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Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Sunday, 20 June 2010
Icy disses The Collector - Vlog 02
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Having enjoyed recording my first vlog entry, I thought I'd do another one. Where I did comics in 01, I'm now doing films - specifically The Collector.
Monday, 14 June 2010
The Killer Inside Me - A Review, Not A Confession
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I'm not entirely sure why, but I've wanted to see The Killer Inside Me for a few weeks now. I saw it had garnered a few decent reviews, and seeing as how serial killer films are something of a specialty for me (my undergraduate dissertation compared three of Hitchcock's serial killers with that of contemporary cinema), I like to see them when I can. The only problem is, having forced myself to sit through a hundred and nine minutes of dross, all I want to do is hurl more than harsh language at Hollywood.
There are a myriad of ways to approach the serial killer film. You've got your slashers (or post-slasher...or even neo-slasher), your exploitation flicks, your psychoanalytical films...amazingly, The Killer Inside Me fails on every count. Even a Eurovision voting card for the UK gets more points than this. Casey Affleck's poor imitation of an upstanding Texas gent grates at every turn, and any film that stars both Kate Hudson AND Jessica Alba should already be on my avoid list. Why? Well they're two actresses who are to serious acting what a cheese grater is to a balloon.
The Killer Inside Me, for those of you who might vaguely care (and I pray you don't), is set in the 1950s, in a small west Texas town. Casey Affleck plays Lou Ford, the unassuming deputy sheriff. Generically Southern and almost instantly forgettable, Ford has no sooner started batting those baby blues of his, than he's visiting the local prostitute, Joyce (Alba) and beating her up. Most women would go, "Er, excuse me, get out of my house, you filthy arsehole" after being violently assaulted, but not Joyce. They embark on an illicit affair, with Joyce (almost painfully predictably) putting pressure on Lou to leave town with her. Elmer, the son of a wealthy local construction tycoon, is in love with Joyce, and when his father offers to pay Joyce off, they initially plan to steal the money and go. Lou decides he'd be better off killing both of them, and just continuing about his business. Why? Because he's "crazy". Cue the eye rolling. Apparently, doing something for no logical reason constitutes madness. If Spock's reaction is anything to go by, then Captain Kirk must be the biggest psychopath in pop culture.
But I digress. Things go slightly awry, and Lou finds himself killing people to cover up the fact that he's killing people. Trouble is, that's actually logical in a freaky kind of way, which just proves that Lou isn't as mad as he thinks he is. With the local DA Howard Hendricks (Simon Baker, better known as TV's The Mentalist) breathing down his neck, Lou starts to unravel. Or does he? Well no, not really. He just gets even more dull. Director Michael Winterbottom seems be aiming for the kind of 'quietly understated' pace that gets described as 'magnetic' or 'powerful', only to have it end up 'dull' and 'unappealing'. The film coasts along to its inevitable conclusion, and by the time they reach the 'dramatic finale', you'll be left wondering who got turned down for the role for Casey Affleck to end up with it. Winterbottom meanders along, punctuating the boredom with tedious scenes of women being beaten up. Given we never see Lou's violence towards males, one can't help wondering if this says more about the director than his main character.
Having the serial killer himself narrate the film is nothing new. I'd argue that the best example is still American Psycho, in the way Mary Harron manages to blend graphic violence with understated menace. You couldn't make the film without Patrick Bateman's narration. His inner monologues about business cards, hair cuts and skincare routines underscore the senseless nature of his savagery, contrasting his superficial obsession with his total lack of human emotion (except, as he admits himself, for 'greed, envy and disgust'). This link between the killer and the audience was originally intended to be a way of forcing us to rethink cinematic boundaries, although now it has become a 'controversial' tactic aimed at putting the viewer inside the serial killer's world, forcing a collusion with him. The problem is, this will never be anywhere near as shocking as the POV shots in Peeping Tom, and that came out in 1959!
As it stands, serial killers may be attractive (Patrick Bateman), charming (Hannibal Lecter), unknowable (Michael Myers) or even funny (Freddie Krueger) but they CANNOT be dull. Unfortunately, Lou Ford is exactly that. I have a feeling Affleck is aiming for 'the boy next door gone bad', but no one will ever be able to nail that quite as well as one of cinema's most iconic serial killers - Norman Bates. We didn't need any narration, or POV shots. We just needed those subtle facial tics, that nervous behaviour around Marion, his calm appearance in the aftermath of the murders - and the final reveal. Nothing fancy, just solid storytelling.
I conclude this rant/review with one very simple thought. If you really want to watch a serial killer movie that is both well-made and quietly understated, you could do no better than seeking out Mr Brooks. Ignore the fact it stars Kevin Costner - it's everything The Killer Inside Me wishes it was, but sorely isn't.
There are a myriad of ways to approach the serial killer film. You've got your slashers (or post-slasher...or even neo-slasher), your exploitation flicks, your psychoanalytical films...amazingly, The Killer Inside Me fails on every count. Even a Eurovision voting card for the UK gets more points than this. Casey Affleck's poor imitation of an upstanding Texas gent grates at every turn, and any film that stars both Kate Hudson AND Jessica Alba should already be on my avoid list. Why? Well they're two actresses who are to serious acting what a cheese grater is to a balloon.
The Killer Inside Me, for those of you who might vaguely care (and I pray you don't), is set in the 1950s, in a small west Texas town. Casey Affleck plays Lou Ford, the unassuming deputy sheriff. Generically Southern and almost instantly forgettable, Ford has no sooner started batting those baby blues of his, than he's visiting the local prostitute, Joyce (Alba) and beating her up. Most women would go, "Er, excuse me, get out of my house, you filthy arsehole" after being violently assaulted, but not Joyce. They embark on an illicit affair, with Joyce (almost painfully predictably) putting pressure on Lou to leave town with her. Elmer, the son of a wealthy local construction tycoon, is in love with Joyce, and when his father offers to pay Joyce off, they initially plan to steal the money and go. Lou decides he'd be better off killing both of them, and just continuing about his business. Why? Because he's "crazy". Cue the eye rolling. Apparently, doing something for no logical reason constitutes madness. If Spock's reaction is anything to go by, then Captain Kirk must be the biggest psychopath in pop culture.
But I digress. Things go slightly awry, and Lou finds himself killing people to cover up the fact that he's killing people. Trouble is, that's actually logical in a freaky kind of way, which just proves that Lou isn't as mad as he thinks he is. With the local DA Howard Hendricks (Simon Baker, better known as TV's The Mentalist) breathing down his neck, Lou starts to unravel. Or does he? Well no, not really. He just gets even more dull. Director Michael Winterbottom seems be aiming for the kind of 'quietly understated' pace that gets described as 'magnetic' or 'powerful', only to have it end up 'dull' and 'unappealing'. The film coasts along to its inevitable conclusion, and by the time they reach the 'dramatic finale', you'll be left wondering who got turned down for the role for Casey Affleck to end up with it. Winterbottom meanders along, punctuating the boredom with tedious scenes of women being beaten up. Given we never see Lou's violence towards males, one can't help wondering if this says more about the director than his main character.
Having the serial killer himself narrate the film is nothing new. I'd argue that the best example is still American Psycho, in the way Mary Harron manages to blend graphic violence with understated menace. You couldn't make the film without Patrick Bateman's narration. His inner monologues about business cards, hair cuts and skincare routines underscore the senseless nature of his savagery, contrasting his superficial obsession with his total lack of human emotion (except, as he admits himself, for 'greed, envy and disgust'). This link between the killer and the audience was originally intended to be a way of forcing us to rethink cinematic boundaries, although now it has become a 'controversial' tactic aimed at putting the viewer inside the serial killer's world, forcing a collusion with him. The problem is, this will never be anywhere near as shocking as the POV shots in Peeping Tom, and that came out in 1959!
As it stands, serial killers may be attractive (Patrick Bateman), charming (Hannibal Lecter), unknowable (Michael Myers) or even funny (Freddie Krueger) but they CANNOT be dull. Unfortunately, Lou Ford is exactly that. I have a feeling Affleck is aiming for 'the boy next door gone bad', but no one will ever be able to nail that quite as well as one of cinema's most iconic serial killers - Norman Bates. We didn't need any narration, or POV shots. We just needed those subtle facial tics, that nervous behaviour around Marion, his calm appearance in the aftermath of the murders - and the final reveal. Nothing fancy, just solid storytelling.
I conclude this rant/review with one very simple thought. If you really want to watch a serial killer movie that is both well-made and quietly understated, you could do no better than seeking out Mr Brooks. Ignore the fact it stars Kevin Costner - it's everything The Killer Inside Me wishes it was, but sorely isn't.
Thursday, 24 September 2009
Dorian Gray
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I went to see the turgid, unmitigated disaster of a movie that was Dorian Gray on Sunday, and it's taken until now for me to feel sufficiently in possession of my credulity to compose an entry about it. I know, you may be (logically) wondering why I keep discussing films in a blog supposedly devoted to my writing career. Firstly, I have two degrees in film and it's a great passion of mine, and secondly, I believe that film faces the same technical problems as writing, in terms of pacing, structure, dialogue etc.
Now, Dorian Gray is somewhat unsurprisingly based on the genius work by Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The original novel is an absolute delight, whereas the movie is a lacklustre blight on the face of the film industry. I'm often somewhat skeptical of adaptations, as few of them manage to retain the subtle subtexts and wide-reaching nuances of the original source, and I should have guessed by the trailer that the makers of this limp movie would have managed to strip everything out bar the basic plot, and refuse to replace it with anything that might go over the heads of the target teenage audience.
The novel is a meditation on the nature of immortality, of truth versus beauty, of the strength of morality and conscience when faced with the temptations of debauchery, but the film chooses to dispense with these to promote the message, "Wouldn't it be fun if you could do what you want?" Responsibility and principles are jettisoned for a selfish gratification of the ego. It's hardly unsurprising in our youth-obsessed times, when people inject botulism into themselves in an attempt to stave off the ageing process, that the film places heavy emphasis on the value and virtue of youth. It ties in nicely with that other cinematic debacle, Twilight, in which vampires stay forever young and beautiful.
It's simply a bad, bad film. The costumes seem somewhat wrong, and I cannot quite understand why the stylist decided to give Sibyl long red hair, when such an appearance in Victorian art would denote the woman as a prostitute, or 'fallen woman'. Victorian art was extremely preoccupied with the idea of the 'angel of the hearth', of the quiet, obedient wife who would run the household for her husband without complaint. Naturally this image appealed to the highly repressed Victorian consciousness, yet man was still drawn to her sinful sister, the harlot. This scarlet-haired temptress allowed men to be experienced before marriage, and represented those who had fallen from grace and would usually end up falling off a bridge into the murky waters of the Thames. Indeed, this is the same fate that befalls Sibyl, despite the fact that she is intended to be a shining beacon of virtue and innocence in Dorian's increasingly dark world.
Part of me wonders that Sibyl's hair is inspired by the fact that when Dorian first sees her, she is playing Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet, although her appearance owes more to Ophelia in John Everett Millais' painting of the same name. Ophelia drowns herself, and Shakespeare hints that she does so as she is pregnant, and it's an eerie echo of the situation in which young Sibyl finds herself. I can understand the inclusion on the part of Mr Wilde, as he was clearly a genius, but I can't help feeling that any similarities featured by the filmmakers are completely accidental.
It is almost upsetting how easily the filmmakers tore the witty heart out of the novel, to replace it with a glossy absence of substance. Dorian's supposed debauchery seems tame compared to the goings on of most soap characters, and when we finally see the painting of Dorian in the final act, it looks more like Vigo from Ghostbusters II than a damning indictment of the havoc wrought upon a misguided man's soul. Where the book revealed the price to be paid for man's folly, the movie turns Dorian into a reckless pretty boy seemingly devoid of personality or charisma. Maybe if the filmmakers had taken a leaf from the diabolically bad League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and cast Stuart Townsend as Dorian (the only good thing about LOEG), then the film might have been saved. Otherwise, it's just a poor adaptation of an amazing book.
Buy the novel; ignore the movie.
Now, Dorian Gray is somewhat unsurprisingly based on the genius work by Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The original novel is an absolute delight, whereas the movie is a lacklustre blight on the face of the film industry. I'm often somewhat skeptical of adaptations, as few of them manage to retain the subtle subtexts and wide-reaching nuances of the original source, and I should have guessed by the trailer that the makers of this limp movie would have managed to strip everything out bar the basic plot, and refuse to replace it with anything that might go over the heads of the target teenage audience.
The novel is a meditation on the nature of immortality, of truth versus beauty, of the strength of morality and conscience when faced with the temptations of debauchery, but the film chooses to dispense with these to promote the message, "Wouldn't it be fun if you could do what you want?" Responsibility and principles are jettisoned for a selfish gratification of the ego. It's hardly unsurprising in our youth-obsessed times, when people inject botulism into themselves in an attempt to stave off the ageing process, that the film places heavy emphasis on the value and virtue of youth. It ties in nicely with that other cinematic debacle, Twilight, in which vampires stay forever young and beautiful.
It's simply a bad, bad film. The costumes seem somewhat wrong, and I cannot quite understand why the stylist decided to give Sibyl long red hair, when such an appearance in Victorian art would denote the woman as a prostitute, or 'fallen woman'. Victorian art was extremely preoccupied with the idea of the 'angel of the hearth', of the quiet, obedient wife who would run the household for her husband without complaint. Naturally this image appealed to the highly repressed Victorian consciousness, yet man was still drawn to her sinful sister, the harlot. This scarlet-haired temptress allowed men to be experienced before marriage, and represented those who had fallen from grace and would usually end up falling off a bridge into the murky waters of the Thames. Indeed, this is the same fate that befalls Sibyl, despite the fact that she is intended to be a shining beacon of virtue and innocence in Dorian's increasingly dark world.
Part of me wonders that Sibyl's hair is inspired by the fact that when Dorian first sees her, she is playing Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet, although her appearance owes more to Ophelia in John Everett Millais' painting of the same name. Ophelia drowns herself, and Shakespeare hints that she does so as she is pregnant, and it's an eerie echo of the situation in which young Sibyl finds herself. I can understand the inclusion on the part of Mr Wilde, as he was clearly a genius, but I can't help feeling that any similarities featured by the filmmakers are completely accidental.
It is almost upsetting how easily the filmmakers tore the witty heart out of the novel, to replace it with a glossy absence of substance. Dorian's supposed debauchery seems tame compared to the goings on of most soap characters, and when we finally see the painting of Dorian in the final act, it looks more like Vigo from Ghostbusters II than a damning indictment of the havoc wrought upon a misguided man's soul. Where the book revealed the price to be paid for man's folly, the movie turns Dorian into a reckless pretty boy seemingly devoid of personality or charisma. Maybe if the filmmakers had taken a leaf from the diabolically bad League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and cast Stuart Townsend as Dorian (the only good thing about LOEG), then the film might have been saved. Otherwise, it's just a poor adaptation of an amazing book.
Buy the novel; ignore the movie.
Thursday, 23 July 2009
Public Enemies
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So I went to see Public Enemies last night. I had high hopes; after all, I've yet to see a Johnny Depp film I didn't enjoy (in my universe, the two Pirates sequels don't exist). Oh, Hollywood, how you continue to let me down. Was it not enough that you buried the Indiana Jones franchise last year? You didn't twist the knife with all the "hilarious" family sequences in Transformers 2?
Kudos to them for the casting of Depp as bank robber John Dillinger. I don't know much about the man in real life, but Depp portrayed him as a charming Robin Hood type, robbing banks but never their customers, ever mindful of his adoring public. Unlike his somewhat violent and thuggish associates, Dillinger would prefer to use the fear engendered by his various machine guns and pistols, as opposed to the bullets they fire.
But exactly what was Michael Mann thinking in casting Christian "I haven't opened my mouth properly to speak since 1999" Bale as Melvin Purvis? I used to simply adore Bale back in his American Psycho days, but since then, he's lost some of his sheen. The fact he seems to play the same character over and over doesn't help, and in this case, it feels like he's reprising his 3:10 to Yuma role, in which he was out-classed and out-acted by Russell Crowe (there's a sentence I never thought I'd find myself typing). In that film, he played the reluctant lawman escorting Crowe to prison, while in this film, he plays a reluctant agent in the fledgling FBI attempting to get Dillinger into prison. In both cases, his co-stars outshone him in every way, portraying their criminal characters as lovable rogues. Bale, on the other hand, portrays his with all the charisma of a mouldy Stilton.
My other two problems were the clunky narrative (please, leave the 'skipping about with little exposition to explain what's going on' to Quentin Tarantino) and the constant shaky cam. It does not make a film feel more realistic - if I were running in real life, my brain would automatically compensate for the fact that the world around me would appear to be jumping about. In a film, this doesn't happen, so instead it simply looks like you dropped a film camera into the monkey enclosure at London Zoo and asked them to tape something.
And it's so long. My right knee actually seized solid with the herculean effort of sitting still for all that time. I mightn't have minded if I'd enjoyed it, but all I could think was "Nice to see Depp taking on a proper role, instead of his 'Woohoo, look at me, I'm CRAZY!' casting of late, but pity about everyone else"...
Kudos to them for the casting of Depp as bank robber John Dillinger. I don't know much about the man in real life, but Depp portrayed him as a charming Robin Hood type, robbing banks but never their customers, ever mindful of his adoring public. Unlike his somewhat violent and thuggish associates, Dillinger would prefer to use the fear engendered by his various machine guns and pistols, as opposed to the bullets they fire.
But exactly what was Michael Mann thinking in casting Christian "I haven't opened my mouth properly to speak since 1999" Bale as Melvin Purvis? I used to simply adore Bale back in his American Psycho days, but since then, he's lost some of his sheen. The fact he seems to play the same character over and over doesn't help, and in this case, it feels like he's reprising his 3:10 to Yuma role, in which he was out-classed and out-acted by Russell Crowe (there's a sentence I never thought I'd find myself typing). In that film, he played the reluctant lawman escorting Crowe to prison, while in this film, he plays a reluctant agent in the fledgling FBI attempting to get Dillinger into prison. In both cases, his co-stars outshone him in every way, portraying their criminal characters as lovable rogues. Bale, on the other hand, portrays his with all the charisma of a mouldy Stilton.
My other two problems were the clunky narrative (please, leave the 'skipping about with little exposition to explain what's going on' to Quentin Tarantino) and the constant shaky cam. It does not make a film feel more realistic - if I were running in real life, my brain would automatically compensate for the fact that the world around me would appear to be jumping about. In a film, this doesn't happen, so instead it simply looks like you dropped a film camera into the monkey enclosure at London Zoo and asked them to tape something.
And it's so long. My right knee actually seized solid with the herculean effort of sitting still for all that time. I mightn't have minded if I'd enjoyed it, but all I could think was "Nice to see Depp taking on a proper role, instead of his 'Woohoo, look at me, I'm CRAZY!' casting of late, but pity about everyone else"...
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