Place Beyond the Pines

Place Beyond the Pines is the longest film in cinema history. Wikipedia and IMDb might tell you that it’s only two hours and twenty minutes long but believe me, Place Beyond the Pines is the longest film in cinema history. Three years ago writer/director Derek Cianfrance and actor Ryan Gosling teamed up to create the memorable and enormously underrated Blue Valentine and now they’re back to try again. The problem is that instead of making one great film, they’ve put together three poor ones and have thrust upon the audience a long, mess of a film which as well as being convoluted, goes nowhere, slowly.

As advertised the film initially focuses on a motorcycle stunt rider called Luke (Gosling) who discovers that he has a one year old son with a former fling (Eva Mendes). Luke quits the road and attempts to settle and help raise his child but turns to bank robbery as a means of doing so. Considering you have Ryan Gosling on screen, robbing banks, this is all very dull. The film heats up at a crossing of paths and passing of the lead actor torch when police officer Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper) tracks the bank robbing Luke to a house in which he is holed up. This brief five minutes or so is entertaining and well done and marks a change in plot. The film then turns in to a tale of ambition and police corruption before heading into the future to attempt to tie everything together in a sort of father son retribution thriller kind of way.

Hunger

Hunger is the debut film from Steve McQueen who subsequently ruffled feathers and opened eyes with his second film Shame. Hunger is perhaps more controversial and certainly more harrowing than its follow up but no less great. It depicts the final few months in the life of famous IRA prisoner Booby Sands (Michael Fassbender) who died on hunger strike in Maze Prison in 1981. The film is a stark and sparse piece which provides little entertainment. It’s one of the most shocking films I’ve seen in recent months and is yet another example of cinema making me feel shitty about being British.

The film takes its time to introduce its central character and opens instead with a Prison Officer before taking us inside the cell of a newly incarcerated IRA prisoner who we follow through several months of a ‘no wash-blanket’ strike in which IRA prisoners who are being denied political status for their crimes, refuse to wash, shave or wear prison uniforms. The conditions inside the cells are enough to churn your stomach as you witness two men in cramped conditions, smearing faeces over their walls in protest. Their treatment at the hands of the guards is equally shocking and terrifying. When I watch films about the holocaust I find it hard to believe that those events happened, never mind so recently and while the stories depicted in Hunger are in no way as severe, I had a similar reaction to them. How could something like this have happened so recently, and in my own country no less?

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Re-view

Films are released, they are discussed, they are judged and they are revered or forgotten. Occasionally after several years or even decades they are reassessed by fans and critics and their historical placing my rise or fall. I’ve decided to reassess a film myself but it isn’t a film I saw decades or even years ago, it’s a film I saw just four months and nineteen days ago. Like a lot of people who grew up watching Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy I couldn’t wait for the release of the first instalment of his second Middle Earth trilogy, The Hobbit and Unexpected Journey. I saw it just before Christmas last year and was hugely disappointed, so much so that I gave the film just 4/10 when I reviewed it. To put that into context, that’s the same rating I gave to Rock of Ages and We Bought a Zoo, two films I never want to see again.

For me the main problem with the movie was that it was ruined by one thing; 3D. I thought the 3D in The Hobbit was pointless (if you’ll excuse the pun). It darkened the screen, hiding the beautiful landscapes and made the scenes set underground as easy to see as a particularly difficult to see thing, being viewed by a blind man, facing the other way. The images were also fuzzy and the motion blur I got from the action scenes meant that I often just gave up and closed my eyes. All in all it was a disaster. So having reviewed the film and received exasperated looks from friends who read it, I vowed to re-view it when it came out on Blu-Ray. So was I right?

Grosse Pointe Blank

Professional assassin Martin Blank (John Cusack) discovers that his next job is in his home town on the same weekend as his ten year high school reunion and to kill the proverbial birds, decides to head back to the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe from which he fled a decade earlier. He tracks down his high school sweetheart Debi (Minnie Driver) who now works as a local radio host and attempts to undo the damage caused by standing her up on prom night. While in town Martin finds himself under the watch of several assassins as well as two NSA Agents but despite the danger is desperate to win back his girl.

Grosse Pointe Blank was a better film than I expected it to be. I’m not a huge fan of John Cusack and would never seek out a film because Minnie Driver was in it. I knew nothing about the story but the most 90s poster in I’ve ever seen did little to wet my appetite. The film is rarely funny and the plot is fairly inconsequential but I enjoyed the chemistry of the two leads as well as the 80s soundtrack and overall was charmed by the movie.

At The Back - A LAMMY Nominated Blog

I started writing about films early last year and have since written close to 500 film reviews. Although I started writing as a means of expressing my opinions about the films I saw, I soon joined with The Large Association of Movie Blogs, known commonly as The LAMB. Through The LAMB I've found some excellent blogs, writers and tweeters who have entertained me, helped me to expand my film knowledge and discover hidden gems while also helping me to promote my blog through tweets, the LAMB Forums and a number of the regular features the site runs.

A yearly feature of The Lamb are The LAMMYs, which must surely be the largest Awards Competition for online film criticism in the world. The awards encompass many areas of blogging from design, writing, knowledge, blogathons and even reach as far as podcasting. One of the categories is for the Best New LAMB, open to any blog which joined the Association in the last twelve months. I got home from work yesterday afternoon to discover that my little film blog had been nominated along with nine others in the Best New LAMB category.

I was shocked by this nomination as around 300 blogs were eligible for this award. I'm also extremely grateful to anyone who nominated me and would also like to extend a special thanks to anyone who has read, enjoyed or shared this blog in the last fifteen months. The views and comments I get make the hours it takes to write more one review a day worth the time and effort.

I'd also like to wish good luck to all my fellow nominees. I've stopped by each of the other nominees blogs in the past and I'm a regular reader of a few. It's a very strong category and I feel honoured to be included in it. Congratulations to the nominees in the other categories too.

A full list of nominees can be found here on the LAMB website and voting runs until April 30th 2013.

Oblivion

I’m a big fan of clever, great looking science fiction but wasn’t really excited by the prospect of the latest Tom Cruise vehicle, Oblivion. The trailer seemed to suggest the great looks but gave little indication of the ideas to back up the visuals. I was wrong. Oblivion is a film which I enjoyed much more than I anticipated and as an overall package is a pretty decent film. It’s 2077 and the Earth has been partially destroyed by a war between humans and an alien force known as Scavengers. Although we won the war, we couldn’t save the planet as the use of atomic weapons left it mostly uninhabitable. With most of humanity relocated to Titan and the rest aboard an orbiting space station awaiting their departure, the last two people on Earth live above the clouds and form a skeleton crew in charge of maintaining drones which protect vital sea based energy converters from the few remaining Scavs.

Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) is drone mechanic 49 who spends his days servicing downed drones while dodging the occasional Scav attack. His partner is Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) who monitors Jack from the clouds and she reports back to Control (Melissa Leo) aboard the orbiting space station. Jack finds himself suffering unusual flashbacks to a time before his birth and when a craft crashes into his sector he discovers that its only survivor is the woman from his flashback dreams. As Jack uncovers new and disturbing evidence after an encounter with the Scavs, it appears that all is not what it seems on Earth. Oblivion isn’t a fantastic film but when science fiction blockbusters these days are either comic book based or just loud, shouty, exploding Michael Bay style affairs, Oblivion harks back to the 1970s period of sci-fi about ideas which are set in a fleshed out and realistic world. Oblivion not only looks brilliant but has an engaging plot which is full of surprises.

Cimarron

In the rush to claim newly opened lands in the Oklahoma Territory, a man takes his Upper Middle Class wife Sabra (Irene Dunn) to the barren prairie to claim his piece of the wilderness. That man is Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix), a polymath with dreams of opening a newspaper in the burgeoning boom town of Osage. As the town thrives, Yancey becomes a local hero and leader but his itchy feet urge him to move on and his adventures out of town leave his wife to fend for herself in the dangerous South West while running his newspaper and raising their children in his absence.

Cimarron won the 1931 Academy Award for Outstanding Production (subsequently renamed Best Picture) and was the first movie to be nominated for seven Oscars as well as the first to be nominated for the ‘Big Five’. In addition to its critical reception, the movie was also RKO’s most expensive picture to date and would remain so for close to a decade. The expense, coupled with the Great Depression meant that the film produced a loss for the studio and didn’t recoup its budget until a re-release several years after its initial release. Despite the large budget and critical success I thought Cimarron was a slightly messy and uninspiring film which left me bored for most of its two hour run time.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Alfred Hitchcock’s remake of his own 1934 film of the same name is not one which will remain in my memory for long. Lacking the tension and intrigue of his best work, The Man Who Knew Too Much is nonetheless a solid thriller, albeit one with flaws. A family are vacationing in Morocco when they briefly meet a mysterious Frenchman who is inquisitive as to their past, present and future. Dr. Ben McKenna (James Stewart) talks freely with the man while his ex-actress wife Jo (Doris Day) begins to wonder why the man is taking such an interest in the couple and their young son Hank (Christopher Olsen). The McKenna’s meet a friendly English couple (Brenda De Banzie and Bernard Miles) who take Hank with them on a tour of the market. When Hank doesn’t return and the Frenchman Bernard turns up dead, the couple embark on a dangerous mission of counter subterfuge amidst an assassination plot to bring their son home.

The plot of this thriller is a bit like Taken for adults. If you removed all the xenophobia and hitting people in the face from the Liam Neeson film and added some middle class sensibilities and brains then you’ve pretty much got the same film. Sort of. Much like Taken I was disappointed with The Man Who Knew Too Much although I didn’t want to end my own life when I saw Hitchcock’s movie.

Amadeus

Amadeus is an Academy Award winning period drama that sheds light on one of the most famous names in musical history, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The film is told through the eyes of his contemporary and rival Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) who as an old man recounts the tale of his ambition and jealousy as well as his part in the death of the great composer thirty years earlier. By having Salieri and not Mozart tell the story we are able to contextualise the man and his music and get to know the actual composer rather than seeing him through his own rose tinted spectacles. What the film introduced to me was a very different Mozart to the one I was aware of. Like I expect most people my knowledge of him stretched about as far as knowing where and roughly when he was born, that he was gifted at a young age and composed some famous operas. Amadeus introduces an audience to the real Mozart, to the talent and the arrogance, the playboy, the debtor and the genius.

The film retells the life of not only Mozart (Tom Hulce) but also of Salieri and their brushes with friendship and rivalry. The movie is set up as a double headed biopic with both musicians getting ample screen time and plot development. By including a second man in the story of the more famous composer the film feels much more detailed and well rounded than perhaps it would have been if it had only focussed on Mozart. I really enjoyed learning about the two men and their strange society. The plot is detailed and incredibly interesting as well as being filled with fascinating side characters such as Mozart’s wife Constanze (Elizabeth Berridge) and Emperor Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones). The film is as much about 18^th Century customs and society as it is about the two men and their music and this further stretches the film’s appeal and scope.

Gandhi

Gandhi is a multi award winning biopic set around the life of Mohandas Gandhi and the formation of an independent India. The film opens with Gandhi’s final few moments in 1948 and then goes back to South Africa in 1893 when a fresh faced, idealistic and well educated Gandhi arrives as a newly qualified lawyer. His treatment in one of the most despicably racist countries on the planet helps to formulate his ideals and it isn’t long before the young lawyer is standing up to the authorities for the rights of South Africa’s small Indian population. Throughout his life Gandhi takes a stand on human rights and once back in his homeland he sets about pushing India towards independence against a stern and unmoving British regime.

I saw this movie a couple of years ago and before I did I have to be honest and say that I knew very little about Gandhi’s life. The film changed my view of Gandhi from the little guy in a cloth who preached about peace towards a greater understanding of who he was, what he stood for and what he means for so many people, not only in India but around the world. The film is in a word spectacular and features a terrific story of true life struggle and determination which is populated by great characters and a fantastic central performance.