Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

It’s often said that actions speak louder than words, and such is the case with Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller’s awe inspiringly demented return to the Wacky Races.

The plot, such as it is, hinges on what is essentially a two hour car chase, a pyretic pursuit across the vast, boundless breadth of the Namibian desert. An unfeasibly armoured lorry, the War Rig, is driven by renegade Furiosa (Charlize Theron) and Max (Tom Hardy); staving off infinite attacks from the War Boys, a squad of freaks giving chase in a bevy of souped-up hot-rods. The cause of this bothersome affair is a harem of five brusque yet beautiful concubines, unceremoniously stolen from king of the freaks, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) with hopes of escaping to some vague Shangri-La.

Miller spent the better part of two decades painstakingly piecing his film together, storyboarding, writing, dipping in and out of preproduction so many times it’s a wonder it ever saw the cameras at all. And yet, with his impressive army of stunt-folk, hundreds of hours of footage and a plethora of shooting and editing styles he has crafted an exquisite ode to the art of film-making.

Fury Road may be the fourth in a franchise, but it comes refreshingly free of impedimenta. Almost entirely omitting any expository run in, Max, and by extension the audience, are thrown into the wringer right from the get-go.

This time out the Road Warrior is portrayed by Tom Hardy, Mel Gibson ironically probably now too Mad to occupy the role. Hardy’s Max is pricklier, gruffer, and generally wilder than the Gibson incarnation, a force of mostly silent ruination, drifting into the melee almost by accident. It’s a rare occurrence when Hardy gets to speak, and when he does it’s in a primal growl, monosyllabic and almost mournful. Hardy lets his eyes and body do the talking.

He’s also seemingly a supporting character in his own film, ancillary in most regards to metal-armed MVP Charlize Theron. Perhaps the greatest heroine since Ellen Ripley, Theron’s Furiosa is the more engaging of the two leads - she’s more human, more desperate and ultimately lends a surprising emotional heft to proceedings. One could even argue that upon her shoulders Fury Road becomes a bona-fide feminist blockbuster: a film about the liberation of women held against their will as baby making slaves from a malevolent and tyrannical patriarch.

Nicholas Hoult rounds out the core trio with an admirably bonkers (and almost unrecognisable) turn as a strangely endearing WarBoy, while Hugh Keays-Byrne’s hams it up as the masked Immortan Joe - coming out just the right side of exuberantly repugnant. Elsewhere, Miller populates the film with a dizzying plethora of nutcases and circus freaks; the contender for best of the bunch - perhaps even the greatest supporting role of the year - a now infamous masked musician, swinging gleefully atop a truck, issuing forth an endless stream of power chords from a flaming guitar.

Indeed, Fury Road reaches its most dizzying and inventive heights when it throws all caution to the wind - when any reflections on character or message are cast aside in favour of a dizzying onslaught of insane stunt work and glorious practical effects. Our heroes’ racing into a gigantic, hellish firestorm, like an insect sucked into a volcanic eruption, the image lingers in the memory as a visual highlight in a film full of gorgeous work. And yet, in spite of all his carnage Miller never loses track of what’s going on, with an efficient clarity often missing from more recent mega budget effects behemoths.

Ultimately, Fury Road is an uncompromisingly entertaining cinematic achievement, beautifully shot, wildly inventive and even gently thought provoking. The best blockbuster of the summer.

5/5

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)

Harry Hart (Colin Firth) is a member of the Kingsman, an urbane and virtuous spy outfit operating out of a Savile Row tailors. After one their number dies they set about looking for replacement, and Hart selects “Eggsy” (Taron Egerton), a smart mouthed and talented yoof from the wrong side of the tracks. While Eggsy is put through his espionage paces, lisping nutcase Richmond Valentine (Samuel L Jackson) sets into motion plans to take over the world with mobile phone sim cards and it’s up to the Kingsman to stop him.

Matthew Vaughn seems to be cinematic Marmite, dividing the film going public into two camps. Some find his brand of sharp, stylised often ultra-violent work to be fun, witty and just the right side of irreverent, while the others accuse him of being over indulgent, succumbing to laddish fantasy and lacking heart or finesse.

Well, luckily for me I fall squarely into the former category. I say luckily for me because Kingsman is the most “Matthew Vaughn” film Matthew Vaughn has ever made. It’s an audacious and wildly entertaining rollercoaster ride, distinctly and unashamedly British and featuring some of the loopiest visuals ever committed to such a high profile blockbuster.

Particular praise must be given to the adrenaline fuelled action beats that litter the film. Favouring long takes and a kinetic camera rather than nauseating and choppy edits that seem to be the norm in Hollywood these days, Kingsman features some of the most inventive action I’ve seen in a long time.

Sheer pleasure is the definite modus operandi here, injecting barrels of fun into a concept that could so easily have just been a run of the mill Hollywood bunkum. Indeed, Vaughn and co-writer Jane Goldman (who also worked on Kick Ass and Stardust) clearly love the spy genre and litter the movie with tons of neat references. From the subtle (the Kingsman all sporting dapper Harry Palmer specs), to the not so subtle (Firth and Jackson engaging in a meta conversation about their favourite Bond films), it’s a treasure trove of spy tropes.

Much of this is entertainment value is down to a roster of excellent performances, with the entire cast embracing the lunacy with wild abandon. Firth is the big winner here, clearly having the time of his life – relishing the opportunity to occupy a Bond-like role he sadly missed out on in younger days. Likewise, Samuel L Jackson is hilarious, bizarrely channelling Will.I.Am via Chris Eubank to great effect. Elsewhere, top support comes from the always wonderful Mark Strong as the Kingsman’s equivalent of Q, and Sophie Cookson as Roxy, Eggsy’s primary rival for the spy role and a refreshingly well rounded female character in another wise male dominated genre.

Of course the film isn’t perfect.  The first half could be accused of being formulaic, grinding gears and positioning characters before the main plot kicks in, but even at it’s lowest ebb it never once dips into boring territory. Elsewhere, the otherwise sharp script comes undone with some muddled class-system satire that could have benefited from a bit of a polish. And of course, as ever with all Vaughn’s films, there are the usual excesses and a definite lack of subtlety. But these are minor gripes and aren’t sufficient to sully what is an otherwise sharp and funny film.

Kingsman is a rollicking thrill ride, then. Light-hearted, fast paced and incredibly funny. Although much of the adult humour and violence won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, for fans of this kind of thing you’d be hard pressed to find a more entertaining and uncompromisingly idiosyncratic film this year.

4/5

The Theory of Everything (2014)

The Theory of Everything (2014)

The Theory of Everything charts the romantic life of legendary physicist Stephen Hawking over a course of three decades. From his early days as a lazy yet brilliant student at Cambridge, through his diagnosis with ALS to his rise to fame as one of the pre-eminent scientists of the modern age.

Adapted by Anthony McCarten, the (mostly) true life tale is based on the memoir “Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen” by Jane Wilde Hawking. Although some liberties are taken with the chronology and facts are gently warped to suit the emotional arc, The Theory of Everything positions itself as a fairly accurate account of Stephen and Janes married life. However, by crowbarring such a complicated and real relationship into a traditional biopic structure, it ultimately ends up as a plot we’ve seen many times before, but with a few added bells and whistles.

Placing the focus squarely on the relationship aspects, the film sadly glosses over much of Hawking’s achievements with perfunctory and shallow exposition. Likewise, large swathes of his academic career are ignored in favour of narrative simplicity. It makes for a smoother cinematic ride, but also robs the kitchen sink elements of legitimacy.

Still, this focus on the nitty gritty details of the marriage does lend the story an emotional edge and the central pairing make fine work with some genuinely tender moments. Eddie Redmayne portrays Hawking with grace and subtlety, showing the physical decline of the man with an impressive lack of flamboyance. Likewise, Felicity Jones lends an empathy and kindness to Jane, an impressive feat given the strangely underdeveloped role.

However for every tender moment there’s some hammy dialogue or overly soapy melodrama to distract from the genuine emotion. Many key plot points come across as mawkish rather than touching; an over reliance on faux “amateur” footage and invasive over the top orchestral swells seem lazy and manipulative.

James Marsh directs with unobtrusive finesse and adds a layer of gloss to a script that would probably be better suited for Saturday night on ITV. Meanwhile, the supporting cast try their best with some clichéd and caricatured roles, Charlie Cox coming off best as a kind natured church choirmaster who sparks up a sweet relationship with Jane. Elsewhere, Hawking’s parents are rendered as one dimensional pantomime bastards rather than rounded human beings, while Jane’s family and friends are conspicuous by their complete absence.

Ultimately then, The Theory of Everything isn’t quite successful. A by the numbers biopic, tailor made for awards season, it’s held together by a handful of genuinely tender moments thanks mostly to a pair of excellent performances at its core.

3/5

Birdman (2014)

Birdman (2014)

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) follows the escalating struggles of washed up Hollywood star Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), and his seemingly doomed attempts to regain credibility by mounting an pompous Broadway show.

Pressure is present on all sides, particularly from narcissistic co-star Mike (Edward Norton) and his damaged, resentful daughter Sam (Emma Stone). As his mental state deteriorates Riggan is visited by the spectre of his most famous role, Birdman, and things get strange.strange.

Birdman is a departure for director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, turning away from his solemn yet powerful dramas 21 grams and Babel and creating something daring and new. The gamble has paid off, however, and what we have here is a surprisingly funny, heartfelt and quirky piece of cinema.

Filmed in what appears to be a single tracking shot, much like Hitchcock’s Rope, Iñárritu’s camera stalks his characters down subdued theatre corridors and lively New York streets, through trippy dream sequences and intimate emotional moments in one fluid move. It’s a technical blinder, and much of the kudos must be attributed to cinematographer extraordinaire Emmanuel Lubezki, who works magic with a tough gig: the long takes here make his work in Children of Men look like child’s play.

Of course it’s all trickery, pieced together seamlessly with brilliant editing, but with some takes lasting up to twenty minutes, the actors have nowhere to hide and it results in performances that are invested with genuine humanity and gritty realism.

At the centre of the maelstrom is Keaton, carrying the movie with a towering performance that affords him the opportunity to mine emotional depths he’s so rarely had chance to flaunt in his previous work. Thomson is a character lost at sea, failing to keep his head above water and blinded by his own hubris, unaware of who he is and what he’s supposed to be doing. It’s the performance of a lifetime and it would be a sin if the Oscars didn’t take notice.

Elsewhere, an impressive Emma Stone is open and real as Riggan’s damaged daughter while Edward Norton provides a sublime and frequently hilarious turn as the an arrogant and mildly insane actor.

While it could easily have been a simple black comedy about theatrical conceit, Birdman sidesteps expectations and metamorphosizes into something more affecting and poignant, with deep ruminations on the nature of celebrity, biting satire of Twitter/YouTube culture, the nature of art itself and an astute insight into a mind falling apart at the seams.

All together, Birdman is a delirious and quirky masterpiece, skilfully engineered and performed with heart and gusto. It’s so rare to find a film that makes you think, feel, laugh and cry all at once, but Birdman does that, and it does it in droves. This is what cinema is all about.

5/5

*originally written for Nouse

Interstellar (2014)

Interstallar (2014)

*Review contains mild spoilers*

Christopher Nolan films now seem to arrive with so much anticipation and furore, keeping so many details about the film under wraps until the last possible moment, it puts a lot of undue pressure on for it to be something special.

And Interstellar is sadly not very special. Although it offers a refreshing counterpoint to a lot of the empty blockbusters that are rammed down our throats on a monthly basis, encouraging the audience to think and ruminate on big weighty topics, it's ultimately a noble failure.

We start out on Earth, the not too distant future. Humanity is on the brink, epic food shortages have brought the population to its knees, all land is given over to farming simple crops and people no longer look outwards with thoughts of exploration: Survival is key, and the focus is on staying bolted to our little rock.

Matthew McConaughey is Cooper, an ex test pilot turned farmer (everyone is a farmer in the future), a man who clearly doesn't belong in the dust and longs for more. Frustrated at the lack of drive or desire to grow and explore, it's not long before he stumbles upon a secret NASA base and is recruited to take part in a top secret mission through a worm-hole with the aim of seeking out a new home for the human race.

There is plenty of positive to things to say about Interstellar. McConaughey in particular is excellent as Cooper, a smart and noble man who is constantly trying to do the best for his children. It's a challenging role, requiring subtle emotional touches and he pulls it off well. Likewise the other cast admirably dedicate themselves wholly to their characters, however most are given short shrift in the script department, given stilted and overly expositional dialogue to chew on rather than anything emotionally meaty. Poor Michael Caine (and Anne Hathaway as his daughter) suffer the brunt of this, with countless instances of cringe inducing semi-scientific bunkum spewing out of their faces. It's a crippling flaw for a film that wants to encourage the audience to look on in awe, but instead more often than not has us drifting off in boredom.

Narratively speaking, it's a grand and epic affair as one would expect, pin balling from the dying Earth into the far reaches of space, time and even into other dimensions. For the most part it all works well and the plot is surprisingly coherent, but even with the almost three hour running time, a lot of the big moments come across as strangely rushed. The notion of interstellar travel, of wormholes, black holes and relativistic time warps are all inherently compelling and lend themselves to comment on what humanity is, where we are and what we can become, but Nolan fumbles around so much with unnecessary detail and dry dialogue that the bigger picture often gets lost and apathy kicks in.

On the positive side, the film does take flight on more than one occasion, literally, once we're into the depths of space, with a whole host of lovely imagery being thrust our way, and a handful of impressive set pieces to keep things entertaining. Nolan has proven himself time and again to be a skilled director with technically impressive and often stunning set pieces, and Interstellar has some of his best.

So too, with such a dry script, it's also a nice surprise to find some small humour, mainly from interactions between McConaughey and a very entertaining AI named TARS, a clearly HAL homaging robot created impressively with a minimum of CGI.

Indeed, the visuals and much of the story as a whole obviously homage and mimic Kubrick's definitive 2001, and it's easy to see Nolan's lofty ambitions with this regard; however never once does he come close to matching or surpassing it in any way. Indeed, as admirable as Nolan's dedication to old school effects are (there's some lovely model work here), the insistent and repeated motif of the spinning space-craft seems strangely lazy and gets boring quickly.

Come the finale fatigue is definitely setting in, and the ham fisted denouement seems crow-barred in. It's all very silly. It aims for emotion and wonder, but dwells too long on an admittedly neat plot point about about scrambled time and gravitational messages (it ends up making more sense than you'd expect) that the final emotional reunion with his daughter isn't given the time to breath that it needs and passes by without much notice. So too, the optimistic ending doesn't ring at all true with the bleak and often miserable goings on for the preceding 160 minutes.

In all then, it's an admirable piece of film making and Nolan does show considerable skill with the action and visual elements, but with such lofty and philosophical ambitions, a poor script, a bizarre lack of humanity and poorly judged pacing prove to be critical flaws. It's worth seeing, and it's very entertaining at times, but it's also a bit of a wasted opportunity.

3/5

Magic In The Moonlight (2014)

Magic In the Moonlight (2014)

Much has been said of the variable quality of his output over the last decade or so, but even after nearly five decades in the business, when Woody Allen hits his stride he can still knock it out of the park. So after the sublime Blue Jasmine last year expectations were always going to be high for the follow up, and with that in mind Magic In The Moonlight is sadly a bit of a disappointment.

The story follows Colin Firth's Stanley Crawford, alias Wei Ling Soo, a world renowned magical artist and debunker of mystical bunkum, as he is recruited to out the young Sophie (Emma Stone), a naif-like clairvoyant, as a fraud. The more he gets to know her the more bewildered he is by her apparent powers, and a third act romantic tangle naturally rears it's head.

There's plenty here to enjoy, littered with many recognisable Allen-isms (obsession with magic, that trademark razor wit, a middle aged chap falling for a much younger woman), it has the potential to be classic Allen, but in the end it falls quite a long way short of the mark.

That's not to say it's a complete write-off; even off form, as he sadly is here, Allen still delivers plenty of great humour and effective observation on the human condition, but it just doesn't seem to amount to much in the end.

Recruiting a great cast (they must be queueing up to work with him), they all do the best with the lines they're given and for the most part it all holds together fairly well, if a little too breezily.
Firth and Stone are both fine and charismatic as the leads, although the rushed script leads to some fairly clunky line readings, and as a result most of the big moments utterly fail to convince. And although he settles in eventually, Colin Firth's abrasive (and often unlikeable) Stanley takes far too long to get used to thanks to an excess of expositional dialogue that renders many scenes unwieldy and even dull.

On the plus side the film looks beautiful thanks to sterling work by cinematographer Darius Khondji (who has photographed most of Allen's recent European output). The idealised 1920's southern French setting is beautifully realised, every shot shimmering with a golden sunshine glow, the period costumes twinkling from the screen. This is how last years Great Gatsby should have looked.

In the end then, it's an entertaining enough diversion offering a few good smirks and some decent work by the cast; but by stretching the premise too thinly it comes across as more of an under-developed half film with more potential than it can fulfil. Fingers crossed for the next one.

2/5

Pride (2014)

Pride (2014)

Much like Brassed Off or The Full Monty, Pride is one of those true-life comedy-dramas that the British film industry seem to do so well. Set in the forlorn working class industrial ruins that were the days of Thatcherite Britain, the film follows the unlikely alliance formed between the population of a small Welsh mining village and a motley crew of gay and lesbian activists from London during the height of the 1984 Miners' Strike. Friendships and human connections are formed due to the similarities in the way they have been oppressed by the media and conservatives.

Directed with vitality and genuine heart by theatre alum Matthew Warchus, (who directed the recent Matilda adaptation and will soon succeed Kevin Spacey as artistic director at the Old Vic), Pride provides a razor sharp balance between funny, sad and affecting.

Much of the success must also be attributed to writer Stephen Beresford, whose punchy script juggles a number of narrative threads and finds humour in areas that may not seem obvious, while offering smaller genuinely intimate moments for the varied cast. The humour may often be broad, but the characters are all given a natural depth and humanity that gives them an endearing quality and renders the inevitable defrosting of the relationships all the more heart-warming.

And what a cast it is, an impressive roster of British (and American) talent, with Bill Nighy, Paddy Considine and Imelda Staunton all shining as Welsh Union members, while Fay Marsay, Dominic West, and Ben Schnetzer stand out as members of the LGSM. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, with the Jessica Gunning standing out as the pro-active and lovely Sian and George MacKay as the innocent and wide eyed young Joe, who is thrust into this world almost by accident and through whose eyes we experience the story.

As the bonds are formed and strengthened, the real backbone of the film becomes apparent, mostly casting aside the politics in favour of a focus on the value of friendships and finding a sense of belonging and unity; of shared interests and the similarities we all share. Amongst all the laughter it's hard not to become a tad misty eyed, particularly as the film reaches its natural and touching denouement.

Warm and endearing from start to finish, Pride is one of the better British comedies of recent years thanks to a sharp script and a uniformly excellent cast. And while the issues in the film may on the surface seem very much of their time, there is still a pertinence to present day events, particularly in how two apparently wildly dissimilar groups or communities may find a common ground and unity if only they just bothered to try.

Oh, and it has a cracking soundtrack.

* * * * *


Review originally written for York Nouse