This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Okay, let’s get this out of the way. This film is silly, and in no way a serious and responsible take on race relations in the era of slavery in the United States of America. It rather beggars belief that such a point needs to be made, but for some reason there’s a subset of viewers who were expecting a nuanced and sensitive take on the issue from Quentin Fucking Tarantino, of all people. While the views of these people can safely be discarded as too stupid to concern ourselves with, let’s at least get that out there.

Django Unchained sees a German dentist turned bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) seek out the enslaved Django (Jamie Foxx) with a view to having him identify a couple of targets believed to be at the last plantation Django worked on before being sold off for having the temerity to attempt an escape with his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington).

After completing this assignment Dr. Schultz takes something of a shine to Django, and while Django’s keen to head off and find his wife, Shultz convinces him to partner up for the winter, collect some bounties and become an apprentice of sorts before heading, together, off to deepest, darkest Mississippi.

Turns out Broomhilda is “employed” in the household of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), the urbane monster behind the Candieland plantation, with a predilection for having slaves fight to the death, and having slaves attempting escape ripped apart by dogs, and generally being a total monster. But other than that, a very nice, polite, charming gentleman. Those minor, inhuman flaws aside.

Schultz and Django attempt to wheedle into Candie’s good graces by posing as prospective newcomers to the slave fighting business, and, well, things soon go south and shooting happens, as you’re probably expecting from a blood-soaked revenge fantasy. Which is, as far as I can gather, what everyone should be expecting. It doesn’t seem to have made any representation towards credibility. I refer you back to the first paragraph.

Christoph Waltz was close to the only thing I really liked in the mediocre Inglourious Basterds, so it’s a pleasure to see him running around chewing scenery and using firearms that have effects significantly less realistic than the incendiary rounds seen in Dredd 3D. His somewhat fish-out-of-water German routine in the Wild West makes for some fun early viewing, and while Django is overall a much less interesting character the progression he makes from tortured shell to ludicrous bad-ass is nonetheless quite appropriate for a film with such a distant relationship with reality.

The other double act in the film, the odious Candie and his “Uncle Tom” manservant Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) do sterling work for Team Evil, and provide some of the most objectionable moments in recent cinema history. That they manage to do so while being amusing is fairly impressive.

It’s violent. Revenge is rarely a dish served without a great deal of cleaning up to be done afterwards. However it’s violent in ways that are very difficult to take even remotely seriously, which is of course the intention. It’s blood and guts played for laughs, and I suppose many will not be on board with that. I am, although you milage may vary. The point of this is to say that if you’ve picked up the impression that this is a dark tale revenge as an ex-slave attempts to free his wife, you have been sold a dummy.

I’m sure it’s been called racist. The film itself, of course, is not, it’s just set in a time of endemic, preposterous racism, and picks up the rhythms of the time. And the parlance, of course, there’s more uses of the dreaded “N” word than anything outside of a Klan home video. The film portrays slave-owners in an unabashedly negative light, and the only characters with any real moral compass at all either foreign or black. America does not come out of Django Unchained well, but if you want to look at the historical aspects of antebellum U.S.A. then you were meant to be at the cinema screen across the hall for Lincoln, not this collection of infrequent vapid gunplay interspersed with cunning linguistics.

On the unqualified positive side, we have some pretty tremendous visuals, not just in the usual cinematographic sense but a playful sense of humour in the framing, motifs and flourishes used throughout. I can’t be the only one who thinks the marketing department missed a trick in not having car-roof mounted model teeth on a ridiculously bouncy spring for sale in the lobby.

Tarantino’s often lauded for his dialogue, and while that seemed to desert him in Basterds, he’s on much better and more obviously comic form for Django Unchained. DiCaprio and Waltz get to play around with some wonderfully florid language, especially given what they’re discussing at the time of speaking, and there’s a scene revolving around the use of bags that’s as good a bit of comedy as I’ve seen in the cinema in years.

There’s a good amount of things to like in Django Unchained, even if I’m not quite so enamoured with it as many seem to be. It’s consistently entertaining, has a number of good, charismatic performances, a lot of funny moments and some funnier violence and bombs along at a decent clip. Sure, it could use a bit of a trim, but that doesn’t seem to hurt it too badly.

The problems with Django are, in a large sense, nothing to do with the film in and of itself. At the risk of referring you back to the first paragraph, if you had been expecting anything more serious than the comedic exploitation/revenge nonsense you get then you’re in for a crushing disappointment.

Likewise, there’s a degree of expectation going into this given the number of Best Picture gongs it’s in the running for. Which is odd, because films this daft don’t often get that sort of attention, and in this case, it’s difficult to argue that it deserves it. Django‘s a good amount of fun, but nothing more than that. If this is the best the year has in store for us, I’m worried.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

There’s an almost unbelievable number of aspects to consider about Peter Jackson’s return to Middle Earth, and a good half of them are fiddling around the edges of the film rather than anything directly to do with the flick’s quality. I can think of so many places to start it’s almost paralysing, so let’s go with the most obvious and recap the story for the perhaps three or four people who do not know what The Hobbit entails.

You may, perhaps, already be familiar with Ian Holm’s Bilbo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings, and if we’re constraining ourselves briefly to the cinema end of things this counts as a prequel, telling how a much younger Bilbo (Tim from The Office) goes on an Unexpected Journey, adventuring off with a motley assortment of dwarves headed by ex-Prince of a pre-Dragonfucked Lonely Mountain Thorin (Richard Armitage) and wizard Gandalf Stormcrow-Greyhame (of the New Hampshire Stormcrow-Greyhames) (Ian McKellen), leading to the discovery of that there Ring that caused Frodo all that bother a few years back.

Controversy the first, I suppose, came from the expansion, or narrowing, depending on how you argue it, of the scope. If you’re at all familiar with the dead tree versions of The Hobbit and the three parts of The Lord of the Rings, then you will notice a rather worrying heft discrepancy. Condensing the chunktacular Fellowship of the Ring and its siblings into one film apiece, even given their running times, and retaining the sense of the piece was arguably Jackson and Co’s biggest achievement. Breaking the comparatively flyaway Hobbit into what I think I shall term a Multiload (shout out to the 8-bit tape loader Massive) was, well, not well received.

The first explanation that made some sense to me back when this was first touted as being split into two was that Jackson (or possibly Guillermo del Toro, the timeline for this is somewhat troublesome to recall) wanted to tell everything that’s in Tolkien’s story, and not have to rejigger and edit anything out. This has a certain logic and appeal to it, and I doubt most would grumble too much about that.

Of course, it didn’t stay that way for long, and we’re now in a position where Jackson has added in certain elements, reportedly in a bid to tie together this and his last trilogy better, or somewhat more cynically, to pad out things to better fit a three movie structure.

This requires a certain degree of testicular fortitude, it has to be said, bordering on the outright arrogance. Adding in a few chapters here and there to what’s routinely considered one of the great works’s of children’s fiction? I’d imagine most are given to receive this rather more poorly.

They would not be without justification, as the most visible of these added elements are easily the weakest of The Hobbit. Thorin’s been saddled with a resurgent goblin nemesis, thought vanquished some time ago. The freakishly sized Azog, killer of Thorin’s forebears acts as a malignant driver of chase mechanisms in places where there is no real need of them, and rather transparently only present to allow for a few hero moments as the band oppose him and to distract you from the fact that for a film based on a story that’s about defeating a dragon, there’s precious little dragon-based activity.

Of the added elements, some are inoffensive, and largely logical, such as a meeting between Gandalf, Elrond, Saruman and Gladriel discussing Mirkwood’s spider and necromonger problem. Some are fever-dream mental – I’m not sure fellow wizard Radagast the Brown was mentioned enough for me to form an impression of him, but even so it certainly wasn’t “manic ex-Doctor Who goofball riding a rabbit-drawn sledge”. As comic relief, I suppose that’s excusable.

Azog’s another matter, especially given the focus he’s given. He’s a paint job away from being the franchise’s Darth Maul, a gurning action figure with no character or personality whatsoever. For this film’s main villain, that’s quite the problem, and we don’t even have the relief of knowing that he won’t return for the next film.

Thankfully, there’s not a lot else that’s wrong with the film. Like the book, I could have done without the singing, but I can’t really complain about the performances or the pacing. Tim from The Office is a terrific Bilbo, and even over the course of this third of the book his character development is believable, and his relationship with McKelllen’s Gandalf and Richard Armitage’s Thorin works admirably. His scenes with Andy Serkis’ CG alter-ego Gollum are almost worth the price of admission alone.

McKellen is effortlessly charming in the role, but at lot of the credit must be given to Armitage, combining Thorin’s mixture of pride, responsibility, sense of loss and determination very well indeed.

Even knowing that it’s a near-three hour film, I was rather surprised when the credits started rolling. It didn’t feel anywhere near that long, and that’s always a sign of enjoyment. While visually, plainly there’s similarities with the look of LotR, the tone is handled rather differently. Much as I loved LotR, it did have a tendency to swing wildly between slapstick and grimdark melodrama, often in the same scene – witness the fight with the cave troll in the Mines of Moria, where within a span of three minutes you’ve got Sam fighting an Orc with a frying pan before blubbering over an apparently dead Frodo.

Everything is much more consistent and lighter in The Hobbit, as perhaps befits a child’s book. Arguably it goes too far in this direction. Even when characters are in mortal peril it can feel cartoon-ish, particularly when it’s happening to the more clownish of characters. Perhaps more variation would enhance The Hobbit, but the lack of it apparently hasn’t detracted from it.

Overall, I heartily enjoyed the eighth of a day I spent with the film, and I would have no hesitation in recommending that anyone do so. I mention this now because I’m about to descend into the murky realms of technical formats, which may be of niche interest. Your mileage may vary, and your home may be at risk if you do not keep up repayments on it.

So, it cannot have escaped anyone’s notice while browsing the cinema listings that The Hobbit is available in more formats than previously thought possible. You can have it in three dimensions or two. Conventionally sized or IMAXified. Of course, and most controversially, in conventional twenty four frames per second or forty eight. And in most combinations of the above. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

I parked my copious ass in front of the 3D 48 FPS incarnation, and to cover the devil we are more familiar with first, the 3D work is decidedly okay. This instantly puts it up with the best 3D films made. It is not eye-poppingly noticeable, because it’s largely restraining itself from needlessly throwing things directly at you, which is commendable. The problem with eschewing such gimmickry and using it for the function God surely intended, that being to aid immersion by seeming more like reality by giving it a depth of field, doesn’t work, because the technology isn’t good enough. The current state-of-the-art 3D experience is a shadow of a pale imitation of your actual 3D that you see with your eyes and that, so it’s completely pointless as anything other than shallow, novel spectacle.

Jackson’s restraint, while much preferable to the alternative, has made the 3D entirely discardable, and while I’ve not seen the 2D print I can imagine that the usual benefit of a brighter, more vibrantly coloured film is a much better aid to immersion than uncomfortable glasses. This, really, is less of a complaint about The Hobbit as it is about the film industry, and it’s certainly not a new one around these parts, so I shan’t labour it any further.

The forty eight frames per second thing, however, I’m much more sold on. It really does looks great, and somehow much more detailed, contrary to any technical argument my brain can come up with given that it hasn’t increased the resolution any. At any rate, the relatively still scenes look nicely crisp, and the action sequences look far more fluid than we’ve seen before. I really hope we get to see a chop-sockey film, in 48 fps, as that should look superplus great.

Some say the 48fps process looks like telly. I assume they have televisions that are thirty foot across, but I think anyone less blessed in the telly department will have no trouble recognising that they are watching a film. It’s not a film that looks like film traditionally looked, but once upon a time neither was colour, or sound, or motion.

There are always complaints over new things from the curmudgeonly, and of course I’m no exception – witness my rants over 3D films here and review passim. However, that’s based on repeated experience – I’ve yet to see more than a handful of films where the 3D is any aid at all to immersion in the story, so I think it’s fair to write it off as a gimmick.

I think that the 48fps technology is far better placed to help us suspend our disbelief by looking closer to reality, and that this process has legs. That said, I’m not going to give any definitive view on a sample of one, but I’m hopeful that other examples will soon exist for us to look at. There’s a good chance a decade from now we’ll be looking at those who cling to 24fps at the gold standard for film the way we currently look at music lovers who proclaim vinyl to be the be all and end all. Alternatively, we’ll have forgotten the experiment ever happened. Time, I suppose, will tell.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Write about what you know, is the oft repeated advice. It’s why I write nonsense about films, for example. I don’t know much about films, but my head’s so full of nonsense there’s often little to no space for things like “remembering to put trousers on”, which is why I’m both so good at ill-informed opinioneering and have so much time to do devote to it, at Her Madj’s Pleas. The original intent of this paragraph was to point out that David Ayer writes about L.A. cops quite a lot, but it rather got away from me.

Still, writer/director Ayer does write about L.A. Cops quite a lot, with variable results. Training Day sprang forth from his pen and while it was, in my opinion, somewhat fortunate to get one of them little gold statues that we all think are so important, it was a pretty solid film. Outings like Dark Blue and S.W.A.T. were rather less successful, and 2005’s Harsh Times was interesting in only one respect – it contains the only dismal performance I’ve seen from Christian Bale in roughly twenty years.

Expectations thoroughly dampened, then, for this latest L.A. cop movie, following young patrol officers Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Peña) on their routes around the less-than-glamorous South Central areas. With heavy gang presences in the area and a constant tension between the encroaching Mexican-dominated gangs and the established gangs, vying for control of territory and drug distribution, it’s not the safest place to be.

The framing device for this is Taylor’s nightschool film course, and a project that sees him filming his experiences with a camcorder or clip-on camera, for maximum shaky-cam-ness. Narrative-wise it’s almost as though this is was a concept for a mini-series that’s been squashed into a film format, with a Taylor and Zavala taking, through blind happenstance, a number of calls to small-ish incidents that are all tied back to the Mexican cartels.

You really don’t want to be on a Mexican drug cartel radar, as events of the last reel or so of the film prove. The main through line is probably less any criminal investigation as it is the relationships between Taylor and Zavala, and the developing romance with Janet (Anna Kendrick) that becomes a marriage over the span of the film.

It’s fortunate, then, that the Gyllenhall / Peña double act works so well. Their friendship and respect for each other is engaging and believable, and their banter is often highly amusing. Their performances really tie the film together, vital for this film to succeed as their characters, and their relationships, are the linking devices to tie together a series of incidents that could easily be reduced to random vignettes.

Oh, but what vignettes they would be. Them there incidents vary between tension-laden, exciting and stomach-churning. That they are happening to people that it’s quite easy to care about makes them rather effective and certainly attention grabbing.

There is, perhaps, not much more to contend with than these points on End of Watch, so I shan’t belabour the issue. There’s a solid argument to be made that as a narrative piece the film isn’t exactly covering itself in glory, and perhaps also that the Mexican gang members in particular get the characterisations stuck on “comic-book ,moustache twirling evil cum homicidal”, but I can’t really see any of that detracting from the enjoyment of the film for all but the most demanding of audiences. There’s a good amount of graphic violence here as well, with even the most extreme depicted without flinching that may perhaps be an issue for the more sensitive of audiences, so be forewarned with that.

This is, to my mind, the most enjoyable cop-based film to appear in 2012, indeed one of the most enjoyable anything-based films to appear in 2012, and is well worth investigation.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Lawless cuts quite a tempting trailer, I’ll give it that. Gary Oldman swanning around with a tommy gun? Sold. And given that the last John Hillcoat / Nick Cave temp-up produced the pleasing The Proposition, there was every reason to look forward to this film. Well, not every reason, I suppose. There was no reason to hope for a robotic monkey, for example. It wouldn’t fit with the genre. But there were a number of good, reasonable reasons to expect that this wouldn’t be a pointless two hour snoozeathon, is what I’m trying to get across. I’m not sure why I thought a side-track about robotic monkeys would help my case. I’ve not been sleeping well lately.

Anyway, Lawless plunges us into Prohibition era Virginia, with the Bondurant brothers busy bootlegging up some moonshine for selling on the black market. Elder brothers Howard (Jason Clarke) and Forrest (Tom Hardy) take care of business, leaving youngest Jack (Shia LaBeouf) minding the gas station / diner that’s the ‘legitimate businessman’ front for their organisation. Presumably to protect Jack from becoming too involved in their life of crime, and also because he’s a total pansy.

Things pick up, at least in theory, when The Law arrives with a view to shutting down the moonshine trade. Well, actually with a view to take a hefty cut of the profits, being as the cops are coming from Chicago, the only police force more corrupt than Gotham City P.D. Chief law dude and your nominated bad guy of the piece is Guy Pearce’s Charlie Rakes, who I assume was promoted through the ranks due to his astonishing weirdness.

Thus runs the conflict, with the other bootleggers in the area buckling and giving in to Rakes ‘n’ Co’s extortion racket, leaving the Bondurants the only holdout. Rakes’s goons send a ‘message’ to the Bondurants, who respond in kind, sparking a circle of violence than escalates until we wind up with pitched shootouts between lines of cops and moonshiners.

It might have the conflict element sown up, but what Lawless can’t do is translate this into any sort of drama. There’s little reason to empathise with any of our moonshinin’ anti-heroes, with Howard largely characterised as a one dimensional violent drunk, Jack a whiny braggart and Forrest a laconic wannabe patriarch with nary a likable character trait to rub between them, apart perhaps from family loyalty. Jack and Howard even get largely disposable love interests to attempt to humanise them, in the shape of Mia Wasikowska and Jessica Chastain, but in the end both largely seem present to leverage into ‘damsel in distress’ plot devices to spur another excuse for the conflicted parties inflict violence on each other.

Inflicting violence might be distasteful, but at least carries the potential to be interesting. Even here, Lawless falls down. While it shows the horrible consequences of getting caught in a turf war, showing the results of, say, cutting someone’s throat in a way that’s missing from most contemporary movies, but also without glamorising it, it also rather undercuts itself by making the Bondurants basically impossible to kill unless you chop off their heads and limbs and bury them in different states.

The other side of the conflict doesn’t fare any better in the characterisation stakes. While Charlie Rakes is certainly unlikable, he becomes so in ways that make him annoying to watch rather than becoming someone you’d like to see get their comeuppance. If you weren’t sold on the Bondurants as rounded characters, wait until you get a load of Rakes’ puzzling mix of weird, occasionally mutually exclusive character flaws and weak motivation.

I suppose it says a lot that the current IMDB ‘people who like this also liked’ gizmo is currently pointing folks to Animal Kingdom, because that was a boring, drawn-out slice of violent nothing too. I’m not one to demand that all films have ‘a point’ as it were, or a surfeit of originality, or genre-redefining whatevers, as long as they’re enjoyable. Lawless fails on that most vital of metrics – there’s just nothing and no one to take an interest in.

It’s not all negative, by any means. I might not like the characters, but the portrayal of them is handled as well as I can imagine anyone be capable of across the entire cast. The cinematography and the more mechanical aspects of direction are never less than competent and often much better. However there’s nothing for any of these elements to service. The characters are unlikeable and underwritten, the plot is barely present and while it seems, at times, to be grasping towards some greater meta-point about the nature of conflict it never takes hold of it, washing away like tears in rain.

Ad-libbed, apparently. Good ol’ Rutger. And the worst thing about it is that you really get all of the Oldman/tommygun action in the trailer, and he’s only in the film for about three minutes anyway. Shockaroonie. Give it a miss.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) trains killer whales, although apparently she’s skipped step one in the process. Always train killer whales not to chew your legs off. Basics, people, basics. She is punished for this schoolboy error by having her legs chewn off by a killer whale. Yes, “chewn” is a perfectly cromulent word.

Stumpy, understandably upset by this turn of events, enters a depressive cycle that’s only broken when she takes the unusual, some would say inexplicable, step of reaching out and calling a vague acquaintance, Alain (Matthias Schoenaerts). While she meets Alain as a bouncer, driving her home after she’s assaulted at a nightclub, we’ve known him for a little longer.

The audience first meets Alain, well, more or less, as he’s stealing a camera. Sure, it’s to sell to feed his son, but hardly endearing. He’s on his way across country to eventually stay with his sister, whereupon he settles in for a good stretch of completely ignoring his son’s needs and wants.

Despite Alain hardly being shown as a model of compassion, he starts helping Stéphanie deal with her new situation, and in a largely separate development, becomes a fighter in France’s apparently burgeoning illegal backyard tournaments. The bulk of the film concerns Stéphanie and Alain’s developing relationship, and how their actions change the personalities and dispositions of each other, so I’ll skip over any details. However, I rather get the impression that this is hoping to say more about the human condition than I’m able to glean from it.

It’s great that Stéphanie manages to find value in her life again, but perhaps unfortunate that so much of it is based around the attention of a total asshole. Alain’s unpleasant, but not in the ways I imagine the character was supposed to be regarded. I’m assuming that we’re supposed to see Alain as a complicated, realistic human character, with a mixture of good and bad, with a lot of the film’s value coming from watching the good begin to outweigh the bad as the relationship with Stéphanie develops.

Unfortunately the initial reel does such a good job of setting Alain up as a lying, stealing, child-neglecting jackass that I’m not particularly inclined to care about his redemption or otherwise. I can see, in a rather detached way, that if you had some interest in his character then the final reel could be quite effecting, but long before that point I’d grew tired of his antics and was thinking about funny videos of cats instead.

If we remove my distaste for one of the central characters from the equation, there’s really not much that Rust and Bone does wrong. Perhaps the occasional drop out into overly-stylistic framing, with particular over-use of the “shot into the sun, lens flare everywhere” motif, but at least that contributes to a strong and consistent visual style.

The acting is impeccable, at least as far as I can gather without actually speaking French, and shows great raw emotion. The direction shows consideration on the movies’ pace and overall is very assured, even when dealing with sudden shifts in the kind of content that ordinarily wouldn’t happen in the genre, such as, say, the illegal bare-knuckle boxing.

Nonetheless, despite all of the positives around it, and the absence of negatives, it’s a film that just bounced off me. I wonder if that’s saying more about me than the film.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

2008’s Taken was, in defiance of all sense and logic, an entertaining revenge-based action film based largely around Liam Neeson’s charisma. News of a sequel that can at best be categorised at “unnecessary” was never going to be another welcome surprise, but I suppose we shouldn’t pre-judge films. Unless it’s in the Twilight series.

Tekken 2 doesn’t deviate from the original’s formula much, the same cast returning with a few additions, a similar control method and upgraded graphics. This time Kazuya (Liam Neeson) must again take on the forces of the Mishima Corporation, controlled by Heihachi (Rade Serbedzija), in one of the more violent boardroom struggles of recent history.

Ahahaha. Just my little joke. (Yeah, very little – Ed.) Somewhat miffed by Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson)’s roaring rampage through his son’s little kidnap operation from the first film, bereaved father Murad Krasniqi (Rade Serbedzija) swears revenge and starts plotting against Mills and his still estranged but somewhat more friendly family. The opportunity for revengeance arrives during a family holiday to Istanbul, tacked on to the end of one of Mills’ private security details.

Lo, despite a good fight, the Albanian goons get the drop on Bryan and his wife Lenore (Famke Janssen). Just before they’re taken, in a neat callback to the first film, manages to get a call off to his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) to warn her of the impending danger, allowing her to stay free and then help her family escape from their Turkish inverse delight.

And so it goes, in a way that will be more or less familiar to anyone who has watched the first one. Now, Taken was stupid enough to be brainlessly enjoyable, but the main problem with Taken 2 is that it’s only stupid enough to be stupid. I know realism isn’t high on the series agenda, but consequence-free, grenade-based echo-location is a particularly ridiculous proposition that should not be encouraged.

While the first film more or less hit the ground running and did not let up with its chasing and fighting and the like, this outing just hits the ground. The early doors waffling between Liam and Co’s family workshop is curiously stilted, for what’s a reasonably talented cast. Admittedly. A reasonably talented cast with an insipid, bland script, but still.

It can’t build enough momentum to overcome the sluggish start, and at points it seems content to drift back down to a stop, which isn’t what I’m looking for in my high-octane adrenaline thrill rides.

It’s not all bad, I suppose, with the few fight sequences in there well enough choreographed and Neeson is still a convincing physical presence, but it’s all a bit cursory and by-the-numbers. Overall, it winds up being a kinda mediocre action film that’s kinda boring and kinda not worth your attention.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

A long time ago, by which I mean about a year, in a different life, by which I mean my blog, I committed to re-watching and reviewing all of the Bond films. As it happens, the atrocities of Octopussy rather dampened my ardour for the endeavour, although I suppose I should pick it back up again for completeness’ sake. Perhaps it makes more sense to start from this freshly minted effort, Skyfall, and work backwards, in the interests of being assured of a few good films before descending back into the dark days of the Moore era.

Make no mistake, Skyfall is a good film – it’s being spoken of as candidate for the best Bond film, and even as a contender for ‘Best Picture’ awards. A long way from Octopussy, indeed. I’m not quite so enthusiastic about it, but even at my most curmudgeonly I’d have to admit it’s in the top five Bond films and top five films I’ve seen this year. But I’m rather getting ahead of myself.

Skyfall kicks off, more or less, with Bond (Daniel Craig) dying. For given values of death, of course. He’s trying to retrieve a stolen hard drive containing a list of every undercover operative and agent in M.I.6. which in the wrong hands would be disastrous. A bad call from M (Judy Dench) and a botched effort by a junior operative to ‘help’ Bond sees him take a bullet and a plunge into the unforgiving waters of well, wherever. While he initially uses the whole ‘assumed dead’ angle to take a short, boozy holiday, it’s not long before he’s reporting back in to M.I.6. headquarters. Or at least their new digs, seeing as someone went and “bombed” the old one. The explanation for how this was achieved is so remarkably silly that I think it more believable if we simply say that a wizard did it.

With the probable exception of M, the Intelligence gang including the new government overwatch mandarin Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) question why he’s back and if he’s fit for duty. After a period of soul searching and testing that feels like someone’s been watching Never Say Never Again, Bond’s back out in field trying to find out who’s got it in for them now. Hey, something that bears a passing resemblance to actual spy work in a Bond film! Who’d have thunk it. In common with Dr. No, we don’t even get wind of who the antagonist of the film is until around halfway through, although admittedly the trailer does a rather complete job of shorting out any suspense this might otherwise have created.

Seeing as it’s out there I suppose there’s no harm in revealing here that we’re ultimately after Silva (Javier Bardem), who has his own reasons for targeting M.I.6. and M in particular. It’s this vendetta between Silva and M that provides the driving force for the second half of the film, with Bond trying to keep them apart. Almost an inverse Licence To Kill. Certainly in Bondian terms, this is a rather involved, up close and personal plot the likes of which are rarely seen. No world domination or trips to the moon, just revenge, with all the character exposition and development that entails. Why, it’s almost a proper film!

Which brings us back to the dichotomy of Bond 2.0 that we’ve been talking about since the pseudo-reboot of Casino Royale. For better or worse, and normally worse, the term “Bond film” carries with it enough luggage to incur significant excess baggage charges on all airlines. Gadgets, daffy plans, over the top action, womanising, martinis, one-liners and all that jazz. NuBond is far less cheesy, and so far better off for it. However, regardless of how often you argue that the new Bond films share much with the oldest Bond films, there’s still an expectation that a Bond film isn’t a Bond film without the gadgets and all of that, and there’s a certain audience demand to bring them back.

You can’t blame film production companies for being influenced by that, I suppose. We’d all love to think that films are art, but like everything else it’s really business, and the traditional Bond formula certainly does business. However, we’re in a very different cinematic landscape now, even compared to the Brosnan era. The guns and gadgets of Bond films provided a good proportion of the summer tent-pole action content of yesteryear, a position that’s now squarely occupied by comic-book adaptations. Going head to head with Marvel is probably going to be a losing game, given that Iron-Man’s alarm clock is going to provide more high-tech wizardry than anything Q branch could come up with, even in their self-parody moments.

So Skyfall seems to mark the start of a compromise, perhaps in part due to the 50th anniversary prompting a retrospective in the writing team. As the canard goes, we know it’s a compromise because no-one’s happy with it. While the old-school influence is minimised and largely compartmentalised to the return of an old car, that it’s there at all feels retrograde. This film, and the others of the Craig era, are orders of magnitude more interesting when looking forward, rather than over its shoulder. I’m much more involved in the film when Bond’s silently questioning his own abilities than I am when someone’s trying to drop a train on him, again by methods best explained by wizardry.

For all that, these moments are exactly that – moments in a film where the vast bulk of the drama and the engagement comes from a clutch of great performances, and believable, well conceived character motivations and obstacles. It’s at its best when it’s down and dirty, however even there it’s not perfect. Silva’s grudge and motivation are solid, but his methods seem to change based on the demands of movie pacing rather than anything born out of a logical progression of his path of rage. There’s nothing too egregious in there, but it takes enough of the shine off to put paid to any “year’s best” talk from this neck of the woods.

The events of the finale provide a tremendous opportunity for moving Bond forward as a character, although the tone of the de-brief sounds, to me at least, as though the next film could see him teaming up with Batman. Bond 24 can zig, or it can zag – I’d be quite interested in seeing either direction, but if it keeps trying to go two opposing directions simultaneously it’s in danger of tearing itself apart. I could also do without digging up any more artefacts from the previous films – this franchise is chronologically messy and ambiguous at the best of times, and it’s now almost in danger of becoming a temporal paradox. And the other Doctor will tell you that those ain’t a barrel of laughs.

With all that pontificating in mind, it’s worth pointing out that these are concerns for discussing over a glass of port in the drawing room post-viewing. In the dark of the matinee, Skyfall‘s a damnably entertaining film. Discussing minor quibbles and its meaning to the franchise as a whole is more interesting to write about than simply telling you that it’s a hell of a lot of fun, and that you should see it immediately. That said, Skyfall is a hell of a lot of fun, and you should see it immediately.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

It’s a quirky oddball indy comedy time featuring a damaged loser – must be time to bring out Paul Dano. In Ruby Sparks, Dano plays the role of Calvin Weir-Fields, an acclaimed author of a startling debut novel that he’s been unable to follow up on, years later. Plagued with insecurities from this, the death of his father and break-up of his relationship, he’s a rather feeble mess.

On orders from his therapist, Calvin’s tasked with an exercise to write down a short description of an attractive young woman who appeared in a dream. This seems to open a floodgate, and an entire character history of Ruby Sparks, in this case rather literally Calvin’s dream woman issues forth from his typewriter. Everyone is pleased.

Calvin is rather less pleased when Ruby (Zoe Kazan, also the writer of this film) appears in his apartment. Calvin rather understandably thinks he’s going insane, but it turns out that everyone including his rather more balanced brother Harry (Chris Messina) can see Ruby as well, and a little experimentation proves that adding to Calvin’s document adds to Ruby’s character and personality. Calvin swears Harry to secrecy and locks Ruby’s character document away, never to change it again, and live happily ever after with Ruby.

This would make for a dull film, I suppose, so it throws a few spanners into the works when the reality of relationships intrudes on the fantasy, in ways that aren’t a million miles away from the usual foibles that you’d find in a rom-com, although there’s always an additional temptation in this set up to, well, write your way out of any problem that comes along.

As it happens, between the temptation of the above and the obvious weirdness of living with a manifested figment of your imagination puts enough stress on the relationship to move things into a fairly dark place, and if I’ve one overarching problem with the film it’s that it can’t quite sustain the tonal shifts it attempts. The moves from light to dark and eventually back again are just a little too far outwith the established characterisation to flow naturally, and it can feel a little forced in order to move on the plot, or perhaps an attempt at searching for a greater theme that’s never made fully apparent.

That, however, is damn near the only negative I can level against the film. Dano and Kazan make the most of Kazan’s script, bouncing off each other well with some great lines and, especially early on, great reaction shots. The supporting cast is fabulous, featuring the likes of Elliot Gould, Steve Coogan, Antonio Bandera and Annette Benning, all of whom add to the texture of the piece.

Direction from Little Miss Sunshine helmers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris is assured and well paced, and it feels like it shares a lot of the same D.N.A. as their last film. Which is certainly no bad thing, given how enjoyable I find Little Miss Sunshine.

It is, I suppose, a film slanted a little too far towards the kooky end of the spectrum to achieve mass market acceptance, but if your taste in light-hearted comedy veers off towards the eclectic you’ll find there’s a great deal to like in Ruby Sparks.