Safe House

I don’t know what I was hoping for with Safe House but I certainly wasn’t expecting so little. With films like Taken setting the bar very low these days for the action genre it seems that a whole parade of films are following in its ridiculous wake and Safe House is but one of these movies. Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) is a CIA Safe House Operative in Cape Town. His role involves waiting around a secure house in case the CIA ever needs to move a criminal, terrorist etc. Twelve months into the posting Matt’s first house guest arrives in the shape of Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) a highly skilled rogue CIA Agent who is being chased by a menagerie of vaguely foreign looking killers. Frost repeatedly ditches Weston but he never stops hunting the rogue agent down and more nonsense I’m bored.

Safe House was more full of holes than holy water from the holy land and had the most obvious twist since Rock ‘n’ Roll. It is such a stupid movie that I can barely bring myself to discuss it. It is never exciting or interesting and beside solid but unspectacular central performances there is literally nothing of merit in the entire 110 minutes.

Flight

Prime Oscar bait Flight is Director Robert Zemeckis’ return to live action following more than a decade producing animated and computer generated movies. The movie tells the story of a crashed aircraft and the following weeks for its functioning alcoholic pilot (Whip Whitaker) Denzel Washington. Whip is a well trained and long serving pilot who has got by all throughout his adult life despite being drunk and stoned everyday. On the morning of the fated flight he is seen drinking beer and vodka and snorting cocaine and even drinks vodka during the fifty minute flight. Despite some miraculous instinct and skill which manages to save many lives Whip is due in front of a tribunal with a failed toxicology report hanging over his head.

It’s fair to say that Flight is one of the weaker of the Oscar season films and the intense crash and admirable Washington performance are all that separate it from mediocrity. The movie is full of religious babble, poorly chosen music and a code era ending which make the excellent opening instantly forgettable and sets up an hour and a half which passes the time but does little to induce much of an emotional response past the odd laugh and one tense moment.

Strangers on a Train

Alfred Hitchcock’s tale of doubles, murder, light and dark, Strangers on a Train is a film with a lot of deep and hidden subtext which sits underneath a nicely woven story. Amateur tennis player and wannabe Politician Guy Haines (Farley Granger) is on a train when he meets a chatty and confident man named Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker). Bruno recognises the tennis ace and begins talking about stories of Guy’s private life that he has read about in the newspapers. Guy is uncomfortable but humours the strange man who soon begins to talk of murder and how they could pull off the perfect murder by each murdering the other’s problem person. Guy is on the way to speak with his wife about a divorce and Bruno suggests murder. A few days later Guy’s wife is found murdered and Guy is stalked by the shady Bruno who says that it is Guy’s turn to commit the crime.

Strangers on a Train is far from my favourite Hitchcock film but it features some stunning cinematography and a vast array of visual motifs which help to spell out the plot and themes. The performance of Robert Walker is also noteworthy but I rarely felt fully engaged with the story. It is perhaps a movie that would benefit from a second viewing but like pretty much all of Hitchcock’s movies is still worth watching.

Black Dynamite

Black Dynamite is a 2009 blaxploitation action/comedy spoof written by and starring Michael Jai White. Although my knowledge of blaxploitation cinema extends to what little I’ve picked up during some light reading and watching Jackie Brown, Black Dynamite is one of the funniest and most enjoyable films I’ve seen in recent years and I’ve now seen it five times. Black Dynamite is a pitch perfect pastiche of the genre that it imitates and takes special care in making sure that the look, direction, acting and mistakes are done just right. It is a film that I’ve recommended to several people, all of whom have laughed their way from start to finish and I’d recommend it to anyone, regardless of age, race or gender.

Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White) is an ex-CIA Agent/Kung Fu expert who leaves a trail of satisfied women and battered crooks in his wake. When his brother Jimmy is killed by the mob Black Dynamite goes back into service to catch his brother’s killers, clean up the streets and generally kick ass, ya dig? Along the way Black Dynamite gets the help of several members of the community from Pimps to Black Panther members, seducing and reducing as he goes.

The Pilgrim

Charlie Chaplin’s shortest feature or longest short, depending on which way you’d like to view it, is important for a number of reasons. Not only was it his final short film before moving to features permanently but it was also his last film to co star Edna Purviance. Purviance stared in over thirty of Chaplin’s films and was his leading lady for eight years but The Pilgrim was her final major onscreen appearance with Chaplin*. The movie also bought to an end a fruitful relationship with The First National Film Company. Following this film Chaplin would produce his final films with United Artists, the company he founded with D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. Those films would go on to define Chaplin’s long career.

Besides the above reasons there is little worth remembering about The Pilgrim and for me it is a bit of a blot on an otherwise successful era for Chaplin. The Pilgrim begins slowly and never kicks into a high gear. There is very little humour or comedy of any sort and the story, while occasionally attention-grabbing, didn’t do anything for me. The ending was nice but The Pilgrim isn’t a film I’ll be returning to in a hurry. In a typical case of mistaken identity an escaped convict (Charlie Chaplin) dresses as a preacher and takes a train to Texas where he is immediately taken for a small town’s new Church leader. His past comes back to haunt him though as an old friend makes a surprise appearance.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Following on directly from the second film in the Millennium trilogy, the final part of the series deals with the aftermath of the events that took place during the previous film. Both the central protagonist Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) and her father Zalachenko (Georgi Staykov) lie seriously injured in hospital while journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) tries desperately to clear Salander’s name and discover the links between the state’s poor treatment of her and a shady underground police organisation known as The Section.

After the disappointment of the Girl Who Played with Fire I was glad to see a partial return to form in this film. The poor end to that film is partially explained as this one picks up seconds after the climax of the second. Although never reaching the heights of The Girl with the DragonTattoo, this movie is interesting but rarely tense. The story is more reminiscent of the original film and ties the series together nicely.

Jackie Brown

Quentin Tarantino’s third feature and his homage to the blaxploitation and heist films of the 1970s, Jackie Brown has been for a long time the Tarantino film I’ve told people was my favourite. On my first round of watching his oeuvre when I was in my mid to late teens, something about Jackie Brown made it my favourite Tarantino to date. Recently I’ve re-watched Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction as well as the Director’s latest Django Unchained and the film is no longer at the top of my list but it remains perhaps Tarantino’s most restrained and focussed film to date and features a great story and top cast on fine form.

When middle aged air stewardess Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) is caught smuggling $10,000 and a couple of ounces of cocaine through customs she is picked up and charged. Facing a stretch in jail or a bullet to the head from her arms dealing employer Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson), Brown attempts to play one side off against the other and pull of an epic but dangerous heist.

Zero Dark Thirty

The follow up to Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar winning The Hurt Locker is Zero Dark Thirty, a film set around the ten year hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Opening with an incredibly visceral, sound only montage of 9/11 telephone recordings in which people are heard calling home and on the phone to the emergency services the film then follows the next ten years in the hunt for 9/11’s orchestrator, Osama Bin Laden. Young CIA Operative Maya (Jessica Chastain) lands in Pakistan to begin work at the US Embassy and various black sites in the area. She witnesses torture first hand and soon picks up a lead which she believes will bring the US to Bin Laden.

The final forty minutes of the movie creates an incredibly realistic reconstruction of the final assault on Bin Laden’s compound and is perhaps the most compelling and seemingly accurate depiction of a black ops mission I’ve ever seen. Tense doesn’t even come close and despite knowledge of how things would pan out I was still glued to the screen with awe but felt repulsed by its realism. The realism actually made me feel uncomfortable and although I think that Zero Dark Thirty is a good film, I didn’t like it.

The Girl Who Played with Fire

Following hot on the heals of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo the second film in the Millennium trilogy finds our heroine Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) back in Sweden following a year abroad. While she tries to keep a low profile and lives of the wealth accumulated in the first film, journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is helping a young employee with an exposé of Swedish human trafficking and prostitution which threatens to expose high ranking officials. After three grisly murders the police have Lisbeth as the only suspect but separately she and Blomkvist attempt to prove her innocence.

I’ve never read any of Stieg Larsson’s novels but really enjoyed the first film in the series and to a lesser extent the pointlessAmerican remake. The shock and suspense of the first film feels far away from the sequel which is unremarkable by comparison. The plot is thicker and much more confusing and overall the tension from the first film is greatly diminished.

Pay Day

A Chaplin short made during a lull in production by the former prolific film maker, Pay Day is an above average and clever film that finds Charlie Chaplin as an expert bricklayer on pay day. Following building site shenanigans Chaplin discovers that his pay is short and that his overbearing wife wants more than her share. After managing to hide some from her he heads out for a night on the town.

Chaplin once described Pay Day as the favourite of his short films which is a bold statement as he made over seventy of them. This isn’t my favourite Chaplin short and it is far from his funniest but it’s a very clever film which features some intriguing camera and editing processes and a fine story plus just enough jokes to keep the audience laughing.