"Te3n" (Guardian 10/06/16)

Te3n ***

Dir: Ribhu Dasgupta. With: Amitabh Bachchan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Vidya Balan. 136 mins. Cert: 15

Riffing, Se7en-like, on the Hindi word for three (“theen”), this remake of 2013’s Korean thriller Montage splices together a disparate trio hunting a long-gone girl: grieving grandfather Amitabh Bachchan, guilt-racked priest Nawazuddin Siddiqui, no-nonsense cop Vidya Balan. We’re watching Bollywood respond to grimtertainments like True Detective – hence director Ribhu Dasgupta’s lugubrious, lights-off aesthetic – while wondering whether Te3n has taken on too much baggage at once: the first half proceeds at such a crawl even the songs sound like somebody’s last gasp. Yet Dasgupta’s playing a reasonably intricate, long game. The pulse quickens with a mid-film ransom drop; skilled playing shepherds us through the twisty second hour. A touch tentative – the work of an industry straining to mature in line with its audience’s tastes – but creditably committed to a new realism: it’s a rare contemporary item to have licensed its sleuths to pursue their leads through Google, rather than the now-standard “FastFindz” or “Netlook”.

Te3n is now playing in cinemas nationwide. 

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office   

for the weekend of May 27-29, 2016:
   

1 (1) X-Men: Apocalypse (12A)
2 (new) Alice Through the Looking Glass (PG)
3 (2) The Angry Birds Movie (U)
4 (new) Money Monster (15)
5 (3) The Jungle Book (PG) **
6 (4) Captain America: Civil War (12A)
7 (5) Bad Neighbours 2 (15)
8 (new) Love & Friendship (U) ***
9 (9) Secret Cinema: 28 Days Later... (18) ****
10 (new) Minuscule: Valley of the Lost Ants (U)

(source: theguardian.com)

My top five:   

1. Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach [above]
2. The Measure of a Man
3. Holding the Man
4. Race
5. Only Yesterday


Top Ten DVD rentals:  

   

1 (3) Spotlight (15) ***
2 (1) Star Wars: The Force Awakens (12) **
3 (2) The Hateful Eight (18) **
4 (7) Dirty Grandpa (15)
5 (4) Bridge of Spies (12) *****
6 (6) Room (15) ****
7 (8) The Martian (12) ****
8 (5) SPECTRE (12) ***
9 (9) The Lady in the Van (12) ***
10 (10) The Intern (12)

(source: lovefilm.com)

                                   

My top five:  

1. The Club
2. Creed
3. Lawrence of Belgravia
4. Room
5. The Revenant


Top Ten Streaming:

1 (1) Spotlight (15) *** 
2 (new) Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach [above] (12A) ****
3 (3) The Assassin (15) ***
4 (new) Holding the Man (15) ***
5 (2) The Propaganda Game (15) ***
6 (4) Like You Mean It (15)
7 (7) The Wind That Shakes the Barley (15) ***
8 (6) Hitchcock/Truffaut (12) ****
9 (5) Black Mountain Poets (15) ***
10 (re) Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (18) ***

(source: BFI)

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:   

1. Wayne's World (Sunday, five, 3.45pm)
2. The Jungle Book (Sunday, C4, 5.05pm)
3. 12 Years a Slave (Saturday, C4, 9pm)
4. Die Hard with a Vengeance (Saturday, BBC1, 10.45pm)
5. Hue and Cry (Saturday, BBC2, 7.20am)

"Race" (Guardian 03/06/16)

Race ***

Dir: Stephen Hopkins. With: Stephan James, Jason Sudeikis, Jeremy Irons, William Hurt. 134 mins. Cert: PG

More marathon than sprint, Stephen Hopkins’ period biopic affords the Jesse Owens story – one of the greatest eff-yous ever recorded in competitive sports – a reverential, middle-of-the-pack treatment: stumbling exposition, grandstanding performers, a thousand yards of rousing speeches and music cues. It’s regrettably typical that Stephan James’ Jesse should be given a Caucasian interlocutor in coach Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis, reining in the smirks); and that his personal struggles are partially obscured by the negotiations of diplomat Jeremy Irons with a chilly Goebbels (Barnaby Metschurat) and saucy Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houten). Still, it raises its game – as drama, spectacle and camp – the closer it gets to the Olympic Stadium, where Hitler awaits, muttering darkly in the stands like a Voldemort in epaulettes. That it remains broadly watchable owes much to James’ lean, committed turn, but what’s around him often seems to be carving its lightning-bolt history not into stone, but easily digestible cheese.

Race is now playing in selected cinemas. 

"Me Before You" (Guardian 03/06/16)

Me Before You **

Dir: Thea Sharrock. With: Emilia Clarke, Sam Claflin, Janet McTeer, Charles Dance. 110 mins. Cert: 12A

Jojo Moyes’ adaptation of her own triple-hanky bestseller strives to integrate one trickier-than-usual plot point into its wipeclean romantic fantasyland. It’s doing disability in the age of Dignitas – granting unemployed kook Emilia Clarke a measure of upward mobility after she becomes carer to hunky quadriplegic Heathcliff Sam Claflin – albeit in comically maladroit fashion: an alternative title might be Two Left Feet. Transferring from theatre, director Thea Sharrock ramps up the property porn, while neglecting to fill this space with anything like recognisable human activity or emotion. Clarke, whose manically distracted smile suggests a dim eight-year-old, appears to require far closer supervision than her client ever does.

Me Before You is now playing in cinemas nationwide. 

From the archive: "The Wind That Shakes the Barley"

No-one should begrudge Ken Loach his Palme d'Or, but in truth - and despite its politics - The Wind That Shakes the Barley feels far less of a "Cannes film" than it does one of those nationalist epics that tends, whether in the form of a Braveheart or a Hero, the Korean film Brotherhood or its Thai equivalent Bang-Rajan, towards expensive commercial spectacle. The setting is Ireland as it was in the 1920s, under British occupation. Our nominal hero is Damien (Cillian Murphy), who ditches a promising career as a doctor, and tears up a one-way ticket to London, to enlist with the Irish Republican Army at a time when it was stepping up its resistance to the King's forces. The establishment of an Irish Free State is only months away, and with its arrival, the idealism of the Republican movement - an idealism Damien serves wholly to represent - will give way to the bloodshed and butchery that was, regrettably, to be the mark of the IRA in the decades to come.

As history, it's not subtle. The British, particularly in the early scenes, leap into the frame like Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition and begin kicking and punching anyone with Irish eyes, making it very easy for Damien to sign up for the cause. Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty have made life hard for themselves, not for the first time, in attempting to describe a period where the violence was retaliatory and disproportionate, literally out of hand: anybody with a strong attachment to their own fingernails will probably need to look away during one extended torture sequence. Yet arguably, this was no time or place for subtlety, or nuance. Loach's not dissimilar Land and Freedom stopped - in what now looks like its boldest move - for lengthy scenes of dialectics between its shootouts. Barley has but one comparable sequence, a courtroom squabble that hints at the bifurcating directions the IRA would take. Damien's brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney), the hardliner whose fingernails suffered so terribly, insists his followers reject the Republican leadership's rulings entirely, while the more moderate Don (Liam Cunningham) counsels they should work with the court.

Although the film conveys a vivid sense of how this one cell of resistance operated, there is elsewhere a nagging absence of wider political context; as someone who knew very little about this period going in, I think I took more away from Neil Jordan's Michael Collins, a film bound more to Hollywood casting agents than it was to the history books. Loach has spoken in interviews about his desire to draw a parallel between Ireland then and Iraq today, which is a noble aim, given the fine line between terrorism and freedom fighting. And yet this is something of a stretch when applied to the film, which - in its more abstract passages - scarcely looks to be about Ireland, let alone the Middle East. Damien barely registers as a hero; for the most part, he's one among many, a representative rather than an individual, curiously lacking in conventional motivation. It feels somewhat misleading of Loach to have cast an up-and-coming star like Murphy in what amounts to a marginal role.

Such choices reveal The Wind That Shakes the Barley to be a problematic rather than bad film; it has virtues with which to combat every last one of its flaws. Handsomely shot by Barry Ackroyd, it's easily Loach's best-looking picture, working up a carefully gradated mythic palette as its action encompasses yellowing prison cells, grey-green assembly halls, khaki brute uniforms and lush emerald forestry. And with every scene, even the more contentious ones, you're reminded again of the tremendous immediacy of Loach's staging: you really do feel as though you're right there in the middle of heated town hall meetings, in the cinema where silent newsreels first break the news of the Irish Free State, out in the fields where those deemed traitors are executed. A film of the heart rather than the head, it's very easy to get caught up with - which probably explains why it's gone on to become this director's biggest box-office hit in the UK and Ireland to date. And nobody should begrudge Loach that, either.

(February 2007)

The Wind That Shakes the Barley is available on DVD through Fox, and also on the BFI Player here.

"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows" (Guardian 30/05/16)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows *

Dir: Dave Green. With: Megan Fox, Will Arnett, Tyler Perry, Laura Linney. 112 mins. Cert: 12A

With 2014’s live-action/CGI hybrid Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, mega-producer Michael Bay refashioned deathless reptilian merchandise in his preferred image. Bay’s Turtles were high-fiving meatheads buffed to a fine digital sheen, thus broadly interchangeable with the steroidal heroes of 2013’s Pain & Gain and last year’s 13 Hours. Sequel Out of the Shadows reintroduces this foursome via onscreen graphics that label Donatello as “Donnie” and Michelangelo as “Mikey”. Accompanying adults are thereby spared from having to explain why these guys have such funny, non-American names, but the touch also betrays how far we now are from anything as lofty as art.

Approached as commerce – as any 3D Ninja Turtles movie should be – it’s soon clear that OOTS follows the model of Bay’s Transformers sequels. Longer, louder and boasting even more hardware, it does everything to generate the illusion of bleeding-edge bang-per-buck, while cribbing shamelessly from 1991’s Secret of the Ooze: the Turtles must again stave off Shredder (Brian Tee), who’s escaped custody and rearmed with scientist Tyler Perry’s world-conquering serum. Bay’s subtexts remain questionable: here we’re asked to cheer heavily weaponised pizza guzzlers against a cabal of non-Caucasians, in a way that altogether uncomfortably aligns turtle power with its white equivalent.

That may make for good business; for human interest, not so much. These über-turtles – joshing pixelated clumps – remain incredibly dull company, their flesh-and-blood sidekicks little better: Will Arnett replaying his glib-jerk schtick without the material that makes it funny, Megan Fox handed disguises that run the gamut from “sexy nerd” to “minxy schoolgirl”. The heart flatlines upon the arrival of multiple Golden Globe-winner Laura Linney, stuck with the one understandably disbelieving expression as New York’s police chief; her presence suggests some Tina Fey parody of Bay’s cinema, only with laughter replaced by sadness at such an egregious example of thespwaste.

OOTS is assembled with consummate slickness, nominal director Dave Green – following up 2014’s semi-heartfelt Earth to Echo – approving many of the right effects shots. Yet only Bay could conceive of blowing this much time and cash upon identifying the exact spot at which zesty, subversive trash (as the Turtles might once have been) sours into ugly, empty junk, assembled solely to school our young in brute market forces and indiscriminate consumption. Our former heroes in a half-shell have become hulking, cold-bloodied bullies, demanding our pocket money and offering nothing in return – save a joyless, two-hour noogie such as this.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

From the archive: "The Prestige"

"The prestige," as Michael Caine's ingenieur Cutter explains in The Prestige's opening sequence, is the third act of a magic trick - the moment an audience cheers at the reappearance of a person or object the magician has previously made disappear. Christopher Nolan's tale of rival magicians in turn-of-the-20th-century London hasn't come out of nowhere itself - it's based on a novel by Christopher Priest - but it is a very skilful work of cinematic conjuring, on a par with this filmmaker's backwards-thriller Memento. You'll need your brain switched on, and your eyes at their sharpest: the action takes place as a series of flashbacks and flashbacks-within-flashbacks, held together by narration sourced from notebooks written by authors deliberately intending to mislead the reader/viewer. Amazingly, it all makes a kind of sense, although multiple viewings may be required to establish how much exactly.

At its centre are down-to-earth Cockney family man Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), a grafter on the theatrical circuit, and aristocratic American showman Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman). Attempting to one-up each other by performing the greatest tricks the world has seen, the two soon become deadly rivals: the Magic Circle's own Salieri and Mozart, its Danton and Robespierre. (Angier even performs under the stagename "the Great Danton".) In terms of Nolan's filmography, these two would appear to be period archetypes of the cop and killer in Insomnia, and the stalker and stalkee in Following; the presence of Bale even reminds us of the duality he expressed in his role as the protagonist of last year's Batman Begins.

We're in altogether tricksier territory here, though: the entire film appears to have been constructed as an extended, even extravagant pun on the homonym illusions/allusions. The misdirection includes repeatedly putting Scarlett Johansson in corsets as the magicians' glamorous assistant; asking both leads to assume more than one role, or to play against themselves in certain scenes; casting Caine in a supporting part that refers back to Sleuth as much as it does Batman Begins; and an entire subplot involving the reclusive scientist Nikola Tesla, played by a very famous rock star - anything, one suspects, to throw viewers off the scent of what's really going on between its antagonists. 

Even if one does lose one's way, though, it's a fun film to get lost within, unfolding in a universe both convincing and compelling, full of secrets, shadows and slights-of-hand. Nolan has a real feel for the work of the theatrical conjurer, and just how their tricks were thought up, staged and perfected; the film might just as effectively be called Practical Magic, were that title not already claimed. Clever staging (on Nolan's part, if not his character's) leaves Angier in the bowels of the theatre, unable to receive his standing ovation upon completing his most accomplished illusion halfway through the film - a smart bit of motivating action. And in an audacious, creepy sequence shortly thereafter, Borden hijacks Angier's trick (and applause), leaving his rival suspended as a comic stooge, somewhere up in the rafters.

Yet Nolan's just as interested in the cinema as a magic trick: when Angier employs a double (an out-of-work sot, also played by Jackman) to help him pull off one vanishing act, the director initially seems content to keep the two Jackmans in separate frames, until an encounter that brings them face-to-face, thanks more to digitalisation than prestidigitation. The flashback structure requires close attention, and even then keeps us guessing; and even all the vaguely extraneous business about electricity as an emergent social force seems to tie in with the understanding that old-hat conjurers like Angier and Borden were soon to be rendered obsolete by the moving image, struck down by the shock of the new. The greatest surprise, as Nolan's film knows very well, is the one you don't see coming until it's way too late.

(November 2006)

The Prestige screens on BBC2 tonight at 11pm.