I decided to take my film reviewing talents to the TV! I did a vox pop length review of W.E. for a show called Moviejuice and it was broadcast through STV on Friday night. You can find the video on the STV Player (for another 27 days). You'll see an extremely nervous me at about 9 minutes in. The full-length written review is on this blog and offers a slightly more comprehensive overview of the film to say the least! I was going to review Coriolanus, which I loved, but no-one was doing W.E so the producers got me to rate that instead. One star! I just hope Madonna isn't coming after me now...
There have been a lot of mixed reactions to this film. There’s a reason for that: it’s both good and bad. I didn’t enjoy it but - staying away from the obvious tendency to judge this film based solely on the fact it’s Madonna who’s directed/co-wrote it - there are some diamonds in the (very) rough.
The film tries to take two storylines which are set in completely different times and places, and merge them into one film. One of these plots are really good, the other really bad. The good one is the story of Edward VIII who abdicated from his place on the throne in order to marry a commoner, Wallis Simpson. The bad one is the story of an ordinary New York woman who’s in the process of leaving an abusive relationship. The second story is trashy, melodramatic pulp. Any relation between these two storylines is contrived and every time it cuts between the two, it feels very awkward, forced, meaningless and confusing.
It’s a real shame, because the story of the Edward VIII is an extremely interesting one. There’s so much there to write about: his controversial lifestyle, marriage to Wallis Simpson, abdication, relationship with George VI and the rest of the royal family – not to mention his alleged Nazi sympathies and friendship with Adolf Hitler! As a straight historical drama, this story would be truly riveting and I personally think it deserves a big budget treatment. It could even do well as a glossy romantic drama or a gritty political drama – or a mixture of both.
I do appreciate that Madge has tried to tell this story (which has been done in film and TV before) from an alternative perspective: through the eyes of Wallis Simpson. This is a credible idea but the film doesn’t focus enough on it. Instead, it’s needlessly confused by a boring, ambiguous plot featuring a deluded and emotionally erratic protagonist nobody can relate to.
The film is occasionally historically inaccurate and utterly bizarre in places. There is a point where a news reporter states that Edward is succeeding King George III, when it is in fact King George V (the former died more than a century before). There are also several absurdities and moments of sheer bad taste, most notably a scene where Edward and Wallis are popping pills at a party as they dance to the Sex Pistols in the 1930s! The fact Madonna chose the song 'Pretty Vacant' is probably more fitting than she'll realise. There is a consistent stream of these absurdities which cause serious detriment to the film’s tone and coherency – as if it wasn’t already hard enough to understand.
There is no conclusion to this film either. By the end nothing is resolved, everything becomes wholly ambiguous and no explanation is given as to the meaning or core purpose of the film. Just before the credits role, as the camera pans up from nothingness to yet more nothingness, you’re left thinking “what was the point in all of that?”
Credit where credit’s due though: the film has some nice cinematography. The fashion and costume design is great too. It’s visually very good and you can tell there are some people working on this film who know what they’re doing, but it’s all wasted on a rotten script. The film seems to concentrate on fashion, materialism, aesthetics and stylistic elements more than telling a compelling story. It’s just superficial.
For me, the bad outweighs the good, and W.E. appears as nothing more than an opportunistic derivative of a sub-plot from the King’s Speech, with potential that would never be realised here. Madonna’s film is brash and contrived at best, random and pointless at worst.
Shakespeare isn’t Shakespeare without Shakespearean language. It might be difficult to understand exactly what the dialogue is during parts of Coriolanus, but there’s no difficulty following the meaning. The action, the direction and some powerful performances – most notably from Ralph Fiennes and Vanessa Redgrave – carry the film and more than compensate for the language barriers. Some people walked out about halfway through but the climactic third act made it well worth the perseverance - especially Redgrave’s moving monologue as the formidable matriarch Volumnia.
Gerard Butler was pretty forgettable in this. Whether that’s because he isn’t exactly of thespian discipline or because his character isn’t particularly pronounced in this play, is up to you to decide. Perhaps he and Jessica Chastain are nothing more than a bit of totty to sell the film? Perhaps that’s just a bit cynical.
James Nesbitt added an interesting, somewhat unexpected dynamic to the play with his enigmatic nuances of jest and malice. Also worth a mention was the little-known Dragan Micanovic who played a minor character, Titus, but delivered a couple of pivotal lines with engrossing presence.
The real star of the show is obviously Shakespeare. His poetic prose courses through your mind and adds fuel to the fires of his drama. His characters are bold and consistent, truly agents of their own destinies. The subject matter resonates with political allegory and the film’s release is timely and relevant. The play set in a present day context highlights the tribal social system which still dominates our affairs. The story also works to express the futility of war.
Fiennes has done well to translate Coriolanus from the stage to the screen and he hasn’t stretched it too far so as to alienate it from the original text. Stylistically, the film is quite gritty. The focus is mostly on the actors, their eyes, their expressions and their delivering of lines, but there are a few purely cinematic moments (fight scenes in particular) which justify the adaptation to the screen. There are a couple of truly violent moments in the film which blast the cobwebs off the old play and hook the modern, desensitized audience into the story.
Coriolanus is a tense and violent political wartime thriller which makes Shakespeare not only accessible but utterly captivating. A credible directorial debut from one of the industry’s finest working actors.
Rango was very entertaining. There were a few belly-laugh moments for me, which is what I was hoping for. The action and romance plots intertwined in a classic but original way and there was more than enough quirky style to keep things fresh.
There were a few moments of adult humour (the prostate joke comes to mind) handled cleverly enough so as to coast easily over the kids’ heads and keep the adults sniggering away - as is somewhat conventional for this kind of animated feature nowadays. I’m not sure when this clever duality of adult and childish humour originated, but it’s certainly very prominent in contemporary films like Rango, Toy Story, Monsters Versus Aliens, etc. It’s a feature that always drives me to animated films and something which I think will come to define this type of film. I’m not entirely convinced this feature is even exclusive to animation, rather it’s just somehow more noticeable.
Rango was a lot like Monsters Inc., I immediately thought. There were a few similarities and in this sense it seems formulaic. The mayor character was quite like the company owner in Monsters: a bureaucratic fatcat who conserves a corrupt system for the apparent good of the people. They’ve both also got slimy, formidable henchmen: in Rango it’s Rattlesnake Jake, in Monsters it’s Randall the chameleon-like lizard monster. The plot is similar in that it follows a story of the feeble yet heroic protagonists’ efforts to uncover a conspiracy and save the day thus.
Cinematically, the film also pays tribute to film history. It appears obviously reminiscent of Western genre greats like John Ford, Howard Hawks, Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone. Not to mention the tip of the cap to Fear and Loathing.
This breed of animated features endeavours to appeal to a mixture of demographics, not just age but cultures and nationalities (Shrek and Disney-Pixar’s upcoming Brave bring the world a little slice of Scottish culture, for example). Films like these seem to adopt a formulaic approach in order to ensure global and trans-demographic popular success. Often very classical and accessible, Rango is testament to the fact that films like this can be both somewhat formulaic and highly original and stylised. Altogether entertaining, well-designed care-free cinema.
The Tree of Life starts something like a fragmented family drama. It soon moves onto an incredible sequence which is almost like an abstract portrayal of the history of the universe, narrowing down to a history of the Earth. Malick takes all the many patterns of life and existence– from microbiotic organisms to interstellar structures – and creates the most majestic collage. (I couldn’t help being reminded of that sequence at the end of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
The film evolves to focus on the story of Jack, son of a God-fearing American couple. It follows his journey from birth through childhood as he grows to makes sense of the world and struggles with his complicated adolescent emotions. The main plot follows Jack and his family, but the film remains universally relatable as it encompasses truly vast themes: life, death, love, hate, childhood, adulthood, parenthood, god, religion, nature, man, gender, sexuality, guilt, fear, shame, happiness, forgiveness, sacrifice…the list goes on.
Nearer the end it becomes highly symbolic, most notably repeating representations of doorways, passageways, bridges, circles, planets, suns, stars, waves, water, trees, hands, the sky and other loaded imagery which will inspire a complex of interpretations.
Ultimately, The Tree of Life is wholly philosophical and its messages are prophetic, discursive and intuitive. The juxtaposition of the greatest and smallest pieces of the universe gives the human drama a context that is humbling to say the least. Malick incredibly manages to underline the relative insignificance of man, whilst presenting an emotive human story. Malick has created an avant-garde masterpiece with mainstream appeal.
Nicolas Winding Refn has obviously been influenced a lot by Tarantino. I think this not just because of the intermittent scenes of graphic violence, but because of the use of a widescreen aspect ratio, the long shots, a mostly still frame and slow cutting. This visual stillness and the introverted calm of Ryan Gosling’s character provide a disquieting sobriety which balances out the occasional bit of mutilation. Drive handles some of the most disturbing portrayals of cold-blooded murder in cinematic history with undeniably cool style. I was immediately reminded of Pulp Fiction and Resevoir Dogs mostly;but the film could be paying tribute to any one of Tarantino’s twisted takes on gangster drama.
An 80s-esque electro soundtrack mixed with the neon-pink titles and cityscapes make this film cry out to be sat next to Tarantino’s filmography as well as classic gangster dramas like Scarface. Like Tony Montana, Gosling’s driver starts the film as a nobody. Unlike Pacino’s egomaniacal anti-hero, however, Drive’s protagonist remains a nobody. The main song in the soundtrack, A Real Hero by College, sums up the driver’s story as it plays over an unsurprisingly down ending with the lyrics “you’ve proved to be a real human being and a real hero” repeating over and over.
Gosling, along with Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman provide captivating characters to drive along a fairly minimal plot. As much happens off-screen as it does on-screen in this film and that really allows the audience to invest their own imagination into the film to fill in the gaps; making for a more rewarding viewing experience, in my opinion. A very solid effort by director Winding Refn, Drive is an intriguing, minimalist crime drama that is satisfyingly sure of its genre and cinematic influences.
I love the simplicity of early cinema and how it gives you a glimpse of history in glorious 4:3. In the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès films circa 1895, you see people who existed more than a century ago moving about before your very eyes. The celluloid is scratched and flickers erratically between the black and white images of ghost-like figures as they go about their daily business or present a fantastical play. Early narrative cinema of the 1910s and 20s has a simple modesty as filmmakers experimented to create storytelling conventions in the medium of cinema – many of which are still used today. Any cinephile has a romantic attachment to the silent era, because that’s where it all came from. There’s no wonder why director Michel Hazanavicius chose to create homage to cinema in his 2011 monochrome silent The Artist. As he says in January’s Sight & Sound: “The real star of the story is Hollywood.”
The film is set in 1920s Hollywood at the peak of the silent era. It follows the decline of a star and the birth of another as the young studio system copes with the advent of sound on film. The transition from ‘movies’ to ‘talkies’ meant silent star George Valentin is left in the dust as the young, vibrant Peppy Miller makes herself heard in the world of showbiz.
Sound is obviously one of the most important aspects of The Artist. This isn’t strictly a silent film, but a tribute to silent films. The soundtrack includes expressive music to simulate the musicians which would accompany a film in 1920’s theatre houses. Hazanavicius plays with the audience in the opening scene however, by blurring the lines between diegetic and non-diegetic sound. He further plays with the idea much later in the film with a dream-sequence in which Valentin can suddenly hear crystal clear diegetic sound, yet his voice remains mute. These little gags are weaved into the film’s subject matter and give the whole thing a great sense of cohesion – a telling sign of a fully conceived film.
The audience, I think, is also crucial to this film’s delivery. The film is very aware of the audience and always cuts to shots of audiences as if to emphasize this. Hazanavicius is always very aware of what the audience knows and doesn’t know. The director realises that modern audiences may well know a lot about silent era cinema. The film is packed with references to classics like Citizen Kane and 7th Heaven; filmmakers like German expressionist F.W Murnau and Hollywood classic Frank Borzage; and stars like Janet Gaynor and Douglas Fairbanks. The Artist is also heavy with classical cinematic conventions, for instance the simple use of rain as an expression of sadness. These conventions used as heavily today would seem ridiculous and clichéd, but within the context of the silent-era style, modern audiences are filled with a sense of fond reminiscence.
The Artist is not trying to be an authentic silent film, but instead wishes to present a novel but respectful nod to the silent era of Classical Hollywood. It is full of references and reads like Hazanavicius' love letter to an era of filmmaking which he - and we - are indebted to. In a time when films like Avatar are attempting to revolutionise cinema by making IMAX 3D the next coming of sound, I'm surprised The Artist was even made. But I'm glad it was. To me it serves as a much-needed look back at the essential beginnings of the art form. Already receiving considerable popular success, The Artist could herald the beginning of an era when mainstream filmmakers and audiences alike become more aware and influenced by the origins of cinema. Apart from all that, The Artist also stands alone as an altogether sad, funny, compelling and entertaining film.
