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.

Oliver!

Oliver! Is a musical motion picture based on the stage musical of the same name which is turn is based on Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. The movie version, released in 1968 won six Oscars from eleven nominations and forty-five years later remains one of the most popular musicals of all time. I have some problems with the central character and the acting and if I’m honest I can’t stand the overblown amateur dramatic feeling to some of the scenes but even I must say that Oliver! features a great story and some wonderful direction. The songs also do nothing for me but the final act is built up towards a tense and surprisingly terrifying conclusion.

Oliver Twist (Mark Lester) is an orphan, living in that wickedest of Victorian institutions, the Workhouse. He is sold to an Undertaker but mistreated and escapes to London where he falls in with a pickpocket called Artful Dodger (Jack Wild) and his boss/carer Fagin (Ron Moody). Oliver is caught and tried for a crime he didn’t commit and taken into the care of a wealthy benefactor but worried he will talk about who and what he has seen, fiendish criminal Bill Sykes (Oliver Reed) is desperate to take him back to Fagin.

Magic Mike

When I saw trailers for Magic Mike in early 2012 I thought it looked like the film I was least likely to see, ever. Despite excelling in 21 Jump Street, Channing Tatum was still one of my least favourite actors and I was yet to see Matthew McConaughey’s fantastic turn in Killer Joe so he was still just Mahogany McConaughey to me. Added to that inauspicious line up was Alex Pettyfer who I had only ever seen in Beastly which happens to be one of my least favourite films of all time. So the cast was awful, what about the plot? Male Strippers. Next. So all of that plus fucking Rihanna warbling over the the trailer made Magic Mike a film I felt I had to avoid. But then I started reading snippets of reviews and comments from people who weren’t the typical wet lipped Tatum fans and wondered if it was actually worth checking out.

‘Magic’ Mike Lane (Tatum) has dreams of designing and selling custom made furniture but for now earns a living in a number of ways which include roofing and more lucratively, stripping. On a roofing job he meets Adam (Pettyfer) who Mike introduces to the world of male stripping. Adam, known as ‘the kid’ quickly picks up the trade and brings in much needed money which soon goes to his head. Meanwhile Mike enters into a flirtatious friendship with Adam’s straight laced sister Brooke (Cody Horn) while club owner Dallas (McConaughey) dreams of ruling over an empire of strip clubs and all the women and money that comes with it.

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.

Identity Thief

Why didn’t I just listen? I have only myself to blame. No actually, I’ll blame my girlfriend as this film was her choice, but no, it’s not all on her, I have to shoulder some of the responsibility. At work Richard, the man behind I Liked That Film told me it was the worst film he’d seen all year and I’d listened to a couple of podcasts and read some reviews which stated similar. But still I went. And now I’ve added another few dollars to an ever expanding pot which makes this waste of talent (at time of writing) the second biggest box office draw of the year so far. How and why is this film so bad? All the ingredients are there. Melissa McCarthy is a fast rising comedy star who was great in Bridesmaids and stole her scenes in This is 40. Jason Bateman is one of the best every man-straight man types in Hollywood today. What happened?

The plot or should I say tenuous excuse to get Bateman and McCarthy in a car together for two hours is that Bateman plays Sandy Patterson. I know what you’re thinking; Sandy is a girl’s name. He must be some kind of girly man, right? Well if you think that’s funny then you’re gonna love the next couple of hours. So Sandy, ha, Sandy works in Denver at a job he’s good at but he doesn’t get the sort of appreciation he thinks he deserves (Amen, brother!). Sandy starts to notice that his credit limit is reduced and eventually his card is declined. He’s all like “What on Earth is going on? I only use the card for gas and coffee…” Meanwhile in Florida a woman (McCarthy) has stolen Sandy (Get it, like a girl’s name) Patterson’s identity and is using it to buy all sorts of hilarious items like hairspray and jet skis. Unfortunately the police can’t help because for some reason they’re not allowed to. So Sandy, wait, sorry. Sandy has to go to Florida himself and play bounty hunter by bringing the woman to Denver to explain to his boss that he’s a good boy really. Also there are bad guys with guns.

Spring Breakers

Spring Break is to me what Taco Bell, 401K and Glee Club are. They are words and ‘things’ which exist in America but mean nothing on this side of the pond. Everything I know about the items, events and shops above, I’ve learned from the movies. I have literally no idea what a 401K is though. So the concept of the Spring Break is something that is not entirely alien to me but my only contact with it has come through the likes of Piranha 3D and Friends. Spring Breakers makes it out to be pretty much what I expected; an alcohol fuelled holiday for slags and nob heads to gyrate through while getting mashed off their tits to terrible music.

Spring Breakers is about four college girls, played by Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine who desperately want to go to Florida for Spring Break but can’t afford to. While Faith (Gomez) is at Church one night, the other three decide to mask up and rob a takeaway. With money to burn the foursome head down to sunnier climes where the bikinis are small and the booze keeps flowing. They soon find they get into trouble with the law though and get bailed out by a suspiciously friendly drug dealer turn rapper called Alien (James Franco).

Wings

1927’s Wings was the first film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. At that first ceremony though there were two categories which were seen as the top award of the night. Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans won Unique and Artistic Production while Wings won Outstanding Picture. The former category was dropped the following year and Outstanding Picture was renamed Best Picture with Wings retroactively considered the overall winner. This seems unfair on Sunrise which in my view is a far superior film which is why I have included it on my Oscar Challenge page.

But back to the matter in hand which is the film Wings. The movie blends elements from a number of genres including action and comedy but is centrally a romantic drama. I say this despite lead actress Clara Bow’s statement that the film was “A man’s picture” in which she played the cream on top of the pie. For me the film is deeper than purely “A man’s picture” and has a highly engaging story about feuding rivals and unrequited love set against the backdrop of the First World War. As America enters the war in 1917 it calls its men to arms and Jack Powell (Charles ‘Buddy’ Rodgers) and David Armstrong (Richard Arlen) answer the call to join the fledgling Air Service. Both men are in love with Sylvia (Jobyna Ralston) and vie for her affections. She only has eyes for David. Meanwhile Jack’s beautiful neighbour Mary Preston (Clara Bow) is madly in love with Jack but he barely notices her and the feelings are in no way reciprocated. While in France the two men become friends and forget their feud but their love for the same woman remains as an undercurrent of their friendship.

The Brood

The second half of Grimm Up North’s recent David Cronenberg double bill was 1979’s The Brood. Creepier and less funny than Scanners, the first film on the bill, The Brood stars a late period Oliver Reed as a Psychotherapist who specialises in the field of ‘Psychoplasmics’, a method in which patients let go of suppressed emotions through physiological changes in their bodies. One of Dr. Raglan’s (Reed) patients is Nola (Samantha Eggar), the wife of Frank Carveth (Art Hindle). Frank is worried about his wife’s treatment at the hands of Dr. Raglan and begins to suspect something else is wrong when their young daughter returns from a visit covered in scratches and bruises. Frank is right to worry as an unwanted side effect of Nola’s treatment is the creation of The Brood, childlike monsters who feed off her negative thoughts, attacking and killing based on her emotions.

Unlike Scanners which I enjoyed all the way through, The Brood takes its time to get going. There are large swathes of the film where I was feeling a little bit bored by what was going on and I wasn’t sure where the film was going. What kept me interested was an early appearance of one of The Brood. The confusion about what it was and where it came from helped me to remain focussed throughout the less interesting moments before a final half hour which was full of excitement, action and terror.

Scanners

Last night I was fortunate to take in a David Cronenberg double bill at the lavish Plaza Theatre in Stockport. The evening was run by the Grimm Up North people who put on an excellent show which attracted a decent crowd. The first film on the bill was Scanners, Cronenberg’s 1981 science fiction horror which was for him at the time, a fairly conventional film. Throughout North America there exist people who are ‘scanners’. Scanners are able to read people’s minds and move objects through telekinesis. Weapons manufacturer ConSec are attempting to use scanners as weapons but rogue scanner Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) halts the programme by killing ComSec’s scanners and forming his own group who wish to rise up and stamp their authority on ‘normal’ people. ComSec uncover Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) and train him to take down Revok.

I thought Scanners was great fun. The movie has a pretty decent story behind it and I was engaged by the espionage and war that the plot created. The central idea is interesting and manages to sustain the plot for over 100 minutes. There are conspiracies and twists which add to the excitement and occasional action sequences which gives you more bang for your buck. In addition to this there are a couple of well written characters although the acting is frankly dreadful. Lead Stephen Lack is quite literally laughably awful. I can’t remember seeing a central performance which was so wooden and cringe worthy. No one really shines although Michael Ironside isn’t terrible and Robert Silverman is actually quite good. He was the acting highlight in a film full of poor performances.

This Must Be the Place

This Must Be the Place is a film which frustrated me. In amongst its less appealing aspects are some great camera work, interesting ideas and flawless deadpan performance from Sean Penn but this is all stifled by a script which doesn’t know what it wants to be and despite introducing some heavy topics, doesn’t have anything to say. The film centres on an aging and bored American Rock Star called Cheyenne (Sean Penn). Cheyenne, still dressed in his Goth rock attire, shuffles around his Irish Mansion and into town where he stares aimlessly at supermarket shelves. His lack of vigour is stark contrast to the joyful expressions of his wife Jane (Frances McDormand) who occasionally attempts to remove the gloom from her husband’s life. One day Cheyenne decides he is going to attempt to reconcile with his estranged father and travels back to New York to see him. Arriving too late he instead takes it upon himself to go on a road trip and track down the 90 year old ex-Nazi who persecuted his father in Auschwitz.