap.

1/10