Category / American Cinema

by hutchwp

Big Hero 6 (Don Hall and Chris Williams, 2014)

As the first Disney-animated motion picture based on Marvel IP, Big Hero 6 was always going to be carefully scrutinised by both extremes of the target audience. At one end you have the die-hard Marvel comics fans, keen to see their beloved heroes done justice on the big screen. At the other end you’ve got fans of Walt Disney Studios, worried that hot on the heels of Frozen, Tangled and Princess and the Frog, Big Hero 6 might not be for them [1].

For the uninitiated (you mean you never read the comics!?), the story focuses on 12-year-old parentless robotics genius Hiro, who is being looked after by his aunt, along with his older brother and sort-of-guardian Tadashi, who also studies robotics at the local university. When further tragedy strikes through the death of his brother, he is left to pick up the pieces with the help of his brother’s greatest work – healthcare-robot Baymax. Banding together with Tadashi’s fellow student friends, Hiro goes on an adventure of vengeance and self-development as he finds taking matters into your own hands can lead to some shocking revelations.

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So the first thing to clarify is that the Big Hero 6 comics were never very popular. Very few people had heard of them before the film was announced, sparking a huge clamber across the internet to find the comics, read them, then form an opinion on why Disney was going to ruin them. They weren’t completely unknown, but they were nowhere near as popular as, say, Spider-man or X-Men. It was interesting to see the negative reaction the series got when it was announced. It’s amazing how many experts on everything we see now that people can form their arguments in one window whilst Google is open in another. I was one of the people who bought post-announcement – I managed to pick up all five of the 2008 comics and I read straight away (the original three-part series was by then already prohibitively expensive, much like the five-parter is now). They were obviously aimed at children, but were reasonably fun and easy to read. I thought they were a good choice for Disney to tackle, with plenty of characters and merchandising opportunities.

Secondly, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the recent Marvel Animation films, but they are by-and-large terrible. I picked up the Ultimate Avengers steelbook about a year ago and watched one of the films, but couldn’t get through the second. The animation is really poor and the voice acting is clumsy and difficult to listen to. So if you’re a Marvel fanboy and want to square on an animated film that doesn’t do your source material justice, you should start there.

Finally, the recent films have been very successful, and I’m sure Frozen’s enduring popularity caused a delay to the release of Big Hero 6. I mean, it’s now on the West End in sing-along form! They just play the film on loop there all day. It has been out for 18 months! Princess and the Frog and Tangled were very successful too. But so was Wreck It Ralph, and that definitely wasn’t aimed at the female market. Neither was Bolt (directed by Chris Williams, by the way). Nor were half of the Pixar releases. Or, say, How to Train Your Dragon or Despicable Me. What I’m saying is – who knows what is going to capture the imagination of the children. Probably the main thing to go for is a great storyline, great characters and some top-drawer visuals. You get all three in abundance here.

I think the animation is the really mind-blowing element of a film that scores highly across the board. It’s fast-paced without ever feeling like it’s trying to lose you in action. The detail given to the plethora of uniquely designed characters is notable, too, and this serves to make each character feel worthy of your investment. If they’re going to spend that long making Hiro’s hair look so awesome, he must deserve a bit of attention on an emotional level too.

The storyline, to be fair, isn’t particularly original. I didn’t feel it was too detrimental overall. Its target audience is definitely under 12 years of age, and it was pitched perfectly.

There was, of course, a post-credits sequence that gave us some juicy details and opened the door to a sequel. I really hope this becomes a reality. I’m sure there are plenty more storylines to be told about these characters yet.

Big Hero 6 is out in cinemas in the UK now, and it has also just this week been released on Blu-ray and DVD in USA. If you’re quick and keen, you could buy the 3D Blu-ray steelbook from Zavvi.

[1] Anatomy of an unprofessional reviewer – I’ve deliberately put in several sweeping and largely incorrect statements in the first paragraph to allow me to argue against them later in the review. Oh how clever I am.

by hutchwp

Ace In The Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951)

Billy Wilder’s 1951 film Ace In The Hole (also known as “The Big Carnival”) was a commercial and critical failure on release, despite the big names attached to it. The pairing of Billy Wilder – who was riding a wave of momentum on the back of his Oscar success with Sunset Boulevard a year earlier – with big name Kirk Douglas meant that its lack of success was doubtless a huge disappointment and an even bigger surprise for Paramount Pictures, who lost some $600k on the project (a huge amount at the time). It has taken over sixty years for the general public to realise how good it really was, and thankfully it has enjoyed a Criterion release in the USA, followed by a Masters of Cinema mirror-release in the UK.

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The story concerns Chuck Tatem (Douglas), who is a disgraced newspaper journalist. Having been employed and subsequently fired by some of the biggest papers in the USA, he has arrived in New Mexico to seek employment at small-time and small-minded local newspaper The Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin. Determined to sit out the job and wait for his big opportunity, he waits longer than expected before a chance occurrence on the way to a rattle-snake drive leaves him at the mouth of a derelict Kentucky cave, which has collapsed and trapped a local man Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) under some rocks. Whilst his wife Lorraine Minosa (Jan Sterling) awaits the news of her husband from the outside, Tatem sees a golden opportunity to spin the story out and build the small story into a media frenzy. But as time progresses, the carefully balanced façade Tatem has created becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, with potentially tragic consequences.

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One thing that struck me about the storyline was the similarities between that and recent Jake Gyllenhaal film Nightcrawler – another film about a journalist taking things too far as his morals go out of the window. Whilst clearly very different films when watched without context today, it’s obvious that they both set out to shock in their respective cinematic climates. In Ace In The Hole, Tatum’s actions are clearly despicable, though the film was censored to ensure the audience saw no collusion with the sheriff, and also to give the audience closure on Tatem getting retribution of his actions. Fast forward over 60 years and actually Gyllenhaal’s character didn’t get any just-desserts in his role, committing heinous crimes and essentially getting away with it, opening up a debate amongst modern viewers about the relationships that television and written media have with politics and law and order, asking them who is really accountable for the way the media conducts itself in the modern world.

Ace in the Hole is just a genuinely excellent film. Douglas is a fantastic actor and that this hasn’t gone down as one of his great performances is a tragedy that can go someway to righting itself with these releases. It’s essentially a one-man show, just like the media circus in the film itself, but that is by no means a bad thing when the results are so effective.

Ace in the Hole is available on Masters of Cinema dual-format Blu-Ray and DVD now.

by hutchwp

White Dog (Samuel Fuller, 1982)

I have to say that White Dog was the first Masters of Cinema release I was genuinely disappointed with. The series, which is usually so full of care, character and attention to detail, falls short on a number of levels this time out.

Firstly, the film itself is very short, at just 90 minutes. The transfer is great, but I’m sure there was space on the disc for at least one other bonus feature. Unfortunately we get nothing – no trailer, no documentaries, no language options or subtitle options, sound only in 2.0 Digital Dolby, no discussion on why the film was banned, how the ban was lifted, how the restoration went. Not that I want to specifically compare Masters of Cinema to Criterion (though they often are), but they did get interviews with producer Jon Davison, co-writer Curtis Hanson, director Samuel Fuller’s widow Christa Lang-Fuller and dog trainer Karl Lewis Miller. The only bonus is the admittedly extensive booklet, which actually has similar contents to the Criterion release. Even the packaging on the MoC release looks lazy, and hardly goes any way to sell the film to anyone not familiar with either the film or the Blu-ray series.

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The film itself is actually really intriguing. The story opens with a car accident where a struggling young actress (Kristy McNichol) runs over a stray white Alsatian. She agrees to pay the veterinary bills even though she can scarcely afford to and when nobody comes forward to claim the dog she adopts it for herself. The dog saves her from a vicious attack from an intruder in her home, which tightens the bond between the girl and her new-found companion, but it soon turns out that the dog has been trained to attack black people – a dog trained by white racists. Not wanting to give her pet up, she seeks out expert animal trainer Keys (Paul Winfield), who becomes obsessed with retraining the dog’s behaviour in what will be one of the hardest projects he will ever take on.

McNichol and Winfield give assured performances in the lead roles and the dog is given real character by some clever angles and a slow reveal of his true colours. The climax to the film is exciting, though a flip in personality for McNichol’s lead character shortly before the conclusion of the story left me with mixed emotions on how I wanted it to pan out. The biggest highlight for me was the excellent score by Ennio Morricone. It’s probably not worth a purchase just for this.

White Dog would doubtless been forgotten due to lack of interest but for the fact it was banned for so long. Another non-victory for the censors then, but no great reward for the patient film lovers that have waited three decades to see the film.

White Dog is available on Masters of Cinema dual-format Blu-ray and DVD now.

by hutchwp

A Most Violent Year (J. C. Chandor, 2014)

J. C. Chandor’s crime drama A Most Violent Year is a well produced piece of cinema that tells an interesting story in a solid manner. However, after sitting through over two hours of its mid-paced plot development, it failed to wow me.

The film stars Oscar Isaac as Abel Morales, the hard-working owner of Standard Oil, and Jessica Chastain as Abel’s wife Anna, with supporting roles from Alessandro Nivola, David Oyelowo, Albert Brooks, Elyes Gabel and Catalina Sandino Moreno. It covers a short but crucial period in Abel’s career as he battles against police and corruption to pull of a deal that will see his small company become a big player in 1981 New York’s oil and gas buying and selling industry.

Isaac looks uncannily like a young Al Pacino in his lead performance, and that may accidentally be to the film’s detriment. Essentially, what we aren’t going to get from this quite understated film is a shot of Isaac gunning down thugs and gangsters from a pile of bank notes and drugs, although the tone of the film could easily have ramped up to this had they wanted to go there. It’s a serious story that didn’t need to fall into some over-the-top cliches, and the film is better for it.

That said, when you’re watching such a long film you’d want slightly more to the plot than a seemingly nice but hard-working guy trying to pull off a financial transaction by going around and asking a few people nicely if they could lend him the money. It is executed very well, but the final product is a little underwhelming.

A Most Violent Year is out at cinemas now.

by hutchwp

Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, 2014)

In the history of cinema, there have been a small number of characters so full of evil they barely resemble human beings anymore. We’re talking Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched, Ian McDiarmid’s The Emporer. I think we can add another one to the list after seeing Whiplash.

J. K. Simmons’s portrayal of jazz conductor Terence Fletcher is absolutely remarkable and his Oscar nomination is fully deserved. Channelling his previous performance as newspaper owner Jameson in the 2002-2007 Spiderman trilogy but taking it to another level, removing the caricatured anger and replacing it with psychopathic traits of real malice, we are treated to a truly great cinematic performance.

The story charts 19-year-old Andrew Neimann (Miles Teller) as a first-year jazz student at the prestigious (and fictitious) Shaffer Conservatory music school. He lands a place in Fletcher’s jazz orchestra, an orchestra renowned for both the high performance standard and intense rehearsal conditions. Happy to meet the challenge, Neimann quickly realises he’s going to be pushed beyond the limits to achieve the thing that all aspiring musicians crave: perfection.

Teller’s performance is very assured, showing admiral talents in both his musicianship (he’s a self-taught rock drummer though had lessons to learn jazz drumming) and his portrayal of a young man trying to find the strength to pursue his dream and avoid a nervous breakdown. He has a bright future in the business, and this is an excellent way to announce yourself to the wider industry.

The film has come under criticism from avid fans of jazz for misrepresenting particular anecdotes used in the film and apparently poor musicianship from the lead characters. I’m no fan of jazz so I won’t comment on something I’m not confident on, but from my point of view the abilities of the performers was not something I felt was detrimental to the film at all. Indeed, it made me want to explore jazz a little more. But anyone can see this film is not about jazz. It’s about bullying, using jazz as a medium to tell the story. The jazz industry would do well to not underestimate the audience so much as to assume they wouldn’t get that.

I can’t recommend this enough to fans of great character portrayal. If Simmons isn’t awarded with an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor next month it will be the wrong decision.

Whiplash is on general release globally now.

by hutchwp

Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)

“Alright Mr DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up”.

What a line. It sums up perfectly the fragile mindset of one of the most brilliantly realised characters in cinematic history – Norma Desmond, portrayed by Gloria Swanson. It’s also memorable, quotable (and mis-quotable) and ironically very well delivered considering it is done so by a silent-era star playing a silent era star.

I’d been putting off seeing Sunset Boulevard for such a long time for two reasons. Firstly, I was sure I was going to love it so I wanted to savour the moment. Secondly, there is always a niggling feeling that I might not enjoy it as much as the hype suggested I would, so I was fearful I would be left disappointed. My experience was certainly very much in the former category.

The film opens with a classic film noir feel, a whodunnit of sorts. We are shown the ending at the start, with a convoy of police and news reporters converging on a mysterious man lying dead in the swimming pool of an unknown rich homeowner on Sunset Blvd. (as it is famously written in the film). We don’t know who this is or who owns the pool, but just as we start to ask ourselves that question, the narration continues and we rewind to six months earlier. From here we pick up the main thread of the film – a struggling screenwriter (Joe Gillis, portrayed by William Holden) is trying to write his breakthrough piece whilst avoiding the bailiffs threatening to take his car as payment for his debts. It is a standard but perfectly pitched opening gambit and it really pulled me in as a viewer. You can view this opening scene below:

As the film progresses into the central act, a series of coincidental events leads Gillis into the path of Desmond, a faded silent-era star who takes him under employment as the screenwriter of her comeback film. It is here that the film starts packing its biggest punches and thus I will stop commenting on the plot.

I found the way Wilder and Swanson dealt with the character of Norma Desmond absolutely mind-blowing. There is no detail lacking attention. She is filmed like a silent star. She is simply one of the greatest literary characters ever created. It’s a picture made for Gloria Swanson, with the role so ominously mirroring her real life. It is generally known that she was a hard-working and studious actress and she threw herself into this surprise return to leading actress status. She clearly knew the importance of this role and it shows in her detailed portrayal. It’s a performance that really deserves to be studied frame-by-frame. That is was completely shut out in the acting categories at the 23rd Academy Awards, is one of the greatest tragedies of the awards ceremony, though it faced tough competition from All About Eve and surprising competition from Born Yesterday,

That’s not to say it’s a one-person show. Eric von Stroheim, here playing Desmond’s butler, is also playing a character ominously similar to his real life scenario. A director in his own right, it was actually a film he directed that starred Gloria Swanson that ruined his career (1929’s Queen Kelly which, if you’re really keen, is shown briefly during Sunset Boulevard). Elsewhere, Buster Keaton and Cecil B. DeMille also have memorable appearances, as well as many other huge stars often mirroring their real life selves in one way or another.

The film has also been turned into a hugely successful musical at the hands of Don Black, Christopher Hampton and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Whilst this version really is a completely different take on an unlikely source for a musical, it has many merits and does it justice, though the popularity of Wilder’s film makes it a hard task to topple it as the ultimate telling of such an important story. You have to treat them as separate entities and I’m sure the aim of turning it into a musical wasn’t to attempt to overshadow the original.

I was blown away by this film and it’s one I will enjoy watching again in the near future, along with as many of Wilder’s films I can get my hands on.

Sunset Boulevard is available on Blu-ray now.

by hutchwp

Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2015)

Wow. I just left the cinema after watching Birdman and I was blown away. It’s easy to see why it has been so heavily rewarded in both the Golden Globes and BAFTA nominations, and I would be surprised if the Academy Awards doesn’t follow suit.

Michael Keaton plays Riggan Thomson, an ageing actor who has enjoyed massive cinematic success some twenty years prior portraying superhero Birdman. In a bid to reignite his waning career on a more critically reputable path, he is directing himself in the lead role of his own rewrite of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”. Also starring in it are Broadway newcomer Lesley (Naomi Watts), Riggan’s romantic-interest Laura (Andrea Riseborough) and late replacement actor and seat-filler Mike Shiner (Edward Norton in excellent form). Also in the mix is daughter Sam (Emma Stone) who is now working as Riggan’s P.A., and Zach Galifianakis as Brandon Vander Hey, Riggan’s lawyer.

It’s a film that’s hard to pigeonhole and I’m not sure I really want to. I’d hate to call it a comedy, only for someone to read this article and feel hard done by by the lack of belly laughs. Then again, it’s hardly a superhero film and you’d be bitterly underwhelmed should you think this is what you’ll be getting.

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One thing that will strike you when you watch it is the use of long single-shot scenes. Actually, the film is essentially edited to look like a complete one-shot, though there are some subtle cuts where scenes have been interlinked. Whilst this technique is something I favour (for a great example of this you should take a look at the excellent opening sequence of Orson Welles masterpiece “Touch of Evil”), it can also be used as a means to show off by a director. I’m a big fan of theatre, so since this film deals with the run up to the opening night of a play, on a basic level I can make a connection with the desire to not have a cut between scenes as they run into each other. That’s clearly not what the director is doing here though. For me, in fact, the purpose of these long takes is to build up the relentlessness of the pressure Riggan is under as portions of his life blur into one another and his less-than-clear thoughts are muddied by his unwanted past as a Hollywood superhero and furthermore by an unexpected pregnancy. It’s a really effective method of storytelling and they completely nail it.

I find the casting of Keaton in this role as a masterstroke of genius too. Whilst he was one of the first big-screen superheroes, his subsequent roles have never looked like troubling the box office as much as his turn in Tim Burton’s Batman, released in 1989. Only Christopher Reeve had been part of a bigger superhero success when he took on the role of Superman, and Keaton’s career trajectory ended up mirroring somewhat Reeve’s problematic career post-Kent. There have been a smattering of successes (Jackie Brown, Toy Story 3 and The Other Guys), but with this in mind I don’t think Birdman’s likeness to the 1989 Dark Knight is a coincidence. This all makes Keaton’s portrayal of a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown (or worse) all the more effective, as he struggles to find relevance amongst his peers. It is ironic that this film is doing exactly that for Keaton.

The real-life-to-character comparisons don’t stop with Keaton. Edward Norton’s Mike Shiner is a character whose talent is only marred by his reputation for being difficult to work with. It’s almost as if the Norton and the screenwriting team of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr. and Armando Bo are having a bit of a chuckle at our expense. Norton recently had another reflective statement when interviewed by NPR about his experience when pulling out of the Avengers series of films, which ironically was the reason he was able to schedule in this film (along with both Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel). Clearly the fear for him was that his life would be consumed by a cycle of filming and promoting, when he could instead be part of several films that are both critically successful and reputable. The feeling I got when watching Shiner develop as a character was they had written him as the person everyone thinks Norton is, rather than what he is really like. With both Norton and Keaton both seemingly playing characters criticising the downsides of the superhero film franchises they were involved with, I wonder how Emma Stone, and more so her boyfriend Andrew Garfield, feel about the underlying commentary.

I’m going to single out Zach Galifianakis’s performance as a highlight. People know him very well for his character Alan Garner in the Hangover trilogy, which he effectively reprised in Due Date and The Campaign, and I was a little sceptical of his casting here. Harking back to Keaton, this is Galifianakis shedding his skin as proving he can take of a serious role with great aplomb if given the chance. A great choice for him at this stage in his career.

Of course, this multilayered overthinking of all the characters is all well and good, but the film has to be good to justify it. Otherwise you end up with something like David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE, which I will go on record as saying is one of the worst films of all time. Fortunately it’s completely not the case with Birdman.There are some brilliant moments of hilarity in here, some surprising and well-handled special effects and a few intensely emotional back-and-forths from actors giving their everything to their art.

This is the first truly great film I’ve seen this year. I can’t recommend it enough.

Birman or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance is out now at cinemas across the UK.