Film Review: The Grey

The Grey. Rated MA 15+ (strong violence, survival themes and coarse language). 117 minutes. Directed by Joe Carnahan. Screenplay by Joe Carnahan and Ian Mackenzie Jeffers.

Verdict: A gripping, psychological thriller about the fear of death. Not recommended for anyone about to fly somewhere on a plane.

Hostile, remote, snow-bound environments have contributed to a number of memorable films about fear. Alive (1993) is the cinematic adaptation of Piers Paul Read’s best-seller about the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes who reluctantly resort to cannibalism in order to survive their ordeal. John Carpenter’s terrific The Thing (1982) pits scientists working in an Antarctic research station against an alien lifeform to thrilling effect.

In The Grey (based on a short story by Mr Mackenzie Jeffers), a group of Alaskan-based oil drilling workers are returning home to Anchorage from their isolated base when their plane crashes in a blizzard. Lead by John Ottway (Liam Neeson), the small number of survivors must conquer not only the perilous conditions, but a ferociously territorial wolf pack into whose hunting territory the plane has crashed.

Film Review: This Means War

This Means War. Rated M (sexual references, action violence and coarse language). 98 minutes. Directed by McG. Screenplay by Timothy Dowling and Simon Kinberg.

Verdict: A slick, classy, charisma zone. Just don’t expect too much.

With his screenplay for Mr and Mrs Smith (2005), Mr Kinberg created an ideal vehicle for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie who polished off the roles of married assassins who had been hired to kill each other. As one of the three writers credited with the screenplay for Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009), he also shared responsibility for the forensically researched blueprint that ensured this film had the potential to reach the cinematic heights it did. Add Mr Dowling, whose light, breezy and entirely predictable screenplay for Just Go with It (2011) ticked all the rom-com boxes, and you end up with a satisfying explanation of all that is good about This Means War.

Film Review: The Vow

The Vow. Rated PG (mild themes, coarse language, nudity and sexual references). 104 minutes. Directed by Michael Sucsy. Screenplay by Jason Katims, Abby Kohn, Marc Silverstein and Michael Sucsy.

Verdict: Perfect Valentine’s fare. Just remember to keep your seat-belt fastened at all times.

Inspired by events in the life of Kim and Krickitt Carpenter, The Vow is a romantic drama that is as solid as a rock. And almost as interesting as one.

It all starts promisingly enough as we are introduced to two love birds – Paige (Rachel McAdams) and Leo (Channing Tatum, pictured) who leave a cinema and drive off into the wintery night. Moments later, after Paige takes off her seat-belt to have sex with Leo in the car, a truck slams into the back of their randomly parked vehicle, sending her flying head-first through the windscreen.

As an Insurance Commission of WA commercial about the importance of wearing a seat-belt, it might have all ended there successfully enough. But no. There’s another 100 infuriating minutes as poor old Leo desperately tries to remind his now-amnesic wife of how wonderful their pre-accident life together was. Standing in his way are Paige’s selfish parents Bill (Sam Neill) and Rita (Jessica Lange), and her smarmy lawyer ex-boyfriend Jeremy (Scott Speedman, of Underworld fame), who each prefer the Paige they remembered, manipulated and controlled in the years before she met the free-spirited Leo.

To their unending credit, Ms McAdams (Mean Girls, Sherlock Holmes) and Mr Tatum (Dear John) invest everything they have into the laboured, cliché-ridden script – and their devotion to the tasks at hand (and their charming and engaging onscreen chemistry) works entirely in the film’s favour. Ms Lange (Frances, Crimes of the Heart, American Horror Story) takes all of a few minutes in her brief scene in the garden to give the cast an acting master-class, while Mr Neill gives the impression of never feeling entirely comfortable with the fact that he’s in a scene at all.

Even though Mr Sucsy (Grey Gardens) directs with a fine sense of respectable intimacy, nothing can mask the film’s fatal flaw – which comes when Paige earnestly (and somewhat self-defeatingly) declares that she hopes, one day, to love someone as much as Leo loves her. The temptation to scream out of sheer frustration might be all too difficult to resist.

This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspaper Group

Film Review: Chronicle

Chronicle. Rated M (violence). 84 minutes. Directed by Josh Trank. Screenplay by Max Landis.

With their punchy, too-cool-for-school big screen debut, twenty-six year old filmmakers Josh Trank and Max Landis have found themselves riding a huge wave of popularity – and deservedly so. While it owes a considerable debt to the grand-daddies of the ‘hand-held camera/found footage/documentary-making nerd’ sub-genre Cloverfield (2008) and Blair Witch Project (1999), Chronicle wins points for the strength of the three excellent lead performances, its grand flights (quite literally) of imagination, and some impressive visual effects.

Andrew (Dane DeHaan, pictured) is living a claustrophobic existence at home with his parents – his mother who is slowly dying and his father who is a violent and abusive alcoholic. When his mates Steve (Michael B Jordan) and Matt (Alex Russell) discover a large crater with a hole in the middle of it, Andrew (who is documenting the extremes of his life with a video camera) is called upon to capture it on film. What the trio discover when they explore where the hole leads, changes their lives forever. Returning to the surface with supernatural powers, the trio – at first –use their new abilities playfully and to improve their popularity stakes amongst their peers. But as their combined powers to alter reality take a stronger hold, the battle becomes about how they will resist the dark side of extraordinary new possibilities.

True Blood cinematographer Matthew Jensen brings a generous (and recognisable) amount of that series’ visual flair to the screen, while editor Elliot Greenberg (Devil, Quarantine) works wonders with the rough and ready jump cuts – ensuring that the tension is mostly terrifically taut.

The dominant skill in this sub-genre is to never let us, or the camera, feel too comfortable or relaxed about where the story is taking us – and the spectacular climatic sequences in which good battles evil for the soul of one of the trio, are certainly worth the restless, edgy wait.

This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspaper Group.

Film Review: The Descendants

The Descendants. Rated M (mature themes and coarse language). 115 minutes. Directed by Alexander Payne. Screenplay by Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash. Based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings.

One of the many complications that attend an actor’s celebrity status (in this case, George Clooney), is that the relentless torrents of salacious gossip and innuendo about their private lives can often overwhelm – or at the very least distract from – the work they attempt for the sake of their craft.

And so it is with the powerful, intricate and involving contemporary family drama in which Mr Clooney’s Matt King is struggling with a considerable number of responsibilities; his two recalcitrant young daughters (Alexandra and Scottie), his being named the sole trustee of his ancestor’s spectacular, pristine beachfront land, and the fact that his wife Elizabeth lies in a coma (the result of a boating accident) from which she unlikely to recover.

It is rich dramatic fodder, and Mr Payne (Sideways) expertly guides his outstanding ensemble through the emotionally-charged and conflicted minefield. Shailene Woodley acts everyone else off the screen as the eldest daughter Alexandra – managing to deliver a perfectly pitched performance as a girl on the cusp of adulthood who is beginning to accept her share of responsibility for whatever the future may hold. Amara Miller makes a superb debut as the youngest daughter Scottie – delivering her engaging young character’s vulnerability, fear and individuality with rare insight and precision.

Mary Birdsong and Rob Huebel provide brief, but expert, support as Matt and Elizabeth’s conflicted friends Kai and Mark – with the scene in which Matt confronts them in their home about Elizabeth’s apparent infidelity, the dramatic highpoint.

The fine threads of black comedy are a welcome relief from all the bleak, intense and introspective drama, but it is ultimately Patricia Hastie’s haunting and wordless performance as the comatose Elizabeth that serves to remind us that we are all equally responsible for the messes we risk leaving behind.

This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspaper Group.

Film Review: The Iron Lady

The Iron Lady. Rated M (mature themes and violence). 105 minutes. Directed by Phyllida Lloyd. Screenplay by Abi Morgan.

Not since Charlize Theron’s brilliant performance as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003) has an actress disappeared so completely beneath the skin of their character. But where Ms Theron was equally immersed in a compelling drama about increasingly desperate personal circumstances, Meryl Streep’s superb Margaret Thatcher is adrift in a movie that fails, entirely, to equal the sum of not insignificant parts.

When we first meet Ms Streep’s elderly Baroness Thatcher, she is shuffling about in a corner store buying a carton of milk – the price of which, she later bemoans to the ghost of her dead husband Dennis (Jim Broadbent), has gone up. It’s a curious and domestically banal introduction to a film about one of the most powerful, ambitious and divisive political leaders of the 20th century – and Britain’s first female Prime Minister.

What follows are lots of MTV-inspired clips of a glamorous Mrs Thatcher striding around surrounded by lots of men, grainy stock newsreels of the ugly, violent, civil unrest (the infamous “Poll Tax” riots, the 1984 Miners’ Strike and 1981’s Brixton riots) that accompanied a good many of Prime Minister Thatcher’s social and economic reform-driven policies. Brief engagements with her younger self (played by Alexandra Roach), the 1982 Falklands War, a very long button sewing-on sequence, and some idle chatter about the emergence of the single currency we now know as the Euro, round out the determined political unconsciousness of it all.

Ms Morgan’s reductivist screenplay and Ms Lloyd’s (Mamma Mia!) undisciplined camera seem happiest when their star is moping around in the dark – scratching about the place for some semblance of the commanding influence she once wielded on the world stage. What might have been useful would have been a script that stopped fluffing around in the kitchen and explored the vast wealth of potential an intelligent film about Margaret Thatcher might have exposed. Meryl Streep’s performance in that film would truly have been something to behold.

This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspaper Group.

Film Review: The Muppets

The Muppets. Rated G. 110 minutes. Directed by James Bobin. Screenplay by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller.

Throughout the mid to late 1970s and early 1980s, it was impossible to get enough of Jim Henson’s adorable Muppets – who began life in 1969 as the puppet stars of Sesame Street. Fortuitously, Mr Henson embarked on a mission to expand his audience – and with the backing of impresario Lew Grade, The Muppet Show premiered in 1976.

The 120 episodes of The Muppet Show featured a “very special guest star” for whom a precious spot on the show was considered a career highlight, while Henson’s marvellously quirky and musically ambitious characters – including Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Animal, Dr Teeth, Electric Mayhem, Beaker and The Swedish Chef – were soon celebrated the world over.

The Muppet Movie (1979), The Great Muppet Caper (1981) and The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984) were hugely successful cinematic incarnations, but by 2005’s The Muppets' Wizard of Oz, the franchise’s appeal appeared to have been exhausted.

Tastes had changed – and Kermit and friends were effectively retired.

And so with generous lashings of nostalgia, Mr Segel and Stoller’s joyfully self-reflective script takes us into the world of the, now, retired Muppets. Gary (Mr Segel) and his Muppet brother Walter (Peter Linz) are indefatigable Muppet fans, so when Gary decides to take his long-suffering girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) on holiday in Los Angeles, the motivation is to visit the old Muppet Studios and Theatre. When Walter inadvertently overhears Tex Richman’s (Chris Cooper) plot to demolish the historic theatre and drill for oil in the ground beneath it, the trio track down Kermit and encourage him to get the Muppets back together again and put on a show to save their precious theatre and studios.

Mr Bobin (The Flight of the Conchords) establishes a light and breezy tone for the film early and never wavers – while the requisite cameos (including Jack Black, Whoopi Goldberg, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, Selena Gomez and Mickey Rooney) are all handled delightfully.

But it is the reassembling of the old Muppet gang that is supremely entertaining (Miss Piggy, for example, is now the Plus Size Editor of French Vogue) and as they bring their Muppet Telethon to life to raise the money to save their theatre, it is impossible to resist the temptation to stand up and cheer. And when the Oscar-nominated “Rainbow Connection” makes its appearance, it’s equally impossible not be overwhelmingly moved by just how influential these extraordinary little puppets once were. And still are.

This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspaper Group.