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Day: 26 January 2015

Review: Unbroken

Written by Amna Shaddad on . Posted in Film.

Obviously from the trailer with its uplifting music along with its release on Christmas day, Unbroken is meant as a feel good film. Whilst exploring the conditions of Prisoner of War camps, I expected it will do so as light heartedly as possible. It was difficult going to see a film that was most probably going to, once again, show American war efforts or American soldiers in a positive or congratulatory light: it’s certainly been done before but the real problem is the backdrop of America’s current track record with regard to worldwide attacks, torture and prisoners of war.

If we ignore the state-of-being America has with the rest of the world and attempt to watch and consider this film as if we’ve been living under a rock and know nothing of current world affairs: it’s simply okay. The only way is which this film stood out is in its better attempts at realism thanks to CGI and other modern cinema technologies including make-up to depict more gruesomely, for example, more than a month’s worth of sunburn. But it was realism up to a point. Chiselled good looks were essential throughout and everything still maintained an airbrushed quality to it.

There seems to be a growing appetite for the feel good nostalgic in cinema and TV and this is one, where once again military struggles are distorted to accommodate patriotic ad propaganda principles.

This isn’t the first film to be directed by Angelina Jolie ‘In the land of Blood and Honey’, also a film concerned with war, a story in which Angleina Jolie had attempted to present the Bosnia war through a love story was labelled a “propaganda film” by many critics in the way that it “presents Serbs as eternal bad guys” according to Željko Mitrović or that she was “producing a sanctimonious vanity commercial for her own good intentions” according to Karina Longworth.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the necessity for this film. The most popular British film of 1958, The Camp on Blood Island, flaunted itself as an exposition of Japanese war crimes by exposing the conditions POWs had to endure at a particular camp; whether the film was based on fact or fiction is still unclear.

In the weeks before going to watch this film, the Senate’s report on the CIA’s former worldwide interrogation programme was exposed. Would it not be more interesting to explore these facts that have been hidden for so long? The world is tired of American heroism and stories depicting purely honourable soldiers especially at this moment in time when there is so much evidence of the contrary. There are even articles in the Rolling Stones about it titled ‘The Kill Team: How U.S. Soldiers in Afghanistan Murdered Innocent Civilians’.

The cinematography is certainly nice. It takes some time to warm towards Jack O’Connell but eventually his acting is convincing enough. However the protagonist’s main enemy, the POW camp corporal who is especially tough and malicious with O’Connell’s character is exactly the male version of Gong Li’s older jealous Geisha in Memoirs of a Geisha mirroring those moments when Li would whisper maliciously into Zhang Ziyi’s face: In one of the instances of this in Unbroken, the corporal does this for the second half of a speech that is supposed to be addressed toward an entire POW camp.

Finally, let this film re-introduce you to Jack O’Connell’s flared nostrils which deserve their own credits because they played a very large role in the film.

1/5

Review: American Sniper

Written by Jack Lunn on . Posted in Film.

‘The most deadly sniper in U.S. military history’ is one title given to Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, though, American Sniper is more than a bloodbath action romp. The man behind the gun is where the main action lies.

The Academy Award nominations announcement contained a major shock with the name of Bradley Cooper under Best Leading Actor – his third consecutive nomination and one which I believe to be justified. Cooper has come a long way from his big breakthrough role as crew co-ordinator in ‘comedy’ flick The Hangover and can now be accepted as a certified Hollywood leading man. His transformation into hardened veteran of war involves a restrained performance of a man who doesn’t celebrate the nasty elements of the war, unlike those he’s around. His life is changed by these events and you can’t help but feel for Kyle as he has to walk a tightrope between helping save the lives of his colleagues and friends on his multiple tours of duty, whilst ensuring that he doesn’t lose touch of his fledgling family back home.

American Sniper excels in its gripping combat sequences, which are some of the best offered from Eastwood’s directing and almost equally matches pound for pound its principal Iraq War predecessor The Hurt Locker. The viewer is immersed into the war-zone, being cast through the lens of Kyle’s long ranged rifle. Tension escalates as Kyle evaluates the consequences of pulling the trigger. Be it on man, woman or child. The brutality of the conflict resulting from America’s invasion of Iraq is displayed here with a pulsating climactic scene in a sandstorm, where visibility is low but excitement is far from it.

The film has come in for criticism from some corners for being pro-war. Canadian funny-man Seth Rogen likened American Sniper to the fictitious Nazi propaganda movie Nation’s Pride featured in the final act of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. He has a point in that both concern snipers. Though, that’s about it as it’s like saying that Jaws is a similar film to Sharknado as both feature the aquatic creatures putting human lives in danger. Rogen’s comments seem misguided mainly to me, as American Sniper doesn’t feel like its trying to put across a political statement, rather it is aims to be a biopic of one man’s feats that took place under the trying conditions of battle. Not only this but various military personnel voice their disdain with the pointless war that their country has embarked them on and both the physical and mental effects warfare has on those involved are highlighted throughout with the struggles of veterans being featured prominently. Furthermore, despite being talented with his weapon, Kyle acts with reluctance to his assigned hero status, rejecting the brash nicknames such as ‘legend’ thrusted upon him.

The only major area where the film falls down on is a relatively average script, unusually so for a project with Clint Eastwood attached, considering how high the standard the writing is in Gran Torino, Mystic River and other war adaptation Letters From Iwo Jima. It should be stated that whilst I was thrilled by the quality of the action scenes, they’re not for everyone and other than Bradley Coopers performance, those disinclined to on-screen violence may take little away from viewing.

Whilst there is no political statement or any innovation in the field of war movies, American Sniper executes its strength well. Intensely thrilling action is coupled with the honest performance of Bradley Cooper, making American Sniper one of the top bracket Gulf War based war films.

4/5

Review: Annie

Written by Elliot Coen on . Posted in Film.

Oh dear. My usual self likes to take on a slightly verbose persona when writing an introduction for a review, but I cannot sugarcoat it for you this time; Annie is an abhorrent film. I thought I had hit rock bottom for the week after watching Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, but, alas, my faith in the medium was to be sapped once more. I saw it in a theatre, empty, apart from myself. This gave me enormous pleasure in not having to keep my anger inaudible. I watch a fair share of films in the ‘family/child’ genre niche, always going in with an open mind, and often coming out pleasantly surprised. So, I need to stress that I am not over exaggerating just how terrible this 2014 interpretation of Annie actually is.

A film such as Annie, centering on one protagonist, is reliant on the performance of said character. You would hope that the story of an orphaned little girl would be endearing, but I found the Annie portrayed on screen, and I’ll stand by this, to be completely punchable. Quvenzhané Wallis is an unwanted presence on screen here, playing Annie in such a horrible and obnoxious way. All she does is sarcastically snap at anyone who doesn’t agree with her, in an overly sassy way. I do not want to be too harsh on an 11 year old girl, who is already heaps more successful than me, so perhaps it’s all in the bad script. Either way, I had no compassionate feelings for Annie during the film, from front to back. It infuriates me that this film is being represented at the Golden Globes, but more so that it is Quvenzhané Wallis up for best actress; it is possible that she could beat Julianne Moore to the title, which would be a real travesty.

Annie doesn’t just fall down on its lead role. Every scene with Cameron Diaz, playing the cruel foster parent, made me want to claw my eyes out. Rose Byrne continues to waste her genuine talent by taking part. I cannot talk about wasted talent without pointing out that motherfucking Jamie Foxx is in this picture. The guy can sing well, act well, and is a decent stand up comedian on the side, but you really wouldn’t think it from watching him in Annie. He plays a stupidly rich CEO called Will Stacks for fucks sake. Get it?

The thing that really tips me over into loathing Annie is the contrived manner in which it tries to justify its relevance. At every opportunity, the presence of social media is thrust down our throats, unfortunately ruining any shred of integrity remaining of the original Annie story. The only reason Jamie Foxx even adopts Annie is because of a video he is shown on YouTube. Annie has her own Twitter and Instagram accounts. There’s a completely farcical chase sequence at the end, in which Jamie Foxx and his crew use real-time pictures posted on Annie’s blog and Twitter stream to track down the car being chased. I left the theatre wanting to destroy my phone and any online presence I have, just out of spite.

Annie is one of the worst films I have ever watched, destroying anything that was once good about the story, replacing it with rehashed auto-tuned songs and rubbish about social media. Avoid at all costs.

0/5

Review: Exodus: Gods and Kings

Written by Eleanor Stead on . Posted in Film.

Everyone knows, at least vaguely, the story of the biblical Exodus, so I won’t bore you with an extensive plot summary. Exodus: Gods and Kings follows the story of Moses and the Hebrews until their crossing of the Red Sea, the only significant change (excluding the skin tone of the major characters) being that the film focuses more on the relationship between Moses (Christian Bale) and Ramses (Joel Edgerton), as here they have been brought up more or less as equals.

Predictably for a 21st century biblical epic, Exodus is doubtful of the existence of God, and at the film’s outset Moses is an agnostic verging on atheist. After climbing a forbidden mountain, he’s hit on the head with a rock, and awakes to a vision, during which he is told of his calling to rescue the Hebrews from their enslavement. At this point, Moses’ scepticism is transferred to Ridley Scott. It is suggested by Moses’ wife that his vision was a hallucination caused by amnesia, and Scott takes every opportunity to show us Moses having shouty conversations with apparently inanimate objects. Even the ten plagues, the hardest part of the biblical content to convey without asserting the existence of God, are linked together by some attempt at scientific explanation. This, to Scott’s credit, works pretty well; the causal connection between the plagues gives them a cinematic cohesiveness, and they are by far the film’s most effective moment, both visually and emotionally.

However, for most of its 154 minutes, Exodus is just far too silly to be impressive. Any additions designed to make the characters more 3-dimensional are amusingly ridiculous – Moses wears his mother’s umbilical cord as an item of jewellery to remind himself of his roots, and Ramses’ favourite pastime is topless wrestling with huge yellow snakes. Speaking of homo-erotic imagery, Exodus employs that age-old indication of moral hierarchy: the camper a character is, the more evil they are. Seeing as Christian Bale is decked out in enough fake tan and eyebrow pencil to satisfy the cast of TOWIE, it takes some doing for Ramses to top this scale – his bedroom is just a diamante-encrusted piano away from the set of Behind the Candelabra.

I won’t linger too long on the unintentionally funny script, but it contains some painfully bad lines, including the least sexy way to start an erotic encounter (‘You may proceed’). The acting, too, leaves something to be desired; Bale (who seems to think if he shouts a line loud enough no-one will notice how bad it is) brings nothing to what is, to be fair, a very limited role, while Aaron Paul is hilariously bad as Joshua (who shouldn’t be alive yet, if we’re being picky), and looks far more like a meth addict than he ever did in Breaking Bad. The most unusual piece of casting, however, is that of 11 year old schoolboy Isaac Andrews. Casting a child as God could theoretically have worked quite well, if he did in fact ‘exude innocence and purity’ in the way that Scott claims, and was generally a bit less unnecessarily aggressive – sure, Old Testament God was a bit of a bastard, but he was never quite this irritating.

Overall, although it has successful moments, Exodus just doesn’t work. The Bible doesn’t make the best source material, simply because it doesn’t contain the sort of enclosed narratives required for cinematic storytelling, contributing to the fact that the film takes far too long to get going and far too long to end, and feels completely unsatisfying. Unfortunately, in the hierarchy of Ridley Scott epics, Exodus lies far closer to Kingdom of Heaven than to Gladiator.

2/5