Month: January 2017

La La Land

Director: Damien Chazelle (2017) BBFC cert: 12A

Be swept off your feet by this swooning romantic musical.

Unashamedly nostalgic for the music, movies, stars and Los Angeles of yesteryear, this fabulous fantasy is a sumptuous love letter to Hollywood’s golden age classics such as Singin’ In The Rain (1952) and An American In Paris (1951).

The ridiculously attractive Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling star in their third film together, and their irresistible chemistry continues to burn through the screen. While neither are great singers or dancers, the film doesn’t pretend they are, adding to the honesty and charm of their performances.

Their characters meet in a gridlocked highway, a metaphor for their lives going nowhere. As the traffic jam becomes a joyful dance number, it’s tempered with the sting of frustration, and the tone scene is set for the story to come.

Gosling plays Sebastian, a struggling jazz pianist with dreams of opening a jazz club. His life takes a left turn when he meets the aspiring actress, Mia. Between auditions she works as a coffee shop waitress at the Warner Brothers studio.

Matching her dance partner step for step but having the more difficult part of doing it backwards and in high heels, Stone offers astonishing levels of heartbreaking vulnerability.

Though Gosling’s talent means he’s far from just window dressing, Stone owns the film. As the pair follow their dreams, they discover compromises must be made when balancing art and commerce.

La La Land‘s deserved record breaking sweep of seven Golden Globe awards has seen bookies make it the favourite for this years top Oscars and its easy to see why.

This is a dreamy, delirious and delightful concoction of high stepping choreography and toe tapping compositions. It’s bursting with sexy energy, eye popping colour and soaring ambition.

Go ga ga for La La Land and shower yourself with tinsel town stardust.

★★★★★

@ChrisHunneysett

 

Silence

Director: Martin Scorsese (2017) BBFC cert: 15

 

Cleanse your spirit of festive excess with this raw religious historical drama.

Director Martin Scorsese’s last film was The Wolf Of Wall Street (2014), an unholy marathon of money,  booze, drugs and sex. I loved it. Now the veteran filmmaker is insisting we suffer penance  for enjoying his cinematic  sins, by making us watch this powerful portrait of pain and suffering.

We follow a seventeenth century devout Portuguese priest who smuggles himself into feudal Japan. Foreigners have been barred and converted Christians are being put to death in inventively gruesome ways.

Brit actor and former Spider-man star, Andrew Garfield is a revelation as Father Rodrigues, the Jesuit missionary. Sporting a runaway beard and raggedy clothes, his soul baring intensity carries the film as Rodrigues’ faith in God is put to the test.

Better known as Kylo Ren from the Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2016), Adam Driver demonstrates his elastic acting range as Rodrigues’ more cynical fellow priest, Father Garrpe.

Rodrigues is trying to discover the fate of his former mentor. Father Ferreira has been reported as renouncing his faith and taking a Japanese wife. As the missing priest, Liam Neeson is back to the form which saw him Oscar nominated for Schindler’s List (1993).

Twenty years in the planning  and filmed on location across harsh mountains, beaches and seas, this has been labour of love for Scorsese. And there’s no doubt the actors are suffering for his art. We see drownings, crucifixions and villagers being burnt alive. The very first scene features torture and heads on spikes.

With its heavy themes of faith, loyalty and guilt, traumatic scenes of execution and extensive use of subtitles, this is far from a multiplex crowd pleaser.

This is Scorsese’s homage to some of his favourite epics; the John Ford western The Searchers (1956), Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Ran (1985), and Francis Ford Coppola’s epic war movie Apocalypse Now (1979).

And by creating this intense masterpiece, Scorsese is elevated to cinema’s pantheon of directorial deities.

★★★★★

@ChrisHunneysett

Assassin’s Creed

Director: Justin Kurzel (2017) BBFC cert: 12A

With a recognisable brand, a built in fan base, a great cast and a serious budget, this could have been a fun action spectacular.

But even with its wretched history of adapting video game adaptions, it’s difficult to believe how brazenly Hollywood murder this one before your very eyes.

Michael Fassbender stars as Callum, a swaggering death row convict prisoner turned scientific guinea pig.

Marion Cotillard teams up with Fassbender for the second under Kurzel’s direction, after his version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (2015). The French actress plays Sophia, the chief of a mysterious foundation which has developed an machine for a covert purpose. Jeremy Irons plays Sophia’s father, and generates the films only laugh.

When Callum is plugged in to their experimental machine, his DNA accesses the memories of his fifteenth century ancestor, an assassin. He’s a medieval Jason Bourne (2016) who bounces across rooftops while juggling with a jelly-like plot – with predictably disastrous results.

Plus it’s a visual vomit of back lighting, lens flare and dust clouds, meaning the poor CGI action is hard to see.

Assassin’s Creed is a souped up sword and sci-fi version of The Da Vinci Code (2006), but lacking the necessary cloak and dagger.

★☆☆☆☆

@ChrisHunneysett

Ballerina

Director: Eric Summer, Eric Warin (2016) BBFC cert: U

This dancing twist on the Cinderella story tangos with the Strictly format, but fails to impress the judge, me.

Felicie is an eleven-year-old girl who dreams of becoming a ballerina. Escaping the orphanage for a prestigious dance school in Paris, she must survive several elimination rounds in order to audition for a role in The Nutcracker ballet.

Her main competition is a spoiled, rich girl with a murderously pushy showbiz mother. Among the other, crudely drawn characters, are a snaggletoothed hunchback and a limping cleaning lady.

It’s a French/Canadian production with Elle Fanning dropped in to voice the lead and add a light sprinkle of Hollywood sparkle.

The animation is mediocre, the humour is broad slapstick, and it has a relaxed attitude to its young heroine being at the sharp end of a love triangle.

Lagging in the wake of Moana, Disney’s forward looking and far superior recent offering, this seems strangely old fashioned.  And not just because it’s set in 1879.

Offering limited fun for dance-mad tweens, everyone else may find themselves wishing Ballerina would foxtrot off.

★★☆☆☆

@ChrisHunneysett

 

 

Passengers

Director:Morten Tyldum (2017) BBFC cert: 12A

Hollywoods hottest stars make cosmic love in this glossy sci-fi mystery romance.

On paper this looks like a winner: Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt are talented, attractive and likeable, with a strong record of blockbuster success. Director Morten Tyldum comes straight from the Oscar nominated hit, The Imitation Game (2014.)

The huge budget allows for top draw special effects. And in a change from cinemas littered with adaptations, reboots, sequels and remakes, Passengers has an original story.

A shame then, the film is such a morally dubious and often dull mess.

Pratt plays a mechanic called Jim, in suspended animation alongside 5000 others on an automated spaceship heading to colonise a new world. An asteroid storm causes his sleep pod to malfunction, and he awakes to find his journey still has about 90 years to go.

This opening is the strongest part of the film, and it’s no hardship spending time with Pratt as he explores the ship. There are some decent jokes here about corporate identity and status.

Jim spends a year slowly going stir crazy with only an android barman for company. It’s played by the brilliant, movie stealing talent of Michael Sheen. Wandering through the ship, Jim falls in love with Jennifer Lawrence’s sleeping beauty, called Aurora.

Cyberstalking Aurora by accessing the ships files, Jim also holds vigils next to her glass pod before deciding to wake her up, knowing she will not survive the voyage.

He blames the ship and the film refuses to condemn him for this selfish evil act, portraying it as an act of love. Then the script rewards Jim with some hot space nookie as she finds his goofy yet capable man-child irresistible. This is Stockholm syndrome in space.

Not that it excuses Jim’s behaviour, but Aurora turns out to be an irritating investigative journalist with daddy issues. She only really comes to life when she’s angry.

For the second week in a row following Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), the robot is the most sympathetic character.

The design and CGI are fabulous and there are interesting nods to Stanley Kubrick classics 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and The Shining (1980).

But the film abandons its early attempts at psychological horror to play the romcom card before becoming an action movie with some dull peril and explosions to bring the story to a close.

Being lost in space for ninety years together is the least this pair deserve. You have to feel sorry for the android though.

★★☆☆☆

@ChrisHunneysett

A Monster Calls

Director: (2016) BBFC cert: J. A. Bayona

This abominably heart breaking fable brings the new year roaring to life. It’s an exceptional mix of live action, awesome animation, CGI destruction and a very intimidating monster.

Lizzie is a single mother with a terminal disease, living with her quiet teenage son, Connor. They live in a modest house which backs onto a graveyard, home to a huge, ancient and knotty yew tree.

Felicity Jones shows far more range as Lizzie than she was able to in the recent humdrum Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). And fourteen year old Lewis MacDougal delivers a remarkable performance of devastating honesty which will leave you in tears.

An elegant Sigourney Weaver is tightly wound as Conor’s distraught grandmother. Even at sixty seven I’m not sure I’m ready for the kick ass star of Alien (1979) to be playing a grandmother.

Conor sees her as a wicked step mother figure and she is one of several possibilities for the monster of the title, until the real one is revealed.

After Conor experiences a series of violent incidents, the yew tree transforms into a fearsome monster, made more terrifying by Liam Neeson’s ferocious bass growl.

He’s a hard and abrasive creature who seems to have come directly from Arthurian legend. The monster tells Conor dark and morally complex fairytales full of murder and betrayal.

Beautifully and vividly animated, these fantastical elements are used to communicate emotional truths to Conor, forcing him to confront the biggest and meanest monster of all.

With warmth and charm to spare, it’s a moving and at times scarily exciting exploration of grief, guilt and love.

It’s based on the best selling children’s book by Patrick Ness and is the first great film of 2017, though perhaps a little scary for the very little ones.

Don’t wait for the monster to call on you, get to the cinema and pay him a visit.

★★★★★

@ChrisHunneysett

The Eagle Huntress

Director: Otto Bell (2016) BBFC cert: U

A teenage girl soars in this inspirational and jaw dropping documentary.

Thirteen year old Aisholpan is from the nomadic Kazakh tribes of Asia. She faces formidable obstacles as she trains to  become the first female to become an Eagle Hunter.

It’s a centuries old, male only occupation which involves stealing an eaglet from its eyrie and training it to hunt foxes. While on horseback. In the snow. In the mountains.

The schoolgirl is brave, determined, skilful, and modest as she climbs, rides, and practises. She does so without complaint, a smartphone or a social media account.

Competing in a tournament against seventy bemused and fearsome looking blokes, she  challenges tradition and ignorance.

It’s beautifully photographed, skilfully edited and brilliantly told. ‘You are awesome’ says her father on the eve of her first tournament. And she is.

★★★★★

@ChrisHunneysett