Dr. Strangelove

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a 1964 satirical black comedy which was co-written, produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. A hit on its initial release and widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time, Dr. Strangelove lampoons the Cold War fear of and attitude towards Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), the idea that if one side were to bomb the other then the other side would retaliate and so on until both were destroyed. Although a seemingly brave subject matter for a comedy it is in fact part of a long line of films which poke fun at serious issues of the day. Both M.A.S.H. and more recently Team America: World Police have managed to find humour in solemn subjects but a very strong argument can be made that Dr. Strangelove is the greatest of them all.

The plot concerns a wayward and mentally disturbed US Air Force General who sends his squadron of B-52 bombers, armed with nuclear bombs towards Russian targets and then closes down all lines of communication and removes all abort codes. With the world close to its end, various men attempt to halt the planes from reaching their targets. British actor Peter Sellers plays no less than three characters here, and plays them all brilliantly. He performs as RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake who attempts to persuade the wayward General Jack D. Ripper (Stirling Hayden) to stop as well as playing US President Merkin Muffley who is in the War Room and his wheelchair bound ex-Nazi advisor Dr. Strangelove.

Midnight Express

For years friends and colleagues who know of my interest in films have been asking what I think of Midnight Express. I’ve always had to apologise and say that I’ve never seen it. This happened most recently last week and when I got home I finally remembered to add it as a high priority to my LoveFilm account with the company duly dispatching it just a couple of days later. Now when someone asks me what I think of Midnight Express I will be able to take them, though it might take some time. There is no doubting that it’s a very good film but it wasn’t quite the film I was expecting and there are one or two quite major problems with it.

The movie is based on a book by Billy Hayes, played here by Brad Davis. While in Istanbul with his girlfriend, Davis attempts to smuggle 2kg of hashish back to the US but is caught at the airport amid tighter security following a series of Palestinian lead hijackings. Billy is arrested and sent to a Turkish jail where he will spend the next several years.

Trance

Trance is the first film from Oscar winning Director Danny Boyle since he helmed the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony. Less than twelve months after performing the seemingly impossible and creating a ceremony for which Britain could be proud, Boyle is back to doing what he does best which is to make bloody good films. Trance is a thriller/drama starring James McAvoy as an art auctioneer who gets mixed up in a heist but subsequently loses his memory. With an impatient gang behind him lead by the always watchable Vincent Cassel, McAvoy’s Simon visits hypnotist Rosario Dawson to unlock his missing memory and rediscover the lost Goya painting.

I saw a retrospective interview with Danny Boyle recently in which his back catalogue was delved into. It suddenly dawned on me that he is one of my favourite directors as I’ve enjoyed every single one of the seven (of his nine) films I’ve seen. Additionally I’ve seen six of those seven more than once and I’d put the likes of Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire in amongst my top 50 films of all time. Trance won’t be entering my top 50 (if I actually had one) and isn’t a film I will be in a rush to see again but I thought it was a taught, stylish and confusing thriller which had me gripped from start to finish.

A Beautiful Mind

I saw A Beautiful Mind sometime in 2003 when I was still living at home with my parents. I remember that we all loved it and for a little while it became my favourite film. (Note I discovered Martin Scorsese the next year). Ten years later and I barely remembered a thing about it. I remembered Russel Crowe and something about maths and spying but that was all. I didn’t even remember how remarkably well formed Jennifer Connolly looked. I certainly didn’t recall any twists or surprises. Coming back to the film after ten years in my bid to watch every Oscar Best Picture winner (the film won in 2002) I was left disappointed by some very obvious twists and character development, something my young mind didn’t pick up on in 2003 and had subsequently forgotten. This early flaw put a dampener on the entire film and although it is very good in places, I could never quite get over the early let down.

The film is based on the life of Mathematician John Nash (Crowe) and we pick up his story as he begins his Doctoral thesis at Princeton in 1947. It is immediately obvious that he is highly gifted, egotistical and sure of his talents but lacks interpersonal skills. This is something which is picked up upon by his class mates and he makes very few friends in his time at College. He does gradually become acquainted with his eccentric English room mate Charles Herman (Paul Bettany) and the two remain close for many years. After a major breakthrough at Collage, Nash begins working at MIT but his unusual personality begins to develop into something more and he is taunted by mental illness which interrupts his work and threatens to break up his family.

Slumdog Millionaire

In early 2009 I was stunned by a cinematic experience so bright, colourful, exciting and interesting that I saw the movie twice within a week. The film was Slumdog Millionaire and a month later it won seven BAFTAS and eight Oscars including the big one, Best Picture. The film is a somewhat fantastical but highly engaging story of love, hardship and fortune told from the point of view of young Mumbai tea boy Jamal Malik (Dev Patel). Through his eyes we are told the story of his eighteen years and of his continuing search for his lost love Latika (Freida Pinto). In the hope that she sees him, Jamal becomes a contestant on India’s highest rated game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire but when he fortuitously answers several difficult questions correctly the host (Anil Kapoor) and Police (Irrfan Khan) want their own answers, most pressingly how he knows what he knows.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that I love this movie. I love everything about it from the direction, the soundtrack and the story to the cute child actors and cute adult actors (Pinto). After my initial double viewing I didn’t see the film again until today, over four years later. As soon as the titles rolled I got the little tingle that I got on my first viewing and by the end I was sure that my affection for the film hadn’t diminished at all.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

The apocalypse is just three weeks away, your wife has left you and you regret most of the major decisions you’ve ever made. What do you do? Some people try to fuck everyone they can, others drink to forget. A few carry on as normal and some riot. Dodge Peterson (Steve Carell) decides he’s going to seek out his old High School sweetheart after discovering a letter from her telling him that he was the love of her life. With him he takes his kooky English neighbour Penny (Keira Knightley) who he just met with the promise that he can get her a on a plane to be with her family before the end.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is a sweet indie type of movie with its heart in the right place. It features two watchable leads and a nice story but is short of laughs and far too formulaic. It was a movie that I’d hoped to see in the cinema but my girlfriend’s dislike of Carell and Knightley coupled with a short theatrical run put a stop to that. It is a film which hasn’t enriched my life and won’t stay with me long but was worth the hundred minutes of my life.

Grand Hotel

For a while now I’ve been trying to review every single winner of the Best Picture Academy Award. It’s harder than you’d imagine to get hold of some of these films but I managed to track down Grand Hotel in New York recently. I chose it over 1927’s Wings by price alone but now wish I’d opted for the latter. Grand Hotel won the Best Picture award at 5^th Academy Awards and is to this day the only film in history to be nominated for BestPicture and nothing else. The film is based on a play which is in turn based on a novel and is set entirely within the grounds of Berlin’s Grand Hotel at the end of the Weimar Republic’s Roaring Twenties. The film is full of glamour and charm but left me feeling rather bored for almost its entire one hour and fifty minutes.

Grand Hotel became the model for many films that followed and for its time was unique for blending various characters and storylines into a coherent narrative. The film follows some of the guests at the hotel over the course of a couple of nights following a statement from permanent resident Dr. Otternschlag (Lewis Stone) that “People come and go. Nothing ever happens”. Before Grand Hotel films weren’t as bold as to mix so many stories and characters in such abundance but the idea continues to this day with the likes of Babel and Crash.

Taken 2

Those of you who know me personally will be well aware that 2008’s surprise hit Taken is one of my least favourite films since, well ever. I deeply disliked the casual xenophobia, cartoonish depiction of Yurop (Europe) and all round head kicking dullness. As you can imagine then, the idea of Taken 2 did not excite me and I had no intention of putting myself through another dose of nonsensical, skull crushing chaos. That was until I was on a recent flight with eight hours to kill. Having already seen films I wanted to see on the flight out I was short of things to entertain me so tentatively pressed the Taken 2 button and closed my eyes in shame and fear when I hit ‘play movie’.

The film follows on from the events of Taken which if you don’t know involved the teenage daughter (Maggie Grace) of ex C.I.A. man Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) being ‘taken’, get it? by a group of Albanian people traffickers to be sold into sexual slavery. This all happened in Foreign (France) where everyone is evil and speaks English, not French. So, it’s a few years later and Mills is still overly protective of his teenage daughter, who looks about thirty by the way. He goes to Istanbul for a job and his daughter Kim (Grace) and ex wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) surprises him with a visit. Meanwhile the family of the nondescript but dead Albanians from the first movie are seeking revenge and ‘take’ Bryan and his ex wife.

The Challenger

On January 28^th 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke up 73 seconds after the twenty-fifth Space Shuttle launch, killing all seven of its crew members. The disaster was, at the time, the most catastrophic loss in NASA history and is still remembered as one of the most disastrous and heartbreaking days in human space exploration. Following the tragedy a Commission was set up to get to the bottom of the disaster and uncover the cause of shuttle failure. The Commission contained former and current astronauts including the first American woman in space and the first man on the moon. It also contained a former Secretary of State, Air Force generals and physicists. One of these physicists was perhaps the most famous of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman. Feynman was crucial to the Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bomb and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 on the back of numerous papers and discoveries.

The Challenger (formerly titled Feynman and the Challenger) is a made for TV movie which first aired on the BBC on March 18^th 2013. The film focuses on the role Richard Feynman (William Hurt) played in the Commission and the lengths that he went to; to prove what was really behind the Shuttle’s failure that January morning. The film intersperses real footage, including that of the actual event with dramatisations of Feynman’s quest for answers which are taken from Feynman’s autobiographical book What Do You Care What Other People Think? The movie is well researched and generally very well made and features a terrific central performance and compelling story.

Robot & Frank

I saw trailers for Robot & Frank close to a year ago and the movie was released in America last August but only arrived on our shores this month. I saw it on a recent flight the same week it came out in UK cinemas. I was intrigued by the premise and have a thing for Science Fiction movies set in the near future. I was also annoyed at having to wait such a long time to see the movie when there seems no reason for such a long delay between US and UK release dates. Now I’ve finally seen the movie all my excitement was unnecessary. While occasionally interesting and often funny, the movie loses its way by the half way mark and I lost interest soon after.

The plot revolves around a retired jewel thief called Frank (Frank Langella) who is suffering from the early stages of dementia. His days are filled with pottering about his house and involve daily trips to his ageing library in which he is pretty much the only patron. It is at the library that he maintains his one and only friendship with Librarian Jennifer (Susan Sarandon). Frank receives weekly visits from his successful son Hunter (James Marsden) who decides to buy his father a robot butler/companion to ease his chores and help to keep his memory in check. Frank initially rejects the robot but soon learns it might help him pull off one final job.