Adam Review

Adam is a small budget drama/indie-romance about a man with Asperger’s (Adam, played by Hugh Dancey) and a woman (Beth, Rose Byrne) who moves into his apartment building. I went into this film expecting a light, sentimental, mildly satisfying feature and left having seen something more substantial, if a still little slight.

The film follows the relationship of Adam and Beth as they get to know each other better with her finding out about his disability and what it entails. Roadblocks in the way of the couple’s true happiness include Beth’s father’s misgivings, Adam’s struggle to find a job and the difficulties intrinsic to Adam’s Asperger’s Syndrome.

The film has been a huge success both in the US and internationally, having already out earned its miniscule budget several times over. All of the actors are fantastic in their roles. The subtleties portrayed by Dancey and Byrne are enjoyable to watch. Rose Byrne is just enjoyable to watch full stop. A cynic could point out that playing a character with a mental disorder is a guaranteed Oscar nomination, so Dancey’s decision to play Adam is a good career move. However, his subtle and convincing portrayal of an Asperger’s sufferer lacks the hackneyed tear-jerking bullshit of blatant Oscar grabs of the past. There is no I Am Sam, Sean Penn over-sentimentality here.

The film’s lack of sentimentality is both its strength and its weakness. There is a sweetness to the film’s central relationship that is palpable and enjoyable. Max Meyer’s simplistic, artful direction allows this sweetness to flourish. However, the film lacks an overarching emotionality. This isn’t to say that it is heartless, or that it lacks character or class, I just don’t think I was affected enough by it. There is a detachment inherent to the films presentation of Adam and Beth’s relationship that doesn’t give the audience full access to the emotions that the characters are experiencing. This detachment surely wasn’t an accident. It works to reflect Adam’s detachment from those around him, with his Asperger’s rendering it impossible for him to know what other people are thinking or feeling.

The film makes good decisions in terms of plot and character development, but somehow it doesn’t add up to a completely satisfying whole. I really enjoyed it, but I wanted to enjoy it more. I feel that in doing the characters justice and providing a real and informed portrayal of Asperger’s, Adam has somehow fallen short of packing a full emotional punch.

That being said, it deserves to be watched.

An Incredibly Late Review of Harry Potter

Harry Potter films have always been a struggle to watch. Being a massive fan of the books, I want the films to reflect my experience of them. This has never and will never happen. So in order to enjoy the movies I need to suppress this desire. I need to ignore my frame of reference. I think Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was for the first time able to accomplish this.


This does not mean that I have not enjoyed the previous Harry Potter movies. I think some of them are awesome, Prisoner of Azkaban being the obvious standout. But re-watching the other instalments made me realise something: the actual act of watching them is a lot of work.


This isn’t because the movies are overlong (they are, but whatever) or because the acting is bad (it is, but who gives a shit?). It’s because you can see the amount of effort that people have gone to just to fit the damn thing into a workable film. In the same way that watching someone vomit makes you want to be sick, or seeing someone get whacked in the nuts by his cricket bat-wielding toddler forces every man in the room to cover his crotch, Harry Potter films make us feel like we are on the job. With the exception of Azkaban, they all are chopped, changed, spun-around, molested and shoved into their running times with a desperation that is all too apparent.


Here is the word that perfectly describes why Half-Blood Prince is the best instalment to date: Effortlessness.


The reason that I was able to ignore my frame of reference and enjoy the film for what was is this: I never once noticed the work. The film had a flow to it that was so natural, so uncomplicated I was able to fully immerse myself in the story. I never found myself reeling at some plot-point or detail that was different from the book. It was only after it was over that I even realised a major climactic battle was completely removed, let alone some characters who play a huge part in the next instalment. And once I did realise I didn’t actually care. The film was better for having left them out. It would’ve been too much work to fit them in.


It was sad when it should have been sad, Light-hearted when it should have been light-hearted, and satisfying when the lights came up. I can wait with confidence that the final Potter will be made the right way, with less of an eye on keeping in all of the details from the book and more of one on crafting an enjoyable cinematic experience.


All Hail the Half-Blood Prince!

The Road preview

The first preview for the much-anticipated film The Road was released this week. It is “much-anticipated” for a few reasons:

1. Based on the book by Cormac McCarthy, the man who wrote No Country For Old Men.

2. Directed by Australian John Hillcoat, whose previous films include the bleakly awesome The Proposition and Ghosts… of the Civil Dead.


3. The book, a story of a man and boy trying to survive after an unnamed cataclysm has turned their world into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, is truly awesome. It won the Pulitzer Prize and really deserves to be made into a good film.

After watching the preview, however, I am getting the sense that Hillcoat is not making this film as closely to the book as I would like. I don’t think that this automatically means the film will be bad, but it is jarring none-the-less.

The book is an endearing study of the relationship between a father and son. The post-apocalyptic setting is used to distil this theme. The whole point is it’s just them – father and son – walking along the road and trying to stay alive. They are the only family they have. However, in the preview it is evident that the role of Charlize Theron as the mother is much (much!) more substantial than the book. In the book she is only ever mentioned in conversation, and even then barely at all. I just hope that they don’t throw away too much man/boy time in order to concentrate on Theron’s character.

The book’s cataclysm is never made known. This ambiguity is spread throughout the book. Characters backgrounds are never given, disturbing events are never explained, there is very little that is certain in the world of The Road. The fact that we are given no information only adds the sense of dread and horror that builds up over the course of the book. However, the preview suggests that the filmmakers have decided to blame the cataclysm on global warming. This kind of ruins the tension a bit.

Now that the gripes have been voiced, the preview has me excited for the film. Being able to see McCarthy’s masterpiece on the big screen will be a great experience. The awesome cast that Hillcoat has pulled together (Viggo Mortensen, Robert Duval, Charlize Theron, Guy Pierce) is really promising. The film looks great with a bleak palette and some harrowed looking actors. And Hillcoat’s pedigree speaks for itself.

In the end, even if the differences between the book and the film become jarring, I have to promise myself to keep an open mind and try to see the film as it is rather than how I wish it were. I just have to figure out a way to pass the time from now until October.

Angels & Demons Review

Angels and Demons is a strange film. When it was first announced that they were actually going ahead with the sequel to The DaVinci Code I was confused. In my naivety I wondered how – considering the failure of that film both stylistically and at the box office – they could possibly have convinced any studio to fund a goddamn sequel. Despite my confusion I had to just accept the fact that I live in a world where stuff like this happens. Mental.

Then even more inexplicably I found myself, months after this initial confusion, sitting in a movie theatre on a Sunday afternoon waiting for Angels and Demons to wallop me square in the jaw with the ridiculous story of Robert Langdon, Symbologist Extraordinaire.

While the book the film is based on is set before the events depicted in Da Vinci Code, this movie is modified to be a sequel. This evidently wasn’t too hard, just the insertion of a reference to the first film in one of the opening scenes and the writers evidently dusted their hands and high fived each other on a job well done. Money in the bank, boys, money in the bank.

The story follows the same structure as the Da Vinci Code: an extended chase for information that reveals unexpected truths and leaves the protagonists irrevocably changed. This time it’s a dastardly plot to kidnap catholic bishops carried out by the dreaded Illuminati. It’s tighter than the exposition-wrought first film, but only just.

The problem with this film is that it doesn’t know what it is. It’s too much of a stupid American chase-action-twist film that it doesn’t work as a psychological thriller, and it tries too hard to be an intelligent psychological thriller to be a fun popcorn adventure movie. It’s sort of lumbering no matter what it tries to be.

The acting can’t really be described as bad, because it’s not like the actors are given characters so much as facsimiles to begin with. They all play their part, and most of the time it’s watchable, albeit a bit predictable. During the films run time I gazed at their machinations with a sort of disengaged mood and found it to be enough. Not substantive or fulfilling, just enough. On a Sunday afternoon I wasn’t feeling too picky.

I can’t really say this film stank because after it was over I at least felt like something had happened – as opposed to that empty feeling you get when a film is really, truly awful – I just wasn’t sure what that something was and pretty certain I didn’t give a shit enough to find out.

In light of all this, I give you my conclusion: Angels & Demons doesn’t stink.

That’s the best I can say for it.

Why You Should Watch Tetro (even though I haven't seen it)

One of the films that premiered at Cannes this year is the low budget, black and white drama Tetro. The words “low budget, black and white drama” are surely going to deter a large chunk of the movie going population, but the fact is you should be excited about this movie. I mean it. Not just mildly interested, or half-heartedly curious. You should be blowing your fucking brains out in anticipation: Balls-to-the-wall, eye-popping, cat-strangling anticipation.

This is serious business.

Why should you care? Simple. This is the first movie that Francis Ford Coppola has written and directed and given a shit about for two decades.

Let me take you back to the pot and coke fuelled days of Hollywood in the 1970’s.

(Insert watery transition and harp music here)

For as long as anyone cares to remember the studios have been in control of the film business. They’ve honed their craft to science: crapping out countless bland, formulaic genre movies for an increasingly uninterested audience.
Suddenly out of the aether a new crop of filmmakers arrive. They are independent, artistic, egotistical, and – most importantly – they believe in the creative control of the director as Auteur. These filmmakers begin a revolution in Hollywood that will last ‘til the end of the 70’s and change the face of Hollywood forever.

These filmmakers have names like Peter Bogdanovich Will Friedkin, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, and Martin Scorsese. These men are making fantastic films, achieving critical success and garnering a lot of attention. The biggest name of them all, the one that stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of both critical praise and cultural ubiquity, is Francis Ford Coppola.

Everything Coppola touches turns to gold.

It all starts in 1972 with a film called The Godfather. It gets made, despite the studio’s reservations about releasing a gangster film in a time when the genre is so out of style, and blows everyone’s minds. It breaks box office records, wins every award possible, and cements Coppola’s position as the unquestioned God of New Hollywood. Coppola is an egotistical figure, pushing people around to get his way, and making great films in the process. 1974 sees the release of two films, the money-burning chart topping sequel The Godfather: Part II, and the lower budget, more personal The Conversation. Both further increase Coppola’s standing in Hollywood and add more weight to his already healthily engorged ego.

But Hollywood – in the immortal words of Bachman-Turner overdrive – ain’t seen nothing yet.

Coppola takes on his next project, his biggest one yet: A Vietnam war film based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It promises to be special, and Coppola easily finds financial backing. The shoot is an absolute nightmare. Originally meant to take a few months, the film is not completed for four years. Coppola insists on shooting on site in the Southeast Asian jungle. He begins dressing and acting like Fidel Castro. Bad weather ruins much of the shoot, as well as logistical problems to do with Coppola’s over-ambitious shot compositions (getting an entire fleet of army helicopters into formation is harder than it looks). On top of this, Martin Sheen has a heart attack, Marlon Brando turns up weeks late and several kilograms too heavy (his character Kurtz was described as gaunt and wraith-like, Brando was obese and jowly), Coppola buys cadavers off someone who is later convicted of grave-robbing (Coppola thought they were donated bodies) and the budget balloons to several times its original size. All of this leaves the cast, crew and producers feeling crazed, angry and abused.

The film breaks Coppola’s financial back. Ruins his company American Zoetrope. Destroys any relationship Coppola has with anyone in Hollywood. And ultimately bring an end to the revolution that Coppola helped begin.

The film, Apocalypse Now, was also the best film of the decade, but no one took any notice of that.

So let’s make a tally of films listed so far that Coppola wrote and directed and gave a shit about: The Godfather, The Godfather: Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. In a matter of around ten years, Coppola managed to put out four of the best films ever made. Problem is, after that all his bridges were burned.

Coppola has never really possessed free reign he was given for those four films ever again. Despite continuing to make films, all evidence points to the fact that he really stopped giving a shit and was just turning up for the paycheck. This is clearly evidenced by the 1996 Robin Williams “Comedy” Jack. Coppola has been accused of being nothing but a studio whore for the past two decades.

However, there light at the end of the tunnel my friends: after twenty years of making films that he doesn’t care about, Coppola has come out with Tetro. Self funded, shot on location, written and directed by Coppola. This film has all the hallmarks of the old days, with Coppola at the helm and in full control.

Early reports say that the film is incredible, and the footage and previews that have been released look beautiful. This is some exciting shit, because it heralds the comeback of an American Genius. While I’m not promising that this movie will be as monumental as The Godfather, the very idea of another Coppola film entering the pantheon of his other greats is thrilling enough to justify the price of the ticket.

So seriously, when Tetro is released in cinemas, watch it. You could be witnessing the redemption of a truly great director.

Cliffhanger Remake?

can you really improve on this?

Earlier this week the world was informed that StudioCanal have decided to remake the 90's Stallone action film Cliffhanger. I have decided that I have a problem with this.

My problem doesn't lie in the fact that Hollywood insists on plundering my 13-year-old self's favorite films, or that remakes simply have a tendency to suck. It lies in the fact that a remake of a 90's action film does not make any sense in the current global political context.

First, a history lesson: the modern American action genre is cut up into three distinct time periods. These periods are: 

1. The post-Vietnam war, Reaganite 80's;

2. The post-Soviet 90's; and 

3. The Globalised, post 9-11, technophilic 2000's.

The first category refers to films like Rambo II, Missing in Action, and Commando. These films feature a lone, muscular protagonist (Stallone, Norris and Schwarzenegger respectively) who singlehandedly takes on entire armies and wins. These films are influenced heavily by the United States' loss in Vietnam, and can be seen as Hollywood trying to overcome America's loss by symbolically claiming victory. Lots of blood, gore, and one-dimensional characterisation ensues.

Films like Die Hard, True Lies and Cliffhanger belong in the second category. In these films, the location has moved from foreign soil to the heartland of America. Where the films of the first category were about America asserting its values overseas, these ones are about America defending itself from foreign invaders. Again, the defense is performed with characteristic gusto. The baddies tend to die in increasingly spectacular fashion. In Cliffhanger, you have a good, honest American rock climber dispatching baddies in many awesome and varied ways: impaling them on stalactites, crushing them in avalanches, etc. etc. Each death is more spectacular than the last.

The third and most recent category is the exact opposite of the first two. Included in this are films like the Bourne Identity and Casino Royale. In these films, the protagonist is not particularly muscular and does not serve as a symbol of American values. The character of Jason Bourne for example does not even know at the beginning of his adventure if he is American or French or English or Russian or whatever. The action sequences are often shot with a handheld camera give a sense of gritty realism. There is lots of interaction with sophisticated technology: mobile phones and laptops becoming the tool of the hero as opposed to the simple yet effective weaponry of earlier action films.

The films of the first two categories reflect a simplistic "us vs. them" political landscape. The enemy is clear, and what must be done to them is even clearer: kill them and then say something glib. Films of the third category offer a murkier morality, where the distinctions between the goodies and baddies are hard to define. The action is less of a spectacle, forgoing the unnecessary brutality that make films in category one and two such simple-minded entertainment.

I guess my point for this post is this: now that action films have com this far there is no going back. A studio that attempts to remake a film like Cliffhanger does so to it's own detriment. If they keep the same basic layout, then they find themselves a decade too late thematically and aesthetically. If they choose to 'modernise' the plot by Bournifying it they lose the essence of the original film. Gabe Walker can never be Jason Bourne. 

My bet is that the studio will be having the good guys texting each other constantly and using smartphones to update their facebook status shot with a shakey, hand-held camera. There will be a Jack Bauer-esque interrogation scene where the good guys torture a baddie in order to find out where a WMD is. Gone will be the smug remarks after an enemy gets horribly and spectacularly killed. Gone will be a muscular Stallone, replaced by Shia Labeouf or some other skinny white boy. Gone will be the simplicity of the 'kill all the bad guys and everything will be alright' mentality. Gone will be Cliffhanger, replaced by some thing that is definitely not Cliffhanger.

Leave the goddamn film where it is. This remake cannot work. 

Star Trek

When talking about the new Star Trek reboot, it is important to make a distinction between the words ‘reboot’ and ‘remake’.

‘Remake’ is a word that Hollywood has been particularly trigger happy with in the past decade. The noughties have seen many remakes, particularly of horror films from the seventies. Remakes show a tendency to want to pillage the past, to take a well-known name like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and slap a fresh bunch of attractive faces onto it, add some computer generated effects and slow motion, and make a whole bunch of cynical, dirty, money.

Apart from a few exceptions, if a movie is a remake it is undeniably awful. Case and point: Steve Martin pirouetting on the grave of comic genius Peter Sellers in 2006’s The Pink Panther. The best advice anyone can get about a remake is to leave it alone. Don’t spend your money seeing it. Just ignore it. Hopefully it will go away.

A ‘reboot’ on the other hand is often an unexpected and glorious occasion. A reboot takes a long running series and says “screw it, let’s start from the beginning.” While this process can be stressful for hardcore fans of the show, what often results is a solid and vastly improved piece of entertainment. The most successful example of a series reboot in recent years is Chris Nolan’s peerless re-jigging of Batman with the formidable one-two punch of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. A duo of films that will surely go down in history as the greatest series reboot of all time. The reboot of the old, camp seventies sci-fi franchise has also been done successfully before with Ron Moore’s brilliant Battlestar Galactica. Which took everything that was bad about the original series and threw it away, adding in political intrigue, emotionally complex characters and biting social commentary to sweeten the deal.

It was with great hope that I went into the cinema to see J.J. Abrams new take on Star Trek. To put it simply: my expectations were met and surpassed. With its fast pace, charming cast and gorgeous special effects Star Trek is a fantastic and cinematic piece of entertainment.

Abrams’ direction takes the franchise into the new millennium by fashioning a plotline that completely removes any need for the story to maintain the mythos of the original series. This is done while including enough references to the original that it doesn’t completely alienate the existing fans. That being said, the hardcore Trekkies are still finding plenty to complain about. On every Trek forum on the internet you will find the hate fueled bile-sprayings of jilted fans who have made it their duty to diligently list everything that is wrong with the film, and everything that they would do to Mr. Abrams if they ever saw him on the street.

Ignore these people. They won’t ever go away, but pretend they aren’t there.

Star Trek is awesome, and I can’t wait for the inevitable sequel.

All hail the series reboot!

My Score : four buckets of fanboy bile out of five.