Two Days in Paris

Early this year I saw a great little Franco-American comedy called Two Days in New York. That film, a sequel to this, worked well as a stand alone film but we enjoyed it so much that my girlfriend sought out the first movie as well. Julie Delpy writes, directs, edits, composes and stars in what is essentially a study of love. French born but New York residing photographer Marion (Delpy) is on her way back to the States following an unromantic trip to Venice with her neurotic, Woody Allen with tattoos and a beard-esque boyfriend Jack (Adam Goldberg) when they stop off in Paris for a couple of days to pick up a cat and drop in on Marion’s parents. The previously disaster filled Venice trip fades into obscurity when put up against the events of the two days as former lover after former lover reappears in Marion’s home city and Jack becomes ever more jealous and agitated.

I’m a big fan of talkie comedy-dramas featuring socially liberal, middle class people. I love Woody Allen, Wes Anderson and Guillaume Canet, all three, directors who can create snappy, funny, insightful films about relationships in often claustrophobic settings. Delpy has the same talent and despite the spacious city streets of the French capital, the film feels hemmed in and claustrophobic which adds to the sense of sweaty tension. The dialogue is politically smart and socially astute and is snappy in both English and French. It’s incredibly droll and witty and manages to play on stereotypes without succumbing to them. There is also a great understanding of the ebb and flow of a relationship and the hang ups which both sides naturally have.

Iron Man 3

With Iron Man 3 Marvel Studios found themselves in a somewhat precarious situation. Coming off the back of the super hit superhero extravaganza The Avengers, they had a lot to live up to and in a sequel to the poorly received Iron Man 2, they had some damage to undo. Stuck between a team of superhero rocks and an iron suited hard place they’ve managed to pull it out of the bag once more and produce a thoroughly entertaining action movie which is in my view, the best Iron Man movie to date.

Our arrogant, former playboy hero Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is now settled with his live in girlfriend Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). While Potts manages Stark Enterprises, Stark himself tinkers in his basement on new designs and upgrades for his Iron Man suit. Unwanted flashbacks to the events at the close of The Avengers movie provide a distraction to his work and coupled with insomnia he begins to lose focus on what really matters in the life of Stark, instead focussing on his alter ego. With his dedication to Iron Man reaching addictive levels he finds he needs to focus when a new menace threatens the world in the form of shady terrorist The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) and a small army of indestructible men whom he has at his disposal.

Trading Places

Just a couple of days ago I mentioned in my Beverly Hills Cop review that I hadn’t seen any of Eddie Murphy’s early films. I realised afterwards that this was incorrect as years ago I’d seen an even earlier movie, Trading Places. It just so happened that I’d recorded that very same movie a few weeks ago and watched it again yesterday. Trading Places is a satirical comedy in which two very wealthy commodities brokers mess with the lives of an employee and a homeless man for their own amusement. Their nature vs. nurture argument leads to a bet that they can turn a poor, uneducated black man (Eddie Murphy) into a wealthy broker while simultaneously turning their suave and successful employee (Dan Aykroyd) into a bum who turns to crime.

Despite its liberal message Trading Places is all over the place morally and much of the humour is derived from racist or offensive material. It’s not a particularly funny film in general but is well made and despite the inherent moral problems with the story, the plot is engaging and thought provoking. The film opens with a montage which sites the differences between Philadelphia’s rich and poor. In the inner city kids are seen playing in littered streets and men huddled round burning drums while in more upmarket areas, people are waited on by butlers and enjoy fine cuisine. This difference is then extended to the introduction of the central characters.

Beverly Hills Cop

People of my generation, born in the mid 1980s have a problem when it comes to Eddie Murphy. To many of us born too late to enjoy his 80s heyday the first time around, he’s that annoying guy who pops up every couple of years to play every character in an awful movie. This is a shame because recently I saw a film which changed my opinion of the Spice Girl bothering, fat suit wearing funny man. That film was Beverly Hills Cop. I’d recorded the film when it was on T.V. so long ago that trailers for Django Unchained were running in the ad breaks but don’t know why I did. I can’t ever remember enjoying an Eddie Murphy performance and never expected to. Well, now I have.

Alex Foley (Murphy) is a wisecracking, talented but reckless young cop from Detroit. When his friend is murdered in front of him, against the express orders of his superiors, he tracks the case to Beverly Hills where he begins to investigate the murder while getting under the noses of the Beverly Hills P.D., especially Sergeant John Taggart (John Ashton) and Detective Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold). Slowly Foley uncovers a major smuggling operation and gets his more conservative and by the book colleagues on side as he does so.

Grave of the Fireflies

I’ve only seen a couple of Studio Ghibli films in the past but each has had an interesting and often unique story. Grave of the Fireflies is the least fantastical and most hard hitting film I’ve seen from the studio and it’s probably also the best. Set at the closing stages of the Second World War it details the struggle for survival of two orphaned children called Seita and Setsuko. The movie has an anti war message at its centre but its main themes are of survival and of sibling love. With their father away at war and their mother killed by falling bombs, the young pair are forced to fend for themselves in a Japan which has no use for them. After initially finding a home with a distant aunt, they soon discover that they aren’t wanted and strike out on their own, finding refuge in an abandoned air raid shelter, scavenging and stealing what food they can lay their hands on.

Grave of the Fireflies is a depressing film both for its overarching themes and also for its individual character arcs. Although I’d heard it wasn’t all fun and games, I was still a little shocked by the brutal honesty with which it depicts war and the ending which is far from what you’d expect for what is essentially a young person’s cartoon. Despite the harrowing themes and images, personally I’d be happy to show the film to a bright child of about ten. If it could hold their attention I think that the movie would both interest and educate them and perhaps open their eyes to their species past, informing their decisions in the future.

Society

I was hoping to catch Society at a recent Grimm Up North screening but I unfortunately missed it because of work. Luckily, a guy at work is a huge horror fan and lent me a DVD copy. What intrigued me about the film was that it has been described as ‘a minor classic in the body horror sub-genre’. Regular readers might know that I’m not a huge horror fan but I do enjoy a bit of crazy, no holds barred body horror from time to time. Give me a film in which a man punches through another man’s stomach until his fist comes out of his mouth before turning him inside out and I’m there!

For much of its runtime Society plays as a kind of 1980s soap opera crossed with a soft-core erotic thriller and the first hour provides nothing beyond a bit of intrigue and laughter at the 80s hair and poor dialogue. The final half hour though is some of the weirdest stuff I’ve seen on screen and makes up for the poor opening. Bill Whitney (Billy Warlock) is a rich kid who attends Beverly Hills Academy and lives at home with his parents and Sister Jenny (Patrice Jennings). For some reason Bill feels like he doesn’t fit in and starts to wonder if he’s even related to the family who are showing signs of unusual behaviour.

Evil Dead

I’m not going to pretend that I was outraged when a remake of classic 1981 horror The Evil Dead was announced because I only saw that movie for the first time about six weeks ago. What I will say is that when I did see it, I loved it and suddenly hoped that a remake wouldn’t do what so many other horror reboots/remakes do and cock up and completely miss the point of the original. Evil Dead ends up somewhere in the middle, remaining recognisably true enough to the original while growing its own branches and taking its own directions. It fails to match the original in terms of entertainment or laughs but is much scarier and is possibly the most stomach churningly disgusting films I’ve ever seen.

Differing slightly from the original, five friends converge on a cabin in the woods in an attempt to get one of their number off drugs. Believing the secluded cabin is the perfect place to cure their friend’s illness they are unaware that it also has a history of the occult and is home to a demonic presence. One by one the group are forced to deal with the demons, leaving them either possessed or gravely wounded.

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?