Walter Hill’s Cajun siege picture, for a long time barely registering on the cultural radar, for cinephiles now sits nicely in the highly influential late 70’s-early 80’s period of Hill’s filmography. At once a retelling of the wolfpack themed pictures Hill nearly perfected around this time ('Alien', 'The Warriors', 'The Long Riders'), but also sharp allegory to American foreign policy, 'Southern Comfort', like all of Hill’s films resonates on multiple levels – historical and social commentary, cinematic legacy and a good old fashioned movie thrills.
Showing posts with label Thriller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thriller. Show all posts
Monday, 7 March 2016
Monday, 6 October 2014
Gone Girl
If you were to simply describe the plot of Gillian Flynn’s pulpy bestseller it would come off as an outrageous Joe Eszterhas-style potboiler ripped from the era of early 90’s sexual thrillers. But when orchestrated by a master of the genre, at the top of his game, where other filmmakers would have made this picture into a sloppy ham-fisted mess, David Fincher makes two and half hours a completely engrossing experience, terrifying and witty in equal measure and self-aware enough not to take itself too seriously.
Friday, 6 December 2013
The Hunt for Red October
In the era of the great Hollywood thrillers (the 90’s) this first Tom Clancy novel out of the gate is a superlative franchise vehicle. Clancy’s sprawling narrative is executed with precision with John McTiernan’s superb directorial flare, and remains one of the best Cold War era spy thrillers.
Tuesday, 19 November 2013
A Hijacking
While the subject of Somali pirating is the same, this already-celebrated Danish film produced before 'Captain Phillips' has considerably less flare but admirably inhabits the same space as Paul Greengrass’s Hollywood version. ‘A Hijacking’ lasers in the attrition of the lengthy negotiation process between the stingy corporation and the wily Somali pirates, with a result no less harrowing and intense.
Thursday, 31 October 2013
Sisters
The first of Brian De Palma’s ‘Hitchcock-influenced films, Sisters boldly begat a career long obsession with the Master of Suspese, recycling and deconstructing his stories, themes, techniques in a dozen films or so over forty years. Without the slickness of later and bigger budgeted works, Sisters feels like a marriage of the director’s handcrafted underground/avant garde works of the late 60’s and the delirious visual showman of the 70’s/80’s.
Monday, 21 October 2013
Captain Phillips
Paul Greengrass’ docu-realism modus operandi is in full effect in this picture, like Bloody Sunday and United 93, capturing the true-to-facts story of Somali piracy victim Richard Phillips as genre entertainment told with docu-style realism. Despite the wattage of Hanks, Captain Phillips is the lesser of these three pictures, faulted by a murky socio-political theme.
Wednesday, 18 September 2013
Prisoners
Denis Villeneuve executes Prisoners with same kind of bold cinematic panache as the best of the genre, namely 'Seven' and 'Zodiac', but with a moral complexity which separates this picture from Fincher’s cold clinical approach.
Thursday, 25 July 2013
Night Train to Munich
Carol Reed’s WWII espionage pot boiler confidently stands as tall as any of the celebrated Hitchcock war thrillers of the era. While this picture predates his more acclaimed post war pictures, The Third Man and Odd Man Out, it sizzles with the same kind of high stakes urgency.
Monday, 25 March 2013
Stoker
In the long history of Asian genre directors crossing over into English-language films, Chan-wook Parks’ Stoker, a deliriously directed noirsih thriller, is the cream of the crop. Unlike this year’s other Korean-directed thriller Jee-woon Kim’s The Last Stand, Park’s devilish film about nebbish teenager disturbed by the arrival of her long lost Uncle bristles with cinematic ingenuity and with a kind of inspired unconventionality not seen since the bombastic heyday of Brian De Palma.
Wednesday, 2 January 2013
Purple Noon
Rene Clement's adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley is still a daring and delicious examination with a raging psychopath. Clement's dreamy 60's French cinematic flavour is neither inferior nor superior to Anthony Minghella's later remake. Two different but worthy artistic adaptations of a terrific story.
Thursday, 18 October 2012
The Game
Looking back on David Fincher's two early films 'Seven' and 'The Game', which were made two years after one another, they have more than proximity of time in common. Both clever genre films seem to be like two sides of the same coin, both overachieving in execution, transforming what could have been generic indistinguishable and unmemorable thrillers into enthralling psychological examinations of our human character.
The Game (1997) dir. David Fincher
Starring: Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, Deborah Kara Unger, James Rebhorn, Peter Donat
By Alan Bacchus
Games are at play in both Seven and The Game. In Seven, the reigns are held by a psychopathic serial killer testing the will and unwilling victim played by Brad Pitt. John Doe (Kevin Spacey), upset with the world, forces the perfect-specimen of society to see the evils of the world in the most horrific way possible. In The Game, Nicholas Van Orten is somewhat complicit in his game, but he enters into his harrowing journey under false pretenses. For Van Orten, the problems with his life are visualized elegantly in a beautifully morose opening sequence, shot in earthy and haunting 8mm film, fake home movies which show the wealthy but depressed life of Nicholas’s father. The sequence ends with his father jumping off his balcony to his death,
As a result, Van Orten’s lifestyle is typically cold. His relationship with his co-workers and ex-wife are unemotive two-word sentences at most. And as a ruthless capitalist, he's introduced firing one of his father’s older colleagues (Armin Muehler-Stahl) in order to save some falling stock, but perhaps subconsciously to finally exert his authority of the ghost of his father. If anything, Van Orten is an on-the-nose caricature of Douglas’s Gordon Gekko, the '80s shark, perhaps updated for the '90s – devoid of the enjoyment of the corporate game, now simply numb to everything around him.
Enter Nicholas’s brother (Sean Penn), who gives him a CRS (Consumer Recreation Services) gift card as a birthday present. He’s not interested in any games, but through some cleverly placed covert clues Nicholas is subliminally persuaded to participate.
Fincher takes his time with the mechanics of the game. The initial adventures Van Orten finds himself in are overly telegraphed, feats of physical strength, a chase here and there, or, as Nicholas himself puts it, ‘elaborately staged pranks’. All of this is either an illusion to mask the true and devious goals of CRS to scam Van Orten out of his money, or to gradually put the man into a hallucinogenic daze in order to push him through the other side of consciousness. At all times throughout, in the back of our minds, we know that it's possible that it's all fake, all part of the game. And so the genius of this film is Fincher’s ability, through shear awe-inspiring cinematic skill, to put us in the mind of Van Orten and have us think from his point of view every step of the way.
This was my experience upon first viewing, as malleable as the puppet Van Orten finds on his driveway, pulled and push at will by Fincher into every dark corner he wants us to go. Thus making every twist a surprise or a shock, and in the case of the impressive climax, a complete revelation.
Seven had the same effect, but while that film bludgeoned its audience with a cold hard dose of cynical reality in the climax, The Game subverts these expectations by taking another direction, transforming its main character into a new person, Van Orten free of the lifelong shackles of his father and able to make his life thereafter his own.
***½
The Game is available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
Friday, 7 September 2012
TIFF 2012 - Motorway
Motorway (2012) dir. Soi Cheang
Starring: Anthony Wong, Shaun Yeu
By Alan Bacchus
The plotting of the good guys vs. bad guys has the same ice-cold professionalism as a Michael Mann film. There are no throwaway gags or witty one-liners here. But while Mann made a fetish of procedural details of the heist, for Cheang it's the escape that gets him hard.
To support the dozen or so chase sequences anchoring the film there is a roll call of familiar action movie plotting devices. To start, our hero (Yeu) is introduced as a hot-shot young cop, who at every turn contradicts his superiors' orders in order to exercise his love for chasing people in his police car. Partnering him is Wong's character, the grizzled veteran, not exactly days away from retirement (that cliché would too obvious), but a cop with his best days behind him who prefers to sit back and take the cautious route to policing. Of course, we eventually learn he was once like his partner, a dervish behind the wheel, but he's suffering from post-traumatic stress related to an accident in the past.
We're in Shane Black buddy cop territory here, and if it wasn't for the superlative Hong Kong slickness and supercool, this would be a tedious affair.
But it isn't. Motorway cashes in on the director's desire to simply make a car chase film that fetishizes the steel machines with Zen-like reverence. Unlike the muscular fetishness of the Fast and the Furious films, the characters' attachment to their cars in Motorway is like Chow Yun Fat to John Woo's guns - ridiculous but impressively passionate.
***
TIFF 2012 - Argo
The real-life mission to rescue six American hostages from Iran in 1979, previously classified by the CIA and now public knowledge, has been realized into Ben Affleck's best film as director. It's both a taut and slick political thriller, as well as a witty Hollywood farce. The film's greatest strength is its ability to switch modes on a dime providing maximum commercial entertainment value and mostly controversy-free political intrigue.
Argo (2012) dir. Ben Affleck
Starring: Ben Affleck, John Goodman, Alan Arkin, Victor Garber, Clea Duvall
By Alan Bacchus
To set things up Affleck crafts a terrific siege sequence wherein the angry Iranian mob storm the embassy in Tehran nabbing 70+ American citizens - a sequence which expertly weaves period news footage with authentically recreated scenes to put us in the time and place of the era. And before that Affleck provides us with a fine history of the background players contributing to the big picture stakes.
Affleck is as good a hero leading man as he is a director here. He plays Tony Mendez, an experienced but lonely family man who has recently split for his wife and child. After dismissing the ill-conceived schemes by the State Dept. brass to get the Americans out of the country, Mendez hatches a plan to get them out via a fake Hollywood movie being made by Canadian filmmakers.
Mendez is thus forced to ingratiate himself with the oddball eccentrics of Hollywood, specifically producer Lester Siegel (Arkin) and special effects artist John Chamber (Goodman) to build the elaborate rouse, which includes finding a real script, drawing real story boards and generating real publicity for Mendez's fake movie, entitled Argo.
Unfortunately, Argo is top-heavy with most of the tension, intrigue and humour at the beginning of the film. By the time Affleck is in the country and executing his plan it's relatively easy-going. Conflict exists between some of the Americans, who are skeptical of the ridiculous scheme. Suspense is manufactured through presumably exaggerated events of ticking-clock jeopardy. At one point the group finds themselves at the airport checking in, but they learn that their tickets have been cancelled by the White House. It's a scene conveniently cut in real-time with frantic phone calls made to the CIA colleagues at home to have their tickets reinstated into the computer system. And the final race to get on the flight and have the plane take off before the Iranian guards can catch them on the tarmac and runway feels completely false and manufactured.
And so sadly, despite the impressive beginning, Argo ends with a slight whimper. And for Canadians it's a feeling of inadequacy and embarrassment, as we discover that our great political triumph, taking credit for the heroic escape, was a sham and part of the CIA classified cover-up. These revelations also negate the 1980s Made for TV Escape From Tehran, which dramatizes the Canadian cover-up version.
But this is Ben Affleck firing on all cylinders as a new director, free of his Boston comfort zone and working with a new script that he didn't write.
***
Monday, 16 July 2012
Deliverance
Perhaps the ultimate film about the male bravado, four city men, in the outback of Appalachia, out to conquer nature and canoe down the rapids of an untamed river wild, become hunted by a group of hillbilly locals. While some of the character conflict and thematic pronunciations hit the nail on the head, looking back 40 years later, Deliverance is still a riveting adventure film equalled by deep connections of man, nature, class and gender.
Deliverance (1972) dir. John Boorman
Starring: Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Ronnie Cox
By Alan Bacchus
Each character is written to highlight the Freudian core of ourselves. Ed (Jon Voight), a lawyer and organizer of the excursion, serves as the everyman point-of-view into the nightmare. Lewis (Burt Reynolds), a swaggering outdoorsman and Darwinist to the extreme, acts as the group's spirit mentor to their internal expression of their primal desires. Drew (Ronny Cox), the moralist and guitar player, fights the group's amoral decision-making. And Bobby (Ned Beatty), the portly nave, famously loses his bravado and gets raped and humiliated by the sadistic hillbilly woodsmen.
Whether it's the conflict within the foursome, such as Lewis's constant taunting of Bobby, or the culture clash of the mountain men versus the city slickers, it's a passive battle for the ages. Look carefully and there's very little direct conflict. Instead, Boorman simmers his pot with scenes of brilliantly quiet tension and consciously oblique plot turns.
The opening scenes are masterful, featuring the group's stop off at the gas station and the first meeting of the foursome and the locals. Despite their inbred poverty, the locals easily read Bobby's arrogant superiority and tense body language. Lewis's negotiation for the drivers who would take their cars to the bottom of river deliciously establishes Lewis's confidence and respect for these salt of the earth inhabitants. The scene, of course, ends with the memorable duelling banjos sequence, a superlative metaphor for the battle of wills about to commence.
John Boorman and Vilmos Zsigmond's brilliant outdoor, on location cinematography looks stunning in Blu-Ray. Few directors used anamorphic widescreen better than Boorman, and fewer films have are more intimately connected to its location than Deliverance.
The film's most famous sequence ― Bobby's rape ― sits right at the midpoint and represents the only scene of direct, face-to-face violence. At a glance, it's certainly most cruel to the character of Bobby, but it can also be seen as one of cinema's great acts of comeuppance for his passive but brazen superiority complex and disrespect for the environment and its people.
The visual and visceral brilliance notwithstanding, Deliverance is as rich in theme and context. The environmental story of man's desire to tame nature, redirecting the river and flood the valley for the benefit of its largely white, civilized population, is inseparable from America's self-determined, wealth-based class system and the external desires of men to conquer everything they encounter.
The Warner Special Edition Blu-Ray, wonderfully packaged with comprehensive liner notes, does right by the film. Featurettes and director commentary from a 2007 release are present, as well as a new high definition retrospective of the four actors sitting down and discussing the making of the film. The lack of a moderator in the discussion makes it mostly awkward, not to mention its location: the Burt Reynolds museum in Jupiter Florida.
****
This review first appeared on Exclaim.ca
Wednesday, 20 June 2012
Accident
This TIFF inclusion from 2009 finally emerges on Canadian soil for public consumption on Blu-ray via Shout Factory almost three years later. While not widely known, Soi Cheang's film has one of the most clever conceptual plot hooks since 'Infernal Affairs': a group of assassins-for-hire specialize in elaborately choreographed murders made to look like accidents, thus absolving their clients and themselves of persecution or retribution. It makes for a stimulating, small-scale thriller ripe for a bigger, more spectacular Hollywood remake.
Accident (2009) dir. Soi Cheang
Starring: Louis Koo, Richie Ren, Shui-Fan Fung, Michelle Ye, Suet Lam
By Alan Bacchus
Hong Kong star Louis Koo plays Ho Kwok-Fai, the brain of the team, a foursome not unlike something we'd see in a Mission Impossible film. They're introduced overseeing their latest orchestration: a car accident on a busy Hong Kong street. Seemingly random details, such as a rogue balloon flying in the air covering up a street camera and a blinding flash of reflected light from a mirror, combine to create a perfectly constructed domino effect that results in their pre-planned fake accident. But on their latest job, when a bus seemingly runs out of control, killing one of Ho's colleagues, Ho suspects he might be the target of someone else's accident orchestration.
Director Soi Cheang keeps the action and plotting contained, making Accident a relatively small picture and focusing in on Ho's character and his obsession, paranoia and isolation. Not unlike Gene Hackman's Harry Caul from The Conversation or Leonardo Di Caprio in Inception, Ho's life of clandestine deception has altered his perception of reality. This boils over into a paranoia-fuelled search for his assassin. He rents an apartment directly below his suspect, maps out his floor plan on his ceiling and listens in on his telephone conversations. Doubt and confusion create an obsessed mania akin to the destruction of Hackman's apartment in The Conversation or Guy Pearce's tattooed notes in Memento.
Louis Koo's performance is delightfully intense and focused, portraying Ho as a broken man plagued by the nightmarish memories of his wife's fatal car accident (or potential murder). Koo's attire complements this intensity, as he wears constricting clothes, a form-fitting jacket and large, industrial sniper glasses.
Cheang imbues a distinct visual palette using long lenses almost exclusively to convey a voyeuristic feel and visually compressing the world around Ho.
If anything, where Cheang leaves us short is in detailing the procedural aspects of his characters' schemes, something a Hollywood remake, as made by Christopher Nolan or Martin Scorsese, would map out and visualize with greater fastidiousness and care. But the work presented here is still an intriguing conceptual film that stands on its own, a sharp little gem to find in the glut of other new home video releases.
The Shout Factory Blu-ray features a decent making-of documentary and curiously, a faulty 2:35:1 anamorphic transfer, which appears as a vertically stretched 16x9 full frame aspect ratio. It's difficult to say if this fault applies to all the Blu-rays in circulation, however.
***½
This review first appeared on Exclaim.ca
Wednesday, 30 May 2012
Safe House
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Denzel Washington, Sam Shepard, Brendan Gleeson, Vera Farmiga
By Alan Bacchus
An unlikely success to be sure, Safe House surprisingly garnered over $120 million at the North American box office. Unfortunately, the story of a lowly CIA safe house operator who finally gets to see some action when a notorious counterspy arrives to stay with a lot of international baddies trailing behind plays like a decent though forgettable Tony Scott knockoff.
That said, we’re put into a unique setting for this picture, Cape Town, South Africa. Denzel Washington’s character, Tobin Frost (great name), is trading a secret file with a rogue CIA agent. After an attack by some big-nosed, slick haired and overall nasty looking gunmen, Frost escapes into CIA custody and is moved to a safe house. Enter Matt Weston (Reynold), a nebbish family man whose career is more like a glorified housekeeper. But when Frost arrives he finds himself eye to eye with a legendary international criminal.
When that big-nosed baddie returns to the fray and finds Tobin at the safe house, it becomes a desperate chase with Weston and Tobin forced to work together to survive. As expected, a few twists and turns in the action involve characters switching allegiances, ultimately revealing Tobin as the keeper of some of the CIA's darkest secrets.
The course of action and its execution play out with only adequate cinematic skills. It’s Daniel Espinosa’s first American film after his decent international hit Snabba Cash. That film showed some promise of a tough action filmmaker, but the underwhelming and turnkey nature of Safe House instills little hope that Espinoza will be anything special.
Reynolds and Washington, the great actors that they are, make a good duo. Denzel commands most of the film, playing his nebulous baddie role with the same kind of aplomb as recent minor hits Unstoppable and Book of Eli. Denzel can do so much with very little. He rarely needs to speak, instead showing the confidence of his character with action and reaction. All the other character actors, including Sam Shepard, Brendan Gleeson and Vera Farmiga, have grossly underwritten stock roles borrowed from other new millennium action thrillers.
The third act plays out the expected expression of mutual admiration and brotherly loyalty developed between Weston and Tobin, and the final gunfight, in which all the characters are blasting each other in one confined space, lacks any cinematic imagination. As such, despite very strong creative minds involved here, Safe House settles into ordinary boilerplate filmmaking.
**
Safe House is available on Blu-ray from Universal Home Entertainment.
Thursday, 10 May 2012
Haywire
Starring: Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Channing Tatum, Bill Paxton
By Alan Bacchus
The inspiration for this picture is well known. Steven Soderbergh, who upon watching an MMA fight with Gina Carano, developed a spy thriller action vehicle around her as an ass-kicking international super spy. It’s an admirable experiment for the man known for a career of varied cinematic experiments, such as casting a real-life porn star in a film about a call girl. The end result of this film, like The Girlfriend Experiment and others, is a mixed bag, but certainly not a full tilt action film to compete with James Bond or the Bourne films. Instead it's a measuredly paced, quiet and ultimately underwhelming thriller.
Ms. Carano is a surprisingly striking figure, a classic Mediterrean beauty with a nice body. But unlike Angelina Jolie in Salt, Carano is physically impressive enough to whoop some ass. However, I don't think the two qualities - beauty and strength - are mutually exclusive. Carano's acting skills have been unfairly trounced in many fan reviews. She has very little to say, smartly playing the quiet, understated assassin-type.
The plotting, as is typical with Soderbergh, is loopy by design, starting in the middle during which we find Mallory Kane (Carano) in upstate New York on the run from some government heavies, including Channing Tatum, who gets beaten down pretty good in a diner. This jumpstarts the film. From there Kane sort of kidnaps an awestruck teenager to whom she confesses her secrets. Along the way Soderbergh flashes back to the events which led her to New York, including a covert ops job from a private militia firm who hired her to free a kidnapped agent in Barcelona. This leads her to Dublin, where she’s set up to be a fall guy (girl) for the previous job. After being doublecrossed in Dublin, Kane seeks to turn the tables by tracking down her enemies and freeing herself from the bullseye on her back.
All of this is shot with a consciously minimalist style. Crisp colour-coded cinematography looks like Soderbergh’s recent work in Contagion, and the bouncing David Holmes soundtrack reminds us of the Oceans films. Despite the complex plotting, the pacing is slow, which results in an awkward viewing experience.
Sadly, Soderbergh doesn’t execute his fight scenes either. The set pieces are clear and defined, and they arrive very suddenly. There’s a disconnect between the realism of the direction between these fights, which feel like cinematic choreographed fight scenes. Soderbergh admirably shoots his scenes with as little cutting as possible, but as a consequence there’s a stagey, overly rehearsed feel to the movement. The fights do feel violent, specifically with the incorporation of Carano’s MMA moves, but everything seems to be set up around them and we’re taken too far out of the film. That said, Soderbergh does intergrate a fun old Asian cinema trick, changing the camera frame rate to ever so slightly speed up the film, and also cutting out a frame or two to make some of the kicks and punches seem harder.
While not a fully satisfying film, it’s another stop in Soderbergh’s fascnating career - never content to deliver what's expected and an admirable attempt to tell a familiar story in an unconventional form.
Haywire is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Alliance Films in Canada.
Monday, 16 April 2012
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
Starring: Tom Cruise, Jerermy Renner, Paula Patton, Simon Pegg, Michael Nyqvist
***
By Alan Bacchus
Tom Cruise is one resilient guy – not just his Ethan Hunt character, who gets knocked around like a fumbled football, but the movie star himself, who is currently on a fine career comeback of sorts from his low point – the couch surfing debacle, his stupid Scientology pronunciations, as well as the horrific Knight and Day. Doing another Mission Impossible movie (a fourth one) seemed, perhaps, to be like going back to a dry well.
But then the film became a massive hit, one of the biggest films of the year and genuinely a terrific action film, arguably the second best of the series. The De Palma-directed original is still unrivalled, a film that actually gets better with age. I doubt Ghost Protocol will last as long as the first film – already on second viewing, it’s not as thrilling. But it’s still better than the John Woo or the JJ Abrams entries.
In this film Ethan Hunt begins the film in a Russian prison, about to be broken out by his crack IMF team, this time featuring the luscious Paula Patton and the witty Simon Pegg. It’s a tense and yet surprisingly humorous scene, equal parts Cruise’s muscular showmanship and Spielberg comedy. Once free, Hunt and company track down some stolen Russian launch codes. In order to locate them they have to infiltrate the Kremlin to find files on the #1 suspect, Cobalt. Here we move to set piece #2 in the film, a terrific combination of new wave techno gadgetry and delicately paced Hitchcockian tension, ending in a running chase and a huge CG explosion.
The Americans are blamed for the Kremlin blast, rendering all IMF teams disavowed. Thus, the group is forced to fend for themselves. They are joined by a slick new analyst, William Brandt (Renner), who is not used to the crazy lifestyle of the field operators on a globe-trotting mission to recover the nuclear launch codes before an evil Swedish scientist can destroy the world.
As with most action films and the Mission Impossible series in particular, MI:4 is anchored by its set pieces. However, the best moments of these films and the original series aren't necessarily the action, but rather the heist-like covert operations and tactics of the crew. The prison sequence is decent and gets the film going, and the Kremlin sequence has the gadgets and detailed subversion plotting we like to see. But the film reaches its high (pun intended) in the Dubai Burj sequence, in which Hunt and company have to break into the computer room of the building from the outside 130 floors up. The sight of the real Cruise hanging (albeit with a digitally removed safety harness) up that high is astonishing. More so in Imax, less so on the small screen, of course. This scene continues with an equally well executed sequence exchanging the aforementioned launch codes for a set of diamonds. Here Bird uses somewhat realistic high tech devices like contact lens-sized cameras that can photocopy documentation remotely in the blink of an eye. It’s a stretch, but not that much to have us suspend our disbelief.
This sequence leads to a chase in a sandstorm, which perhaps might pay homage to the ultimate sandstorm sequence in cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman. I doubt it though.
Unfortunately, MI:4 never gets better than the Dubai scenes. When the film moves to Mumbai, the two main set pieces – Jeremy Renner crawling inside a computer mainframe looking to deactivate a nuclear missile and Cruise battling Dragon Tattoo alum Michael Nyqvist in a remotely operated parking garage tower – never trump the Kremlin or Dubai sequences. And the ticking clock, a race to disarm a nuclear missile midfield, is the stuff of bad James Bond plotting.
Pixar vet Brad Bird makes a strong live action debut as director, though he doesn’t have a sense of his own style yet, not like JJ Abrams did in his outing. However bad, at least John Woo’s film felt like a John Woo film. And of course, Brian De Palma’s is an action-suspense masterpiece. That said, this film, and in fact all of the MI films (even John Woo’s), make the tired old James Bond films look like amateur work. Credit goes to Tom Cruise and his resilience, as evidenced in the Blu-ray special features. He appears to be a passionate cinema junkie who gets a kick out of making entertaining action films from this series. I just wish he didn't take his shirt off so much – for some reason it makes me uncomfortable.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Paramount Home Entertainment.
Monday, 9 April 2012
Insomnia
Starring: Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, Martin Donovan, Nicky Katt
***1/2
By Alan Bacchus
After the success of Memento, choosing to direct this film based on the 1997 Erik Skjoldbjærg Swedish thriller was a smart career decision for Christopher Nolan. For several reasons; 1) he didn’t have to write the film, and thus exercised his muscles at adapting someone else’s work; 2) he could shoot it back-to-back with Memento, and even before the previous film had come out; 3) he was working with a more conventional story with the rules of the procedural/serial killer genre as a safety net.
The result is a resounding though modest success, not a mindblowingly ambitious production in the vain of the Batman pictures, Inception or even The Prestige, but an unpretentious yet beguiling little one-off nonetheless.
Will Dormer (Pacino) and Hap Eckhart (Donovan) are a pair of big city LA cops who have come to a cosy little northern Alaskan town to investigate a grisly murder of a young teenaged girl. Dormer in particular is carrying the baggage of an internal affairs investigation involving tampered evidence in an earlier case. The stress of this case combined with the ever-present sun, which because of their high latitude provides perpetual sunlight, puts Dormer in a perpetual haze. Despite this, Dormer is all business and picks apart the case with the precision of a surgeon, instantly taking command.
But on their first sting, Eckhart is accidently shot and killed by Dormer, and a split-second wrong choice by Dormer to cover it up results in a steady downward spiral in which his personal ethics become foggier and foggier. Dormer finds himself teaming up with the serial killer to cover up his partner's killing and save his own ass. He would be home free if it wasn't for a spry and ambitious brownnoser, Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank), who is close on Dormer’s trail.
There was no need to fuss with the original material, as Hillary Seitz's script is written with efficiency, a near carbon copy of Nikolaj Frobenius and Erik Skjoldbjærg’s screenplay. It’s an unflashy yet deceitful story that provides a number of unexpected turns - not twists in the sense of shocking moments of revelation, but choices made by the protagonist, which turn the vice of tension and stakes. These moments are spaced out throughout the 90 minutes of the film. First there’s the death of Eckhart and Dormer’s decision to cover it up. Then there’s the introduction of Robin Williams as the serial killer at the halfway point, a new active character in the film and the quiet partnership they form together. And lastly, there's the slight twist of betrayal of Dormer against Finch in the end.
Along the way Nolan finds time to draw just enough attention to a couple of smaller powerful moments of insight into Dormer’s character. The most important of which is when Dormer refuses to sign Ellie’s police report on Eckhart’s death. It comes towards the end when Dormer is at his most haggard. With the report closed off, the trail of Dormer’s cover-up would have been cut off too. But Nolan makes Dormer stop and pause, and without overt motivation he tells Ellie to double-check her report before filing it. It’s dramatized without much of a beat, but looking back it serves as Dormer’s unspoken confession and desire to give himself up and one of the most important moments in the film.
Insomnia is a mostly dour thriller, but what serial killer films aren't? It doesn't have the visceral impact of Seven or Silence of the Lambs. It's part of the simmering tension that underlies the story, but never really explodes with the force of those other two films. Nolan’s frequent musical collaborator other than Hans Zimmer is David Julyan, who composes a moody score not unlike his work on Memento and The Prestige, and perhaps influenced by the atmospheric scores of Howard Shore. It perfectly complements Nolan’s slow and steady pacing and the foggy mountain vistas and overcast sunlit visuals.
Despite the praise and mondo box office success, from these eyes Inception was more of a mess of ideas than anything else. It will be a while before we see if Nolan returns to the intimate close-off style of filmmaking of Insomnia or Memento. We’ll have to wait until after the third Batman movie to find out.
Insomnia is available on Blu-ray from Warner Home Video.
Thursday, 29 March 2012
Casablanca
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt
****
By Alan Bacchus
This is my favourite movie of all time, the zenith of Hollywood studio system, a war time romance, pot boiling noir and razor sharp thriller all rolled into one, crafted to perfection with one of the greatest screenplays of all time. It’s also the culmination of the creative skills of one of the great directors of all time, Michael Curtiz, a shamefully unheralded genius, a rare studio-era auteur whose influence spread for decades into the work of pulp masters like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
It was also the launching film for Humphrey Bogart, who, before then, was a primarily a character actor, playing second bill heavies, supporting more notorious thugs like James Cagney. Here Curtiz takes a chance on Bogie as brooding anti-hero and romantic leading man. He plays Rick Blaine, owner of Rick’s a popular club in Casablanca (Morocco) a port city known for exporting anti-Nazi resistence spies. But Rick’s there because he’s escaped his own persecution in other parts of the world, as well as a failed relationship with his former fling. Once burned twice shy, now ‘he sticks his neck out for nobody.’
Then, of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, in walks Isla Lund (Bergman), his former flame with her Residence hero husband Victor Laszlo (Henreid), looking to buy letters of transit which would send them abroad in safety. The Nazi thug Major Strasser (Veidt) and the Casablanca chief of police Capt Renault (Rains) know this and tries to intercept. With Rick in the middle, and torn between his rekindled love affair and his innate desire to fight against oppression, he’s forced to make a crucial decision, leave with Ilsa or give up the letters to Laszlo. This decision, choose selfishg love, or sacrifice for the good of the world, becomes one of cinema’s great surprise endings.
Plenty of analysis has done on Julius and Philip Epstein’s legendary screenplay. It’s perhaps rivalled only by Chinatown for it’s structural perfection, like the Parthanon of screenplays. Michael Curtiz’s direction is even sharper and to the point. Watch his editing, and punctuation scenes, his brilliant montage scenes and pacing of action. The opening sequence is magnificence, powered by the pulsing Max Steiner score, Curtiz throws us into the fast paced, multi-cultural world of urban Casablanca. Few films kickstart with a better bang than this.
Curtiz's mastery of the visual cinema language is on the level of all the revered masters of the era – Ford, Welles and Hitchcock. His camerawork is unmistakable. The master of the dolly shot, but always motivated by the movement of his actors. But since Curtiz loved to move his camera, it meant his actors were constantly in motion, criss crossing the frame in the foreground and background to create the elaborate choreography on screen. His lighting represents the best of early studio noir. His use of shadows is a hallmark as well – often framing the shadows of his characters to convey the secretic world of the covert activities.
The awesome new Warner Blu-Ray boxset commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the film is chock full of goodness. In fact before even before I popped in the Blu-Ray of the actual film I watched the accompanying documentary: Michael Curtiz: The Best Director You’ve Never Heard Of. The comprehensive chronicle of his career confirms everything I love about the man, his artistic triumphs as well as his gruff cantankerous personality. The testimonial of Steven Spielberg alone, who owes as much to Curtiz as he does to Ford, is perhaps the greatest compliment to the man.
Casablanca 70th Anniversary Box Set is available on Blu-Ray from Warner Home Entertainment
I also suggest going through Michael Curtiz's great body of work to discover some great films made in the style of Casablanca, such as:
Angels With Dirty Faces (1938)
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
The Sea Hawk (1940)
Mildred Pierce (1945)
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
The Sea Wolf (1941)
Flamingo Road (1949)
Young Man With a Horn (1950)
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