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Day: 23 November 2014

Classic Review: 12 Angry Men

It’s safe to say that nothing is impossible when it comes to the world of film. Modern audiences are now accustomed to seeing superheroes flying around, saving the world, and fantastical voyages to the furthest corners of space. This sense of spectacle can sometimes be taken for granted and many films are guilty of allowing their visual effects to outweigh the quality of plot, all of which is a crying shame as movies are gradually losing their essence and their true purpose. It should be the story and the narrative that captivates the viewer and holds them till the very last frame. There is no need for false gimmicks or flashy sets; movies can be simplistic in scope and still ignite the same profound emotions.

Take the premise of 12 Angry Men; the majority of the film takes place in one claustrophobic room as 12 jurors decide the fate of a young man under trial for murdering his father. At first glance the decision seems like a forgone conclusion, except for one juror, played by the indomitable Henry Fonda, who believes differently. The tension amongst the men slowly reaches fever point as Fonda goes about opening their minds to how ambiguous the case actually is. As the heat escalates within the confined room, the jury swelter under the enormity of the pressure placed upon them.

The prejudices and misconceptions of each juror are spooled out, shedding new light on each character’s vivid personality. The characterisation of each juror is so thorough and detailed that no actor is left underserved. Special mention must be given to Lee J. Cobb who provides sterling work as the main antagonist of the piece. His emotional breakdown during the climatic moments of his stubborn confrontation humanises a character that may have seemed one-dimensional. The acting showpiece, however, comes from Fonda. Even when portraying a character with no name or back story, he is still able to develop a complete and whole person whom the audience can support. Most impressively, he does all this just through the power of passionate rhetoric. His calm persistence and determination, despite being alone in his stance, display a decency and courage that are inspiring. He is the everyman that every man wishes to emulate.

Sidney Lumet directs the film with intensity and measured pacing to ensure the viewer has no chance to catch their breath and is left aghast after each dramatic swing of the justice pendulum. Lumet trusts in the taut script and knows there is no need for ostentatious camerawork or increased action and the absorbing dialogue itself is enough to maintain the high level of suspense. It’s hard to believe this was his directorial debut. With universal themes that are just as relevant nearly 60 years on, 12 Angry Men has proven to be a lasting reminder of how pure and essential cinema can be.

Live: The Coronas

22nd October

Soup Kitchen

7/10

The Coronas have been established for around 11 years now. They have supported the likes of Justin Timberlake, The Script, Paul McCartney and KT Tunstall. This year has seen them tour parts of Australia, and they released their latest album All The Others last month. Performing in one of the infamous Northern Quarter hotspots, the Soup Kitchen, set The Coronas up to be a good night. And they did not disappoint their sold out audience.

Their support sounded a little off throughout their performance, and so The Coronas seemed really fresh when they began their set. There were a few fumbles with instrument exchanges between songs, but I suppose that’s to be expected in such a small, and packed out venue.

Despite what sounded like a hyped-up fangirl audience—typical of any small-town Irish boyband—the audience was in fact a mix of ages. The gig saw fans get their money’s worth as Coronas played an album worth of songs, mixing the old with the new, including one they’d never played to a live audience before. It wasn’t difficult to tell which songs were the older ones, as people were buzzing to hear them, and seemed to know them word for word.

For the encore, the lead came back out, alone initially, and took centre stage on keyboard.  He performed a beautiful acoustic version of ‘Heroes and Ghosts’ from the new album. Suddenly being surrounded by a sea of little screens recording this one-off massively took away from the fantastic atmosphere he was creating.

The band clearly enjoy what they do, and engaged with the audience throughout the evening. They also showed appreciation to friends for favours, as well as the support of loyal fans before leaving the stage.

Review: The Imitation Game

Many film makers in recent years have lashed every drop of creative potential out of the two World Wars, and it comes to be that any movie-goer could be forgiven for assuming that any new release set in this grim period in human history will end up being ‘just another war film’. But, thankfully, a promising number of directors seem to see the crisis of originality in which the war genre finds itself­— David Ayer was one man to thank here for delivering the refreshingly gritty and bloody Fury to us last month, and now Norwegian Morten Tyldum has given us an exciting new WWII spy drama to freshen the genre’s stale breath.

The Imitation Game tells the tragic tale of British mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing (played with characteristic excellence by Benedict Cumberbatch). Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, he is summoned to Bletchley Park to assist with the battle against the infamous German encryption device – the Enigma machine. Convinced that Enigma cannot be broken by conventional means, Turing sets out to build a machine that will decrypt all German communications at the flick of a switch. The problem? His co-workers like his idea about as much as they like his tactless and snarky attitude. Turing’s personal life also has the potential to sabotage the operation – he is homosexual in the days when gay people were treated as the spawn of hell; Turing’s agony at the forced concealment of his identity has a profound effect on the film’s narrative.

The quality of the film’s intricate plotting cannot be overstated. The narrative hops between three points in Turing’s life – his schooldays at Sherborne, his time working in Bletchley Park during the war, and the later events surrounding his conviction for homosexuality that led to him taking his own life at the age of 41. Deception is always going to be a prominent theme in any espionage drama, but few biographical films manage to mirror this theme so well in their relationship with the audience as The Imitation Game. Tyldum slowly feeds us information about Turing that ensures we always find him sympathetic, even when he’s being insufferable to his colleagues. The gradual revelations about the man’s past and future—which are perfectly positioned in the narrative frame—make what starts out as an entertaining spy drama become a deeply moving tragedy of distinctly human proportions.

As anyone familiar with the extent of the man’s talent would expect, Benedict Cumberbatch is utter perfection as Turing. A biographical drama is dependent on the strength of its lead performance more than any other genre of film, and when you have as prodigious an actor as Cumberbatch in the mix, you can only expect magic to happen. That said, he still leaves room for other performers to have their turn in the spotlight, most notably Keira Knightley, who does fine work as the sole female cryptographer at Bletchley Park.

The movie is not without its problems, though­— a number of minor characters are set up who inexplicably disappear just when we want to find out more about them. Charles Dance and Mark Strong are two actors who fall victim to this waste of talent. And while the film avoids outright sentimentality, there are times at which it feels like it’s trying a little too hard to draw laughs and tears. Sometimes it’s almost as awkward as Turing’s own social skills. My biggest problem with the film though is that it veers alarmingly close to being too reverential to its subject in the closing scenes. When you’re humanising a character through a biopic, one of the biggest errors you can make is to nudge your audience with an unsubtle reminder about how wonderful they were. It comes within a fraction of a millimetre of completely derailing the movie— that’s how poorly considered the film’s final moments are.

That being said, The Imitation Game is well worth your while. Within the canon of recent WWII films, it achieves brilliance but falls short of greatness. You can count on it being a big player come awards season, but I’m pleased to report that it’s more than a stuffy Oscar-baiting melodrama. It is still every bit as moving and entertaining as its subject matter promises to be.

4/5

Feature: Should the Sci be Greater than the Fi?

From Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and its excruciatingly detailed interpretation of the delicate mechanisms of space flight (so intricate some consider the film a cinematic ruse to test Stan’s camera-trickery for the ‘faked’ moon landing footage of 1969) to Paul Anderson’s (not that one) abominable lump of worthless space-junk Event Horizon and its ‘gravity drive’ hidden behind not one, not two, but three magnetic fields(!), Hollywood’s attempts to conquer the final frontier have been as varying in scientific legitimacy as when the Soviets first slung Laika the terrified terrier to her fiery demise in a lower earth orbit in 1957. With the release of Christopher Nolan’s 170-minute, small-third-world-nation’s-gross-domestic-product-costing venture into the great unknown, the prospect of a soirée amongst the stars is eye-wateringly tangible from the safety of an IMAX, probably the closest any of us will ever come to an outer-atmosphere experience—particularly in the wake of fatally flawed Virgin Galactic test flights and an economy that condemns the all-consuming financial commitment of space exploration.

So now that we’ve seen the majesty of the unknown projected before our infantile globes across five decades, why in the period since Kubrick’s masterpiece have so many got the science portion of the sci-fi so wrong? How is it that George Lucas got away with conjuring up a moon-sized space-base only to fob us off with a floating storm trooper hotel-o-sphere, divided into top-to-bottom floors, with gravity pulling uniformly downwards? Why, when destroyed by the malicious Arachnids, does the ill-fated mega ship in Starship Troopers explode into flames in the oxygen-less vacuum of space? How the fuck is it that in Capricorn One, two characters are able to have a real-time phone conversation between Earth and Mars, a distance which radio waves need 20 minutes to traverse?! While these films will render you thoroughly entertained, they each shame-facedly transgress basic scientific concepts. Are they cases of lazy film making, made popular only by a scientifically illiterate public?

Or does it not matter? It’s easy to label these as the pedantic musings of an insufferable cynic looking to impress, and easier still to consider these objectively massive blunders unimportant. Perhaps the magic of sci-fi is in its transcendence of the trappings of dusty old physics; maybe it’s okay for a film to exist in its own universe, where breaking the rules merely enhances the spectacle. Nah, ‘fraid not, guys. Keep your flux capacitors and midichlorian counts; genuinely thrilling, immersive and classic sci-fi needs a basis in reality. One could argue that a film can only be considered true sci-fi if, and only if, grounded in Hoth-cold fact. Anything beyond that is merely fiction in space—not inherently valueless, but not science fiction. This may or may not be the case, but only when a film guides you through the realm of reality and then beyond can it truly inspire and mesmerise. But that isn’t to say that sci-fi can’t push the envelope of our comprehension past the boundaries of our puny psyches.

Take the case of Interstellar, the release of which was trailed by a gargantuan tidal wave of critiques penned by pricks and pedants decrying its multidimensional menagerie of mayhem armed only with their broadband connections and gilded scalpels of truth. The criticism focused on its interpretation of time as a dimension (which I actually considered to be a hugely inventive and enthralling (if a little Nolan-y) attempt at visualising a fundamentally un-visualise-able concept) and its pseudo-scientific spiel about ‘love’ as the all-pervading, all-transcending, all-empowering universal force. Yes, of course it was all nonsense, but prior to this, wormholes aside, Interstellar maintains an attention to detail and reverence for the harsh realities of the vast expanses of empty space that rival those of 2001:… The dialogue may be as hammy as a hoard of Gamorreans and Anne Hathaway’s acting as two-dimensional as a Euclidean plane, but the precision is undeniably impressive.

Neglecting the fundamental laws of our universe in favour of plot and journeying beyond our comprehension of the unforgiving realm we occupy are both forgivable in the pursuit of an entertaining story, but only the latter as the third act in a reality-based trek can make for profoundly exciting cinema. This is what 2001:… and Interstellar share, although if you’re undecided on what to watch before a night spent gazing at the heavens, go for Ed Wood’s unappreciated 1959 classic, Plan 9 From Outer Space.