Tag / FilmJuice

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Rampart (2011)

FilmJuice have my review of Oren Moverman’s Rampart.

Written by the crime novelist James Ellrot and set against a backdrop of police corruption and political wrangling, Rampart tells the story of a cop on the wrong side of history. Played by Woody Harrelson, Dave “Date Rape” Brown knows all the angles and all the dirty secrets meaning that even when he fucks up and gets caught, the brass can’t touch him. All Brown needs to do is claim to have received a job offer from Fox News and his problems simply melt away. However, as the film progresses and the political climate shifts further and further from yesterday’s old pals and backroom deals, Brown finds himself struggling to keep his head above water:

The idea that there is no place for a person like Dave in a civilised society provides Rampart with much of its thematic power. Dave, we are told, is the son of an old school cop and his status as the son of an old school cop gives him access to a network of contacts embodied by the nameless retired detective played by Ned Beattie. At the beginning of the film, Dave has a place in the LAPD because the department is still in thrall to the old and brutal ways of doing business. Most of Dave’s problems stem from the fact that he simply cannot adapt to the new LAPD being built by ambitious politicians like those played by Sigourney Weaver and Steve Buscemi. Thus Dave’s fall from grace is not just about his own stupidity but also about power leaching away from the brutal white men who police the city.

Though Rampart‘s wonderful cinematography, engaging characterisation and some hugely entertaining and recognisably Ellrovian dialogue are more than enough to make for an entertaining film, one cannot help but feel that there is something increasingly generic about the existential art house crime film. Back in 1967, John Boorman’s Point Blank used the tools of the art house to delve into the police house and since then a steady stream of art house directors including Abel Ferrara, Werner Herzog and Nicolas Winding Refn have happily used brilliant cinematography to tell and re-tell the same stories of crime, madness and existential alienation. Indeed, Rampart‘s real problem is that it is ultimately nothing more than a well realised genre film. Great cinematography? Check! Enigmatic protagonist? Check! Long drawn out pauses? Check? Descent into madness? Check! Ambiguous ending? Check! Though entertaining, the art house crime film really has lost its power to shock or provoke… in its own way it is just as predictable and safe as the country house mysteries of yesteryear.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Le Silence de la Mer (1949)

FilmJuice have my review of Jean-Pierre Melville’s first film Le Silence de la Mer.

Given that Melville is best known for such noir crime thrillers as Bob Le Flambeur (1955) and Le Samurai (1967), it is surprising to discover that his first film is neither a thriller nor an homage to the noir classics of Hollywood’s golden age. In fact, Le Silence de la Mer is an adaptation of a novel written by a member of the French resistance. Densely atmospheric and pointedly stripped of all extraneous dialogue, the film tells the story of the relationship between a pair of French people and the Nazi officer they are ordered to provide with lodgings. Every evening, the Nazi officer comes home and trots out a few pleasantries that the French people pointedly ignore. As the months go by, the officer’s love of France and desire to talk bubbles over into a series of impassioned speeches about his hope for the future of Franco-German relations. Aside from being beautifully composed and wonderfully still, Le Silence de la Mer is also wonderfully ‘of its time’ thematically speaking:

Aside from its technical brilliance, Le Silence de la Mer also offers a fascinating snapshot of a French intellectual class that was still trying to come to terms with the implications of widespread collaboration. Indeed, between the officer’s status as a ‘Good German’ and his lengthy speeches on the greatness of French culture, it is easy to read this film as an ode to the majesty of France (the film is based on a novel written by a member of the resistance) but look beyond the foreground and you find a morally ambiguous world full of silently complicity French people, bars closed to Jews and a Nazi delivering what was effectively the Petainist line that France would become greater through collaboration. While Le Silence de la Mer may lack the slow-burning outrage of Melville’s more famous indictment of French collaboration L’Armee des Ombres (1969) this is still a heroically ambiguous film from a time when France was desperate to escape all suggestion of moral ambiguity.

As someone who owns the Mieville DVD box set, I was somewhat taken aback by how different this film feels to many of his better-known works. Indeed, contained in this still and ambiguous early film are the blueprints for an entirely different cinematic career… what if Melville had not become a maker of thrillers but a more traditionally art house experimentalist? This is a film that captures the attractions of just such a possibility.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – L’Atalante (1934)

FilmJuice have my review of the Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, which is being re-released in cinemas by those noble folks at the BFI.

Though not quite as subversive or as loveable as Renoir’s Boudu Saved From Drowning (with which Vigo’s film shares the incomparable Michel Simon), L’Atalante still offers a fascinating portrait of a style of life that has long since been extinguished.  Set on a French canal barge, the film explores the tension between a young woman’s desire to be with her husband and her desire to see the outside world. Evidently a man of his times, L’Atalante concludes that young women probably should stay close to their husbands but while Vigo seemingly has little affection for the life less civilised, he does an absolutely brilliant job of capturing all of its glamour and mystery:

While the film ostensibly takes its name from Jean’s ship, the ship’s name refers to the Greek mythical figure of Atalanta who refused to marry until one of her suitors could beat her in a footrace. Like many strong female mythological characters, Atalanta is something of a feminist icon but Vigo presents Juliette’s escape in decidedly ambiguous terms. Indeed, while Jean is clearly a stick-in-the-mud Vigo’s depiction of Juliette’s travails in the outside world make it clear that he thinks that the best place for her is with her husband. The only thing preventing the sexism fairy from getting to this film is the fact that Jean effectively falls apart once he realises what he has lost in Juliette. While the strength of Daste’s performance and the affective power of Vigo’s depiction of Jean’s despair prevent the film from ending on a sour note it is interesting to see that it is Father Jules and not Jean who manages to track down and ‘save’ Juliette suggesting (in accordance with the myth) that it may be the colourful Jules and not the drably professional Jean who is Juliette’s true soul-mate.

Given that our media landscape is increasingly concerned with the new and the fresh regardless of its quality, it can feel oddly contrarian to go and see an 80 year-old film at the cinema. After all, these types of film are all available of DVD so why would you bother to go and see them at the cinema when you could go and see Ghost Protocol instead? The answer is that there is still something unique about seeing old films in the way that their creators intended. To be held spell-bound by images of people long dead in a world long disappeared is a really strange but entirely rewarding experience that I simply cannot recommend highly enough. Go and see this film in the cinema and, believe me, you will be glad that you did.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Mademoiselle Chambon (2009)

FilmJuice have my review of Stephane Brize’s drama Mademoiselle Chambon.

Based on a plot synopsis alone, Brize’s story of a happily married man who falls in love with his child’s primary school teacher might seem stupefyingly generic. After all, how many films do the French really need to make about attractive middle class people and their complex romantic entanglements? Despite the highly generic nature of its plot and themes, Mademoiselle Chambon in nonetheless a fascinating watch because Brize tells this very conventional story in an entirely unconventional manner:

Mademoiselle Chambon is a film that lives and dies by its awkward conversational pauses. These kinds of pauses will be familiar to fans of European art house film as they are widely used in that cinematic tradition to create an impression of psychological depth, the idea being that if you have the characters do something unusual and then allow the audience the time to speculate about why they did it, the insights they gain seem more profound and intelligent than if the characters had delivered them through dialogue. However, while these kinds of pauses usually hint at such unpalatable emotions as rage, sadness and alienation, Brize uses them in order to denote the presence of deep but well-hidden passion. Mademoiselle Chambon never directly addresses the love between Jean and Veronique, instead it traces the outline of their desire in the minutiae of everyday life.

While I was not entirely convinced by the way the film ended, I was nonetheless impressed by Brize’s approach to storytelling. His grasp of emotional nuance and his ability to explore those nuances through entirely non-verbal means makes Mademoiselle Chambon a great place to start acquiring an interest in art house film.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Ides of March (2011)

FilmJuice have my review of George Clooney’s much-hyped political thriller The Ides of March starring Clooney, Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti.

As my review suggests, this is an entirely decent piece of filmmaking.  The story is a fundamentally interesting one, the direction is competent, the performances are entrancing and the whole thing looks and feels very much like an episode of The West Wing featuring some of the best thought-of actors in modern-day Hollywood. The problem is that, while The Ides of March is entirely decent, it is not particular exciting. Indeed, when I say that it looks and feels like an episode of The West Wing, I mean exactly that and while I liked The West Wing quite a bit at the time, I do think that a serious political film has to do a little bit more than ape a decade-old TV programme:

Whether on a visual or narrative level, Clooney and co-screenwriter Grant Heslov really do not show us anything that we have not seen before. The tale of idealism crushed beneath the boots of political expediency is an old political saw and while the themes of fear and loyalty are interesting, Clooney’s direction fails to elevate them above the level of a subtle motif. Perhaps if Clooney had been less plodding in his direction and the film’s accusation had been more concrete and impassioned then Ides of March might have been a truly memorable piece of political filmmaking. Instead, Clooney’s latest is nothing more than an entertaining and competently directed romp featuring great performances from some of Hollywood’s most potent (and promising) acting talents.  Some Friday nights, that is more than enough.

I didn’t dislike the film and I would warmly recommend it to West Wing fans but no film this derivative should have this amount of buzz surrounding it.  That’s all I’m saying…

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Super 8 (2011)

FilmJuice have my review of J.J. Abrams’ Super 8.

The film is intended as an homage to the sorts of family action adventure movies that Spielberg used to dominate the cinematic landscape in the 1980s.  Think ET and Goonies. As I explain in the review, the film adopts the traditional Hollywood template of having two distinct narratives that interweave and feed off of each other.  Traditionally, in these types of films, one narrative is very mundane and all about kids growing up, while the other is more fantastical. These two plot lines then intersect in such a way that the fantastical elements of the film help the kids to confront issues in their everyday life such as divorce, the death of a parent or simply growing up.  Knowing a good template when he sees one, Abrams uses the same trick in Super 8 but, because this is a J.J. Abrams film, he tries to add a postmodern flourish to the film by making it all about a bunch of kids running away from aliens whilst trying to make a film:

Unfortunately, while all of these themes and narratives work superbly on their own, they never quite manage to link up and feed into each other meaning that Super 8 is never more than the sum of its parts. The failure of the film’s various subplots to connect with each other is particularly noticeable in the film’s conclusion when what should have been a moment of heart-rending reconciliation falls completely flat because all of the journeys undertaken by the characters were undertaken alone.

Though unlikely to prove as memorable as any of the films from the 80s genre boom, Super 8 is nonetheless an entertaining soufflet of a film that contains some real spectacle and some real heart.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Arrietty (2010)

FilmJuice have my review of Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s Arrietty. A Studio Ghibli adaptatation of Mary Norton’s Borrowers books.

As one might expect of a film directed by one of Ghibli’s finest animators, Arrietty is visually very impressive indeed. The characters are well-designed, the sets are elegant and the re-use of mundane items — de rigueur in all wainscot fantasies — is both imaginatively conceived and brilliantly executed.  However, beyond such shallow set-dressing, Yonebayashi displays a skill for visual storytelling that shows an astonishing amount of promise:

However, while the film repeatedly shows us how alien a world can be when it is not built with you in mind, it also whispers of conciliation and companionship and of what beauties might be achieved if only humans and borrowers could learn to live together. This yearning is symbolised by a dollhouse built by Sho’s family as a place for borrowers to live. A place of glittering chandeliers and tiny silver kettles, the dollhouse is nothing short of a holy land for a group of small people that are very afraid and very alone in a world full of humans.

Unfortunately, while Yonebayashi’s direction is flawless, many of his visual motifs work against Miyazaki’s characteristically slap-dash plot.  Indeed, while Yonebayashi is hinting at what might be if humans and borrowers could live together, the film ends with the borrowers leaving the world of humans completely.  The disconnect between the story told by the film’s visuals and the story told by the film’s script gives the impression that Arrietty is filled with unresolved plot lines resulting in a film that feels more like the opening of a trilogy than a self-contained world.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Sarah’s Key (2010)

FilmJuice have my review of Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s Sarah’s Key.

Starring Kristin Scott Thomas, the film tell the twin stories of a young Jewish girl who was sent to a deportation camp as part of the French government’s infamous War-time Vel D’Hiv Roundup and an American journalist who becomes obsessed with the fact that her husband’s family may have benefited from the roundup:

As these two plot strands slowly unfurl and the connections between the two stories become more and more apparent, Sarah’s Key not only shows us the extent of French complicity in the Holocaust, it also presents us with an explanation of why it is that the events at the Vel D’Hiv were so swiftly forgotten.

While I thought that Paquet-Brenner handed the period elements of the film very well, I felt that he really struggled with the part of the film that tried to make a case for a sort of universal human guilt whereby even the children of people who indirectly benefited from the Holocaust bear a distinct burden of guilt. While this idea neither baffles nor repulses me, I think that it is something of a hard-sell and Sarah’s Key never manages to approach a convincing argument despite an increasingly melodramatic tone. Disappointing but fairly enjoyable up until the 90 minute mark.