The Moviejerk © by Janz

RABBIT HOLE {2010}

2010-12-17T06:53:00.001+08:00

F I L M C R I T I Q U E

Cast: Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Diane Wiest

Director: John Cameron Mitchell

Screenplay: David Lindsay-Abaire

Studio: Olympus Pictures

Runtime: 91 mins

Genre: Drama/Independent

Country: USA

Grief in cinema is not always very pretty, even if you see pretty people bawling their eyes out and suffering in all-encompassing sadness. Rabbit Hole's premise is nothing new - the death of a child usually makes for a brooding, character-driven movie about parental grief, whether it's in psychological horror domain seen in Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland trying to recover from post-traumatic death-of-a-child stress in Venice, or gripping melodrama in Clint Eastwood's Changeling with Angelina Jolie launching a crusade to find her lost son, or perhaps existential psychobabble in Lars von Trier's grief-porn Antichrist with Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe blaming each other for their kid's demise and slicing up genitals in the woodlands. John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole shouldn't work, or end up as plain clichéd, as there couldn't be possibly anything more to say about couples mourning over the loss of a child. But it works, and rather beautifully, and ends up being a subtle, nuanced, carefully studied exploration into what makes grief somehow bearable. Rabbit Hole isn't merely about suffering, despite of the profound sadness of its subject matter, or being deeply buried in an emotional underground, to use the title's metaphor, but this film is about coming to terms with the loss of a loved one and subsequently finding the light and emerging out of the dark tunnel.

That says a lot for a film that deals some dark issues, the ultimate parent's nightmare, yet somehow manages to be hopeful and sensitive. Structurally, the action begins in media res, months after the child's death. We don't get to see the tragic accident, not until a brief, sensitively handled flashback later. We plunge headlong into a suburban Connecticut couple's seemingly handsome yet mundane life - Nicole Kidman's Becca kills time by eternally pruning the garden and baking homemade pies and Aaron Eckhart's Howie carries on daily officework routines. Yet the narrative unveils cracks in the portrait through various moments - Becca gets subliminally furious as her neighbour accidentally stumps on her newly planted rosebush, cracks up in a group counselling after a remark about God and banishes all trace of toys, lunchboxes, drawings and every other trace of her deceased son out of the house. Howie deals with it differently, angry at Becca's insistence, wanting their son's memorabilia to be left where they are.

Kidman, whose curriculum vitae as of late has been terribly misguided (due to an unmoving forehead, depends on which tabloid you read), hasn't delivered a strong performance in a few years, except for the vastly unseen Margot at the Wedding and Baz Lhurrman's misunderstood Australia. But here she comes back with a solid return to form, perhaps her best performance since The Hours. It's a galvanised, complex, multi-layered piece of screen acting, proving her skills in intimate human dramas. Her Becca Corbett is doesn't stereotype the 'grieving Mum' character, but rather gives reasons to her emotional deep-freeze, whether it be lashing at her own mother (a terrific Diane Wiest) and grouchy with her own pregnant sister. Kidman wrings out all manners of expressions rarely seen in this actress these days, and she makes Becca believable, even loathesome and somehow sympathetic. She finds curious solace in the beleaguered teenager driving the car that accidentally killed her son. In other lesser films, this would have turned to some sort of psycho-friendship, but here Becca doesn't do scape-goating. Instead, both of them feels linked by fate, albeit a terrible one. Eckhart also stands his own ground, giving a heartfelt performance as the husband, grappling with ways in which he could deal with the loss whilst never letting go of his wife. Director Mitchell doesn't play for all-out, overwrought theatrics from his actors, but rather wrings out emotions and character motivations through a deft skill of observation and naturalistic handling. 'Less is more' must be his guiding philosophy in filmmaking.

With its painful and sad excursion into parental grief, Rabbit Hole somehow provides hope in distress and beauty in the breakdown without reducing to schmaltz or diluting its honesty. This is a subtle, nuanced little film with a bruised humanity, rooted with two compelling central performances by Kidman and Eckhart.

A TOWN CALLED PANIC {2010}

2010-12-03T17:36:00.001+08:00

F I L M C R I T I Q U E

Cast: (voices)Stéphane Aubier, Bruce Ellison

Director: Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar

Screenplay: Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar

Studio: La Parti Productions

Runtime: 90 mins

Genre: Animation/Arthouse

Country: Belgium

At the first sight of this lo-fi Belgian animated export, it looks like a herky-jerky tomfoolery assembled by primary school kids let loose in a playroom with a bunch of plastic action figures. The plot boomerangs around from a mad shenanigan to another that virtually makes no shred of logic - A Town Called Panic is about a trio of toys, aptly named Horse, Indian and Cowboy, with the latter two mistakenly purchasing 50 million bricks instead of 50 for Horse's birthday barbecue, and misadventures follow that includes an aquatic rescue with reptilian marine scuba-divers, cannonball pigs, and wacky penguins. It doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't strive to have some. It's deliberately wacky, hilariously inventive and you'll find yourself laughing out loud that nothing onscreen seems to matter. Directors Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar (must in hallucinogens whilst making this) provide gleeful abandon and deadpan nonsense that makes A Town Called Panic a sort of anti-Pixar, an anarchic, irreverent animated work that defies any linear, or conventional, structures. Where Toy Story, Up and the likes aim for emotional fluency, character arcs and CGI perfection, it's quite refreshing to see something like this that ditches out pixels and embraces old-school playground aesthetic and Pythonesque codswallop. Too much of it might drive one insane, but gladly it runs for 90 minutes, and it's just wonderfully, bizarrely pitch-perfect.

A deliriously madcap mo-cap. A Town Called Panic makes for a trippy, hallucinogenic animated feature that daringly defies glossy mainstream aesthetic - and so much better for it. It's also very dementedly funny.

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART ONE {2010}

2010-12-02T21:56:00.007+08:00

F I L M C R I T I Q U E

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham-Carter

Director: David Yates

Screenplay: Steve Kloves

Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures

Runtime: 130 mins

Genre: Fantasy/Adventure/Drama

Country: United Kingdom

Up until now, the decision to split J. K. Rowling's the Harry Potter finale into two parts seems debatable, and the clash of wits between those who think it's for financial reasons and those who argue about 'narrative purity' extends to infinity. There is no denying that Rowling's behemoth of a book The Deathly Hallows is ridden with munificent amount of sequences and plot threads that might be a testament to her genius or just mere over-plotting, depending on your opinion of this saga, that leaving out such details might stir a major uprising from the Potter sector the size of China's population. Nevertheless, it's sheer hypocrisy to claim that the cleaving act is done out noble artistic integrity. That's bullshit. This is Hollywood we're talking about. Where the cash goes, the cows follow. Potter is Warner Bros.' biggest cash cow in the studio's history, and splitting the final one into two movies only gives studio honchos the golden opportunity to squeeze some more milk.

But it remains surprising, despite of blatant studio voracity, that this franchise continues to be consistent throughout and Deathly Hallows: Part One is a solid entry to the series. It might not rank as the best of the franchise (that goes to Alfonso Cuaron's superb Prisoner of Azkaban), but it's not far off either. Director David Yates, the longest mainstay director of them all, brings his own dynamics, tone and artistry to this penultimate instalment, which improves from his previous work on The Half-Blood Prince, which was a rather sluggish affair. For the first time in the Potter universe, the narrative structure has been freed from the now-becoming monotonous school-calendar basics, shunting the main three characters, Harry, Ron and Hermione far from the comfort zones of Hogwarts and are plunged into a very uncertain, treacherous and forbidding territories. This sense of danger and darkness can be felt spilling from the screen. Cut off from the world were chaos reigned, courtesy of malice-stricken Voldemort (a magnificently hissy and terrifying Ralph Fiennes), the trio are set out with a task to find and destroy the Horcruxes that contain shards of the Dark Lord's soul. Yes, it's like The Lord of the Rings, only more McGuffins, more British thespians and plenty of darkness. What is the fantasy genre without the influence of Tolkien, anyway? The difference is that the trio come across the so-called Deathly Hallows, three magical instruments that can defy death.

Part One combines elements of mystery, heist thriller genre and even fugitive film – and the result is often electrifying. There's an excellently staged Ministry of Magic infiltration, with political undercurrents of a totalitarian Third Reich with the Mudbloods treated like Jews, and the memorable Privet Drive convoy with seven Harry's to bewilder and escape the clutch of the Death Eaters. These sequences are all very well, yet there are those who bemoan about the 'slow' middle-half where the trio wander around forests, battling egoes and expectations. This is not a Michael Bay or a James Cameron film where you get bombarded with explosive chases and gunfights. Screenwriter Steve Kloves, with the structure of the book, allows to fully flesh out the characters as rarely seen before, underscoring Harry, Ron and Hermione's isolation, loss, fears and anxiety of the world around them. What is more, the trio are played by the same actors in a stretch of a decade, and that's nothing short of remarkable for a Hollywood franchise, and those who have invested in this series will feel emotionally engaged in this coming-of-age allegory. The films gets to spend time with these leads, often set against wide, open landscapes in Eduardo Serra's bleak but beautiful cinematography, hammering home the trio's loneliness and desolation. Sometimes, there are moments that these characters are fugitives or survivors from a wartime period.

It's also quite a sad, sombre film to watch. Despite the series coming to an end, there's also this burgeoning sense of loss here, with death and sacrifice playing vital parts in the narrative. Emma Watson's Hermione, in a beautifully understated performance, erases the memory of her parents and the scene is handled with such concise, haunting power and Watson makes it very poignant. Rupert Grint, his most mature work, also gets to shine as he is taunted with surreal sexual images of his two friends making out, a long-harboured jealousy and longing leaking out of the gaps. Daniel Radcliffe brings moments of suppressed pain, most especially during the visit to Godric's Hollow, the graveyard of his parents. It's quietly heartbreaking. Yet are also moments of well-timed humour and élan, demonstrated in the Tale of the Three Brothers where the narrative is allowed to breathe, using a wonderful shadow animation unusual in a Potter film that might be Part One's most subtle and bold move.

For those who carp about The Deathly Hallows: Part One being long-winded and with little pay-off, this is not really made for you. This is made for those who went aboard the Hogwarts Express a decade ago and grew up with this franchise. Although inevitably flawed, there are flickers of sombre beauty, moments of sadness and heartfelt, mature performances from its three leads that lend this film some resonance and dramatic weight.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

2010-11-01T00:40:00.005+08:00

F I L M R A M B L I N G S

This All Hallows Eve, instead of trick-and-treating, The Moviejerk confronts the postmodernist movie vampires (I'm talking to you Twilight wusses) with a sharp stake on hand, sending these pretenders back to their shallow graves and resurrecting the truly frightening vampire that would scare the living daylights out of us all.

Bella is captivated by Edward's smouldering stare, model locks and glittering skin. The epitome of the 'wussy' vampire.

Hallowe'en is here, folks. There's barely a better time of the year to spend the night-in, turn the lights out, put on a horror film and start screaming until the next door neighbour starts banging on your door. But before all that commotion, you begin browsing your film library to choose the best all-out scare when you begin wondering - when was the last horror film you've seen that brought you to a point of near heart-attack? The modern day horror cinema is currently built around shock tactics and pseudo-documentary post-Blair Witch gimmicks in the likes of [REC] and Paranormal Activity. That's barely scratching the surface. Those people who shrieked their way watching these have probably done so just because the entire cinema is roaring with screams, to go along with the flow, and have never seen a genuinely terrifying horror movie. With monsters. Or vampires. Speaking of which, the recent day audiences have seem to be desensitised with sparkly kiddywink fantasies pretending to be 'horror' movies. Before in the old, halcyon days, kids go trick-and-treating dressed up as the wolfman or the vampire, replete with fake plastic fangs and dripping Heinz ketchup on their chin. Now, they've all grown some chest hairs and start wearing leather jackets to look like a rip-off version of Edward Cullen.

Unless you've been living in an underground bunker recently, planet Earth is presently run over by vampires. No, we're not talking about power-hungry politicos nor soul-sucking corporations. We’re talking about the fantastical fanged creatures of the night that have recently claimed resurgence in our screens both big and small, drawing a phenomenal amount of the hot-blooded female audience that would make Count Dracula sweat in excitement.
Whenever you stare into a screen, may it be cinema, television or even your computer, chances are, you’ll find a flour-faced bloodsucker staring back at you. So impossibly debonair and good-looking that these transmuted species don’t look like they just stepped out from a coffin, but rather from a Dolce & Gabbana advertisement. The Twilight Saga, as you ordinary moviegoer very well know, is to be blamed for this consternation. Those that watch, worship, roll over the ground in the holy name of Twilight - you are to be blamed that the next instalment Break Dawn is going to be split into two movies and do a Deathly Hallows route. As if the abominations the were New Moon and Eclipse were enough to send this back to its abyss. Apparently, movie producers have realised that there are hordes of teenage girls (and their mothers, too) that could carry on vehemently screaming their way into the brink of throat cancer in the next stage of the franchise. Nevertheless, aside from this Twilight shithole, arthouse cinema saw maverick filmmakers also dabble into the vampire genre with Let The Right One In and Thirst, with the former being remade in the Stateside as Let Me In. In the box, Stateside television is mauled by True Blood and Vampire Diaries, two TV series that serve as great magnet to soaring ratings and female titillation. The plague is here, people. The apocalypse looks like it’s all teeth-on-neck action.

Let The Right One In sees a new vampire evolution - the existentialist, lonely nightwalker. Still very dangerous, nonetheless.

This trend is somewhat baffling at first, at least from the male perspective. Vampires these days have seem to shake off their dust-beaten, castle-lurking existence. Gone are the cobwebbed days of literary monsters that prowl in the dark, the black-clad, insomniac, bloodsucking spawns of Vlad the Impaler. Hello, gorgeous, glamorous vampire – all fashion-model locks, brooding stares, looks that kill, Abercrombie & Fitch six-packs and flawless, sparkling skin. In The Twilight Saga, vampire protagonist Edward Cullen glitters under the sunlight. Literally. The new breed of vampires are now anti-photosensitive, and don’t burst into flames at the touch of sunbeam, unlike what happens to curmudgeonly Uncle Dracula during the old days. They don’t flap around ancient castles and hunting for village virgins anymore. Instead, they infiltrate high school grounds looking like a bunch of reanimated James Deans – admired, socially recognised yet dangerous. Their prey are now females of the emotive, obsessive sort, who longed to be bitten and to be one of the vampires’ ultra-elite, Alpha-Omega-esque fraternity.

The Twilight Saga is responsible for this current revivification of vampire culture, fulfilling the caprices of the tween dream; young, barely legal girls who harbour unabashed fantasies of being whisked away by some handsome hunk who happens to be a vampire. The premise of this romantic fantasy is that the heroine, Bella Swan, is willing to give up his mortality to be with elusive dog-toothed lust object Edward. Nevertheless, there’s a central conflict (surprise, surprise). Bella is torn between vampire Edward and werewolf boy Jacob. But oh no, it's a difficult choice and she shouldn't shag either of them because it's really about abstinence. And preservation. And love. And romance. It's a blatant contradiction, then, given that vampirism practically links to eroticism, sexuality and often unfeigned hedonism, not gift-wrapped in a Mormon Sunday service. This is the stuff scarlet Harlequin novels are made of, the butch guy and the damsel in distress, only with fangs. And this is not without justification - the novels of Anne Rice about Southern American vampires carousel around this premise.

Nosferatu scaring local village folks in F. W. Murnau's silent horror classic.

But why is such the appeal of vampirism that it lures the starry-eyed masses? Let’s look at history. Vlad the Impaler’s reign of Wallachia circa 15th century is renowned to be bloody and brutal, sending his enemies to deathly stakes. His sobriquet ‘Dracula’ is immortalised by Bram Stoker in his quintessential horror fiction, which in turn has flourished cinematically from F.W. Murnau’s German silent classic Nosferatu, to versions that seduced directors such as Terence Fisher, Werner Herzog and Francis Ford Coppola, the latter rendition being the most lavish, flamboyant, luxurious of them all. What is installed to be a horror genre at first, from the creepy, disturbing manifestations of Max Schreck of Nosferatu, Christopher Lee and Gary Oldman, these supposedly forbidding graveyard creatures gradually become glamorised throughout the years, becoming increasingly buff and swoon-inducing to the female sexual sector. Look at Neil Jordan’s adaptation of the Gothic Anne Rice novel, Interview with a Vampire. Vampires look like Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise looking impossibly muscular and drop-dead handsome. Combine all of that, we now have sophisticate Robert Pattinson, the epitome of vampire bourgeois.

95% of the modern-day vampire movie audience are reportedly female. The remaining 5% is presumably husbands and boyfriends being dragged into cinemas to be put through an ordeal of girlish shrieking. Hell is no match over the fevered female fantasia. Books by source author Stephanie Meyer are even lapped up by the same exact female demographic. What is troubling is that the central heroine of the franchise is an ambitionless, passionless, passive individual whose main driving force of her existence is knight-in-shining-armour, or teeth rather, Edward’s sculpted cheeks, square jaw and smouldering gaze. Take Edward away, and Bella reduces to a non-existent, inanimate object unable to pursue a passion, an ambition, life's goals. Of course, millions of girls watching this are too captivated to realise the misogyny beneath Edward’s charms, as the hypnotised Bella is devoid of any decision-making, life-management skill, letting Edward and wolf-boy Jacob debate about her future. If anything, this sends a sharp wooden stake into the very idea of feminism, to which pundits from The Guardian call ‘the epitome of submissive passivity’. Strip these men away from her and she’s left with nothing. Just a pale, passer-by forlornly dreaming of a vampire hero to whisk her away of her demure existence.

Whilst this mainstream tag-along is less than complex, the left side of the arena offers us more complicated, damaged and less romanticised night creatures. In Thomas Alfredson’s Swedish arthouse masterclass Let The Right One In, the entire vampire mythology is flipped around its head. Eli, a 200 year-old vampire frozen in the body of an eleven-year-old girl, is devoid of any sexuality, ambiguous, melancholic and only driven by the will to survive. Her neighbour, bully-victim Oscar strikes a friendship with her and both find solace in a harsh world. social drama about adolescence draped in a diabolical vampire film. Vampirism is just an excuse to explore uncertainty and frailty of human existence. In South Korean indie Thirst, directed by Oldboy Cannes-winning director Chan-wook Park, a rural priest turns into a vampire via disease infection and is compelled to question his moral, religious and sexual nature. Sexuality here is depicted in an unfettered manner, as the protagonist falls into a destructive, deviant relationship with a young seamstress. The approach is so unhinged that Thirst’s bloodlusty sex scenes will make average Twilight fans blush their way out of a cineplex. Yet this is what separates mainstream from an independent movie approach, where younger audiences are catered for in the former and the artistically liberal in the latter. Try and swap these two demographic and we’d expect a gigantic groaning in theatre houses.

Klaus Kinski mutilating a virgin back in those days when vampire are still frightening, in Werner Herzog's 1979 version.

But no matter how magnificent these arthouse vampire movies are, they still remain unseen by a great many. With a good exception of Let The Right One In, this generation has failed to produce an outstanding vampire movie that frightens, stuns and moves simultaneously, seen by both mainstream and the left-field. Perhaps it's about time to resurrect the old ones, then. In spite of these severe differences, there is a common vein that runs through both mainstream and arthouse vampire flicks – it’s the curious shift from villainy to central protagonists. We all know Dracula and his German counterpart Nosferatu were enemies, loitering in dark corners, preying on oblivious victims, but the new wave of vampires have seem to gain some forms of heroism, saving damsels-in-distress and courting them like any other conservative gentleman. They are now conflicted, tragic anti-heroes, flawed, vulnerable and sexually repressed, depending on MPAA rating, that is. In the more adult terrain, they are hedonists of unaffected deviancy.

The evolution of the modern vampire film is striking, indeed, but that largely depends on the nature of its audiences who feed on this undying genre. Perhaps vampirism is part of human nature, elements of desire, forbidden lust and wantonness suppressed within mankind’s, or womankind’s, Freudian slips. And there is no escaping, no matter how many nails you hammer on that coffin lid, this immortal blood will continue to live on, mutate and thrive on the next generations to come. But please, this is a call to filmmakers, make vampires less handsome and more terrifying to make for a really satisfyingly creepy and frightening Hallowe'en movie night. One that could make you lock your doors.

DEATH IN VENICE {1971}

2010-10-31T04:22:00.004+08:00

C I N E M A R E T R O S P E C T I V E

Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Bjorn Andersen

Director: Luchino Visconti

Screenplay: Luchino Visconti

Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures

Runtime: 130 mins

Genre: Drama/Arthouse

Country: Italy

To outwardly loathe, or the very least deny the power of Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice is like ignoring cinema as an artform. There are a few films in the history of celluloid that could split audience opinion as sharply as a guillotine could chop heads, and this is one of them. For a great number of puritanical critics, Visconti's screen adaptation of the Thomas Mann novella had been chewed, spewed and spurned, reduced to being nothing more than a pointless, ponderous pile of paedophilic wetdream, with a central protagonist obsessing with a pretty boy he cannot obtain. Meanwhile, the liberal-minded leftists champions this a sublime study of humanity's search for beauty, the inevitability of death and the profundity of Great Art. Whatever field you stand on, Visconti might have had the final laugh: he made a film that drew controversy, attention and a big confusion.

The question: is Death in Venice really that good? Yes, it is. Sure, it wallows into an excruciatingly slow pace that often you could allow an actual funeral pass through most scenes that allow Dirk Bogarde's beleaguered German classical composer Gustav van Aschenbach eternally sitting on a beach, contemplating his existence, walking through Venetian streets and gazing longingly at his object of desire. Or obfuscation, rather. But most people who gripe about this are usually those with virtually sub-zero attention, those that cannot comprehend depth and implications, and cannot stand wordless sequences. Death in Venice is not supposed to be entertainment, for god's sake. That's why there's 'death' in the title, you dweebs. For all Visconti's abstraction, this is a sombre, melancholic mood-piece, with Venice so beautifully photographed like a vintage postcard, and a burnished cinematography that very well matches the city's old grandeur. There are scenes which you can literally freeze-frame and hung it on your bedroom wall. The opening scene alone is perhaps one of the most gorgeous opening scenes I've ever seen in film. Visconti also deliberately changes Aschenbach, a novelist in Mann's novella, into a classical composer and tailors Gustav Mahler's elegiac compositions, the Third and Fifth Symphonies, into the film's most devastating scenes.

Yet, Visconti's vision is far from being perfect. It is deeply flawed, such as his reckless and haphazard use of zooming throughout the first half, a lazy technique that blemishes this exquisite vista. It's narrative also meanders too often into aimlessness, such as a rather stale and contrived sequence in an outdoor restaurant as the hotel guests are being serenaded by a street musician. But most gripes are really centred on the tale's homosexual undertones, an unrequited yearning of a stressed-out, middle-aged gentleman with a beautiful youth Tadzio, whose appearance had been hailed by feminist Germain Greer as "the most beautiful boy in the world", resembling like those portraits painted by the Renaissance masters. If we're all being unintelligent, we could easily dismiss this as a film about an unfulfilled, repressed homosexual going to Venice for a last gasp of sexual fervour for an unsuspecting thirteen-year old. What is the point of cinema and literature but to explore even the darkest, meanest side of humanity? Aschenbach is portrayed as a struggling artist, fleeing his debilitating work and even condescended by his best friend that his music bears no meaning anymore. He is an artists in self-exile, whose craft is bereft of beauty and seeks refuge in Venice to find peace, only to find beauty and perfection in the form of an innocent youth. Even Tadzio may be unaware of his own actions, or even his own sexuality. He's thirteen, lacking of any wisdom and experience of the world. And Aschenbach follows him throughout, lured into obsession, yet so terrified to taint Tadzio's purity. There's a magnificent scene where Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde gives a legendary performance) has a makeover, dying his hair, restoring his own lost youth, and trails Tadzio around the city amidst the spread of cholera and sirocco and ends up sprawled on a fountain, weeping and laughing at the same time - bemused, bewildered and dripping with self-pity. Bogarde achieves this without even saying a line of dialogue. That closing scene alone where he dies in his chair is a moving paean to performance and filmmaking.

Never has a film about dying so beautifully photographed. This is also a sombre, melancholic mood-piece that daringly explores hefty subject matters such as the inevitability of death, unattainable perfection and cruelty of youth. Visconti's vision of beauty and Great Art maybe flawed, but such is life.

The Social Network {2010}

2010-10-26T03:45:00.013+08:00

F I L M C R I T I Q U E

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Juston Timberlake, Rooney Mara

Director: David Fincher

Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Runtime: 121 mins

Genre: Drama

Country: USA

As 2010 is nearly coming to a close, perhaps it's about time for cinema to turn its head and look back at what really defined the past decade in this planet - Facebook. Nothing short of ubiquitous, you may or may not disagree with it, but Facebook has undoubtedly revolutionised the way we, earthlings, socialise and communicate. This phenomenal, culture-shaping online platform has as much influence as any radical movement in the past century, which is also, in turn, a great cultural irony - it connects 500 million users around the world, whilst rapidly destroying this generation's skills to communicate properly. So a film about 'Facebook' could easily explore this central theme by zapping throughout the globe, creating a clichéd über-montage of people's faces glued into their screens, lighting up souls in a subconsciously desperate bid to impress, to connect, to be liked. Yet, this is not that Facebook movie. Director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin leaves that entire social-commentary lecturing in the Media Studies department. Instead, their sole focus is the founding of Facebook and its progenitor Mark Zuckerberg. It's a tale brimming with technological banters, legal battles and verbal put-downs, but if you've imagined a cluster of techno-nerds huddled around together, programming a website, is astronomically yawn-inducing, you're proven wrong. The Social Network is perhaps the cleverest, most exhilarating film ever made about website-making, and a genuinely strong contender for this year's best screenplay.

From the film's opener itself, a fast-paced dialogue exchange of Zuckerberg (a spectacularly spot-on Jesse Eisenberg) and his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara as The Social Network's Rosebud, Citizen Kane's unattainable one, and now Fincher’s dragon-tattooed girl), the scene is set for the rest of the movie. We have an anti-hero in our hands: an egomaniacal, narcissistic, socially-inept, ambitious, coldly logical piece of work, condescending his girlfriend, and perhaps everyone around him. This rivetingly reflects the very main themes Fincher and Sorkin are trying to nail here, the distancing of human relationships and failure of communication. Fed up with Zuckerberg's intellectual arrogance and obsession of infiltrating Harvard’s ultra-elite final clubs, said girlfriend dumps him in a pub in a classic break-up scene, and instead of bursting into catharsis, his self-absorption barely allows him to understand where his relationship went wrong and launches into a barrage of hate-blogging, calling ex-girlfriend a flat-chested bitch, followed by a palpably misogynistic online beauty contest "Facemash", and lo and behold, the birth of Facebook.

It sounds simple, but the film doesn't surrender to easy film viewing. Sorkin's brilliantly sketched screenplay moves in a linearity breakdown, yet still remains chronological, leaping through timelines, from a latter-day lawsuit case hearing and back into the online network's early conception, exploring all characters involved with unexpected depth and nuance. Those that gripe whether what we’re seeing have actually taken place or not, accuracy here is beside the point. Cinema is art, not a history documentary channel. Even Schindler's List got plenty of historical details wrong, and that’s the Holocaust we’re talking about. The Social Network isn’t interested on finger-pointing, on who’s telling the truth or not, who are the villains and the heroes in this fiasco, but rather keen on exploring the nature and subjectivity of truth. Often, it plays like a modern rendition of Akira Kurosawa’s incendiary Rashomon, where every single player has their own version of truth-glossing. Sorkin’s narrative lurches from one perspective to the next, from Zuckerberg’s insistent intellectual proprietorialism, to ex-BFF Eduardo Saverin’s claim of partnership and fiscal betrayal, to Harvard’s upper-class Aryan bluebloods the Winklevoss twins, who accuse Zuckerberg of stealing their idea of exclusive Harvard networking. None of these characters seem worth rooting for, but in Fincher’s tightly controlled yet perceptive drama, we see motivations, psychologies and hurt beneath these individuals. Zuckerberg – part-billionaire, part-genius, part-arsehole – is hardly a protagonist to root for, but actor Eisenberg shows an impressive understanding of Zuckerberg, a young pioneer driven by the need to belong. There is a quietly poignant opening of Zuckerberg walking through the Harvard campus at night in a hoodie and flip-flops, an outcast traversing through a social jungle and ends up in his dormitory, flaring up the blogosphere. This is intercut with scenes of the super-exclusive night-parties of the Harvard elite, ramming home the message of Zuckerberg’s disjointedness, far-flung from the parties he is never invited and welcomed.

Focusing on the human drama that revolves around Facebook is a stroke of genius. Fincher, arguably an underappreciated director of our time, takes a thriller approach to excite the proceedings, all rapid-fire editing, darkly yet beautifully lit cinematography, but he never undermines all that emotional undertow here. When we see Eduardo Saverin (a subtle, vulnerable performance by Andrew Garfield) losing his temper at Zuckeberg and Sean Parker (a smart casting of Justin Timberlake) for their corporate betrayal, we feel his car-crash outburst. When we see free-spirited, Machiavellian Napster-founder Parker transform from swaggering, cocksure bastard to a rabbit-caught-on-headlights for dealing with coke, we feel pity. That’s because Fincher invests much on dramatic build-up throughout scenes. Come the inspired final shot, Zuckerberg perpetually pressing F5 (Refresh) on Erica’s Facebook page, it’s plainly obvious that The Social Network isn’t so much a movie about Facebook as a timeless, cautionary tale of selfish ambition and capitalism pursued in expense of lifelong values such as friendship and real human relationships. At its bitter heart, the 500 million users might want to befriend Zuckerberg, but he remains inconsolably, incontrovertibly alone.

Beneath its understated workings, The Social Network emerges as a deceptively crafted, erudite, marvellously written and directed piece of zeitgeist-nailing screenplay. We have films that reflect a generation in our lifetime – The Graduate, Easy Rider, even Fincher’s own Fight Club – and this is one of them.

Gran Torino {2008}

2010-10-23T16:25:00.001+08:00

Cast: Clint Eastwood,

Director: Clint Eastwood

Screenplay: Laeta Kalogridis

Studio: Paramount Pictures

Runtime: 140 mins

Genre: Drama/Thriller/Horror/Noir

Country: USA

Clint Eastwood, at 80, shows no sign of slowing down. Without a doubt one of the most prolific and most respected American filmmakers alive today - he averages two films a year - we'd somehow assumed that old, shrivelled-up Dirty Harry had had his golden days and that it's time to clear out his desk and say adieu to Hollywood. No. Instead, in the last two years, he's produced and directed films that some of us unfortunate souls can only dream of making at least one in our entire lifespan. There was the superb Changeling, the somewhat mellow Invictus and this year's Hereafter, films that boasts that grand, sweeping, old-school Hollywood emotional sucker-punch. It's easy, then, to surmise that Eastwood's increasingly becoming a sentimentalist, a big softie beneath that grizzled, rough-hewn façade. Perhaps that comes with age. Or perhaps that's just craft and emotionality being refined.

Gran Torino, thankfully, is given a subtle emotional undertow without resulting into schmaltz. It's a Western film without horses and saddles, an action film without gunfights, a Hollywood weepie without the three-piece hanky and a social indictment without being full-on preachy. It's also a well-developed character-driven piece with Eastwood himself playing the central protagonist, the grey, furious, war veteran Walt Kowalski. Eastwood is a sheer galvanising presence that sums up an entire acting panoply of cowboys and cranky gunslingers. Here, he's an old-age, grumpy pensioner at odds with the world - disgruntled with everything and everyone including seemingly harmless South-East Asian neighbours in his Detroit 'hood, his selfish kids, obnoxious grandchildren, local gangbangers, his priest and even God - and only takes temporary relief in swigging beer in his porch and his immaculate Gran Torino. Even in his wife's funeral at the film's opener, he doesn't so much mourn as growling at his disrespectful clan. It's a rapacious, magnificent turn, with Eastwood managing to be equally menacing and sympathetic. It's also a star quality unrivalled by any other actor his age, where his onscreen presence just overshadows everybody else in the film, which reduces the Asian kids in his block acting as plummy.

At heart, the narrative structure is reminiscent to a John Wayne Western, or even Eastwood's own canon, where the embittered, mortally-ill hero-with-a-gun saves a bunch of folks in his land, the Southeast Asian minority a shoo-in as Indians. This issue is also given much more complication with Kowalski being portrayed as a certified racist, spewing out slurs that oozes with breathtaking offensiveness. Yet Kowalski is never reduced to neither a sour curmudgeon nor ham-fisted misanthrope. There's humanity within. Come the unexpectedly moving finale, there's a noble, pacifist intention behind Kowalski's final act of resolve. It will tug hearts, and make you forget of the first-half, which resembles like a middlebrow, live-action version of Pixar's Up with Carl Fredricksen going all Dirty Harry with a gun, raiding punks in the 'hood.

Gran Torino isn't astounding filmmaking, but it is a quiet, reserved and dignified one worthy of respect. If this would be Eastwood's swansong to silverscreen acting, it's a memorable one.

Dogtooth {2010}

2010-10-11T20:37:00.014+08:00

Cast: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor

Director: Giorgos Lanthimos

Screenplay: Efthymis Fillipou

Studio: Boo Productions

Runtime: 94 mins

Genre: Foreign Film/Horror

Country: Greece

It's hard to imagine a more brilliantly bizarre picture this year other than this Greek import Dogtooth. Here is a film that doesn't deliberately, and figuratively, mutilate audiences' eyeballs as Lars von Trier set out in Antichrist, nor mercilessly heightens violence as Gaspar Noé's Irreversible - yet still remains profoundly shocking. Violence in Dogtooth isn't intended, but rather a disturbing effect of innocence, and simultaneously, ignorance. Which makes it all the more disturbing, as the three twentysomething children living under the tyrannical rule of their bourgeois parents are misled, misinformed and totally detached from the outside world, the social 'norms', and hence, reality. In their own isolated, fence-ringed world, they are told that a zombie is a flower, a pussy is a lamp, a cat is a savage beast, and Frank Sinatra is their Uncle. And any sign of misbehaviour would mean homegrown capital punishment such as holding Listerine in the mouth until it burns.

If all of these sound absurd, director Giorgos Lantimos roots absurdity in context to this social conditioning. Although laced with some Lynchian weirdness, he doesn't plunge the film in total darkness; Dogtooth's cinematography looks like its shot by Sofia Coppola, all sun-dappled environs, idyllic mood shots, quietly understated framing. But despite of this, there's an air of eerie dread and claustrophobia, its entire running-time an unpredictable carnival of derangement. Lanthimos refuses to offer explanations to the motivations of the parents, especially the haywire, control-freak father, and the passive-aggressive mother, which makes the entire harrowing affair more unsettling. His approach is rather observational, as though he's letting us take a peek into this madcap culture, an extreme case of parental fascism. Dogtooth, for all its horrors, takes a Buñuelian dissection of middle-class isolationism and a fearless glimpse into the face of one of humanity's bleakest moral cruelties - social control.

Unsettling, provocative and tragic. Dogtooth may be one of this year's most bizarre yet genuinely haunting films, exploring parental fascism with devastating results. As soon as this bites, it leaves a lasting mark.

Sunrise {1927}

2010-10-08T15:40:00.008+08:00

Cast: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor

Director: F. W. Murnau

Screenplay: Hermann Sudermann

Studio: Fox Film Corporation

Runtime: 94 mins

Genre: Drama/Silent Film

Country: USA

1927 was a crucial and ironic year for cinema. For one, silent films were dying. Warner Bros. had unleashed the studio's technical gambit The Jazz Singer, the first ever full-length feature that paved way to the sound era. Yet, on the other hand, two silent movies were released that year that somehow eclipsed The Jazz Singer's status in the annals of filmmaking history, and both dazzlingly demonstrated silent cinema at the peak of its powers - Fritz Lang's sci-fi behemoth Metropolis and F. W. Murnau's Sunrise. Today, what the former has contributed to the science-fiction genre is comparable to what Sunrise has done to melodrama. Murnau's first ever Hollywood gig (he was invited by William Fox to direct a feature) illustrates the fruition and marriage of two very distinct filmmaking styles: German Expressionism and Hollywood mainstream craft. Despite its breezy title, underlined with A Song of Two Humans, this begins as a dark psychological domestic thriller, all warped sets, noirish lighting and intensified expressions, as local farm husband The Man (a brutish yet engaging George O'Brien) is seduced by Margaret Livingston's city-vamp femme-fatale to drown his lowly, dowdy Wife (Janet Gaynor) in the nearby lake. What seems to be a twisted film that initially celebrates unfeigned hedonism miraculously transforms into a genuinely heart-wrenching melodrama, a moral journey from betrayal, devotion and subsequently, redemption.

Many have accused Sunrise as being simplistic, but they have completely missed the point: simplicity is where silent cinema draws its power, and Sunrise is a far better film than hundreds of noisy, brassy movies that came during the advent of sound. Take Janet Gaynor's performance for example - her transformation from dramatic strength to another, from shell-shocked to being repulsed, from frightened to wounded, beleaguered, and ultimately forgiving and loving. All this range of emotions without even a line of dialogue. That first ever Oscar for Best Actress in the history of the Academy is wonderfully deserved. There is also Murnau's masterful direction and superb technical authority. He lends Sunrise a flowing cinematography that seems impossible in 1927's standards, employing long takes, following characters through farmlands, cameras gliding through trees, marshes and even lakes. And from the idyllic, moonlit rural setting, he brings the entire film into a bustling Jazz-age metropolis as the couple regain what they've lost, and here Murnau brings the film fully alive. His camerawork doesn't stop moving, tracking the couple in busy streets, shops and even nightclubs. Watch that showstopping sequence with the Man and Wife causing a traffic jam as they vanish into a sun-dappled countryside stroll. It's a sweet hymn to human love that forever influenced modern day cinema. See Pixar and its abashed romanticism.

One of the greatest testaments to the power of silent cinema. F. W. Murnau's sublime wordless weepie transcends crowd-pleasing melodrama into high art, luminous poetry and a virtuous moral fable. This is, arguably, the Citizen Kane of the silent era.

Salt {2010}

2010-10-03T23:11:00.011+08:00

Cast: Angelina Jolie, Liev Schrieber, Chiwetel Ejiofor

Director: Phillip Noyce

Screenplay: Kurt Wimmer

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Runtime: 100 mins

Genre: Action/Thriller

Country: USA

There's nary an A-List Hollywood actress working right now that could slip into svelte suits, run like the wind, leap atop moving lorries and blast a horde of armed forces single-handedly whilst maintaining conviction, credibility and physical aplomb like Angelina Jolie does. Honestly, who else does? Despite Salt's ludicrous premise - a CIA agent accused of being a home-grown, planted Soviet sleeper spy to annihilate America's stronghold and kickstarting a nuclear warfare - Jolie roots the whole shebang with a naturally convincing turn as the eponymous Evelyn Salt. In this post-Bond and Bourne era, spies have regained some humanity and emotional conflict, but what's remarkable is that Salt locates a female in this genre populated by the Big Boys with Big Guns, and by the looks of it, Salt is certainly not the one to be messed around with. Salt's fiery intensity feels like she could well wipe out those bunch of Expendables with barely a scratch.

Essentially, Salt is Bourne without the amnesia, and Bond without the glamour. She's a no-nonsense killing machine who fully knows her own mission. It is us, the audience, who could only guess her allegiances in a movie with fast-shifting loyalties and blurring moralities. The narrative twists and turns are beside the point (the story swerves so many times you'd hardly be pressed for getting dazed and confused), director Phillip Noyce is the second director this summer blockbuster arena next to Christopher Nolan to blast the brains of his audience, whether Salt is really a skilfully-trained Russian spy or an American sympathiser. The answer is neither of both. That's why we come back again to Jolie's magnetic presence, whose roles in action films Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Wanted have cemented her iconic status as a top-billing actress who could hold her own ground and guns, who manages to show here her almost feral versatility to jump, leap, run, plunge and then manages to nail emotional brevity in some of Salt's standout moments. The prologue after her release from the North Korean camp, the moment she discovers her boyfriend's (August Diehl) resolve to find her whereabouts, there are tremors of both relief and despair present in her face without saying anything. And later on, in a genuinely agonising moment, Jolie beautifully captures stoicism and betrayal of emotions employing nary a word, and yet letting us view the inner pain within. It's these notes that makes Salt emerge not as an action hero, but a fighter whose losses only contribute to her steely determination in her road to vengeance. Consider her alongside The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo's Lisbeth Salander as one of the recent year's most electric heroines - scarred by a wounded past yet knows how to fight back.

Preposterous as a spy thriller, but masterful as an action movie. Salt is a well-geared and efficiently calibrated slick machine propelled by a terrific dynamo of a performance by Jolie. Her action goddess status is, by now, entirely a league of her own.

Inception {2010}

2010-08-09T01:18:00.019+08:00

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Marion Cotillard,

Director: Christopher Nolan

Screenplay: Christopher Nolan

Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures

Runtime: 150 mins

Genre: Action/Thriller/Drama

Country: USA

In the Hollywood arena of summer blockbusters, Christopher Nolan's Inception sticks out like a sore thumb. No, let me paraphrase that. A formidable, towering monolith amongst clunky, weightless pretenders throwing up whatever cinematic sputum onscreen - whether it be blowing some shit up, recycling ideas after another, spewing out remakes upon sequels upon formulas upon plot conventions upon infinite boredom, ad infinitum, ad nauseum - all designed to cash in some multi-million mega-bucks revenues in exchange for your brain. For all the mainstream film industry's capabilities, it's a blast of sobering fresh air when a film emerges out of the studio machine, deliberately engineered to engage people's minds and seduce that think-tank organ between your ears that is left vegetated by
a great many dastardly dumb, unimaginative, underwhelming Hollywood mass fodder. Inception, then, is a warm welcome.

To delineate Nolan's "brainbuster" would be a bugger, as it's a film that defies almost any linear categorisation. At its very core, Inception is a psychological heist thriller with a gang of corporate mind invaders, tactically investigating deep into the main target's subconscious. Imagine The Thomas Crown Affair meets Nolan's very own Memento, but on post-Casino Royale steroids. But to reduce Inception as derivative would be foolish, as this is very much Nolan's territory. Exploration of the human mind, the fragility of memory, fears and perception have always occupied Nolan's films: the reverse recollection of Memento, a tale about a copper's short-term memory loss told backwards; the smokes and mirrors of The Prestige, blurring the lines between magic trick and deceit; and the breathtaking scope of his Batman's revision, achieving full-tilt in the superlative The Dark Knight, transcending the superhero genre into a psychological, ontological lockdown between the forces of good and evil. It seems, at the moment, there's barely a Hollywood director working today that could rival the scope of Nolan's mind-bending canon. He creates adult dramas with an action-thriller scale, and forces us to think. And Inception is a testament to that, perhaps his most complex, labyrinthine, brain-frying work yet.

Influenced by much of Stanley Kubrick's scientific, quasi-religious psychobabble, David Lynch's overlapping, dream narrative, and Sigmund Freud's theory on dreams, Inception conceives layers upon layers of dreams, where the protagonists plumb the depths of secrets and motivations. Thwarted, haunted professional dream invader Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio in a thoroughly engaging performance) is assigned to plant an idea, hence the significance of the title "inception", into the subconscious of the heir to a multi-national corporate empire. Nolan cleverly sets up the plot kinetics and rationalities of the film's conceit at the onset, where Cobb goes through a dream-within-a-dream test. What follows is a riveting, albeit exposition-loaded, heist flick, where Cobb gathers a bunch of dream invaders, but where in a common heist thriller a group robs a bank or steals an artefact, this innovatively turns the "heist" around its head, executing "inception" rather than "extraction". No matter how ludicrous that may sounds, Inception works perfectly under its own logic and mindscape.

And when its logic fully grabs hold, it's awe-inspiring. Inception might not be Great Art, but it's one hell of a jaw-dropper. There is a stunningly explained sequence where Cobb shows novice yet brilliant student architect Ariadne, appropriately named after the Greek goddess who guides Theseus out of Minotaur's labyrinth, the Parisian metropolis unfolding on top of itself, defying physics and gravity. Dreams can be controlled, as explained, but it is also a place where anything goes. The film's gnawingly tense third act is perhaps the greatest action sequence you'll ever see this year, oozing with technical authority, which the entire Nolan team has tirelessly edited to tight-wire, cut-throat precision. It elaborately stretches over to four dream layers, as the invaders try to solve Cillian Murphy's Fischer's Daddy issues - Dileep Rao's Yusuf dodging mercenaries in Fischer's militarised subconscious, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Arthur fighting henchmen in zero-gravity corridors, Tom Hardy's Eames attacking an Arctic wasteland - all at the same time, Cobb facing the guilt of his enigmatic dead wife (Marion Cotillard as the emotional fulcrum of the film), who keeps on haunting Cobbs dreams, destroying each one of his scheme like an avenging angel. Cobb's guilt complex are played throughout as memory lapses, like Memento, visions that intermittently punctuates every emotional resonance in the film.

Technicalities aside, the running-time flies through like a zip line. It takes all amounts of imagination to engage audience attention in almost three hours, and Inception achieves this remarkably. And it also takes an actor like Leonardo DiCaprio, underrated and under-appreciated in his last stretch of filmography, to immerse us into this breakneck journey, in a performance so unfussy and persuasive. His flawed, guilt-ridden Cobb is a empathic hero, wrestling with his memory and painful grief, locked up away in a safe only the most valuable assets can uncover. There are nuances in DiCaprio's acting that effortlessly convincing, moments of fleeting pain and tragedy crossing his expressions, suppressed by a man trying to do his job in a dream state where one can get lost in an eternal limbo. As Cobb emerges, he basks in a personal epiphany. Meanwhile, we emerge out of Inception enthralled out of our wits.

A delirious, dazzlingly inventive, multi-layered mind-trip. Inception seems like Christopher Nolan ambitiously reaching for Kubrickian heights of consummate filmmaking and Lynchian labyrinthine "a-dream-wrapped-up-in-a-dream-within-a-dream" storytelling, interweaving the visceral with the cerebral. It is complex but not confusing, intricate but not infuriating, clever but not smug about it. What is more, this is one summer blockbuster that doesn't treat its audience like a horde of brainless zombies, and that is in itself an achievement.

Clash of the Titans {2010}

2010-08-01T20:10:00.007+08:00

Cast: Sam Worthington, Gemma Arterton, Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes

Director: Louis Leterrier

Screenplay: Travis Beacham

Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures

Runtime: 106 mins

Genre: Action/Adventure

Country: USA

Don't mistake Louis Leterrier's Clash of the Titans remake as a loving revamp of the 1981 Greek mythology camp-classic. It's anything but. Instead, it's inane, inept and juvenile, carelessly dished out to feed the Hollywood mainstream cinematic starvation populated by masses of lunkheaded, all-explodin', shoot-'em-up video game generation. It's pitched for those who worship Michael Bay, James Cameron and Roland Emmerich, directors whose entire directorial canon involve more set explosions than explosive storytelling, rather than the self-confessed Greek mythos geeks. Here, Leterrier ditches the drama, togas, youthful innocence and all semblance of narrative wit to make something excessively loud and noisy, stuffing shitload of nasty creatures one sequence after another, pitting hero Perseus against shrieking harpies, giant scorpions, CGI Gorgon Medusa and a Kraken the size of an Olympic stadium. It should have worked a lot better if it weren't for a mythically turgid performance of Sam Worthington as Perseus, whose appearance here isn't so much a Greek demigod as US Navy Marine, all shaven head and buffed-up as though he just walked straight out of the Avatar set and stepped into a sword-and-sandal movie accoutrements. It also doesn't help that the characters here spit out dialogues that seem to come out straight from the "How To Make A Hollywood Epic for Dummies" screenplay book, with Gemma Arterton's criminally ill-advised goddess Io blurting out unnecessary expositions at every opportunity, just in case you've nodded off. And if she's not onscreen, we are tormented with a painfully ludicrous Liam Neeson as Zeus in glittering armoury, the most indecisive Olympian God, ordering an attack on Argos one minute and backing Perseus the next. Ralph Fiennes, arguably this film's show-stealer, is deliciously entertaining but his hunch-backed, hoarse-throated Hades looks like Lord Voldemort attempting to put on a Rocky Horror Picture drag show.

Greek mythology goes heavy metal and ends up astronomically dull. One of the year's worst films, with a turgid Worthington lumbering from big effects-laden set-piece to the next, devoid of any storytelling panache. And there isn't really much clashing of titans as there's only one titan involved - so Hollywood, who the fuck cares?

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

Mildred Pierce {1945}

2010-07-24T19:17:00.007+08:00

Cast: Joan Crawford, Ann Blyth

Director: Michael Curtiz

Screenplay: Laeta Kalogridis

Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures

Runtime: 111 mins

Genre: Drama/Noir

Country: USA

Film noir, to quote James Brown, is "a man's man's man's world". Tough-nut men in trilby hats wisecracking hard-boiled dialogue, toting guns, fighting gangsters and sucking up cigarettes like there's no tomorrow. Women in this genre are either femme fatales or subjects of abuse. So it's surprising, then, that Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce designates a woman at the centre of this 1940s noir picture, which essentially mashes up film noir with women's weepie, a concoction that went on be lauded as the "definitive women's noir". This is a giant blunder. For all Mildred Pierce's dramatic tension and Hollywood sheen, it feels derivative and most of all, manipulative. Here is a tale of a titular mother's resilience and self-sacrifice told in flashback, as a fur-coated Joan Crawford tells her story in a police investigation after the murder of her wealthy second-husband. It turns out that the actual truth is an elaborate set-up of a mother's cover-up and her daughter's betrayal, a mother so engrossed in her own restaurant career that she fails to recognise her own daughter stealing her husband just right under her nose. Mildred Pierce has been a part of the 1940's feminist discourse, but if feminism means establishing a solid womanly professional career whilst sacrificing the moralities of your underlings, then Mrs. Pierce is completely deluded and self-possessed, her ineptness in raising children masquerading as devotion.

The biggest flaw here is the titular character, so wrongly drawn despite of the transformation Joan Crawford has to go through (not that she needs it - her Hollywood image is very linked to old-school glamour), from lowly, dowdy suburban wife to glamourpuss restauranteur. Okay, Mildred Pierce is a hardworking woman, a sacrificial mother who wanted to provide the best of her children, pursued her career by starting as a waitress who went on to open five restaurants, which all resulted to the downfall of her spoilt-rotten daughter Veda (a terrific 17-year old Ann Blyth, who almost eclipses Crawford in this with her ice-cold bitchiness) - but somehow in the end, you're thinking who to really blame. Is it the daughter, calculating, greedy and sordid? Or the mother, who feeds material conformities to her children, fails to discipline them and remains mindlessly oblivious to her daughter's affairs, until to the very last clinch?

The entire film, in film noir fashion, is framed with the final climax bookending both ends, with Mildred contemplating suicide on a harbour with a gun in her pocket. This feels like a plot contrivance, a deux ex machina to keep the final twist from audience's attention, and not because her character really means to commit suicide. Michael Curtiz, famed director for Casablanca, does a professional job for providing aesthetic finesse to the picture, all signature noir lighting and polished cinematography. It falls however in Max Steiner's choice in musical scoring, recycling every bit of the melodramatic orchestra in his Now,Voyager theme every time Mildred scores with a man. Nevertheless, let's wrap with the main woman of the show. In this performance, Crawford did not only win as much as clawed her way to her first Oscar, which she wanted very badly after a career comatose, preceding her transfer from MGM to Warner Bros. She may be Mildred Pierce, but Pierce looks and moves like Crawford, replete with a glamorised stiffness. It's a performance as overrated as this film. No wonder why Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck turned down this role.

What is touted to be a "definitive women's noir picture" turns out to be a faux pas, a faulty Hollywood representation of a resilient, self-sacrificing mother. Despite Curtiz's prestige direction, this is a manipulative, melodramatic blunder that barely goes skin-deep. Crawford is as overrated as the film, and compared to other sterling, more complex women-centric noir pictures Double Indemnity and The Letter, Mildred Pierce pales in comparison.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

Shutter Island {2010}

2010-07-23T19:15:00.011+08:00

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer, Mark Ruffalo

Director: Martin Scorsese

Screenplay: Laeta Kalogridis

Studio: Paramount Pictures

Runtime: 140 mins

Genre: Drama/Thriller/Horror/Noir

Country: USA

Say what you will about Martin Scorsese. There's a very few Hollywood filmmakers today that could wring out an impressive CV laminated with solid, credible auteurist works that treads the fine balance between popular cinema and contemporary film art, boasting a canon loaded with signature cinematic specimens of Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and Raging Bull. He may have won an Oscar for directing The Departed, but it wasn't his best film. Now, with a statuette under his belt, he could have gone and made a Hollywood crowd-pleaser and perhaps gather more gongs. But he didn't. Instead he made Shutter Island, and went all Powell and Pressburger on us - and there's barely any other film in recent memory that potentially divide audiences sharply in the middle. Either you like it, or you don't.

For the cinematically uninitiated, any fairweather moviegoer who practically knows little about film noir, Hitchcock, Powell and Pressburger are very likely to appreciate Shutter Island less, as Scorcese packs a chock-full of filmic references that in most frame compositions, it would send a film-fan with an OCD flying though film books for a fevered scrutiny. That Shutter Island, adapted from Dennis 'Mystic River' Lehane's novel, shares an identifiable DNA with Hitchcock's Vertigo - a noirish, sombre tale of a detective set to investigate a crime. In Vertigo, James Stewart's protagonists seeks to solve the identity of a woman, and in Shutter Island, Leonardo DiCaprio's Federal Marsall Teddy Daniels lands on the eponymous island to investigate a missing woman, a patient in an American correctional asylum where this film entirely takes place. It also happens that both narrative threads implode on its two central characters. Noir, meanwhile, is the underlying theme here, with DiCaprio and Ruffalo's sidekick Chuck donning 1950's noir trilby hats, Philip Marlowe cloaks and Humphrey Bogart cynicism. Crucial to the proceedings is also the genre's prototype, the unreliable narrator, which serves significant to the final twist.

Which leads us to the story. If it weren't too self-conscious, Shutter Island could have fully engorged on its audiences. This doesn't mean it's an inferior film. Teddy's odyssey into the dark depths of the asylum, encountering eccentric and intriguing mental-hospital doctors played to oily perfection by Sir Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow, is gripping stuff, working best as a mutual engagement between noir-thriller and loony-bin horror. We descend further into the labyrinthine mystery surrounding the island, walking through Gothic hospital corridors, dark underground prison cells, and sends us into the tall vertiginous cliffs towering over lashing waves below - scenes so marvellously framed and lit that could make Scorsese's idols Powell and Pressburger proud. Yet the steady narrative flow is occasionally broken by unsubtle flashbacks of Teddy's haunted WWII past and his dead wife (Michelle Williams), scenes so overly saturated and stilted, where the film's central problem lies. There is a final twist that isn't so much M. Night Shyamalan as Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, a denouement that both frustrates and sends minds reeling with incomprehension. This is not a critique to the 'twist', but rather the execution to the finale, which transports the narrative into flashback again that could have fared better with exposition. Nevertheless, minds are warped here, so who are we going to believe?

This might be far from a masterpiece, flawed and ridden with contrived flashbacks, Shutter Island's material is nonetheless a perfect fit for Scorcese - a tough-edged potboiler with a noir-thriller Hitchcockian undertow. Cinematically, it's impressively assembled it could make film gods proud.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

I Am Love {2010}

2010-07-18T16:12:00.001+08:00

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Flavio Parenti, Diane Fleri

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Screenplay: Luca Guadagnino

Studio: Mikado Films

Runtime: 120 mins

Genre: Foreign/Drama

Country: Italy

At the heart of Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love are two things - a sterling central performance and an opulent, exquisite filmmaking. Tilda Swinton, arguably one of the most fascinating actors working in the film industry today, is the central beating core of this rich, nuanced, grand Italian melodrama and her matriarch Emma Recchi, Russian-born and married into a clan of über-wealthy Milanese bourgeois, is a character so magnificently well drawn that it makes one think Swinton might as well read the London Tube map and we're still in thrall to her talents. This is an actor that veers mightily and fearlessly from one superlative performance to the next. She was the only dignified thing in The Chronicles of Narnia as the glacial White Witch, nabbed an Oscar gong for her gig as corporate bitch in Michael Clayton whilst eclipsing co-star George Clooney, delivered an unhinged, tempestuous performance as a freewheeling prostitute at last year's kidnap-thriller Julia, and now this. An Italian arthouse, to which she produced herself.

This harks back to the nostalgia-tinted days of 50's Douglas Sirk melodrama via 70's Hitchcock byway of Antonioni and Visconti's Italian cinema, which might seem to be a gross pastiche at first, but Guadagnino's sublime directing elegantly swerves this film from an arthouse trainwreck. It's tale might be a tad familiar, the clash of the old and new, as the ancient heirloom of the Recchi family is being handed down to the younger generation, to run the age-old textile business, reminiscent of Coppola's The Godfather and Visconti's The Leopard, but the approach is supremely stylish. Its operatic tone means cameras smoothly glide around the Recchi household, from corridors, to halls, to staircases, and introduces us to the key family members by inter-cutting through a dinner scene. We get to know them straight away and their criss-crossing of relationships with barely any exposition, but through a visual style. A stronghold of family foundation that would soon crumble when a sweeping force of change leaks through the gaps in the clan's tapestry.

Through all this, Emma remains a lovely wallflower. Only until her daughter rushes off to be with a girl. There is an eloquent scene when she discovers her daughter's letter outside a shop shown in superfluous editing of Emma's urgent reactions, sharp breathing, unfocused eyes, wearing a face of both surprise and realisation. She reacts not like a mother, but a woman who suddenly questions not only her daughter, but also herself. Swinton doesn't act this out, she embodies Emma through and through. Also, she gets to show off her Russian and Italian language skills. And Swinton guides this journey to self-awakening, as she falls passionately and gloriously in love with young earthy chef Antonio (her son Eduardo's best pal). Guadagnino frames one literally ravishing scene in which Emma dissolves into Antonio's lush prawn cocktail, lit by a headlight while the rest of the restaurant and everything else orbiting Emma fades away. It's an evocative set-piece, and says there is all to say off-setting food with carnal, basic human passion.

Guadagnino mounts a superb sense of pacing, as Emma and Antonio's illicit affair become known to her son Eduardo, taking this film into a tragic, heart-wrenching crescendo, a full-blown orchestra of misunderstandings, alienation and subsequent liberation. Emma's soaring pursuit for her inner self comes to full tilt at a funeral, with Swinton in an impressive transformation from an impeccably dressed wife to an earthy, liberated woman. This refined piece of human artefact in the Recchi gallery of solid traditions, learns to free herself from repression, a Russian tempest that was laid dormant from marriage, responsibilities and subservience. This is gorgeously sublime, liberating stuff.

Here is the first great film of 2010. Luca Guadagnino's operatic Italian melodrama I Am Love possesses a supreme understanding of cinema as an artform, operating visuals, tone and story to spellbinding precision. Above all, this high-class, exceptional study of a mother's existential awakening has a narrative build-up that bursts into a shattering, breathtaking climax.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

The Idiots {1998}

2010-06-28T00:56:00.008+08:00

Cast: Bodil Jørgensen, Jens Albinus, Anne Louise Hassing

Director: Lars von Trier

Screenplay: Lars von Trier

Studio: Zentropa Entertainment

Runtime: 117 mins

Genre: Foreign/Drama

Country: Denmark

It's always awe-inspiring when somebody in this earthbound existence steps up and does something completely out of the ordinary. Although Danish filmmaker-cum-provocateur Lars von Trier isn't relatively new to behaving like a wild child of world cinema today (if you're uninitiated to the von Trier canon, try seeing either Breaking the Waves or Dancer in the Dark, but for your good life's sake not simultaneously together, you'll be gagging for a strong swig of whiskey afterwards to send all the gloom and bitterness down from the back of your throat to the pit of your stomach), during his Dogme 95 manifesto-toting early days, he was a revolutionist, a trailblazer of pure, challenging cinema. A plumpy, Eastern European version of Jean-Luc Godard minus the signature Raybans and cigarette questioning every single Hollywood convention and advocating tenets of credible, intelligent filmmaking. The year 1998 saw this said cinematic revolution. Cannes was invaded by the Danes, with two liberal-minded films Dogme #1: Festen and Dogme #2: Idioterne. Two films that defied hard-fast rules of established cinematic techniques, observational works that employed lo-fi, home-video aesthetic, naturalistic use of setting and sound, and engaged with improvised performances. Realism, meanwhile, is the ultimate goal.

Yet despite sounding so simple ('Hookay, let's grab a videocam and start filming, dude!'), von Trier's entry to the "Vow of Chastity" aka the Manifesto, The Idiots, is far from simple. It's an elaborate, maddening, challenging piece of work. The title points to a gang of middle-class malcontents, educated and crucially aware of the zeitgeist, masquerading as an institution of the mentally handicapped. With intention and full recognition of their actions, they take the piss on society and its norms, and pull pranks on anyone as they drool and dribble and convulse their way through restaurants, pubs, streets and public swimming pools - and then retreat to their suburban estate like post-modern hippies, disdainfully sniggering at society's pathetic reactions to the handicapped
. It's without a doubt a provoking concept for a film, as we viewers laugh at the pranks pulled at the beginning, cringe at the crew's deliberate social experiments halfway and then later compel us to recheck society's inherent revulsion to anything abnormal.

Von Trier seems determined to suggest the poser here, what is normality? In the freewheeling attempts of the group, we see a dark mirror of the bourgeois superiority complex, patronising those that commit unruly social behaviours whilst this pack of anarchists feel much more superior about their actions in return. Normality is this group's number one enemy, as they all disregard etiquette and common decency, shredding clothes in public and even an explicit gang-bang sex with full-on, brief, upfront, pornographic penetration. Don't watch this with your puritanical grandma, she might die of heart attack. All of this is observed using scattershot camera, with a fragmented storyline that that shifts gear from one situation to the next, conveying a pseudo-reality show feel. But the laughs completely dissipate when the band is visited by Down's Syndrome patients, where the leader of the pack, charismatic yet nihilistic Stoffer, is appalled by the genuine innocence and twitchiness of the patients - a reaction that turns out exactly akin to those oblivious people they take the piss on. From then on, the foundation soon starts to crumble, and they begin to question themselves and their purpose. That they're nothing more but a group of social misfits who couldn't function in the so-called normal environment, and their spassing is their way to be involved in something, to be noticed, even in sheer disgust.

The Idiots, despite a difficult viewing experience, reveals some devastating truths and emotional cruelty of humanity, themes that would recur in many of von Trier's later works, most especially Dogville and Dancer in the Dark, in which the films' heroines are subjected to forms of social and psychological punishments. And here, we witness this in Karen, the newest member of the gang, whose transformation from a shy middle-aged wallflower to a willing saviour of the group's final degeneration by volunteering to 'spass' in household environment is developed to a heart-wrenching effect. There's a riveting final shot that will have you either fuming in anger or sobbing your eyes between your clenched hands, depending on your emotional capacity.

The cinematic equivalent of a knife in your gut. The Idiots is altogether a complex, maddening, devastating, kaleidoscopic one-of-a-kind viewing experience. Compared to its more triumphant film-brother Festen, this is an underrated Dogme 95 work that lobs a searing, scathing critique to society, Hollywood and sanitised audience expectations.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

Cléo from 5 to 7 {1962}

2010-06-19T05:31:00.011+08:00

Cast: Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dominique Davray

Director: Agnès Varda

Screenplay: Agnès Varda

Studio: Cinè Tamaris

Runtime: 90 mins

Genre: Foreign/Drama

Country: France

A woman, after hearing a rather grim tarot reading from a frizzy-haired soothsayer, emerges out of the room terribly upset. She descends down the staircase, beset with anxiety. But before she leaves, she checks herself in the mirror, ruminating "When you're beautiful, you're more alive than many others'. Wiping her tears away, she swept out into the glorious Parisian daylight. This is Cléo, a minor French chanteuse with three popular songs under her belt, and she's possibly dying. Throughout the film's entire course in pseudo-real time, hence from 5 to 7, we accompany her as she waits for the test result of her medical biopsy of her stomach cancer. What purports to be a documentary at the onset, the camera following this woman's foray into a personal odyssey, turns into a luminous, quietly touching, subtly intellectual cine-essay about the transience of life, and inevitability of death.

If that sounds a bit depressing, don't fret. It's not all gloom-and-doom. In fact, this beautifully designed central conceit ironically breathes life to Agnès Varda's masterful work, where a sense of foreboding and uncertainty hangs resolutely for the entire film, making everything the heroine's wilful actions attain a gravity to them. At the exterior, she's frivolous, pretty and chic and she spends the first half of the film engaging in capricious preoccupations - shopping for hats, being pampered by her PA, and cavorting with her distant lover. But after an achingly painful breakdown with a Michel Legrand-penned song (Legrand appears as the pianist), she sheds off this spoilt façade sans hair-wig and feathery frock, breaking free from the world of pretence and meaninglessness. What seems to be frivolity turns out to be a front, a cover-up to mask an emotionally shattered being faced with a cold, bitter truth of mortality. She soon wanders around the streets of Paris, seeking for some shred of meaning to her own existence.

Corinne Marchand gives a graciously nuanced performance as Cléo. In a superlative sequence in the Bois-de-Bolougne park, she starts strutting around the stairs as though in a musical in a self-plea for distraction and then subsequently descends into a melancholic self-pity. Nevertheless, there's a lightness of touch in Varda's approach, as she introduces a promise of romance, bringing vivacity to the final proceedings. Consider it whatever you want, may it be plot contrivance or a cinematic desperation to uplift things up, Varda handles the existential identities between Cléo and Antoine, the soldier she meets at the park, with a quiet dignity, allowing the two characters to share an unfettered emotional and psychological candour. The result is magnetic. This pre-empts Richard Linklater's superb Before Sunset and Before Sunrise double-act, with a brief encounter that turns into something relevant. For the first time in Cléo from 5 to 7, we observe the heroine getting calm, free from anxiety.

This are feminist tones to the film, and only more remarkable since the magnitude of the French New Wave is ruled by masculinity - boys with guns, rebels of society, lovers on quarrel. Cléo from 5 to 7 is very much a nouvelle vague film, aware of its cinematic medium, as Varda uses jump-cuts throughout the film, elaborate camera set-ups, soft-focus lens during intimate moments, and even juxtaposes the scenes of tarot-reading in colour with the entirely black-and-white shots. She manipulates time, space and emotions here - and ultimately debunking the very idea established by the New Wave movement, that cinema verité is as pretentious as any other movements. Varda argues the cinema is, and will always be, cinema - open to manipulation of all sorts, an artist's plaything, a beautiful pretender emulating life but shall never achieve such ambition. She creates a vision of real-time life, but she soon puts it to hiatus before the final half-hour, with a sudden cut of
Cléo and Antoine staring into each other's eyes, an inspired final shot that rivals François Truffaut's freeze-frame of Antoine Doinel in Les Quatre Cents Coups, reminding us that this is reel-time she's fashioning. Life is more complex than that. The ending also suggests various things, whether
Cléo and Antoine will blossom into a romantic relationship or both of them will soon share a status quo, that she's indeed dying and that he's being sent to fight in a war in Algeria, thus his impending death. Nonetheless,
from
first frame to the last, Varda firmly contends
that awareness and acceptance of death only makes life much sweeter to live.

As profound and technically daring as any incendiary works of the 1960s French New Wave. Varda crafts a quietly thoughtful yet compelling portrait of femininity in an era dominated by the boys of the nouvelle vague. This belongs to a higher order of sophisticated filmmaking, which arguably ranks alongside Godard's A Bout de Souffle and Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort {1967}

2010-06-13T18:44:00.004+08:00

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac, George Chakiris, Michel Piccoli, Gene Kelly, Danielle Darrieux

Director: Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda

Screenplay: Jacques Demy

Studio: Madeleine Films

Running-time: 120 mins

Genre: Musical/Romance/DramaForeign

Country: France

Let's be truthful - the musical genre is an all-too American affair. It's hardly surprising when you take a peek into every single 'Best Musical' poll around the planet and you'll be pressed to find that they're all American. Or at least financed by Uncle Sam's currency. So when a foreign musical comes along, it gets snubbed or flippantly pushed back into the depths catalogue oblivion. Which is a shame, because Jacques Demy's Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, his follow-up to the luminous Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, is an exuberant, joyous homage to the Hollywood musical genre - complete with romantic abandon, Technicolour bombast, radiant choreography and titillating songs - that for a momentary consideration, the Americans should be pleased with the cinematic gesture. Nevertheless, the collaboration of Demy and his wife Agnès Varda remains self-consciously French, that it's understandably too hard for them to betray the nouvelle vague which they belong to. The result is glorious musical filmmaking.

This may be Cherbourg's twin sister, but whereas Cherbourg is more technically daring as an all-sung romantic opera and bears a more melancholic, wistful tone, Rochefort is the exact opposite. Effusive, jubilant and formally reverent to the genre, Rochefort is essentially a film about dreams, love and hope. It's a tale about small-town idyll, where twin sisters Delphine and Solange (played by real life twins Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac respectively) yearn to leave Rochefort and hit the big-town Paris. The entire film takes place in a long weekend, and the roving narrative weaves upon the lives of the town's folks; the lovelorn mother, the quixotic sailor in search for his 'feminine ideal' (played by a very young Jacques Perrin), the besotted American visitor (Hollywood musical legend Gene Kelly in a cameo role), the toe-tapping twosome and the nostalgic piano dealer. Unlike the traditional Hollywood narrative, Demy does not focus on any protagonist, or the two heroines for that matter, but allows these miniature stories to mesh with each other in often complex intersections and teasingly beautiful interplay of time and missed opportunities. Rochefort is a French film through and through. It glorifies life yet never forgetting reality, and in the end, it seems to imply that we are all part of a bigger tapestry, and whilst shit happens, love will conquer all.

An exquisitely, eloquently made nouvelle vague musical. Where Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is a love song to lost love and broken dreams, his follow-up Les Demoiselles de Rochefort is a hopeful chanson to love found and regained where characters cannot help but sing their hearts out. This is French film magic.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

Alice in Wonderland {2010}

2010-06-12T03:24:00.023+08:00

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter, Anne Hathaway

Director: Tim Burton

Screenplay: Linda Woolverton

Studio: Walt Disney Pictures

Running-time: 108 mins

Genre: Fantasy/Adventure

Country: USA

Once upon a time, a fair few had tried meddling with Lewis Carroll's literary apothecary, and the results were somewhat varied: some ended up plain mediocre, some poisoned by toxic cinematic waste, and many unfortunate souls forever banished to Dullsville. From the silents, to animation, to talkies, to brash Technicolour, to kiddie television (you can IMDB it, the list is bloody endless) - there is none that bring the visionary inventiveness and bravura to Carroll's children's classic that deserves the title 'great film'. That is, if you set aside Spirited Away, which is arguably Hayao Miyazaki's reworking of the tale, a Japanese Alice in Wonderland. Other than that, virtually zilch. So when Disney announced they're having a second stab at the much-influential fairytale with Tim Burton and Johnny Depp on the bandwagon, there's not much groaning as excitable lolloping amongst the Burtonian fandom. Perhaps Burton, the most zany, eccentric, Mad Hatter of Hollywood cinema, will bring us the Alice the mainstream has been waiting for. Perhaps.

As it seems, this is mere wishful thinking. Although Burton's signature visual touches are ever present (swooping cameras and post-modern Gothic otherworldliness to Underland's design), its narrative is pure Hollywood gossamer gloss, with the Mickey Mouse studio capitalising on a British national treasure to engage business with the 10-year old demographic. So we have a 19-year old Alice in this reimagining of Adventures in the Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by way of sequel, where Alice flees a stuffy Victorian engagement party and her fiancée-wannabe and stumbles down into the rabbit-hole the second time around to find that the primary-coloured Wonderland of her childhood days is now all dark and ominous Underland ruled by a tyrant, the Red Queen. What promises to be an existential, brooding, coming-of-age character-piece turns into something like Narnia on acid trip.

There are the famous, if obligatory, shrinking-and-growing sequences, and the oddball characters returning for a cinematic tea-party and so far, so pedestrian. Mia Wasikowska as nearly-adult Alice is fine and feisty, but somehow lacking the conviction needed for an empowered female of the Victorian period of corsets. Not until Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter enters the scene and chews them, with gap-toothed gameness. His Hatter is a work of both extraordinary performing dexterity and utter silliness, seesawing from a British dandy to a boorish Scotsman whilst remaining surreally loony. Adding to the lot is Helena Bonham-Carter as the Red Queen, a scream of a character throwing tantrums like a big child 'Off with their heads!', with a magnificently magnified head, a grotesquerie subtly inspired by Bette Davis' Queen in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. Bonham-Carter, an omnipresent Burton collaborator (and wife), is obviously having a whale of a time, and so does Anne Hathaway as the royal sister White Queen, a dreamy Nigella Lawson doppelganger. Plus a bunch of British thespians lending their voices in passable fashion; Alan Rickman as the high-on-hooka caterpillar, Stephen Fry as slinky Cheshire Cat, Timothy Spall as the valorous hound Bayard, Michael Sheen as the Rabbit, and Sir Christopher Lee as the Jabberwocky. It's all tolerable, only until both sides of the warring clans form a climactic battle set in a giant chessboard the size of a stadium you'd want to smack yourself awake from this recurring dream, increasingly turning into a nightmare. Then the Mad Hatter starts break-dancing afterwards. That's the point where you definitely shriek yourself awake. Immediately.

Not so much Burtonesque as shoddy Hollywood plot-picking, roll-calling, re-wrapping moribund mainstream affair. You'd wish Burton haven't made this for Disney, as it feels like a Narnia déjà vu. Visually exuberant yet aesthetically uninspiring. Count this as another failed stab on Carroll.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

Iron Man 2 {2010}

2010-05-20T21:01:00.013+08:00

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Scarlett Johansson, Mickey Rourke, Sam Rockwell

Director: Jon Favreau

Screenplay: Justin Theroux

Studio: Paramount Pictures

Running-time: 124 mins

Genre: Action/Adventure

Country: USA

As superhero sequels go, they go darker, meaner and meatier. Think of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, which completely throws it out of the park, knocking down genre conventions and emerge as a genuine masterwork that rises up above its superhero contemporaries. That is supposedly the trend, but other Hollywood's recent superhero foster child like Iron Man tends to go the other way around. Jon Favreau's first gig of the franchise was a blast of fresh air, making Iron Man a zesty, occasionally irreverent, take on the conventional superhero movie with a central protagonist whose ego is bigger than himself. Proud, cocky and a bit of a smart-aleck, Tony Stark is something of a nutso creation - a multi-billionaire-cum-megalomaniac, lightyears away from the post-teenage spunk of Peter Parker, the father issues of Clark Kent and the moral anguish of Bruce Wayne. And in Iron Man 2, Robert Downey Jr., a Has-Been-Turned-Comeback-Superstar, now Hollywood's go-to guy, embodies Stark impeccably with a natural swagger and a tousled, I-don't-give-a-shit demeanour. But whilst Downey is notable, the rest of the film isn't. In this sequel, the spark and lustre of its predecessor are gone. And we are left with a script that's cluttered, overstuffed yet bereft of any meaty chunk to chew on.

Gone is the parable of terrorism, and instead we have a tale of revenge criss-crossing with a plot on rivalry. After a supremely dull opening montage (the sight of Mickey Rourke as the vindictive Russian Ivan Ivanko assembling a suit is tediously familiar), we are plunged into Tony Stark's world purview, being transformed into something more than just cocky - but a real cock. After the moral travails he went through the first, you'd somehow expect Stark's a changed man. But he's gone worse, pulling of a gone-off-the-rails stunt which doesn't come across as funny but very irritating. And there are a lot of other characters to deal with, some ranging from mediocre to just unnecessary. Sam Rockwell's rival weapons manufacturer Hammer delivers the quips and oiliness but suffers a lot of character stereotype. Don Cheadle (replacing Terrence Howard) as Stark's military best-bud is as dramatically stiff as his metal-cast suit. Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Pots aka the Love Interest is reduced to some nagging figure. Scarlett Johansson, whilst ultra-sexy lashing out high-kicks in a vaguely kinky outfit as Black Widow, feels inessential to the entire plot. And even Samuel L. Jackson is misplaced in this film, reminding us that this isn't much of a sequel but rather a platform to which Marvel Studios launches The Avengers. Here, characters seem like walking and talking teasers for a forthcoming franchise. So even when we're blasted through an action-packed final act, with regenerated Iron Man clashing against a host of renegade metal machines, we're left devoid of any affection or even just an iota of connection. And that's a true sign of a bad moviegoing experience.

This is exactly what you'd expect with your typical Hollywood mainstream fare - a lot of noise and little story, and if there's one, it's clunky, convoluted, cluttered and damningly clichéd. Save from the swagger of one Robert Downey Jr., Iron Man 2 is nothing but an orgy of FX metal play that's as emotionally catatonic as a junkyard.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo {2010}

2010-05-19T15:52:00.009+08:00

Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist

Director: Niels Arden Oplev

Screenplay: Nicolaj Arcel

Studio: Yellow Bird Films

Running-time: 152 mins

Genre: Drama/Mystery/Crime/Thriller/Foreign

Country: Sweden

Whatever the hell Hollywood is thinking, remaking Stieg Larsson's Swedish literary blockbuster The Millennium Trilogy, the word is already out - it would take a sizeable lot of Hollywood creative workforce and sheer genius to outshine this original Swedish version. As remakes now go, the American industry has lately been noticed picking up modern celluloid from the Swede home turf, no matter how exceptional they already are (the superb Let The Right One In now has a Hollywood version in the can, equipped for lazy Americans who either cannot be bothered to read or just plain illiterate). This follows that ill-advised route, and despite the David Fincher-Carey Mulligan electric combination as director-and-star partnership, there's no doubting that Fincher and Mulligan have a touchstone to live up to.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the opener of the three-part series, is an astonishingly dark cocktail of crime-mystery, whodunit detective thriller, Swedish miserablism, socio-political psychosis and psychological exploration. Above all, it has a prime protagonist who is more ingenuously fascinating than the story itself, a savagely intense heroine compelled to solve a crime only to uncover a deeper moral darkness in society whilst facing her own personal past. Not since Bonnie Parker in Bonnie and Clyde and Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs had there been a crime-film heroine so justifiably complex, and not since Nikita and Mathilda Lando in Léon: The Professional had there been a character so startlingly vengeful. Lisbeth Salander is a walking mystery herself - she's part-Goth, part-waif, dressed in black leather supposedly designed for S&M antics, as heavily pierced and tattooed as a punk-rocker and face daubed thickly with kohl that could make Marilyn Manson blush. Sexually ambiguous and a social outsider, her mind burns with rage, making use of her canny intelligence to plot vindictive revenge on her sexually abusive guardian and her resourcefulness to swipe at any motherfucker who touches her. And actress Noomi Rapace plays her compellingly that Salander is not all about simmering looks and tough biker-chick - there are incredibly poignant moments in which Rapace subtly lets vulnerability touch Salander's surface, her personal pain of her childhood past and the seemingly eternal anguish that haunts her follow through momentary flashbacks throughout the film.

For a lengthy running time for over two hours, there's never a dull scene, despite of an unfussy, flowy camerawork. Director Arden Oplev does not employ showy cinematography, although crisply shot, and makes sure this film is about story and substance. There's also another main character to deal with, exiled journalist Mikael who works for a liberal magazine called Millennium, stripping bare society's darkest evils such as corruption and political fervour, and Salander's pseudo-partner in a crime investigation of a 40-year old unsolved mystery. The plot may ring familiar at first, a vanished girl in a faraway town conjures Agatha Christie and Twin Peaks, but this has bigger resonance that touch on the origin of evils in European history, political misdirection, Nazism, misogyny, illegal prostitution and human trafficking. As you watch the mystery unfolds unhurriedly and gracefully, you'd somehow feel at the end that this abyss of society has got to be stopped and we're rooting for Lisbeth Salander to unleash her wrath on these evils.

A riveting, complex and taut crime-mystery that solidly opens the Millennium Trilogy, with a magnificently created heroine that burns into the mind long after the film ends. Rarely has there been a literary adaptation that deftly mixes blockbuster brio with a character-driven sensibility, casting an unflinching look into a dark moral abyss of our society. Consider the forthcoming Hollywood remake look like a waxwork next to this Swedish original.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER {1999}

2010-05-04T23:25:00.007+08:00

Cast: Cecilia Roth, Marisa Paredes, Penélope Cruz

Director: Pedro Almod.var

Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar

Studio: El Deseo SA

Running-time: 101 mins

Genre: Drama/Foreign

Country: Spain

You've got to admire Pedro Almodóvar. There's nothing quite like his signature cinematic vision in Spanish cinema or in any film landscape in the world. He is, essentially, the Spanish apotheosis when you combine David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock and George Cukor, albeit on kinky boots and sipping a perverse cocktail. High camp, high melodrama, dark humour and a sensuous visual style, all of these are prevalent in almost any Almodóvar work, almost as recognisable as any world landmark. And in this critically-acclaimed effort All About My Mother, he does not only provide all his signature ticks but he gives what seem to be sorely lacking in many of his films - a great, big heart. Here, Almodóvar achieves a higher degree of sophistication, crafting a film of subtle nuance and purpose, dedicating this to actresses and mothers, as the title refers to.

While still maintaining liberalism in form (he brews a dazzling concoction of melodrama, tragedy, soap-opera, farce and pitch-black humour, throwing in queer-folk cultural references, with transsexuals, transvestites and other sexual ambiguity in typical Almodóvar fashion), My Mother is perhaps the most linear in narrative context in the Almodóvar oeuvre, eschewing reliance on flashbacks common to many of his films. We are drawn to the story right away, as Manuela embarks on a quest to find the exiled father of his own son, who was killed on an accident after chasing famous Huma, an actress playing Blanche DuBois in a Spanish stage revival of A Sreetcar Named Desire. In My Mother, the past isn't much shown but rather very deeply ensconced in the present, the flaws of the past ever influencing every strand of this rich, interwoven stories of human fallibility and human resilience.

You may laugh at its savage campness sometimes, but My Mother brims with a remarkable sense of compassion, humanity and heart that you'll never find yourself laughing at Manuela's loss of her son, Huma's tempestuous relationship with a lesbian junkie, Rosa's impregnated nun or at Lola's condition, the father of Esteban and Rosa's child, now a transvestite and bearer of HIV virus. Even the film's most humorous scene, La Agrado's one-woman, show-stealing romp, improvising in front of an audience on how she ended up as an operated woman, we never laugh at her. We laugh with her. It's an accomplishment of deeply felt characterisation, creating very flawed human individuals yet never drench them with self-pity. Instead, these bunch of characters are testaments to human staunchness, and it's one of Almodóvar many fine talents, to let his audience reserve their judgements and to listen and understand these characters and their lives.

At the heart of All About My Mother is, after all, a celebration of solidarity between women, femininity and most importantly, motherhood. Almodóvar deliberately reconstructs scenes from All About Eve, and pays homage to Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider, to actresses, to women who act, and to mothers, whilst disposing the male species as maladroit creatures. To a degree, there is sarcasm to its representation, portraying men here as either men who dress like women or men who want some blowjob during intermissions. Nevertheless, Almodóvar emerges with dignity and a genuine compassion towards the fortitude of mothers and their legacies.

Impressively crafted, handsomely acted (especially by Roth) and emotionally satisfying, Almodóvar's All About My Mother assumes a zenith in the auteur's fascinating oeuvre. Above all, this is a heartfelt paean to motherhood and human resilience.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

WINGS OF DESIRE {1987}

2010-05-04T23:23:00.005+08:00

Cast: Bruno Ganz, Solvieg Dommartin, Otto Sander

Director: Wim Wenders

Screenplay: Peter Handke

Studio: Road Movies Filmproduktion

Running-time: 130 mins

Genre: Drama/Art

Country: Germany

There is not a film quite like Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire. This is clearly a bold statement, given that there is an entire century of celluloid-making history to contend with, and that Wenders' himself dedicates this work to "all the old angels, especially Yasujiro, François and Andrei". These are master film craftsmen, the Japanese Ozu, the French Truffaut and Russian Tarkovsky, whose cinematic influences have left a profound presence in Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin or The Skies over Berlin, as a literal German translation of the film's original title). The quiet grace of human observations is clearly an Ozu legacy, the humanism and magical realism is Truffaut-esque, and the sweeping cinematography and contemplation of history and human existence have long been deeply ingrained in the works of Tarkovsky. But instead of resulting into a postmodern pastiche, Wenders' work soars above its own cinematic sphere of influence and emerge as a truly original, elegiac, graceful and beautifully profound work of modern art.

A million light-years away from any Hollywood narrative convention, Wenders' approach is that of a European art-film sensibility. It is contemplative in mood, evocative in its visuals and evades narrative and plot for spatial musings and meditation on human existence - this is more cinematic poetry rather than your typical mainstream movie classification. The first half roves around a war-ravaged, post-Nazi Berlin, all crumbling walls, decaying urbanities and banalities of life, and amongst these torn human creatures are unseen celestial bodies, angels drifting around the city, listening to every pain, hurt, emotional yearnings of every citizen. Wenders' ditch the common ideal image of angels in haloes and wings, except at the beginning where we see Bruno Ganz' Damiel standing atop a church's spire with wings fading into the light, but instead wearing long overcoats like existential, sombre-looking noir detectives hearing the inner voices of the populace, their deepest thoughts and desire, and even casually touching humans for reassurance. This is familiar to mainstream as City of Angels, the crooningly mawkish Hollywood remake with Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan, where angels pretty much wear the same thing. So here, there are two central characters, Damiel and Cassiel, two angels whose immortalities allowed them to observe more-than-enough earthbound human experiences. Desire does not preachify over religiosity and spiritualism, but it portrays a form of magical realism, of deities existing amongst and inbetween physical matters unknown to humankind.

A narrative emerges when Damiel (an emphatic, soulful-eyed Bruno Ganz) forfeits his immortality when he falls in love with a lonely trapeze artist Marion (a beautiful Solvieg Dommartin), whose existential anguish and solace has captivated Damiel. It's an unabashedly romantic projection, that loneliness is as beautiful as beauty itself and as truthful as life, and Damiel knows this in an enchanting scene where he declares his yearning to experience earthbound pleasures, as simple as warming his hands to a cup of coffee, to be able to physically touch somebody, to love and be desired. Wenders offers here a life-affirming, hopeful palette amid the black-and-white angel's POV, intriguingly shifting into full colour at the perspective of humans. And when Damiel finally gets to become human, he sees blood in dark red, and is wonderfully rapturous about the sight of it, the implication of human mortality, of transience, pain and uncertainty.

Here is a film that wraps you up and never lets you go. Wings of Desire transcends conventional film form into a haunting, lyrical, elegiac, beautifully profound cinematic poetry about earthbound existence. For a film about angels, Wim Wenders provides a very humanist philosophy here, a deeply touching love-letter to the simple pleasures of human life. An enriching, stunning work of art.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

HELLO, DOLLY! {1969}

2010-04-30T18:13:00.004+08:00

Cast: Barbra Streisand, Michael Crawford, Walter Matthau

Director: Gene Kelly

Screenplay: Ernest Lehman

Studio: Twentieth Century Fox

Running-time: 146 mins

Genre: Musical

Country: USA

Consider this well-found fact that this 1969 musical has gained more popularity since it was featured in Pixar's WALL-E, and has boosted its DVD sales compared to its last four decades' worth of box office gross. That says an awful lot for a film where public consciousness has been drawn towards it not because of the film itself, but through another medium. For all the loveliness and resonating sentimentality entrenched in WALL-E, where the musical's unabashed romanticism is masterfully evoked (see the great opener in the tune of Michael Crawford's "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" to an ironically bleak, visceral wasteland, and "It Only Takes A Moment" with Wall-E and Eve clinching in the rustic shack) - Hello, Dolly! is completely the opposite. Extraordinarily theatrical, cluttered, bloated, and shriekingly shallow. The primary plot involves a widower, supposedly in her menopausal phase, gallivanting around New York City and Yonkers, New York pairing lovey-dovey couples, even ill-matched ones, whilst surreptitiously slicing her way into famous Yonkers merchant Horace Vandergelder (a name that rings like cash) beyond everyone's belief, including the oblivious Vandergelder himself. Dolly Levi is not only a matchmaker by profession but essentially a conspirator, a manipulator and provider of man's illusions. Not to mention, Barbra Streisand, despite of her terrific presence, comedic gab, and soul-sweeping vocal jurisdiction (she was the warbling mega-star of the world at the time, where Julie Andrews vacated the podium for a while), is also terribly miscast, a 27-year old actress playing a fifty-something woman, making her worldly-wise put-upon wholly unconvincing and her chemistry with leading middle-aged man Walter Matthau nondescript. And the musical sequences such as "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" and the utterly bombastic and lavish scenes in the Harmonia Gardens are fun but the set-pieces are ringing with clear contrivances and unnecessary. Dolly Levi's entrance is given more social importance than even the Queen of England gets, and Harmonia Gardens end up like a stage, a restaurant porn. Okay, Louis Armstrong gets a cameo, but he only appears for five minutes as the Gardens' bandleader, and then disappears entirely. His screen presence, whilst thrilling, competes with that of Streisand. What were the studio honchos thinking, "Oh, let's get Armstrong in this, just for the hell of it."

If there's a musical that makes you think less of the musical genre, it's Hello, Dolly! Extravagant, pompous, shriekingly shallow and has a terribly miscast Streisand. No wonder why it bombed and sealed the death of musicals circa 1969.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

FUNNY GIRL {1968}

2010-04-30T16:56:00.004+08:00

Cast: Barbra Streisand, Omar Sharif

Director: William Wyler

Screenplay: Isobel Lennart

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Running-time: 151 mins

Genre: Musical/Drama

Country: USA

There are only a very few actresses in the Academy Awards history who have won for musical roles and all of them are onscreen debuts - Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins, Liza Minnelli in Cabaret and Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. Albeit Streisand technically occupied half of the 1968 podium with Katherine Hepburn in Lion in the Winter (it's the only Best Actress tie, hitherto), her musical-comedic role of Fanny Brice, a street urchin of lower East Side who turned into a vaudevillian Ziegfield star, is a rare moment for the musical genre where the movie star legitimately nails down the central character, both carrying the entire show and often at the expense of other supporting characters. It's a magnificent, limelight-stealing, show-conquering performance, and Streisand, with all her performing abilities and sheer vocal prowess, overshadows almost everything in this film, the entire cast, the costumes, the leading man and even the direction itself. She makes Omar Sharif, who plays the dashing entrepreneur-cum-gambler Nick Arnstein, look dull, turns the whole dazzling Ziegfield extravaganza a little less sparklier. It is, without a doubt, one of the best musical performances Hollywood has ever seen, rubbing elbows with Minnelli's stunning Sally Bowles in Cabaret.

But take Streisand out of Funny Girl, and we have an often laboriously melodramatic film, formulaic, straying into a conventional pattern of a low-life dreamer who is given the chance to show off her schtick and then meets the man of her dreams in the process, gets married and finds out that marriage is not as jolly as the folks in her town claim to be. So there are lots of suffering, lots of singing about suffering - but thankfully, Fanny Brice is a comic character creation, finding the humour in the most clichéd of moments and when some scenes turn into a rote path, Streisand always have the bon mots and the gift of perfect comic timing. And nothing in Streisand not to love here. She does not only sing, but she acts every song, means every line, whether it be a melodious, sentimental number "People", a goofy roller-skate gag "I'd Rather Be Blue Over You" or a showstopping belter "Don't Rain On My Parade". And director William Wyler had rightly guided her to that Oscar trophy (after all, this is a luminous director who had waltzed with forty stars into an Oscar acting win), his camera capturing Streisand's unique facial features and many of the film's eloquent camera sweeps, may it be as complex as craning vertiginously over a ballet sequence or as simply restrained as following Streisand's figure in an alley, a dramatic character entrance, to the final closing shot of her fading into black stage backdrop.

This is Streisand's central, magnificent show through and through, eclipsing anything and anyone in Funny Girl. It's a musical/comic masterstroke, elevating an otherwise formulaic film about a star's rise-and-shine, William Wyler's first and only musical in his entire formidable filmography.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

A SINGLE MAN {2010}

2010-04-30T01:31:00.004+08:00

Cast: Colin Firth, Julianna Moore, Matthew Goode, Nicholas Hoult

Director: Tom Ford

Screenplay: Tom Ford

Studio: Artina Films/Fade to Black

Running-time: 101 mins

Genre: Drama/Adaptation

Country: USA

Imagine this - in an alternate universe located somewhere between platforms of glittering catwalks and lofty billboards, anybody who occupied the high altars of fashion could easily pull silken strings and make a super-stylised art-film-fart filled with impossibly beautiful, genetic-laboratory-specified people. The result could have been an over-preening, self-conscious, self-aggrandising piece of lunkhead, tailored to fit the equally superficial industry of physical glamour. Let's face it, all the Lagerfelds, Versaces, Karans could do this, and Tom Ford is one of them. But instead of making a Warholian art-trash project, fashion designer guru Tom Ford, saviour of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, purveyor of sharp suits, golden grooming and unapologetic Vanity Fair spreads with naked Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson, crafts a solemn, sensitive film about grief and mortality, courtesy of Christopher Isherwood's novel of the same name A Single Man. Of course, this isn't without handsome people and perfectly tailored wardrobe, the film is consciously rife with it. What's remarkable in A Single Man is that there's actually profundity in its proceedings, despite of its fashion-conscious mise-en-scene and cinematography that occasionally resembles a stylish, upmarket men's aftershave advert (after its impeccably framed scenes, you'd somehow expect a perfume name would rise at the after-credits, Gorgeous Mourning by Tom Ford). Beautifully shot that it resembles a Wong Kar Wai mood-piece set in Los Angeles; the banality of daily life shot in washed-out, grey-and-tan hues as Colin Firth's grieving, homosexual English professor George Falconer tries to go through what seems to be his last day on this earthen wasteland, and then becomes vibrantly, cinematically alive when he reflects on old, happy memories with his long-time partner Jim (a good Matthew Goode). It's a wise, stylistic choice, also reminiscent to an early shades of Godard, playing with colours and using them meaningfully to represent moods and emotional temperatures. Ford, as it seems, knows his film canon.

But, of course, for a film debut, there are gaffes. Fashion commercial argument aside, there are elements in the story that appears to be some big, prurient joke. A Single Man comes very close to implying that it's perfectly alright to lose a lover in a fatal car accident, because there's always a beautiful stranger around, specifically a James Dean lookalike, hanging outside your local off-license, or a pretty-boy student in your class, ever attentive and is more interested in the lecturer rather than the lecture itself. This is mainly nitpicking, as both characters serves as George's escapism and also a reminder that life is worth living, in one way or another. Thanks, then, to Julianne Moore's brilliant recreation Charley, George's best friend, showing off her London socialite tongue, giving the film a sense of human balance. Charley is the Yang to George's Yin; impulsive, emotionally uncontrolled, unsettled divorcee, forever wasting on Gauloise and alcohol whereas George is the repressed and refined one, a man who once truly loved and then lost someone. Colin Firth, in a decade's worth of typecasting, has finally found a role that is perfectly tailored and groomed for him, embodying a man whose lament on life and shattering grief is considerably a private matter, drifting through his last day as it were an ordinary one. Firth's Englishness is an ace, a testament to human stoicism in the midst of a personal storm.

A visually accomplished, nuanced and stylish mood-piece in the shades of Wong Kar Wai and Jean-Luc Godard, and that's enough comparison which Tom Ford should be proud of. It might look swish, all glossed and groomed up, but A Single Man is no kitsch, trash stuff out from the world of fashion. It's a sombre, sensitive study of love's labour's lost, of private grief, albeit a gorgeously mounted one with an impeccable turn from Firth.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

MANON DES SOURCES {1986}

2010-04-27T16:30:00.003+08:00

Cast: Yves Montand, Emmanuelle Béart, Daniel Auteuil

Director: Claude Berri

Screenplay: Claude Berri, Gérard Brach

Producer: DD Productions

Running-time: 113 mins

Genre: Drama/Adaptation

Country: France

Part Two of the classic French rural drama conveys a slightly darker and vindictive personality compared to its other film brother, Jean de Florette. Sure, Florette has Yves Montand's aged, conniving Papet and Daniel Auteuil's irresolute Ugolin conspire to overthrow the new outsider planting crops next to their land, and has murder in the name of heritage preservation written all over its landscape, the second act Manon des Sources transforms the themes of greed and monopoly into a revenge saga and ultimately, a tragic spectacle of human culpability. Here, villain Cesar Soubeyran takes the backseat as the story allows the enchanting, free-spirited Manon, the daughter of the ill-fated Jean de Florette, unleash her beautiful vengeance on the two neighbouring crooks. While she's not busy shepherding flocks and flouncing around mountains, occasionally naked like a nymph, she's stooping into caves, blocking secret main sources of water and letting people down the hills suffer in thirst and agricultural drought. Emmanuelle Béart plays Manon sumptuously, all sun-kissed beauty and pastoral grace, but her loathing is often impulsive rather than calculating, which lessens the gravity of her revenge at the end. Autueil's Ugolin, meanwhile, a character less regarded in the first film, also takes centre stage as he becomes hopelessly captivated by Manon's charms, literally sewing her hair ribbon into his chest. His tragedy is further given more resonance when Cesar learns a bitter truth, a tragic twist of fate in his own making, that the man he once plotted to kill was his one true heir. Yves Montand's sobering, heart-wrenching performance in the final act almost overshadows everything in this film.

Some nitpicky contrivances aside, Manon des Sources stands up right alongside its film brother Jean de Florette. Berri concludes this Provençal melodrama in sumptuous fashion, with a beautiful, aggrieved shepherdess seeking retribution and an avaricious landowner facing his own tragic, self-made comeuppance.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

JEAN DE FLORETTE {1986}

2010-04-21T21:06:00.005+08:00

Cast: Yves Montand, Gerard Depardieu, Daniel Auteuil

Director: Claude Berri

Screenplay: Claude Berri, Gerard Brach

Producer: DD Productions

Running-time: 120 mins

Genre: Drama/Adaptation

Country: France

Had Claude Berri's prestige picture Jean de Florette been made earlier in the 1960's, it would have suffered an immense, irrevocable blow from French cinema's most formidable critics and would be subsequently dusted out from film books. Fortunately, in historical context, this was made and released in the 80's, the nouvelle vague had dimmed and the cinéma du papa, or the heritage cinema, had claimed its rebirth. The equivalent to the British costume drama, it consisted of a body of films adapted from literary sources, but where the quintessential British period film portrays upper-class snobbery, upstairs-and-downstairs chaos, the French heritage cinema explores the rural landscape where the class system is out of the question and centres rather on the mysteries of provincial folks. Yet this never escaped the scathing scrutiny of French critics (both the best and worst in the world), branding this as a traditionalist affair rather than going forward. In close inspection of style, the critics were right: Florette is the complete antithesis of New Wave cinema, favouring linear film narrative, beautific photography and overt melodrama. But what critics had seem to ignore was no matter how literate this kind of filmmaking was, Florette remains to be a glorious melodrama. Unfussy in its style, free from the jump-cuts and self-conscious attitudes of an auteurist effort, Berri takes his time to tell the story of human avarice amid the beautifully photographed, pastoral landscapes of Provence. The plot is fairly simple - a landowner and his nephew conspire to claim the neighbouring land owned by a city-slicker, the titular hunchback Jean de Florette, played mesmerisingly by Gérard Depardieu, by surreptitiously blocking the main water source of the land. Water, here, is the classic origin of conflict, and this dark narrative of greed and murder conspiracy just unfolds unhurriedly, to an intriguing effect it will keep you rooted. And Yves Montand is deliciously oily and conniving as the affluent, ageing farmer Cesar Soubeyran, one of his last roles before his death, and despite the film being named after Depardieu's thwarted agricultural newbie, this is Montand's film and his plot to meet his own end, which transforms into a karma backlash, as told in Part Two.

Whether you agree with the damning attack of French critics or nod along with the millions of who praised and loved this French soap-opera, there's no denying that Jean de Florette is an exquisitely photographed, lovingly portrayed elemental tale of land, water and the people that fought to possess them.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

NINE {2009}

2010-04-21T17:49:00.035+08:00

Cast: Daniel Day Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson

Director: Rob Marshall

Screenplay: Michael Tolkin, Anthony Minghella

Producer: Weinstein Company

Running-time: 1 hr 58 mins

Genre: Musical/Drama

Country: USA

The musical is a dying breed. Forget the frivolous, lightweight pretenders High School Musical, Hairspray and even the soppy Dreamgirls. We're talking about real musical bravura here, rock-solid gravitas and razzle-dazzle performances that could make our jaws drop, worthy successors of either Cabaret or Oliver!. Musical productions as grandiose and resplendent as any Gene Kelly picture or a Barbra Streisand vehicle or a Baz Lhurmann bonanza. So in attempt to perhaps resurrect the bygone age of golden musicals, the interplanetary system of Hollywood deliberately gathers an ensemble of stars with the hope to deliver some lost gravitas in the mainstream musical genre. And there is not quite an ensemble you'll ever see, as Rob Marshall, the purported Bob Fosse of this living, breathing generation, cherry-picks a sizzling hot lineup of Oscar-laden actors. Nine, a screen adaptation of the Broadway musical, which in turn is based on Frederico Fellini's masterpiece 8 ½, has a dream cast that could make a casting agent go radio ga ga.

It has Daniel Day-Lewis gurgling out notes as the anguished, existentialist Italian filmmaker Guido Contini, playing along with the female star-power panoply of Dame Judi Dench as his costume-designer-cum-confidante, Marion Cotillard his beautiful, neglected wife, Penelope Cruz his raunchy mistress, Nicole Kidman his shimmering muse, Kate Hudson his Vogue journalist fling, Fergie (of Black Eyed Peas) the local hooker of his childhood days, and Sophia Loren as his ghostly Mama. The array is formidable and surely there is enough acclaim and Oscar golden trophies between these cast that could very well sink an entire ship.

It's all very promising, only until the film itself. What seems to be a guaranteed extravaganza in supernova proportions ends up as a curiously flat and hollow affair. Despite of its gorgeous art direction and cinematography, which often shifts from black-and-white reels of Guido's childhood to the lovingly burnished 60's Italia, the intentional thematic weight of Nine feels somehow lost in translation, making Day-Lewis' Guido more of a surly, self-possessed, confused man-child eternally sucking up cigarettes rather than a middle-aged man beset with mid-life angst, sexual provocation, existentialism and artistic impediment. This is a Guido far detached from reality, and to an extent, detached from Fellini's Guido, despite of Day-Lewis' best attempt.

The ladies, meanwhile, deliver nuance with varying degrees, ranging from spectacular to playful and then just plain awful. Marion Cotillard is easily the best thing about Nine, playing the overlooked wife with poignancy and redemptive strength. Like Anouk Aimee in 8 ½, Cotillard steals the entire show, underplaying all throughout and then subsequently pulling the rug from everyone's feet, as her Luisa beautifully evokes inner marital pain, with her two big numbers "My Husband Makes Movies" and the Cabaret-esque showstopper "Take It All". Dench, with her usual deadpan wit, plays a good sidekick to Guido and pulling off a wonderful, if reverential, musical piece "Folies Bergeres", and Penelop Cruz is scintillating with her steamy, lingerie-clad "Call From the Vatican". Fergie delivers the most vocally powerful number of them all, the stomper "Be Italian". However, the rest are underused: Nicole Kidman and Kate Hudson, with the quietly luminous "Unusual Way" and the sparkling go-go girl number "Cinema Italiano" respectively, are no more than pretty decorations, and Sophia Loren is criminally utilised here like some face of a lost relic.

What promises to be a bombastic musical with a shamanic alignment of megawatt star-power ends up with barely a bang. Rob Marshall's Nine, despite of its lavish, slick production, gorgeous cinematography and art direction that oozes with 60's retro chic, is a film of misfired ambitions. Far from Fellini's original 8½, this is a mediocre, passable, if not entertaining, affair.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE {1946}

2010-04-15T02:00:00.019+08:00

Cast: James Stewart, Donna Reed

Director: Frank Capra

Screenplay: Jo Swerling, Frank Capra

Producer: Liberty Films

Running-time: 130 mins

Genre: Drama

Country: USA

From its premise alone - a small-town do-gooder plunges into Christmas despair as tribulations heap up on him like piled snow, whilst the starry heavens wink on him and send a gentle, wingless angel to save this miserable soul - it's destined to be cloyingly sentimental stuff, one that could make film cynics huff-and-puff and reduce this to corny, mawkish wish-fulfilment. Instead, this one's made it as a "Christmas classic", one that's been running for years on television like an annual feast, beloved by both sides of the family spectrum, be it Nan, Grandad, Mum, a bit of Dad, and Child. The Dog's quite possibly seen this one, too, on a dozy post-turkey dinner. Sure, the high-school sequences in the beginning have now appeared stilted and stereotyped, but this is a film that builds one sentiment after another, that in the end, in an overtly heart-wrenching climax, it's hard not to be moved and overwhelmed by the simplicity of Frank Capra's message picture.

And it's not all sugar-coated loveliness, there are darker themes It's a Wonderful Life strays into: contemplation of suicide on a Christmas night, existentialism, economic breakdown and corporate evil, and Capra is not afraid to touch these territories. But he remains true to the values to family life and the sense of goodness, which thankfully the film does not preachify. Okay, some heavenly bodies in the galaxy above sparkle and talk like they do in a nursery puppet show, but that's a minor gripe. What's remarkable is that Capra does not intellectualise the story, conveying pure emotions from a man who desired to travel the world and live up to his dreams but is leashed on his community, a responsibility that he simply cannot shake off. The film then meddles on fantasy elements such as guardian angels and visions as everyman George Bailey is transported into a hellish netherworld where his identity is wiped out, in a sequence so rivetingly portrayed where Bailey sees the town without his existence, a morally crumbling Pottersville. It's a beautiful, stirring message of how we influence lives around us even in the smallest of ways. And come the glorious denouement, only the hardest of hearts shall be left untouched.

A genuinely redemptive film that goes beyond its pigeonholed "Christmas classic" status. Frank Capra conjures a magic trick here, a decidedly dark message-movie with a feel-good factor that is rarely delivered even from the most populist of directors today. And James Stewart has rarely been better. It will make you laugh, be fascinated and then sob into your glass of Cabernet Sauvignon.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

CITIZEN KANE {1941}

2010-04-14T16:17:00.012+08:00

Cast: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten

Director: Orson Welles

Screenplay: Orson Welles, Herman J. Mankiewicz

Producer: RKO Radio Pictures

Running-time: 144 mins

Genre: Drama/Noir/Mystery

Country: USA

Only a very privileged few could ever stand up against this perennial masterpiece, Orson Welles' much-ballyhooed 1941 vanity project Citizen Kane. There isn't any other film in mind (or you'd have to scour dusty old film libraries) that endured as much backlash and critical thrashing during its release, with its immediate box-office flop, and then amassed recognition through time, galloping like a dark horse and emerge a cinematic triumph, ever garlanded by any movie critic as "the greatest film of all-time". Ask those BFI honchos and Sight & Sound pundits, they'll give you a roll-call of how many decades this film has become a mainstay in numero uno in their top ten polls. With its almost legendary place in the canon of cinema, it has various attachments to its name almost dizzying in comparison to so-called "groundbreaking film", a moniker used very lightly today but certainly not in 1941 when the golden age of cinema was just at simmering point - Citizen Kane deployed deep-focus cinematography for future filmmakers and film scholars to chew on, gave birth to the American biopic genre, re-established the dying montage cinema, and revolutionised the film narrative, eschewing linear storytelling and opts for dazzling, anti-chronological structure that has influenced hundreds of films we see today. In other words, this is a film worthy of a post-film pub talk. From Martin Scorcese's The Aviator to Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, from David Lynch's television series Twin Peaks to Matt Groening's The Simpsons, Citizen Kane has been imitated, spoofed, paid homage to by a list that is almost boundless.

But for all its technical bravado and cinematic importance, audience throughout the years have somehow sidestepped the immensity of Kane's most vital element - storytelling in cinema. If you'd think that James Cameron's Avatar has officially revolutionised cinema, you'd have to see Citizen Kane to think twice. Avatar's purported 3D innovation pales in comparison to what Kane has achieved, marrying technicalities with narrative ingenuity, utilising collaborative techniques (cinematography, editing, sound, misé-en-scene) to dramatically enhance the story of newspaper-mogul-turned-misanthrope Charles Foster Kane. The result is a genuinely exhilarating reconstruction of this renowned man's life after his death, told through newsreels, flashbacks, detective investigation through the people that surrounded him and a series of montages so beautifully effective and allegorical. The breakfast montage, for instance. Years of marriage summarised in impeccably timed editing and intelligent scriptwriting.

And there is also the enigma of "Rosebud", Charles Kane's dying word, a deux ex machina that sets off the plot running, with detectives and journos trying to uncover the meaning of the word that might solve Kane's death. This is where Citizen Kane really soars - a story that has an infinite resonance to our modern world, a metaphorical and metaphysical comment on commercialism, monopolistic proprietorship, capital greed and envy, and ultimately, the human pursuit of wealth and power as substitution to happiness. "I don't think any word can explain a man's life," ruminates one of the journos in the film's end, rummaging through the warehouse of Xanadu, Kane's private palatial Alexandria, housing many of the world's ancient artefacts. "Anyway, it wouldn't have solved anything," he continues. They think "Rosebud" did not exist. In fact, it did, and still does in the hearts of many. All the Murdochs, Turners and Rothschilds in the world had better recheck their ambitions, as Citizen Kane satirises that kind of life, that search for material glory only to arrive in an existential point of emptiness. As we see the flames licking Kane's childhood sled named "Rosebud", there's a deeply poignant recognition that what Kane was searching for in his entire life was that sense of purity, something transient yet eternal, a paradox in a life of lost innocence.

A glorious, towering achievement in 20th century cinema. Even now, this remains the most revolutionary piece of celluloid since the dawn of the sound era, or perhaps since the invention of cinema itself. Thrillingly innovative, giddily entertaining and impeccably framed, shot, acted and directed. Orson Welles, for all his narcissism, will have you moved and converted.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

SCARFACE {1983}

2010-03-27T04:14:00.003+08:00

Cast: Al Pacino, Michelle Pfeiffer

Director: Brian de Palma

Screenplay: Oliver Stone

Producer: Universal Pictures

Running-time: 170 mins

Genre: Crime/Drama

Country: USA

It can be easy to dismiss Brian de Palma’s 1983 update of the crime classic Scarface as nihilistic, ultra-violent, and super-charged with sadism and gross abandon that it’s almost impossible not to flinch at the sight of Al Pacino’s Tony Montana dipping his entire nose to snort a barrel-load of cocaine heaped on top of his dark-mahogany desk, or perhaps in a much worse case scenario, molests the audience’s attention by viscerally showing a full-on gore galore chainsaw sequence that could have been righteously banned when Production Code was still the Hollywood rule of thumb. But obviously, this is not the 1930’s. It’s the 80s, the age of video nasties, pop culture excess and post-punk, neon-tinged, god-awful decade of fashion – in other words, everything goes. So in De Palma’s update of Howard Hawk’s black-and-white gangster film of the same title (‘update’ is used here, as this isn’t a remake as much as a reworking), we see an apotheosis that would soon resonate in a decade of filmmaking and popular culture; flamboyant cinematography, using day-glo colours in its misé-en-scene, montage cuts bopping to the soundtrack (this would later inform countless of music videos), and lots and lots of violence that would make the 70's look sparkly clean. Perhaps there has never been a film as gratuitously violent in mainstream Hollywood since Coppola’s The Godfather and Hooper’s 1974 original horror The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

It can also be mistaken that the violence here is glorified, with gorgeously mounted camera flourishes, a signature style in most of De Palma’s oeuvre. Watch the chainsaw sequence in a motel room, as the camera smoothly cranes through windows, hovering over a perfectly composed street and then sweeps back into the room of carnage. Even the final shootout with a drugged-up, fired-up Montana in his wild desperation is filmed in all Grand Guignol glory; dramatic, intense, almost excessively operatic in scale, with Montana being portrayed as a contradiction – a tragic anti-hero figure, but at the same time, an icon of the gun-and-gangster culture. It’s not a surprise then that this meaning has been misjudged by many demoralised youth, where Montana’s hedonistic excess permeates and highly influences the hip-hop ‘bling-bling’ culture, taken as a God of the cool. What this generation have largely misunderstood is that Scarface, for all its sadistic portrayal of violence and thirst for power, money, sex and drugs, is actually an indictment of all the things the film tries to embody. And in the tragic figure of Montana is a result of a palpable excess and human greed, his rise from his local dishwasher to the upper echelon of Miami mafiadom and subsequent fall a cautionary tale to anyone with unchecked ambitions. And there is not a better actor that personifies the unhinged, gleeful amorality of Montana other than Al Pacino, who gives a magnificent, grandstanding powerhouse of a performance, filled with a potent cocktail of swaggering bravado, disturbing sneer and spitting motor-mouth expletives – a bordering megalomaniac, who can both bring gravitas and irony to even a capricious greeting such as ‘Say hello to my little friend’ whilst holding out an M16A1 to a bunch of gunslingers.

You may call Scarface as nihilistic, brutal, ultra-violent and something of a sadistic gangster flick, but what does one exactly expect of the Miami drug-and-crime trade underworld portrayal? For at the heart of De Palma’s film is a dark, decaying grandeur, a ruthless satire of the bling culture, and a tragedy in Shakespearean proportions rooted with an iconic, bravura central performance by Pacino.

Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

THE 5TH MOVIEJERK AWARDS - YEAR 2009

2010-03-07T18:40:00.017+08:00

Welcome to the enfant terrible of the movie awards circuit. At this very moment, as you will know, all the red carpets have been rolled back and the sprinkles of stardust have already settled. The Academy Awards has just recently culminated the awards hoopla, the Golden Globes has been handed, Critics' Choice has been chosen, and BAFTAs has been bestowed, and just as when all is relatively calm and quiet -- the awards riot in The Moviejerk field is just kickstarting. But hey, no after-parties though. Here is an award-giving body (observe: just a guy, a self-possessed, self-confessed movie megalomaniac who bothers do this sort of thing) that bequeaths no shining trophies of gold. Here be no envelopes, no speeches, no fuss, no bullshitting. Hence after this, we can just all slip back to reality once again.

But for now, let's postpone reality for now. This is The Moviejerk Award's 5th year, and nothing has changed, pretty much, by the looks of this. As you can notice, this year, the awards poster pays homage to the good 'ol Westerns, which explains why the hell that golden guy is clutching a shotgun. But mainly, it honours this year's terrific Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino's revisionist Western-cum-World-War-II picture. For those who haven't seen it, it's gloriously cinematic. For those who have and hates it, stop frowning and pack away your history books with you, this is cinema, not a historical archive. Thankfully, then, Oscars this year have some good humour and an inkling of sense to recognise and nominate Tarantino's prowess, and also the sheer ability of this one woman who dominates the arena filled with men - Kathryn Bigelow. A bona-fide first-rate filmmaker, who detonated explosive bombs in The Hurt Locker, has just made Academy Awards history for being the first woman to win the Best Director statuette. From this, we have learned that 1) even an adrenaline-fuelled, ultra-masculine film can be intelligent, emotionally sensitive and psychologically numbing (that's a treatise to you, Michael Bay), 2) a woman can blow up some serious shit, and 3) ex-wife rules. That Oscars has opted for some serious gravitas and political and human-interest resonance, rather than some fancy, glittering, visual spectacle masquerading as an industry-revolutionising event. James Cameron, thanks for this "cinematic revolution" package offer, but no thank you. Even an animated film Up, with no 3D gloss package, has more emotional depth, ontological dimension and character development than Avatar. So enter Pixar's Up - probably the most existentialist of all animated films, ever. So you might question why The Moviejerk chose this tale about a man tethered to his flying house, above all films. Because it dares to question big things about life, and tells the story in the the simplest of ways imaginable. Simplicity, by the way, is never simple. That's the magic of cinema. If Charlie Chaplin were alive, you can go ask that man.

And because The Moviejerk is a mumblecore. End of.

Performances-wise, the Academy has preferred sheer force over nuanced subtlety, and Sandra Bullock rightly deserves that win. Her big, blustery, crowd-pleasing performance in The Blind Side is a sure-fire comeback, and ticks all the right Bullock boxes. Feisty, tempestuous, unapologetic yet with an iota of sensitivity. But The Moviejerk cannot, with all its heart, ignore Carey Mulligan's breathtaking, enchanting turn in An Education. She happens to meld charm with effortless grace, offset silliness with intellect, and mixes vulnerability with wise-beyond-her-years attitude. That is no mean feat for an actress who come from nowhere and has never graced the screen before in a major role. She is a major actress to watch out for. With the Best Actor category, whilst Jeff Bridges is spot-on as downtrodden country singer Bad Blake in Crazy Heart, which often feels like a rehash or a reincarnation of his The Dude figure in The Big Lebowski (even Bridges can play this role whilst sleepwalking), The Moviejerk cannot deny the unexpected, beautiful performance of George Clooney in the corporate satire with a heart Up in the Air. You'd think Clooney can never be this good, but he does and he pulls out his best cards on the table with this one, with one special ace that we've never seen before in the Clooney canon - human culpability. One faux pas, though, The Moviejerk hasn't seen Colin Firth's turn in A Single Man, so no protests. Tom Ford's film is technically slotted in the 2010 bracket. This awards looks back to the past year, January to December.

Anyway, enough with my ramble-shambles, and off you trot with the awards list.

MAJOR CATEGORY

BEST PICTURE

Runner-Up:

The Hurt Locker

BEST DIRECTOR

Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

Runner-Up:

Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

BEST ACTOR

George Clooney, Up in the Air

Runner-Up:

Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

BEST ACTRESS

Carey Mulligan, An Education

Runner-Up:

Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side

BEST ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

Christopher Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Runner-Up:

Alfred Molina, An Education

BEST ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

Mo'nique, Precious

Runner-Up:

Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Inglourious Basterds

Runner-Up (tie):

[500] Days of Summer

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Up in the Air

Runner-Up:

An Education

BEST FOREIGN FILM

The White Ribbon (Austria)

Runner-Up:

Departures (Japan)

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Runner-Up (tie):

Where The Wild Things Are

Fantastic Mr Fox

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

The White Ribbon

Runner-Up:

Bright Star

BEST ART DIRECTION

Bright Star

Runner-Up:

Nine

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Nine

Runner-Up:

Bright Star

BEST MAKE-UP

Star Trek

Runner-Up:

Nine

BEST FILM EDITING

Inglourious Basterds

Runner-Up:

The Hurt Locker

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Avatar

Runner-Up:

District 9

AWARDS BY GENRE

Best Action/Adventure Film

Inglourious Basterds

Best Animated Film

Best Comedy Film

In the Loop

Best Drama Film

An Education

Best Foreign Film

The White Ribbon

Best Horror Film

Antichrist

Best Family Film

Where The Wild Things Are

Best Romance Film

[500] Days of Summer

Best Sci-Fi Film

District 9

Best Fantasy Film

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Best Thriller Film

The Hurt Locker

Best Documentary Film

The Cove

MINOR CATEGORY

COOLEST MOVIE OF THE YEAR

Inglourious Basterds

Runner-Up:

[500] Days of Summer

WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR

2012

Runner-Up:

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

MOST OVERRATED MOVIE OF THE YEAR

Avatar

Runner-Up:

The Hangover

MOST UNDERRATED MOVIE OF THE YEAR

Where The Wild Things Are

Runner-Up:

Bright Star

BIGGEST SURPRISE OF THE YEAR

[500] Days of Summer

Runner-Up:

An Education

BIGGEST DISAPPOINMENT OF THE YEAR

Avatar

Runner-Up:

Terminator: Salvation

BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS

Carey Mulligan, An Education

Runner-Up:

Abbie Cornish, Bright Star

BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR

Christopher Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Runner-Up:

Sharlto Copley, District 9

COOLEST MOVIE COUPLE OF THE YEAR

Carl & The Flying House (Ellie and her memory), Up

Runner-Up:

Tom & Summer, [500] Days of Summer

BEST ACTION SEQUENCE

Bomb Disposal Sequences, The Hurt Locker

Runner-Up:

The Finale Aboard the Zeppelin, Up

BEST KISS

Joseph Gordon-Levitt & Zooey Deschanel, [500] Days of Summer

Runner-Up:

George Clooney & Meryl Streep (as puppets), Fantastic Mr. Fox

BEST MOVIE LINE OF THE YEAR

"Climb the mountain of conflict? You sounded like a Nazi Julie Andrews!", In The Loop

Runner-Up (tie):

"Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.", Up in the Air

"Ain't nobody love you, ain't nobody need you. Get your ass to the welfare!", Precious

MOST MEMORABLE SCENE IN A MOVIE

The 40-year, life-spanning montage of Carl & Ellie, Up

Runner-Up (tie):

A Nazi Visit in a Jewish Farmhouse Hideout, Inglourious Basterds

The Split-Screen Sequence of Reality Versus Expectations, [500] Days of Summer

MOST UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTER OF THE YEAR

Col. Hans Landa, Inglourious Basterds

Runner-Up:

Carl Fredricksen, Up

BEST VILLAIN

Col. Hans Landa, Inglourious Basterds

Runner-Up:

Mo'nique, Precious

ENSEMBLE OF THE YEAR AWARD

Inglourious Basterds

Runner-Up:

Nine

LONGEST MOVIE TITLE OF THE YEAR

Where The Wild Things Are

BEST MOVIE POSTER OF THE YEAR

[500] Days of Summer

Runner-Up:

Where The Wild Things Are

BEST MOVIE TRAILER

Where The Wild Things Are

Runner-Up:

Nine

BEST MOVIE TAGLINE

"See it with someone you ****.", The Girlfriend Experience

Runner-Up:

"There's one in all of us.", Where The Wild Things Are

Catch you all soon next year, y'all!

The Moviejerk (c) Janz

CRAZY HEART [2010] - Dir Scott Cooper, USA

2010-03-03T07:15:00.003+08:00

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Farrell

Director: Scott Cooper

Screenplay: Scott Cooper

Running-time: 1 hr 52 mins

Genre: Drama

CRITIQUE:

Crazy Heart, an artlessly-titled, mediocre film about a washed-up western country singer, frustratingly adheres to an all-pervading formula common to almost all musical biopics. This treads Walk the Line and Ray territory (albeit less powerful),and touches the same themes with Leaving Las Vegas (but less depressing). A grizzly, dishevelled, greying country singer way past his stardom drowns his sorrows with whiskey, faces personal demons, romantic rough-patch, career meltdown, and embarks on a road to redemption – honestly, we’ve been this road before, many times. This could also be The Wrestler’s second-cousin, although a less compelling and inferior one. The comparison isn’t without justification: here in Crazy Heart, we have a tortured has-been trying to get the grips with his past, seeking forgiveness from his once-neglected offspring, finds a glimmer of romantic hope with a woman almost half his age – and all of this happens whilst guzzling down lethal amounts of alcohol (and to other Hollywood screenplay formula, meddling with drugs). This is exactly the kind of film that its synopsis alone should be quite enough to tell us what’s it all about and where it’s going, even with our eyes closed throughout its running-time.

Gripes about its over-familiarity aside, we have to consider, then, Jeff Bridges’ emotionally satisfying, if not histrionically remarkable, presence and performance. His career roles may have been much ignored by the award-giving bodies, he’s definitely and easily the best thing in Crazy Heart, and there’s no doubt about the tremendous acclaim being built on his portrayal of the self-pitying Bad Blake. And there’s no questioning that he manages to give some appreciable weight to this otherwise banal role, overshadowing even good acts from Maggie Gyllenhaal as the love-object journo (understated and underrated) and Colin Farrell as country-music upstart Tommy (spot-on portrayal, but in a contrived role) – but his delivery of Bad Blake seems and feels more like a lived-in Bridges performance rather than a real stretch of acting muscle. As effortless as it may be, this is because Bridges can play this sort of role even in casual-mode, even in his sleep, even probably in his boozed, drunken stupor. If Oscars were to award him the Best Actor trophy this year, it’s out of respect, not based on the versatility of performance.

VERDICT:

Jeff Bridges superbly etches the failures, pain and inner crisis of the washed-up, greying country singer Bad Blake – a performance so convincingly drawn that it makes one forget the entire film, which is actually a dramatically inert, drearily familiar tale of midlife crisis and self-redemption. With Bridges aside, Crazy Heart is lethargic, derivative and as prosaic as watching the back of your hand.

RATING: B-

DISTRICT 9 [2009] - Dir Neill Blomkamp, USA

2010-02-23T00:56:00.005+08:00

Cast: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope

Director: Neill Blomkamp

Screenplay: Neill Blomkamp

Running-time: 1 hr 52 mins

Genre: Sci-fi/Action

CRITIQUE:

2009 had been a momentous year for sci-fi. Unless you’ve been living underground for the past few months, the genre has witnessed a recent technological reinvention in the mainstream field with James Cameron’s technical-and-visual show-off Avatar and the cinematic resuscitation of the nearly-dying, if not dead, sci-fi franchise Star Trek. Throw in along with these lot District 9, a relatively unknown, lo-fi sci-fi. Coming out of nowhere and assembled in shoestring budget miles beneath Avatar or Trek’s gargantuan pile of bucks, on paper this stands no chance pitted against these behemoths. Then, turns out to only to smash the genre completely out of its evergreen park. Consider District 9, for once, an unexpected reinvention and revivifying of the tired clichés we know of many science-fiction films, where mostly all are located in glimmering Americana and alien invasions signal either a shot of the White House being laser-beamed to dust or thousands of Manhattanites gaping above at a sparkly spaceship. Well, forget those as District 9 directly plunges us into a post-apartheid South Africa where alien invasion doesn’t involve human carnage and hostility but rather a giant migraine for the Johannesburg government.

It is bracingly knowing, even courageous to suggest an allegory of Africa’s dark past, and where other sci-fi movies this year take place in space, (Avatar exploits Pandora, Star Trek hangs around black holes and Moon frolics around, well, the moon) District 9 is firmly rooted in our own terra firma, thrillingly mixing a pseudo-documentary aesthetic with a very grim socio-political commentary. Newsreels, staged interviews and shaky-cams, now in vogue in this post-Blair Witch and Cloverfield era, are employed to create a sense of urgency around the city ridden with alien immigrant, all of whom are fenced inside a decaying inner city slum reminiscent of the City of God favelas. The comparison is not without reason – gang crime, prostitution and blood-splattering violence litter around its streets. But unlike many sci-fi actioners, the prawn-like extra-terrestrials mean no harm and are racially shunted by a xenophobic government. Even its main protagonist (a multi-layered performance by newcomer Sharlto Copley, whose dialogues were mostly improvised) is a giddy, white-skinned and white-collared government-agent-cum-media-buffoon, more than willing to head the relocation of these slum insectoids, so gleeful yet malicious in his job, taking lengths to burning alien cocoons. But after being sprayed by a dodgy alien fluid, he transforms into a blithering, cowering half-human, half-blackened lobster on the run from the agency he works for.

But no matter how exciting the proceedings that follow, this is exactly where the film stumbles. First-time director Neill Blomkamp certainly knows his material and delivers it with sheer blitzkrieg confidence, but he later swaps intellectual urgency with a more prototype Hollywood commercialist man-on-the-run plot. In other words, the final half of the film is where things get blown up, as Wikus Van De Merwe suddenly becomes an all-action Transformer man to fight armoured tanks and a horde of military men to service the, well, Transformers generation. It’s caveat that is with justification common to many blockbusters, that is swapping real gravitas with some weightless, balls-out one of the film’s plotholes left gaping wide-open, including the origins of the machine, the nature of the mothership hulking over Jonnesburg, how humans manage to comprehend alien language filled with clicking sounds. And what about inter-species prostitution?

VERDICT:

This is big-minded sci-fi, ambitiously and thrillingly weaving bloody entertainment with socio-political resonance. But District 9 is half-conscious and half-moribund, taking the genre into an entirely new level at the first-half, and then becomes delirious and aesthetically unhinged in the latter.

RATING: B

BROKEN EMBRACES [2009] - Dir Pedro Almodóvar, Spain

2010-02-15T07:19:00.002+08:00

Cast: Penélope Cruz, Lluis Homar

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar

Running-time: 2 hrs 7 mins

Genre: Drama/Noir

CRITIQUE:

There isn’t quite a name like Pedro Almodóvar in Spanish cinema. With an exceptional oeuvre encrusted with widely-acclaimed, high-class gems such as Bad Education, All About My Mother and Women on the Verge of Breakdown, perhaps it’s hard to bring up a name as formidable and as culturally and aesthetically important as Almodóvar. His every latest release is watched with anticipation by loyalist fans and trepidation by his detractors, and usually ends up as a critical darling. Such as his recent cinematic effort Broken Embraces, which is so deeply entrenched in the annals of narrative cinema that it’s very likely to be lapped up by cinéphiles anywhere around the world. He dazzlingly and daringly blends noir, romance, melodrama, thriller, farce and homage to the medium itself that anyone with a deep love for film could hardly be won over.

In Almodóvar fashion, reminiscent to his earlier works Bad Education and Laws of Desire, Broken Embraces sets up a multi-layered narrative that swerves from two timelines, with Lluis Homar’s blind director revisiting his past forbidden fling with a beautiful call-girl-cum-actress-wannabe Lena (a scintillating, effervescent Penélope Cruz), who is in turn married to an old, decaying millionaire Ernesto Martel. This is the central conflict, with lust, betrayal, espionage and dangerous passions become the thematic undercurrents of this tale. And for those well-informed in cinema, these are the basic rudiments of the noir genre, to which Almodóvar’s film spectacularly pays reverence to, from dark classic Double Indemnity to even the earlier Hitchcock celluloid. From Cruz’s faithless wife to Homar’s director with a split personality Mateo Blanco/Harry Caine, these character and plot techniques refer back to the genre it assumes to embody. Which leads us to the core of the film. Whilst we undoubtedly admire Almodóvar’s aesthetic brilliance, he seems to wrap himself up with innumerable entanglements here that whence we get through the knotty tangle and arrive at the film’s conclusion, there’s a sense of disenchantment. For a film that builds so much on intrigue, slowly absorbing us into its depths, Almodóvar, then, ultimately lets us go with barely an emotional payoff. For we are left with a film about filmmaking, and we do not feel the central protagonist’s assemblage of work but rather Almodóvar hi-jinks.

VERDICT:

Pedro Almodóvar’s love-letter to noir cinema is passionate, ravishing and impeccably shot. Yet we are left dazed rather than overwhelmed, feeling as though Almodóvar owes us a much better pay-off and denouement. What starts off as gorgeously intriguing ends up as a self-indulgent and pompous.

RATING: B