The Skin I Live In

Antonio Banderas doing his Cary Grant impression

The Skin I Live In, the winner of the Best film not in the English Language at this years BAFTA awards is the latest dark and twisted thriller from critically acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. Antonio Banderas plays plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard who has successfully created skin which cannot burn. Although claiming to have conducted his experiments on mice, it is revealed that he has in fact been experimenting on a woman who is locked in his house. I don’t want to give much more away that that but the film deals with loss, betrayal, revenge and madness in a thrilling two hours that will leave you saying ‘but… huh?’

Banderas is charismatic and sinister and pulls off the role of a lonely, slightly unbalanced but focussed doctor well. He is joined by the ridiculously beautiful Elena Anaya who plays her difficult role with conviction. She can be seen in another strong, although sexually explicit role here. The film features a wonderful score from Alberto Iglesias which helps to create a sense of entrapment and suspense. The setting and internal sets are beautiful and contrasting. One the outside you have the rugged, unkempt city of Toledo and its surroundings whereas on the inside everything is ordered and clinical. This helps to create the feeling of separation from the inside and outside.

*Swoon*

It is difficult to talk about one of my problems with the film without giving away any major spoilers but while I was satisfied with the physical transformation, I felt the film in no way explained the vocal transformation. This is only a small issue however and on the whole the film is full of intrigue and suspense and is extremely twisted and bizarre.

7/10 

Attack the Block

When I first saw Attack the Block, I’d made up my mind before even seeing it that I was going to love it because I am such a fan of writer/director Joe Cornish. (Stephen!) Having now watched the film for a second time and this time and ignoring my love of Cornballs Cornish I still found that I enjoyed it a lot.

The film is set on a South London Council Estate and follows a group of local teenagers over the course of a single night during which they are subject to an alien invasion. The film begins with them mugging a nurse (Jodie Whittaker) as she walks home from work. From there the gang discover an alien, destroy it and parade around the block showing off their kill. What they fail to realise however is that their alien is only the first of many and the others will be looking revenge.

The film is shot and directed so that the audience feels like they are watching an alien planet or space ship and not a council estate. Cornish uses unusual angles to give the tower blocks the look of space ships from the outside and an alien space station from the inside. The effect is to give the film an eerie, other worldly look which is appropriate for the subject matter. The aliens themselves are well designed and look real enough to be scary but not too real as to escape from the 80s feel that Cornish was aiming for. The whole film is like a love letter to the Spielberg esque monster movies of the 1970s and 80s. Their ultra black fur and luminous blue teeth are an impressive creation and their parcours style movement is both scary and unnerving.

The acting on the whole is impressive. Whittaker gives a good performance as the terrified nurse, Nick Frost is on hand to play the shlubby local drug dealer and Luke Treadaway is impressive as a middle class student who tries to use slang to fit in with the teenage thugs turned heroes. The teenagers themselves are all well defined and written. The slang they use feels real and unforced and while some lines are a bit cheesy, on the whole they sound like real South London teens. Their acting is also very good and together they seem like a real gang rather than actors thrown together to make a film.

'Check yo' self blood or we murk you innit'

My only real problem with the film is that despite their partial redemption, I still found the majority of the gang unlikeable. In the films opening scene we see them mug a nurse at knifepoint and they are responsible for the alien problem too so it is hard to feel love for them. Cornish tries to combat this by showing us inside the leader, Moses’ world and perhaps letting us in on why he is how he is, but it isn’t enough to forgive him for the malicious acts he commits during the film. This however doesn’t detract from an otherwise fine film which is a fantastic debut by Joe Cornish and proof that Britain can handle sci-fi B-Movies as well or if not better than their American counterparts.  

8/10  

No Strings Attached

This is yet another sex friends romantic comedy, a genre that has become far too popular in the last couple of years. Emma (Natalie Portman) and Adam (Ashton Kutcher) keep bumping into one another over a period of fifteen years and eventually have sex. Emma is afraid of relationships and commitment etc so they decide to forgo any relationship and just have no strings attached sex. Predictably things don’t stay sweet for long and when Adam wants more from their relationship, Emma decided to break it off only to realise that she really does love him after all. Maybe I should have started this paragraph with ‘Spoiler Alert’ but anyone with an IQ higher than that of a Satsuma could guess how things are going to go.

After winning her Oscar for Black Swan it would appear that Portman is taking time off from acting by appearing in both this and Your Highness in the same year. I hope her sabbatical ends soon because she is wasted in these roles. Ashton Kutcher plays the Ashton Kutcher character, something he plays well but he is an annoying screen presence who sucks the life out of any movie he appears in. Some of the supporting cast are ok but there are far too many of them so no one character gets more than a few lines of dialogue. The character of Adam’s father, which was quite a large role, served no purpose and the father and son back story went nowhere.

Kutcher proving he can bench press 90lbs

The story is so unbelievably dull and predictable that my girlfriend (who made me watch the film) suggested turning it off half way though. I think it is trying to be clever by using the female character as the one who is afraid of commitment but this is hardly a new idea and the sex-friends angle has been done numerous times recently in films such as Love & Other Drugs (review here) and Friends with Benefits both of which are far sweeter and funnier.

The film did have one or two good lines and I laughed once and chucked a couple of times but it falls well short of the Kermode five-laughs-or-more-makes-a-comedy rule which I Adhere to. I also felt no compassion for Portman’s character who we are meant to feel sorry for when she realises she has made a mistake. It’s her own stupid fault.

This film should be avoided at all costs. If you really want to see a fuck buddies comedy then try one of the films mentioned above instead.

3/10

Outbreak

Outbreak came at a time before infection type disaster movies were the mainstay of Hollywood. Since 9/11, film makers have shied away from the terrorist type disaster movies of the 1980s and 90s and films such as 28 Days Later, Rec and Contagion have taken over from the likes of Die Hard and The Siege. So Outbreak was perhaps slightly ahead of its time. I am too young to remember its initial release in 1995 but I can imagine that its actors were as big a draw as they are today with some of them at the height of their careers. Morgan Freeman features, a year after The Shawshank Redemption, Cuba Gooding Jr was a year away from his Oscar win for Jerry Maguire and Kevin Spacey had appeared in Seven and The Usual Suspects in the same year. With the additions of Dustin Hoffman and Donald Sutherland, this film is the definition of an all star cast.

The film is about a virus that is found in Zaire which later turns up in a small town in California. It has mutated and infected the town’s population and a team of military scientists which includes Dustin Hoffman and Cuba Gooding Jr must battle both the virus and the military to save the town and possibly America itself.

The plot is fairly formulaic with few surprises. Due to the nature of the story there is also little peril. At one point, the President orders the infected town to be bombed but you know this will never happen in a mainstream Hollywood movie. In another scene, Hoffman and Gooding Jr are in apparent danger when a plane is on course to hit their helicopter but again, you know this won’t happen. I think this is where films such as 28 Days Later and Children of Men have an edge as the danger feels more real and the characters more at risk. The film also features a lot of plot explanation which gave me the feeling that the writers thought the audience was too dumb to understand certain parts of the script. There was one very good plot device in which the outbreak of the virus in the Californian town happened in a cinema which I thought would have increased a cinema audience’s fright/enjoyment.

Kevin Spacey after being shown the finished film

Considering the film contained such an esteemed cast I didn’t feel like any one of them excelled. Either they cancelled each other out, weren’t trying very hard or the script and direction didn’t allow for any great performances. I have a feeling it is down to a mixture of the last two.

The film hasn’t aged too badly considering it is now seventeen years old and one of the two countries in which it is set no longer exists but this is a nuts and bolts disaster movie with a cast that promises a better film than it delivers.

5/10 

Gladiator

“The General who became a slave, the slave who became a Gladiator, the Gladiator who defied an Emperor”.  Gladiator is the story of Roman General Maximus (Russell Crowe) who seeks revenge for the murder of the Caesar and of his own family at the order of new Caesar, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix).

The story is enthralling, and the battle scenes, epic. The impressive sets and locations are a reminder of the great historical epics of the 1950s and 60s. It is a joy to see real places at a time when CGI is often used instead. Talking of the CGI, it has held up to scrutiny very well and despite being twelve years old at the time I’m writing this, it looks as good as all but the best 2012 has to offer. The wonderful images are joined by a great score by Hans Zimmer. 

The main characters are well defined and attention-grabbing. Crowe’s Maximus is a man on a mission who shows little emotion while in battle but a great deal of love and emotion towards those he loves. Crowe is opposite one of the most hateful characters in all of cinema history. To me, Joaquin Phoenix often comes across as unlikeable but he takes this to new heights as the villain of the piece, Caesar Commodus. The supporting cast that includes Derek Jacobi, Djimon Hounsou and Connie Nielson are all very good but the stand out is Oliver Reed who unfortunately died during filming, making this his last film. His scenes were completed at a cost of $3.2m using motion capture and CGI, money well spent in my view as it is difficult to spot.

The whole film itself seems fairly inexpensive when compared to its contempories. It cost $103m in 2000 whereas Titanic cost $200m three years earlier and Kingdom of Heaven cost $147m five years later. I think you get a lot of film for your buck with Gladiator. (This is especially so when you compare it to Pirates of the Caribbean 4 which had an estimated budget of $150-250m and is a poor excuse for entertainment).

Occasionally the film gets a bit repetitive. Maximus is forced to fight one opponent after another in the Coliseum and after a while this begins to get tiresome. Each new battle introduces new elements such as chariots or wild animals which help it to keep fresh but you do get the feeling you are just watching the same thing over and over again and waiting for the final battle between the central characters which will obviously be coming. This being said, on the whole Gladiator is a great historical epic which should keep you entertained for over two hours and is better than similar films such as Troy and Alexander in a genre that it helped revive.  

8/10

The Muppets

The Muppets is a reboot of the classic puppet show that has been on a twelve year hiatus from the big screen. The story follows brothers Gary (Jason Segal) and Walter (a Muppet born character) to Los Angeles where they are meant to be celebrating Gary’s ten year anniversary with Mary (Amy Adams). While in town they take in a tour of the old Muppets studios, only to find that the evil Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) is planning to tear it down and drill for oil. In order to save the studio and the Muppets themselves, Walter must persuade Kermit to get the gang back together…

I have to be honest and admit that I have never seen a Muppets movie before but due to how much they have penetrated modern culture, I was able to name over half of them on sight. Despite never seeing a Muppet movie, I am a big fan of puppetry and love Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. The puppetry in the film was incredible. There was so much emotion in their faces, more than Orlando Bloom for instance and it is a feat of direction that the film makers managed to have so many puppets on screen at one time.

The first third of the film was amongst the funniest I have seen in the cinema. I had a constant smile on my face as gag followed gag at a frenetic pace. Had it continued for the entire film I’d be putting it up with This is Spinal Tap as one of my favourite comedies. The number of jokes and laughs inevitably decreases as the film progresses in order to focus more on the plot but there are still more laughs to be had than in even the funniest of films I’ve seen recently. The screening I was in had a real mixture of young children, teenagers and adults and all were laughing, often at the same time and sometimes on their own, but everyone seemed to be enjoying what was on screen.

The film’s songs were excellent and so obviously the work of Flight of the Concords Bret McKenzie. Each one had a Concords ring to it and was funny and catchy. There were also some pretty good cameos in the film, and Jack Black. I’d expected a little more from the cameos having heard about the massive stars the Muppet Show used to attract but most were funny. The main human cast was ok. Amy Adams was her usual fluttery, singing self and although Jason Segal wasn’t great, he has written a very funny film so I’ll let him off. The stars of the show though were of course The Muppets. Kermit and Miss Piggy are at the centre of the story but it is Animal who gets the most laughs and each main character is given at least a couple of chances to shine for a few seconds.

My one complaint with the film is the shameless advertisement for the film Cars. On no less than three occasions we saw a billboard for the film. They might as well have just had Kermit say “You know what guys? We should go and see Cars when we’re finished” and be done with it. I expect this came down from somewhere in Disney rather than from James Bobin but it was disappointing so see so often. I hate to see targeted or semi-subliminal advertising, especially when it is aimed at children.

The Muppets will have created a whole new audience for the fuzzy puppets and I expect we’ll see much more from them in the next few years. The film is a very accomplished comedy that is not afraid to reference itself or even break the forth wall and overall is incredibly enjoyable, funny and sweet.

9/10  

Sleeping Beauty

Billed as an erotic drama and far removed from the fairytail which bares the same name, 2011s Sleeping Beauty is more like a confusing first draft of an interesting if not a little seedy idea. Emily Browning plays college student Lucy who in search of extra cash is drawn into the sordid world of erotic entertainment. At first she is required to act as a lingerie clad, silver service waitress but as things progress they take a more squalid turn and she ends up being drugged to fall asleep and have men spend time with her, under one provision – no penetration.

The film is slow, quiet and bare and features little music or dialogue. The story is played out at a deliberate pace in purposeful scenes that are full of subtle emotion. Despite the large amount of nudity and sexual language, I wouldn’t class the film as erotic. It is actually quite depressing. Browning’s character has few friends and spends her evenings craving attention and affection from strangers. She also takes part in humiliating acts of medical experimentation and partakes in drug abuse, possibly to escape ‘herself’.

The film is a brave choice for Emily Browning who was last seen in Sucker Punch,(reviewed here) a film with a very dodgy attitude towards women. In this she is rarely clothed on screen and has to deal with some quite degrading scenes. She is much better here than in the aforementioned crime against narrative cinema however and lets her face and body do the acting. Her face is often expressionless and she appears to be floating through it and life, even when she is not drugged. Despite a better performance here, and a more natural one too, I think the jury is still out as to whether she can successfully move into less grubby cinema.  

My main problem with the film is that it is just really lackluster. The idea is fairly interesting and it has a pleasing minimalist and blank look to it which compliments Browning’s own looks but it wasn’t in the least bit exciting or interesting to watch. The emotional scenes are not and one scene in particular in which an old man tells a very long story had me reaching for my phone to check twitter, this despite also having a nude Emily Browning in shot. The ending is unsatisfying and confusing and by that point I’d completely lost interest. To be kind to the film, it is shot very beautifully and has an interesting concept but it is disappointing in its execution.

4/10

The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others is a fantastic thriller set in 1980’s East Germany. Stasi officer, Weisler (Ulrich Muhe) is ordered to spy on playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) by his superiors. Dreyman’s apartment is bugged and Weisler sits upstairs for hours on end, listening to everything that is said and done below him. Weisler soon discovers that the surveillance is down to one of his superiors infatuation with Dreyman’s girlfriend, the actress Christa Sieland, but nonetheless continues with his round the clock surveillance. Weisler, married to his job and with no life outside of it becomes intrigued by the lives of the artists who he is listening to, hearing literature and music which is completely new to him. He begins to suspect that the whole operation is an abuse of power and has to choose whether to continue to be honest in his accounts of what is going on in the apartment below him.

The film is acted with great aplomb. Muhe gives the standout performance however. He is mostly stoic and expressionless which makes the very occasional outbursts of emotion that much more unexpected. His performance reminds me most of Gary Oldman’s in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It is the merest movement of a lip or raising of an eyebrow that gives away his feelings and emotions and is a wonderful performance. Sebastian Koch is also very good, playing the playwright who is under observation and Ulrich Tukur and Thomas Thieme are both well cast as the archetypal villains of the piece, playing the roles of a senior Stasi officer and Government official respectably.  

The film’s great strength is its subtlety and the way the tension creeps up on the audience without being obvious. Again, I have to compare the film to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in this respect. There is little in the way of action but the audience are kept waiting, on the edge of their seats for the story to play out. It is masterful story telling that is wonderfully directed by von Donnersmarck.  

Additional – For a review of a tragi-comedy film featuring the same events click here.

10/10

The Taking of Pelham 123

2009’s The Taking of Pelham 123 is a remake of the 1974 film of the same name. I haven’t seen that film so I can’t comment but the remake is a let down. A man by the name of ‘Ryder’ (John Travolta) takes control of a Subway train in New York City where he and three fellow hijackers take several hostages and demand $10m for their freedom. Ryder is in contact with a NYC train dispatcher called Garber (Denzel Washington) and the film follows his attempts to control the situation and stop any hostages from being killed.

The film starts off with an annoying frame rate which is reminiscent of watching strobe lighting. Thankfully this technique ends with the opening credits but it was a bad start to a poor film. At times it had my heart pounding, thanks in most part to a thumping techno soundtrack, but for the most part it was lifeless and dull. It is difficult to get excited about the film when the majority of the dialogue takes place via radio with Garber in his control room and Ryder in a Subway tunnel. When the action is taken outside these confines towards the end of the film, it picks up somewhat but by then it is too little too late.

I've got a goatee, and I'm not afraid to use it!

Denzel Washington does his thing of the everyman caught up in an extraordinary situation but John Travolta is completely unconvincing as a bad guy. Even with a gun to a passenger’s head he seems more like he’s playing a man who is a little bit naughty than the part of a deranged psycho with a score to settle. The supporting cast featuring John Turturro and James Gandolfini are given little to do and Gandolfini’s character of the Mayor takes off half way through the film, seemingly with a plan in mind, never to be seen again. It didn’t make a lot of sense. Perhaps the edit messed up his character’s arc…

The film’s ending seemed rushed and was disappointing but to be fair even a fantastic ending wouldn’t have prevented the film from being just mediocre.

5/10  

Good Bye, Lenin!

I first attempted to watch this film eight years ago when it was shown to us on my first day of University. Unfortunately that day there was a problem with the projector and the film cut out half way through. Here I am, eight years later having finally finished it with a review.

I think that the idea behind the film is brilliant. It is 1989 in East Berlin and a hard line Communist mother watches as her son is arrested for taking part in a reunification rally. Upon seeing his arrest, the mother has a heart attack and falls into a coma. Eight months pass by during which the Berlin Wall falls and capitalism sweeps through East Berlin, which is now reunified with the west. When the mother eventually wakes up she is in a very fragile state and her son is told that any excitement or surprises could kill her. He then has to try to maintain the lie that East Berlin is still under control from Moscow in an attempt to keep his mother alive.

The film is quite funny in places and interesting throughout. I felt that about fifteen minutes could have been cut from the middle third as it sags slightly there but then it builds up to a tremendous final half hour. Some of the lengths the son goes to, to maintain the lie are extraordinary but two in particular stand out. He uses his budding film director friend to make up eight months of news and also borrows an ex-Cosmonaught turned taxi driver for an emotional and loving scene.

The acting is very naturalistic. The whole cast seem very at ease and almost unaware that the camera is on them. East Berlin (one of my favourite places) looks great. We don’t see much of it but what we do see are the brutal Communist buildings that give it its signature look.

Part of what remains of the wall today. Taken by me in 2010

Overall, Good Bye, Lenin! Is an interesting film with some funny moments and a lot of heart. There is enough politics in there for people who are interested in the reunification but not too much so that it would overpower it for those who are not.

Aditional - For a review of the Oscar winning The Lives of Others, which has shares a time and place with this film, click here. 

7/10