WINTER’S BONE reviewed
Mar 14Obligatory indie with splendid moments of gritty reality & choice performances, but ultimately fails to thoroughly entertain.
Our reviews are short. Really short. Deal with it.
BURIED review
Oct 07
Buried is a surprisingly thrilling portrait of a middle-class American man held hostage in Iraq, completely contained within a wooden coffin. Its originality is only outdone by its ambitious attempt to hold an audience’s interest in one small and dark location, on one subject, for 90-plus minutes.
It succeeds.
I’ve decided that, in the few hours since seeing the film today, Buried works because of one key element. While filmmaking is a collaborate effort, and many factors need to gel for an entire film to succeed (especially in the case of an independent film such as this), Buried had something that exceeded expectations and carried the film from the realms of barely-passable to convincing.
For instance, Ryan Reynolds is convincing as contracted truck driver Paul Conroy– he had to be. I normally don’t dig on Reynolds’ performances, he hasn’t turned in a gig yet that I was overly entertained by, let alone convinced. Until now. Reynolds turns in a performance that is grounded and believable, and one for which he should be commended. If I were him, I’d keep this at the top of my resumè (but we all know that spots is reserved for Green Lantern, right after I Get To Sleep With Scarlett Johansson, So There). However, Reynolds is not the ultimate reason Buried works.
Director Rodrigo Cortés has paced his film perfectly, and rinsed every ounce of reality out of Reynolds. That’s the most important thing he had to do. Thanks to its low budget, the grit and style of Buried is a given, and, while it may have been testing to keep things fresh from scene to scene, the director’s vision seems to have been drawn from the creativity found in the writing, rather than personal expression.
Screenwriter Chris Sparling had his work cut out for him: Only one performance, in one box, for an entire film? The premise is delicious at first, but a bitch to pitch to an audience (let alone a studio head), and even more difficult to actually write over ninety pages. With the aid of some helpful items left in the coffin with Paul, the character is able to contact the outside world and negotiate the terms of his release while continually leaving us in the dark about his future (thanks to a time-limit set very early on). Nice move. These elements allow director Cortés to carefully handle story elements that are political, primal and heartfelt, without being overly obvious.
Save for a few questionable character decisions, the writing and direction are definitely solid, but they are still is not the winning factor for Buried.
I have no doubt Buried ultimately works because of the masterful work of Cinematographer Eduard Grau. The creative way he used his camera to conjure very real feelings of claustrophobia, anxiety and desperation are a testament to his attention to detail. A simple focus pull might be affective in a two-shot for a ‘normal’ film, but here, it becomes heart-stoppingly genius and new. And this is just one example. Clearly a fan of ‘Hitchcokian’ style, this is one setting where such a style makes complete sense without being pure copycat.
Thank you, Grau, for not being weak and predictable by resorting to a shaky hand-held camera like so many young, ambitious filmmakers would have done. Thank you for carefully selecting your shots with deliberate composition. Even when the frame became frantic, it was still superbly composed.
Without this masterful camera work keeping things visually fresh, Buried would have gotten stale very quickly. Thankfully, it doesn’t.
Buried is engaging to sit through and leaves space for conversation with fellow viewers afterwards. You’ll only ever need to watch it once, though. I can’t anticipate it being anywhere near as engaging on repeat viewings, thanks mostly to the film’s somewhat unsatisfying conclusion.
TOMORROW, WHEN THE WAR BEGAN review
Sep 08
Ostensibly aimed at a relatively young audience, John Marsden’s Tomorrow novels were nevertheless dark, complex, and breathlessly intense – and spoke home truths about human nature to an audience struggling to come to grips with the dark, complex and stressful responsibilities of growing up.
The movie adaptation, penned and helmed by Stuart Beattie (one of those Aussies-in-Hollywood who’s scripted such mixed projects as Pirates Of The Caribbean [the first one], Collateral, 30 Days Of Night, and Australia), doesn’t nail all of the elements that made the books so special, but gets enough of them right to warrant lukewarm encouragement, if not outright praise.
Much effort is invested (in the film) in lending the characters and situation a sense of realism and sympathy. Many of these efforts just don’t play right. Protagonist Ellie’s disembodied voiceover is intrusive and superfluous; the talking-to-the-camera bookends feel like a failed attempt to carry some of the novel’s first person perspective over into the film; and a lot of the character-based jokes and gags hit the screen with all the pomp and circumstance of wet cardboard.
Even worse, the performances are mixed. Where the actors playing protag Ellie, anti-hero Homer, and beauty-queen Fiona (Caitlin Stasy, Deniz Akdeniz and Phoebe Tonkin respectively) are solid as a rock, the others (played by Rachel Hurd-Wood, Lincoln Lewis, Chris Pang, Ashleigh Cummings and Andy Ryan) are clearly struggling to inject life into flat line-readings, and get no help from debut director Beattie.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that we’ve (that is, Australians) all grown up on a steady diet of Hollywood fluff, and have come to equate American accents with seriousness – or, at least, a veneer of seriousness (kind of like the way professional wrestlers are stacked like bodybuilders, but would go down after two seconds in the ring with a tae kwon do black belt) – and we read local, familiar, reassuring accents as calming and laid-back.
In an Aussie production like this, it’s hard to tell whether the source of a performance’s weakness is the actor, the director, or the accent itself. I don’t know what the way out of this predicament is, and neither does Tomorrow. As Ellie says in the film (about something completely different), it ultimately boils down to instinct. Do the performances feel real? In this case the answer is ‘yes, but not often enough.’
Action scenes aren’t something Australian filmmakers are generally known for, but in Tomorrow the action scenes work just fine. The explosions are big and cathartic, the chase scenes are loud and intelligible, the stakes are all laid out in impressive scope – and all this working with a budget a quarter the size of the average American equivalent.
The production is watertight. While some scenes are too desaturated, and much of the soundtrack’s pop music is naff, the sound design, cinematography, stunts and production design are world class.
The same can’t be said for the film’s pacing. The first hour trickles by at a snail’s pace, and so much slack piles up that the climactic third act struggles to pull it taut in time. This is a fairly big departure from the novel’s whiplash pace and mounting sense of escalation. While the film has a lot of expository ground to cover, it should have covered it more efficiently, leaving the final act with more room to breathe.
Another gripe I have with the film is the schizophrenic way it treats the audience. Some things – specifically, the characters’ individual emotional journeys – are treated with suitable subtlety, and play extremely well. Other things are repeated and enlarged and underlined and bashed over the audience’s head for no reason – “hey, look, a bridge. I bet that bridge is important. Look at them using that bridge! What can we do with that bridge, I wonder?” – and it all comes to a head in a handful of nauseating dialogue scenes complete with lines like “We thought we were safe. That turned out to be the BIGGEST FAIRYTALE OF ALL!” and “[being shot feels] like someone’s pulling barbed wire through you.” Nobody talks like that, Australian or otherwise, and for every line of dialogue Beattie gets right, there are two that fall flat.
Professional dollar priests have predicted that Tomorrow will rake in around US$15 million when it’s released over there. Put that together with its current takings here (AU$4m and climbing) and it’ll probably make its budget back – just. But why should the reception be so lukewarm over there? Do American audiences scoff as much at Aussie accents in serious situations as we do?
A big blow against the film’s financial prospects is the characters. The main character’s a girl – ew! – and she falls in love with an Asiatic bloke – gross! There are too many girls in the main cast (4 out of 7? They’ll want the vote next!), and none of the characters fit into the cookie-cutter stereotypes we’ve spent our entire lives cultivating in our minds (the pretty one is also the smart one? The greasy Mediterranean chap is the heroic one? The jock is a coward? What?).
Tomorrow, When The War Began (the film) is merely competent. Its source material, however, burns so bright that its light glows through the film’s mediocrity. The slack pace, the awkward performances, the superfluous voiceover – the film has its flaws. But the bits it gets right – the ethical arguments, the character beats, and the ever-escalating set-pieces – makes it a damn sight better than the average Hollywood explode-a-thon playing in the adjacent cinema.
A flawed beginning, then, to a promising franchise.
SALT review
Sep 04
Unlike many who, perhaps understandably, raised a questionable eyebrow when they first saw the trailer for Salt, I was instantly excited. I knew right away I wanted to see this film. Not just because it starred Angelina Jolie; not just because it was directed by fellow Aussie Phillip Noyce; and not just because it looked like a straight-forward-good-time-no-brainer action thriller; but because it appeared to present all of these things in one sexy 100 minute package.
Boy I love it when a film delivers on its promise!
There were moments in the trailer that had me thinking the studio had given too much away in their bid to attract the majority audience. Thankfully, this wasn’t completely the case. Instead, Salt took a midpoint turn like no other film I can recall in recent times, and took the audience in a completely new direction that remarkably remained convincing and entertaining. Obviously I can’t write about what this directional change is – and, trust me, you haven’t guessed it – but it was undoubtedly a gamble that was paid off by patient and deliberate filmmaking from Noyce and his team. It could have so easily ended in shambles. The trailer shows hardly any snippets of the film beyond the midpoint. How could it? (If you’re planning on seeing it and haven’t yet, do so before someone drops the ball and reveals to you what this midpoint change is—I reckon it’d alter the viewing experience a great deal.)
Seeing as this is called Salt, please bear with me while I use a cooking motif in the next paragraph to describe the kind of film Salt brings to the table… Oh, glorious puns!
Take just a pinch of James Bond, add a huge dollop of The Bourne Identity/Supremacy/Ultimatum and a cup of Mission Impossible, add a teaspoon of MacGyver (remember him?) blend thoroughly, heat on high and serve smoking hot. That’s Salt.
Now, I don’t mean to say adding up the excitement of all of those films and franchises equals this film; rather, Salt contained elements of them all in new ways with a great female lead—and a plot that allows the female lead to have real purpose. Originally, Tom Cruise was set to play the lead Salt character before he backed out. The script was re-tooled once Jolie expressed interest. This is probably the best thing that could have ever happened for the project because the female lead really helps it stand out from a pack of usually-male-leads in this genre.
The bare-bones plot (for the sake of this review and spoilers) has Jolie, as Evelyn Salt, working for the CIA and is unexpectedly told, by a Russian spy, that she is a Russian spy and will try to kill the Russian President. “Whatever, you freak,” (paraphrasing) says Jolie, and she promptly tries to leave—but the CIA aren’t convinced of her innocence and will hunt her down wherever she goes. Oh no! Luckily she’s a highly trained agent who can kick ass and get herself out of the stickiest of situations. Oh yes! That’s the first 15 minutes for you…
Turns out I’m an Angelina Jolie fan. I mean, I’ve always admired her work and been interested in her film career (as opposed to her tabloid life). There’s no doubt Jolie can act—she has an Oscar to prove it—so it’s strange to have conversations with young folk today who haven’t bothered seeing Girl, Interrupted and sight Jolie as nothing more than a boobs-and-hair action star. She’s so much more. Salt actually helps underline my point. She takes the thick drama (ala The Changeling) needed to plead her innocence to the CIA and blends it perfectly with kickass action skills required to knock guys the fuck out (ala Tomb Raider, Mr & Mrs Smith). I never questioned her performance—I was convinced of her struggle to prove her innocence and I was convinced she was in pain whenever a baddie got a cheap shot in. I mean, she’s hardly out for an Oscar in this one, is she? Turn up, go hard and look damn good doing it. She was sexy like a Bond girl only she had the lead role and was doing the cool, dangerous, exhilarating action.
The supporting cast included solid, straight-laced performances from Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor as important guys in suits. There wasn’t much room for them to move with the spotlight shining so bright on Jolie; they delivered their characters simply as required for such a story.
I enjoyed the way director Phillip Noyce didn’t throw a brick at the audience, yet still allowed everything to be explained point-blank. Aside from some excruciating flashback memories from Joile that hold on her while awful cross-fades bring them up, the film is paced and delivered near-perfectly. Everything is laid out and explained in creative ways, following the engaging plot was a breeze and aided the mountain of wonderful set-pieces. For instance, unlike the Bourne sequels, I could actually keep track of who was hitting whom during a fight sequence; all of them wonderfully orchestrated and easy to follow.
There isn’t too much else to say for a film of this ilk. It would be a waste of time trying to critique the cinematography or the subtexts, because this isn’t trying to be a thought-provoking art film. Salt is an action thriller with some great originality, and it was a blast to watch. You won’t find it on many ‘100 Movies You Must See’ lists 10 years from now, but as far as modern-day thrillers go, it’s definitely a stand-out.
Of all the overblown sequels and franchises we see in this day and age, here’s an original character in a great new action-thriller environment that’s original and deserves a second go-round. I’d definitely get in line for a sequel.
SALT
SPLICE review
Aug 19
Splice is unsure of itself from the opening frame. The opening credits are distracting, redundant, and poorly rendered – symptoms of which the rest of the movie is sadly guilty, too. There are some interesting themes floating around in the script, but director Vincenzo Natali (Cube) doesn’t quite know which ones to focus on, which ones to push into the background, and which ones to cut entirely.
The characters are unsympathetic and hurt the plot more than they should. The two main characters, played by a solid Adrien Brody and a patchy Sarah Polley, are inconsistent in their actions and completely mysterious in their motivations. For a small-scale sci-fi that focuses more on character than action, this is bad news.
The idea of genetic experimentation is treated inconsistently as well. As part of the film’s back-story, scientists magically combine DNA from various barnyard animals to create an amorphous blob that serves as a medicinal protein factory; creating a locomotive organism from bits and pieces of various other organism is pushing the envelope of plausibility as it is, but then, when the scientists add just one sequence of human DNA into the mix, the result miraculously looks 99% human – it’s easy enough to forgive some storytelling liberties, but Dren’s human appearance is a bit too much of a stretch for me.
Also ridiculous is the “she ages days in minutes” device slapped onto Dren. For the first half of the movie, she’s shown in various stages of development, from infant to adolescent, but then, about halfway through, Dren’s supernatural ageing conveniently halts at just the right level of development for Adrien Brody’s character to find her sexually attractive.
It’s shortcuts like this – jumping from amorphous blobs to human forms, dropping the rapid growth idea when it becomes inconvenient – that betray Splice for what it is. It’s clear that the story-writers (director Vincenzo Natali, along with Antoinette Terry Bryant) had a couple of half-decent third-act ideas, but had no idea how to build a supporting first and second act to get there.
A dark streak permeates the plot, an aspect that probably would have helped the film if it had stronger characters, but in reality serves to alienate the audience from what little good Splice has to offer. Film classifications should probably warn of rape scenes, too, especially when such deeply traumatic experiences are treated as glibly as they are in Splice. Make no mistake, Splice is an ugly film.
For the first half or so, before the film completely runs off the rails, the plot is mildly engaging. There are quite a few different themes going on at once, but, thanks to the film’s leisurely pace, they never seem cluttered or confusing. It’s a shame that none of them pays off properly, but, while it lasts, the film’s first half is relatively enjoyable.
But when the second half kicks in, it all gets a bit silly. Unsure of how to deal with underdeveloped side-characters who know too much, the script simply has them killed. Unsure of how to give one of the central characters strong motivation, the film spends too long on a subplot / back-story that has no direct effect on the action. Unsure of how to underline Dren’s alienness, the script throws a couple of goofy-looking insect wings onto her arms. And then it gets really ridiculous towards the end.
The script’s biggest crime, though, is its uncertainty in dealing with Dren. Despite looking 99% human and displaying cognitive linguistic ability, the script prevents her from speaking, probably to emphasise her non-humanness. Either too lazy to follow through on the plot idea, or mistakenly enamoured of their characters, the screenwriters opt to trap Dren in the family barn, hidden from public view, rather than show her to the world and gauge the reaction.
If they’d followed through on that idea, the film could have become more like the Frankenstein story it’s already channelling, and more compelling as a drama. If Dren had become a sought-after celebrity, a curiosity and a wonder of science, maybe then the characters’ in-fighting and jealousy could have played out in an interesting way. As it is, the worst thing that can happen to the main characters is that they could die, and as far as the audience is concerned, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
The script needed more work before going into production; that much is clear. Performances could have been tightened, too, as quite a few of them are weak or one-dimensional; Dren especially seems awkwardly over-the-top at times. The plot, too, could have done with a major overhaul, and the characters could have been represented in a more consistent light.
Nevertheless, there is – somewhere – a half-decent premise in Splice. While the ethical implications of cloning are largely glossed over by the script, it’s enough to get the audience thinking. The dark Oedipal / Freudian themes alluded to, and the clothes-off sexy-time promised by the trailers, might titillate some. But I think most people will find Splice too bitter a pill to swallow, too ugly an experience to enjoy, and too hollow a film to watch more than once – and that’s just about the worst thing you can say about a movie: that you’ll never watch it again. It’s a shame, because Splice was almost interesting – almost.
Splice
OPINIONS COUNT