Change Your Image
gdg23
Reviews
The Father (2020)
Difficult to watch but exceptional
This film does an amazing job of giving an insight into the confusing world that a dementia sufferer inhabits. Memories of people, events and places lost or distorted and sometimes imagined; faces and names changing, time shifting.
Hopkins plays Anthony, a man struggling to make sense of what is happening to him. Visited by Anne (his daughter) who is trying to care for her father while holding her life together the story centres around their exchanges, difficult, scary, sometimes humourous, and for the greater part bewildering, we are given Anthony's version of reality to decipher.
What the film does so well is to bring some of that disorientation to the viewer, without becoming inaccessible. Hopkins does an astonishing job - but credit has to go to everyone involved, the entire cast, the direction, the writing, the music, and everything in-between.
The film's stage roots are evident in the simplicity of its location, set almost entirely in an apartment, and this is crucial in creating a feeling of claustrophobic, but also in letting us experience the life of the characters.
Never slipping into sentimentality, we are nevertheless taken on a bruising emotional journey, never 100% sure of what is real (which of course is the point) somehow I left the cinema feeling that I understood a whole lot more about the reality, and surrealities of life for a sufferer, which is an incredible achievement.
Dark (2017)
This will have you scratching your head, where did all that time go?
Firstly an admission, if the measure of a TV show is whether it gets you hooked or not then this one did a pretty good job. I'm still watching, now halfway through series 3 despite deciding some way through series 2 that this had run out of steam and storyline. However the enjoyment has now begun to drain rapidly which is a real shame.
As others have said, Dark initially bears a rather uncomfortable resemblance to Stranger Things, but mercifully with much less product placement. The ingredients are undeniably similar - small town, large shady organisation involved in secretive stuff, a group of kids, a disappearance, 80s references... you get the picture. It would be uncharitable though to write this off as a cheap copy, after a couple of episodes it develops nicely and if anything more interestingly than Stranger Things. It's also German so you get to choose from distracting dubbing, or distracting subtitles (unless you speak German of course). To be fair I barely notice the dubbing now.
To cut to the chase the story revolves around time travel and the complex outcomes of meddling in the past... or future... along with some more existential questions such as where is the past, present & future? I would argue that this is a subject that has been done to death, and I'm not convinced Dark really brings much new to the table. However it does work hard to maintain its integrity, and it does its best to drag you along into the web it creates, a web of differing pasts presents and futures for its characters. Whereas some shows seem to delight in obscuring storylines (seemingly sometimes to feign clever twists and turns when the bare bones are rather weak) Dark gives you a decent number of reminders as to who is who, and who is whose mother, and occasionally whether that mother is in fact the daughter of her own daughter (honestly)! I don't have a huge amount of patience for shows that expect you to map out family trees on your living room wall just to keep up, and Dark _just about_ stays the right side of that line. But this will definitely appeal most to those who love to track details and who are willing to immerse themselves fully in the experience. For my part I felt that by the series 2 the die was very much cast - characters travel between times, each with their own agendas, sometimes manipulating their younger selves or old friends into serving a purpose. And the show continues much in that vein, with occasional big reveals, but never anything conclusive, which successfully left me watching more just to see how things end up.
I think at this point - halfway through series 3 - the most striking thing is that for pretty much the entire show there has been virtually no change of tone. The actors display an absolutely minimal range of emotion, almost exclusively somewhere between upset & confused to silent & brooding, with a couple of menacing 'baddies' thrown in. It actually becomes pretty tiresome to watch. I guess in its defence the impending apocalypse isn't generally a subject with a great deal of humour.
So all in all, like a lot of the Netflix offerings, the production values are high, the acting is good (even if the actors are barely allowed to flex their acting muscles), the soundtrack and cinematography often excellent.... but eventually I was left feeling cold. It would be a fib to say it hasn't engaged me, it certainly managed that, but two series was plenty, now it just feels like they're wringing out the last few dollars. If I had a time machine I'd go back a month and tell my past self to turn the telly off and start on those online French lessons that I've been putting off for years.
Neighbors (2014)
laughably bad... but without the laughs
Holy mother of god this film is awful. I went with my eyes fully open, expecting a tasteless, crass assault on the senses, and I was in the mood for exactly that. Sometimes those kinds of movies are just what you want even if you come out after feeling like you should scrub yourself vigorously with bleach-soaked sandpaper and say a million hail mary's.
And this film delivers... half the package. It is crass and unnecessarily rude, chucking in a few c-words for shock value, a few boobs to keep the spotty teenagers (and spotty adults) happy, a bit of violence etc etc. But WHERE WERE THE FRIGGING LAUGHS? I chuckled about 3 times, and one of them was because I heard my mate laugh and assumed I had missed a joke (he was in fact, quite understandably, attempting to suffocate himself by ramming his head into his Pick N Mix).
There were a couple of promising moments in the opening scenes which I can't even remember now. If I had known that they were to be the only laughs in the entire film I would have made more of an effort to record them. As it was I blithely assumed that there would be more to come. In retrospect I blush at my naivety.
Millions of my brain cells short-circuited themselves just so that this utter toilet-juice could not be transmitted into my head. If you suffer from seizures/are prone to heart problems/or are at risk from having a stroke... do not worry, you are more likely to die from boredom/suicide as you watch this brain hemorrhage of a film.
Everything about it is annoying - the actors are annoying, the script is annoying, the product placement is annoying, the music, the plot (hahaha), the pacing, the *stupid* *unfunny* 'hilarious' to-and-fro's between Seth Rogen and Rosie Byrne, the sickly Hollywood moralising ... all *annoying*, and worse still sometimes just plain dull. How do you make a film of this genre *dull*, I mean at very least you expect it will tick along at a reasonable pace; even if it is depressingly badly done surely the loud noises and flashing lights will stimulate some part of your brain, yes? You would think so because you are a rational human being and someone has placed a product in front of your eyes that cost millions of dollars to produce; something that took months of writing, planning, acting (cough), editing, all done by *professional* film makers working for a major Hollywood film production company. But no. I have sat through more exciting and rewarding bowel-movements (by a huge margin, but then perhaps that's setting the bar a little high). You probably get the idea: I didn't like it.
I know I mentioned the 'comedy' 'back and forths' between Rogen and Byrne, but I feel it is necessary to clearly state that you will feel physically sick during these. They have attempted to make these exchanges appear spontaneous, as if the comic tension between the two of them was crackling and sparkling with such fury that the director just said 'hey you guys, you don't need a script, you don't need me, hell you just stand there and vomit me comedy gold'. Well they vomited... right over your clothes and in your hair and in your eyes. Like a children's birthday party where Uncle Bertie gave them all the lemonade and cake they could eat *before* he let them get on the bouncy castle.
I feel much better, thank you IMDb for allowing me to undergo this therapeutic experience.
Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013)
Better than expected
I wasn't expecting great things of this movie, how many times have fantastic TV characters hit the big screen only to lose everything that made them special? So after guzzling my own body weight in KFC deliciousness, and arming myself with a kilo of pick & mix I sat myself down and awaited the inevitable half hour or so of charitable, but rather forced laughter, followed by the hour of quiet dismay and regret at not having waited a couple of months to buy the DVD for 3quid.
But things began well... actually that's not true, things began badly as we were made to sit through 25 minutes of trailers for what looked like a selection of the very worst films ever made. And _then_ things improved. The opening credits are a gem, Alan is driving into Norwich, Roachford 'Cuddly Toy' (inspired selection!) on the stereo, mouthing the words with such conviction that I found myself almost joining in.
We are introduced to the new cut-throat profit-at-all-costs owners of Radio Norwich (now re-branded as Shape FM), Alan is oblivious to the threat the takeover poses to his own position, but other colleagues are feeling less secure. In particular graveyard shift DJ Pat Farrell fears for his job and convinces Alan to talk to the new owners in a bid to secure their futures. Alan eventually agrees, with the inevitable end result that, in a bid for self-preservation, he talks the owners into sacking Pat.
Pat reacts rather badly to his dismissal, and at the launch party for the new re-branded station takes the staff hostage. By a twist of fate Alan is outside at this point, but as the siege unfolds is asked by the police to go back into the building to aid communication with the raving Pat.
From here it pans out probably as you'd expect, but that's good news because by keeping it simple the writers concentrate on gags, and there are enough good ones to keep you chuckling all the way through. It's not all laugh out loud by any means, but there are enough solid laughs that you never feel like the movie is dying.
I guess it helped that I was on a sugar high for most of the film, and of course comedy can really depend on your mood. But for me I felt that most of the jokes worked. It's true that some worked better than others, but it was rare that I felt a big gag failed completely.
It also helps that some of the funniest moments come towards the end, in particular a Bin Laden line that made me laugh uncontrollably at the time, and even as I write this is making me chuckle.
I wouldn't describe this as a classic by any means, but I think it'd bear watching again. Who knows, I might even invest in the DVD after all... at the right price.
Only God Forgives (2013)
A Banquet of Bloody Meringue
To start with let me admit that, yes, I did see Drive, and no I haven't seen anything else by this director. Does that mean my opinion of this movie holds any less validity? Well i'll leave you to decide.
As many reviewers have said if you're expecting Drive 2 (which, for the record, I wasn't) then you will be very disappointed. 'Only God Forgives' is a journey into a world of violence and revenge, crime and punishment, power and powerlessness, teetering between reality and fantasy. Big, tasty subjects that have been quenching cinema-goers appetites for decades.
The story begins with the death of a prostitute, killed by one of two brothers who run boxing matches as a cover for a drug-smuggling operation in Bangkok. The prostitute's father avenges her, beating his daughter's murderer to death. This leads to the arrival of mother (Scott-Thomas) seeking revenge for the loss of her favourite son. Julian (Gosling) plays the largely silent, brooding 'other' brother who fails to kill the prostitute's father as instructed by mother-not-so-dearest. Undeterred she takes a hit out on the father, and so begins a chain of violence involving an otherworldly ex-police chief, his very sharp sword, and some eye-watering torture involving Chinese hairpins.
The visuals in this film match its themes in size and impact. Refn etches his heavily stylised Bangkok underworld onto our retinas; each scene is undeniably meticulously crafted, a lavish banquet of colour and sound. But I found my appetite curiously unsated. It was rather like being (slowly) served a delicious looking and smelling roast dinner, only to find that when I hungrily attacked the thick, juicy slices of lamb, it crumbled like meringue.
All style and no substance? I don't know if i'd go that far, but for me this film flatters to deceive. Certain elements felt rather self-consciously concocted, Julian's semi-sexual relationship with his mother for example, or the karaoke singing police chief; like a carefully staged, but not very convincing, Lynch tribute.
There is plenty of violence too, I don't have a particular problem with that but in many cases it felt unnecessary and gratuitous.
In the end then I was left hungry, it was like being served beef wellington without the beef (can you tell i'm hungry as I write this?), a rather hollow experience that promises much more. I guess you could argue that films that provoke such polar reactions as this one has are somehow by definition successful. But those of us who had to raid the fridge when we got home might disagree...
Lucky Number Slevin (2006)
Tries too hard
This is a film that has some style and isn't all bad by any means, but in the end it comes out looking like a mish mash of several Cohen Brothers films and The Usual Suspects. The cast do 'ok' but really everything about the film falls just short of being anywhere near that league.
The script is lively in places, but tedious and too 'clever' in others, and much the same could be said for the storyline. The direction and sets are sometimes impressive, but somehow fail to create any really convincing atmosphere or suspense.
I knew nothing about this film before watching it, but very early on its shortcomings were pretty clear. The 'tying up' of all the loose ends takes rather a long time, and doesn't leave enough mystery (and anyway by then none of it comes as any surprise).
Better than your average dumb shoot'em up, but in the end it's a pale imitation of much better films.
(Oh, and the plot is full of holes, but i'll be generous and say that most films of this type rely on a decent amount of disbelief suspension!)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Great film
Pitt is outstanding, as are so many of the cast. It's a slow paced film, not the shoot'em up that some might expect, but I was immersed from start to finish. Admittedly I was marvelling at how fantastic it looked playing the blu-ray on my new TV, but even so there was very little not to like.
I know nothing about the actual history of these events, or the book upon which the film is based, so I cannot comment on it's accuracy or otherwise. But it drew me in completely. It is suspenseful in a fairly understated way, Pitt is menacing but human; his idoliser, Robert Ford, is complex and tragic. The supporting cast all put in strong performances.
Despite the fact that the (near) ending is already known, when it comes, it is mesmeric.
Some reviewers have commented that it is too long, perhaps I can see that the section immediately after Jesse's death which briefly covers the rest of Robert Ford's life could have been omitted, but actually the film is about him as much as it is about Jesse, and I wanted to know his fate. I am glad it was there.
The camera work and direction are stunning.
See it! And if you have access to HD then you'll really appreciate it.
The Specialist (1994)
Appalling
It's pretty simple really, this is an appalling film, honestly just awful. But like so many other films that have virtually nothing going for them somehow it kept me watching. There are 3 caveats to that statement - firstly, it was on TV so I hadn't wasted any cash renting it out, secondly I didn't actually make it to the end, but if it hadn't been for an inconveniently placed ad break i'd probably have watched on, and thirdly I am mentally ill (or at least I must be for staying up late to watch this).
I don't know if this is due to my snazzy new TV but somehow it looked like it had been filmed on an HD home video camera. Perhaps the extra clarity of the screen just served to expose the awfulness of the cinematography. There were scenes, particularly one in a bar, that looked like they could have been straight out of Home & Away. Strangely though it wasn't even an HD broadcast, so it could really be that this film is, after all, that bad.
Anyway, there's not a huge amount to add to what has already been said, Stallone is just Stallone, as is Roberts (as in he's Roberts, not Stallone.. if you see what I mean). Steiger (head of the Leon family) is about as menacing as my mum. Woods hams it up quite well all things considered. Stone is awful, but in this company looks like she should be up for an Oscar, as should the loud shirt that is the recipient of the best line in the film when Woods comes out of a lift (you'll have to watch it just for that).
It's worth watching because it is sooooo bad, and you will laugh out loud many, many times, so on that basis I recommend this movie wholeheartedly (but still can't bring myself to give it more than 3/10).
The Deep Blue Sea (2011)
dull...
... and not only dull but really poorly acted. I haven't seen the play, and perhaps that might have added something to the experience, but if you're adapting a play for the big screen surely you can't rely on all of your audience having seen it.
And I find it hard to imagine that seeing the stage version would have really added anything to the film, except perhaps another layer of disappointment.
Why are we constantly bombarded with films about repressed Britain? Long silences, drifting camera pans, dreary music, dreary act-by-numbers performances. The key seems to be to find a depressing subject (normally failed romance/deprived ex-mining towns/alcoholism/drug addiction/AIDS (or, even better, all of the above)), make it more depressing by shoe-horning 'the war' in there somehow and off you go, have a few million quid and indulge yourself. The BFI need to wake up and show some innovation and bravery, we *must have* so much more talent to display than this.
So that was a general rant - a brief bit about this particular offering (I wont bother with the plot, other reviews cover that). Rachel Weiss and, well, pretty much the entire cast, are stilted and wooden beyond just 'acting' stilted and wooden. I'll grant you that the film is (at least partly) about repression of emotions but the performances are so devoid of life and energy as to make the viewer devoid of any emotional attachment to any of the characters. So when (after what seems like days of miserable 'not much going on') Ms Weiss is contemplating leaping in front of the Picadilly Line eastbound I found myself hoping someone would give her a shove and get it all over with. Unfortunately Aldwych station has been closed since 1994.
There are so few positives I find it hard to lighten up this review. It doesn't even seem to really have the courage of it's convictions, there's no feeling of 'well, I didn't get it but I can see that the cast and crew did', it just feels like a real waste of everyone's time (and unfortunately a waste of the ticket, kindly brought for me by a friend). I quite liked the chap who played her husband, I don't know why really, I think he was the only character who even came close to being humanm and you know, he just had one of those 'nice' faces! How we're supposed to believe that she ever married him is beyond me, but I guess that must be in the play so that's not the film's fault.
To be charitable it feels like a project that had good intentions but that somehow just didn't work. You can't really fault the actors when they have so little to work with, and the director must have been obsessing about the 'treatment' of the original play, rather than making something that was actually watchable.
Der Rote Baron (2008)
more dog's dinner than dog fight
The acting actually isn't terrible in this, and there are a couple of nice flight sequences (I know nothing about aviation, but it's amazing to see how different fighting must have been back then). But that's about the end of the interest unfortunately.
I'm sure the Red Baron has a very interesting story behind him but it seems like this film completely fails to tell it. There's an appalling contrived romance with a nurse, who seems to appear out of nowhere wherever he happens to be posted (as does the American character played by Fiennes), and the rest of the film drifts between scenes with little structure, or any sense of passing events/time, and certainly singularly fails to illustrate it's lack-of-plot with any insight into the wider context of the war itself.
Characters appear and disappear almost within a blink of the eye, when the Red Baron loses his close friend I was actually unsure as to who the character even was, let alone why he was so upset.
Of course films will never be 100% accurate or without added drama, but the script and plot are so poor that you're left wondering why they didn't just stick with the facts. It's sad that this wasn't a better film, I would have been interested to learn about this famous character, and the time in which he lived.
Another Year (2010)
brave but disappointing
I should say that i'm not a great fan of Mike Leigh so perhaps a Mike Leigh film was never going to be for me! And before anyone tells me that I can't handle 'gritty reality', or that I am a Devilish Hollywood-worshipper I can tell you that neither of those things is true. In fact the supposition that Mike Leigh's films are 'reality' any more than any of Disney's offerings is reality quite gets my goat (i'll rant about that a bit more in a minute).
However I had reasonably high hopes for this film from the reviews and trailers. In the end though I felt very disappointed.
I have read other reviewers saying how wonerfully 'real' the characters are, how this is a true reflection of 'reality' and 'real' life. Well I hate to say this but it's not real, it's a film, and if you look a little closer it actually isn't even good at being a film about 'reality'.
Far from being 'real' the characters are *incredibly* one-dimensional, and no character illustrates this more than the supposedly 'beautifully crafted' (to nick another reviewers words) character of Mary. 'Beautifully crafted'? No, no, no! Could someone please tell me a little more about Mary, other than that she is a sad drunk teetering on the edge of life? At what point in the film are we shown an inkling of the human inside/behind the awful blanket that is smothering this character? If Mary was at all 'crafted' it was done by a man with a big hammer and chisel who was in a rush to get out of the workshop.
I have known many people with *real* life-threatening problems, but they all have a person inside, we never meet Mary, not really. Instead Mary is just a sharp stick, a stereotype to please our expectations, the only reaction we can possibly have as we shuffle through the aisles with our half-eaten bags of m&m's is 'oh how tragic', 'oh wasn't Mary a terribly tragic person?' & 'oh it was so 'real', we should be nice to people who have problems'. I'm sorry, I don't buy it. Anyone who thinks that is 'real' is living in a different world to me, and I am glad I am not there.
What are we left with if it isn't 'gritty reality', well i'm afraid we are left with 'grim reality', the reality is that this film is a cheap trick, what we are spoon-fed is what we (sadly) think reality is all about. If you aren't willing to buy into this then you'll probably find yourself checking your watch as the minutes drag.
Does the fact that this film doesn't offer up anything 'real' matter? Do I even *want* to watch reality? Probably not in all honesty, so I am glad that there are film-makers out there to offer up meditations on life, i'm just sad that Mike Leigh's offering is so 2 dimensional.
So that's all the negative stuff out of the way. There were some positives. The film started well and to be fair I actually quite enjoyed the first half. I felt the actors put in some good performances and I wasn't too bothered by the slow pace of the 'action'. However by the second half I needed to believe in these characters, but with so little to believe in I was left feeling sadly empty.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
Benjamin Button reminds us all that Time is Precious
Perhaps the most overwhelming emotion I experienced during and after this film was that we have only so much time in which to enjoy life. Unfortunately this reminder of our mortality had nothing to do with having watched a deep, insightful, thought-provoking film, but instead was because I had just sat through over 2 and a half hours of really very dull movie.
I have nothing against slow films. I am not an action film junkie in any way and would rather enjoy a thoughtful experience at the cinema than some car-chase thriller with a generic plot/characters/dialogue/soundtrack. But The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was a big disappointment. In fact the only curious thing about it was that it ever made it into my local picturehouse cinema.
It did not strike me as a particularly original or clever concept, not that a film necessarily has to be either, but in this case at least a dose of one or the other would have made the experience more bearable. As it was I spent a good deal of the second half looking at my watch... which seemed to be going backwards. Unfortunately unlike Benjamin instead of feeling younger at the end I felt a good deal older than when I had taken my seat.
So I am writing this a long time after having watched it, but having seen that somehow it rated 8/10 on IMDb I felt duty bound to add my voice of discontent!