The Oscars 2012 - Final Thoughts

Well the Oscars have been and gone and the clear winners were The Artist in the artistic categories and Hugo in the technical ones. So here is my annual moan at the obvious injustices.

Except there aren't any glaring errors this time. Personally, it would have been great to see Gary Oldman get a deserved award, but that never looked likely to happen. Michelle Williams and Jessica Chastain will clearly get their turn sometime, but it's hard to argue with the winners in their categories. And Chico and Rita would have been a braver choice for best animated feature than Rango.

But those minor grumbles aside, Oscar did not too bad at all this year. That's it for another year.

The Muppets

I was never a huge Muppets fan as a child (or indeed as an adult) so I approached this film (good reviews not withstanding) with no real expectations. I left the cinema having laughed more than i had at any film for quite a while.

The plot, such as it is, is rather inconsequential. Gary (Jason Segal), his girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) and brother Walter (who happens to be a puppet, for reasons that are never explored, thankfully) go on a trip to LA. Whilst there they uncover a plot by dastardly oil baron Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) to tear down the Muppet studio, so get the Muppets back together to put on a telethon to save the studio.

As a story, its both predictable and full of inexplicable holes, but that's the Muppets. The joy here is that after a slightly slow start, it keeps hitting the right notes comically. The laughs keep on coming - from the 80s robot, the sight of Oscar winner Copper rapping, travelling by map, gathering the gang by montage to save time, Animal's anger therapy, Emily Blunt reprising her Devil Wears Prada  role as Miss Piggy's assistant, a nice final gag with the telethon scoreboard and so on. The laughs keep coming.

The human cast are also good - Segal and Adams go a long way to confirming their position as the nicest people in Hollywood (even as their love story plays second fiddle to that of Kermit and Piggy), Cooper is a delightful bad guy, Jack Black and Zach Galifianakis haven't been in anything this funny for a long time. The decidedly quirky edge of Flight of the Conchords Brett Mckenzie also proves to be a great fit for the songs.

The bonus is a delightful Toy Story short film from Pixar at the start, which would almost be worth the admission price by itself.

Overall - 8/10  Consistently funny in a wonderfully good-hearted way. The Muppets are back!

Man on a Ledge

A man checks into an expensive hotel, eats a meal in his room, wipes his prints off everything and then climbs out the window threatening to jump. There follows a tense psychological will-he won't-he thriller as the police try to talk him down. Except there doesn't, no sooner has the premise been established than the filmmakers loe interest in it and cut away to show you what's really going on (just in case you haven't seen the trailer and already know the plot).

You see the man (Sam Worthington) is an ex-cop and escaped prisoner wrongly framed for stealing a huge diamond from an evil businessman (Ed Harris). Whilst the police negotiator (Elizabeth Banks) tries to talk him down, he's more interested in providing a diversion for his brother (Jamie Bell) and his brother's girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) to actually steal the diamond and thereby prove his innocence. As plans go this is maybe not the best thought out. Meanwhile Worthington's ex-partner (Anthony Mackie) is wondering creating questions about whose side he's really on (the only question not really answered by the trailer).

Actually, the constant cutting to a new supposed twist probably works in the films favour - the whole thing is ridiculous and doesn't really bear close examination (not least the huge variations in accent in one family), but by constantly shifting the action it's entertaining enough to keep the audience involved.

Sam Worthington's continued popularity as a leading man rather escapes me. It's not that he stinks as an actor, just that he's rather bland. Fortunately he isn't required to carry the film, and the supporting cast are great - Ed Harris chews the scenery delightfully in the bad guy role, Bell and Rodriguez provide most of the comic relief and William Sadler keeps cropping up in random places.

Overall - 6.5/10 It's nonsense, but quite entertaining nonsense.

This Means War

Tom Hardy and Chris Pine play two best friends who also happen to be spies. Both fall for the same woman (Reese Witherspoon) and end of using the full resources of the CIA in order to win her (or at least stop the other one winning her). The love triangle is hardly a new plot device, but the spy element should add a bit of fun and a bit of action. After all, director McG (however bad his track record on the big screen) has some form in the knockabout spy comedy from TV series Chuck.

Watching the film, it has moments and it has potential, but is overall disappointingly flat. On the fun side, there are definitely laugh out loud funny moments - a few of them were even not included in the trailer - a paintball date and a viewing of Klimt paintings stand out as being amongst the funnier moments. However, as far as the action goes, the spy plot kind of feels crammed in round the edges of the film. Only the final car chase feels really satisfying, with earlier sequences feeling rushed, clumsy and poorly cut.

The characters are largely underwritten, but the cast are game. Witherspoon and Pine are old hands at this kind of thing and gamely give it their all and their side of the triangle is probably the one with the most zing. The usually great Tom Hardy suffers the most. This is partly due the character, who is supposed to be the earnest, straightforward one to Pine's more playboy-ish, the Bourne to his Bond if you will. However, it feels a bit more than that and you can't help the nagging sense that maybe, great actor though he is, he is a little bit miscast here. Certainly the bromance with Pine falters when it should fizz.

Overview - 6/10 There have been a lot worse comedies made. This one has genuinely funny moments, but takes a long time to get going and never really totally loses a slightly flat feel.
 

Martha Marcy May Marlene

As the tongue-twister of a title might suggest, this is a film that raises questions about identity and belonging. It also raises questions about the effects of experience on our perceptions.

Martha is a young woman who has recently left a cult led by the charismatic Patrick (John Hawkes) where she was renamed Marcy May. Now staying with her sister and her husband (Sarah Paulson and Hugh Dancy) at their lake house, she struggles to adapt to 'normality' and what is expected of her.

Relative newcomer Sean Durkin, acting as writer and director, has produced a challenging, but subtly engaging film. The structure switches between Martha at the lakehouse and her surfacing memories of life in the cult, drawing both links and contrasts and leading the audience to deduce the reasons for her behaviour which starts a little out of the ordinary - going swimming without a costume - and becomes gradually more unhinged. Much is left suggested rather than spelt out and Martha remains throughout rather silent on her experiences, whilst some details are foregrounded, others are glimpsed in the back of shots, like a chair propped against a door.

Durkin also marshalls some strong performances. Hawkes is superb as Patrick combining a real charisma with a menacingly sinister edge - watch out for the moment when he gives shooting lessons. The secret weapon here though is a mesmerisingly human and vulnerable performance by an Olsen sister (and that's not a sentence I thought I'd ever be typing). Elizabeth Olsen (younger sister or Mary-Kate and Ashley) is simply brilliant in portraying the traumatised young woman.

Its's never comfortable viewing and it has a deeply ambiguous ending that will divide and frustrate the audience, but it will get you thinking and/or talking.

Overall - 8/10 Challenging and thought0provoking cinema, often beautifully put together and wonderfully acted.

Chronicle

Chronicle is a low-budget sci-fi built around a really good premise. What would really happen if a group of average-ish real American teenagers were given superpowers? Would they become superheroes (with great power comes great responsibility and all that jazz) or would they use them to have fun, play practical jokes, etc...? Then what would happen if one of those teenagers was a socially awkward boy with a dying mum, an abusive alcoholic father and rather poor impulse control.

Of course, a lot of low budget films have great ideas, it's the execution that lets them down. Here, director Josh Trank gets close to getting it right. The young cast generally do a really good job - Dane DeHaan as the troubled Andrew is particularly good and carries most of the film - and they are aided by some strong supports in the (few) adult roles. The script is generally strong and the pacing is good. We have a nice introduction to the characters prior to the encounter with the alien object that gives them their powers (telekinesis and levitation), there's a real sense of menace in the scenes involving Andrew's father, mixed with lighter moments as the three boys experiment with their powers to pull off magic tricks and play practical jokes, etc... and a slow build up to the finale when Andrew fully goes off the rails.

The finale is not bad, but it does let the film down a bit. This is almost entirely due to the decision to place the film in the found footage genre (i.e. the entire film is supposedly shot from camera(s) actually there in the action.) There have been some stunning examples where this has worked really well - think of Cloverfield or last year's Troll Hunter. In these cases the the medium actually served a narrative and artistic purpose - footage as evidence surviving a catastrophe or a government cover-up - and actually enhanced the story that was being told. Also, in those examples all the footage came from a singular source. Here, it's not totally clear why they took that route (except perhaps budgetary reasons?) but it doesn't really work. The single source route is abandoned early on and by the finale they are cutting between so many sources, so quickly and having to work so hard to get all these "cameras" into the action that it becomes distracting and confusing. Even then there are moments when you'll be left scratching your head thinking who's actually shooting this.

Overall - 7/10 There's clearly talent here and a great idea which almost makes a very good film, but is let down by one bad choice.

Carnage

Two sets of middle-class parents meet to discuss and try and sort out a fight that happened between their two sons leaving one boy quite badly hurt. From the intially civil, gradually the polite and correct masks begin to slip, the arguments deepen and alliances continually shift.

Carnage is decidedly stage-y for a film. There are two reasons for this - it is adapted from a French stage play and (due to his well-publicised legal difficulties) director Roman Polanski shot the whole thing in a Manhattan apartment completely recreated on a French sound stage, rather than on location. There are disadvantages to this - the reasons that one couple don't just leave sometimes feel rather implausible, the characters become drunk that little bit too quickly - in other words, at times it feels contrived. But it's worth bearing with it, because once it really gets going this is a brutally funny satire of middle-class mores. It's probably the best that Polanski has produced in a decade.

The strong cast are all on great form too - Christoph Waltz's lawyer is probably the most emotionally, morally and physically detached, spending half the time on the phone trying to hush up a scandal with a drug company he's representing. He also seems to almost delight in the mayhem that ensues and gets most of the best lines. Kate Winslet does well with perhaps the most difficult, least defined character who swings the most from compliant to resistant. Jodie Foster is perfectly cast as the liberal writing a book on Darfur, the most attached to doing the right thing as she sees it, but unaware of her own hypocrisy, whilst John C Reilly is great as her blue collar husband pretending to go along with her values whilst pining for the world of John Wayne. There are some great moments like the men bonding in mourning over the drowned Blackberry.Also notice the moment not in the apartment over the closing credits and what this says about the point of it all.

Overall - 7.5/10 Funny, at times brutally so. Get past the theatricality and there's a brilliant ensemble with great material.

The Descendants

The Descendants is Alexander Payne's first full length film since 2004's Sideways. It is the tale of Matt King (George Clooney), Hawaiian landowner and descendant of the original royalty, having to come to terms with his wife being in a coma, needing to take a more hands on approach to parenting his two daughters and learning that prior to the coma his wife was having an affair. On top of this he also has a decision to make on behalf of his extended family about who (if anybody) to sell a huge bit of untouched Hawaii real estate to.

As in his previous movies (Sideways, About Schmidt and to a lesser extent Election), Payne takes complex human situations and mines them for both pathos and humour, the humour sometimes straying into the apparrently inappropriate but nonetheless funny - the scene where King and his oldest daughter verbally disect his wife's lover (a surprisingly good Matthew Lillard) whilst standing in front of him is one standout. Here, this is also combined with a strong sense of place, giving the audience a real feel for Hawaii (even if the music does begin to get irritating after a while). The story goes to some rather predictable places (the ultimate decision about the land-sale) and some unpredictable ones, but ultimately that's not really the point. It's the humanity of the characters and very real emotions they face - even the most apparrently shallow (Nick Krause's Sid coming across rather like Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted mode) get moments that reveal another side.

Here Payne is aided by some stunning performances. Clooney has gathered all the praise and he's on note perfect form here (although maybe not career best) from the comedy running to the moments of real feeling. As he gets older, the comparisons with the likes of Cary Grant become more telling - it's a great performance and yet you never forget that you're watching Clooney, but really that doesn't matter. The really amazing thing is that someone who you never forget is such a big star can still make a millionaire into an everyman hero and that's what puts Clooney in a class almost by himself and where the Grant comparisons are so valid. For my money, he was better in both Syriana  and Up in the Air than he is here, but still deserves the Oscar nom (although either Oldman or Dujardin would be worthier winners for me).

The buzz around Clooney has also distracted somewhat from two amazing performances by the young actresses playing his daughters. Shailene Woodley (as the older Alex) is particularly good and is clearly a name to watch for the future.

Overall - 8/10 Intelligent, heartfelt and funny. Payne and Clooney combine well to make this well worth watching.