The Amazing Spider-Man – Review

July 7, 2012 6 Comments

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

Directed by Marc Webb. Starring Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Denis Leary, Martin Sheen, Sally Field, Irrfan Khan.

The Amazing Spider-Man ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

With the latest “Spider-Man: no way home” on its way, what better excuse to revisit some of the old ones
When the news of a reboot for the Raimi-Maguire Spiderman was first announced (and not just a reboot, but another ‘origin’ story, only 10 years after the first one), the obvious question on anybody’s lips (and mine too) was “Why on earth?”.
What followed was a sort of anti-campaign from fans and critics alike: it was as if we had all already decided we were going to hate this film, at all costs.
Well, I could not have been more wrong: The Amazing Spider-man is a lot fun, feels fresh, and deserves a lot of more credit that it’s had over the last few years, but more importantly Andrew Garfield was just a wonderful Spiderman (something I never thought I’d say at the time, as I loved Maguire in his previous films): he even has a couple of Oscar moments here and there (not that The Academy would ever reward a superhero movie…). This is probably the film that made me like Garfield for the first time.
The comparison with the previous incarnation of “your friendly neighbour”, especially since we are meant to buy into another ‘origin story’ so soon after the first one, is not just unavoidable but also quite fair.
The ghost of Raimi is constantly behind the corner, but cleverly director Mark Webb (who has obviously studied his source deeply and intensely) managed to avoid most of the obvious comparisons by giving the story a completely new spin (pardon the pun), steering away from anything which could give us any sense of Déjà vu, making the story and the characters different enough at each opportunity, giving us a new baddie and most importantly a new girlfriend too.
In fact, what really makes this film work for me, despite all the action, the spinning, the spectacle (and the film has a lot of that!), is the relationship between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone: their chemistry is undeniable (Yes, I know those 2 were actually together at the time) and it’s the real heart of the film. I love watching them.

Three editors are officially credited and that’s usually a sign of a film that’s gone through several permutations, and some of those tweaks and reshuffles were apparent to a slightly trained (and nerdy) eye like mine. For example despite the 136 minutes, some of the transitions were a bit too quick: the explanation of how Parker was able to make his web seems to be those sequence that suffered more than any others.

Also, James Horner‘s score felt a bit too saccharin/syrupy and much too stirring in what should have been quieter and intimate moments, but more crucially, it seemed to lack that Hero-theme which these types of films require. The kind of theme you can still hum by the time you leave the theatre, just like when you watched the original Superman or Indiana Jones (God, is John Williams really the only composer who’s able to do that?).

But I know, I am really picking needles here! This might not be the most original story you’ve ever seen (well actually it’s definitely not but at least they spared us from seeing the ‘origins’ all over again in Tom Holland’s films!), but it’s still a thrilling romp and thoroughly enjoyable one too.

4 Stars (out of 5)

Filed under latest movies, Reviews Tagged with Amazing Spider-Man, Andrew Garfield, batman, Christopher Nolan, costume, Denis Leary, Emma Stone, Indiana Jones, James Horner, John Williams, Marc Webb, New York, Pietro Scalia, Raimi, Rhys Ifan, Sam Raimi, Spider-Man, spiderman, Superman, Tobey Maguire

Killer Joe – Review

July 1, 2012 2 Comments

Killer Joe (2011)

Director: William Friedkin. Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Emile Hirsch, Juno Temple, Thomas Haden Church, Gina Gershon.

I came to this film knowing very little about it and pretty much spoiler-free (which incidentally it’s always the best way films should be watched). However I was very aware of the director Friedkin‘s pedigree and having seen all those 5 stars flashing on the poster, I was building myself up for something really good, if not a masterpiece.

Unfortunately the film left me not just cold, but actually rather annoyed by how uneven and all-over the place it all was. In the end I just can’t help but be baffled by the critical response that it’s gaining.

It won’t take you long to realise what type of film you’ve stepped into and you’ll be able to tell straight away this is certainly not one for everybody and especially not one for the Matthew McConaughey‘s hard-core fans (who are there anyway?!): within the first 30 minutes of the screening I was in, I watched at least 4 different couples standing up and leaving the theatre.

The people depicted in the film certainly don’t belong to your typical American family. You know the ones I mean: the loyal husband kissing goodnight his lovely wife in her nightgown, always looking as if she’d just stepped out of a 2 hour beauty session and all together having a lovely meal around a dinner table… These are people who don’t really talk to each other, but rather “at” each other: they shout, swear, lie. They’re happy to plot the murder their own mother, or their own ex-wife, willing to let their own daughter to have first time sex with a stranger in order to pay what they can’t afford to buy.

Friedkin doesn’t shy away from showing you not just the worst side of everyone, and certainly there is no sugar-coating around any of the depiction of the characters. Just to give you an idea of what I am talking about, let me tell you that the first shot we get of Gina Gershon, introducing her character as she opens the door to her son-in-law in the middle of the night, is an uncompromising view of her private parts. We get it straight away.

The film indeed did leave me with a quite uncomfortable feeling right form the word go, but not so much because of this approach, of the unlikable characters, or grim subject matter, but more because of the way the actual story was all being handled by the director. I couldn’t quite work out how I was supposed to take all this.

On one hand it was clear that Friedkin was talking about that “America” we rarely get to see in movies: shockingly ignorant, naive, violent and brutal. And while this doesn’t certainly make a pleasurable viewing experience, I was very willing to go with it. I was constantly being reminded of films like The Killer Inside Me and yet there was something slightly off about Killer Joe. There was something fake about it: at times the characters seemed to be over-the-top caricatures of themselves: hard to like (of course), to care about and more crucially to believe in them.

It was at least 40 minutes into the film that the audience I was with, started to laugh. Call me thick, but only then I began to realise that all this was actually to be taken as a satire.

Of course, the Killer Joe Cooper himself is at times is filmed like a character from a comic book, and yet other times the camera lingers on him for very long takes, giving the film a much more grounded sense of reality.

But this is a long step away from the harsh realism Friedkin‘s previous masterpieces, like The French Connection and to a degree even The Exorcist, which despite the absurdity of its story, always treated its subject matter with so much respect and honesty that it actually felt incredibly real (which is what made the film so powerful).

What we have in Killer Joe is a weird and uneven hyper-version of reality: and we as the audience are left to watch it from the outside, as you’d probably watch some kind of freak show.

But this isn’t another Natural Born Killers, Killer Joe constantly shifts (especially in the first part) from real to almost parody and even slapstick (the joke with the jacket, however funny, seems to belong to a different film). Some people may argue that this is called “being subtle” and it’s what makes Killer Joe a masterpiece, I personally call it being “all over the place” and eventually found it very hard to digest.

Don’t take me wrong, I am not against satirising violence or ignorance: the Coen Brothers did it in Fargo with splendid results, but while in Fargo there was no fudging, just a perfect unity of tone right from the start, here I couldn’t help feeling that this was a film made by different people pulling in too many directions. All the subplots to do with Emile Hirsch‘s character (which is incidentally the most under-developed in the story) belong to one kind of film, while Thomas Haden Church (who once again plays an idiot) belongs to a different one, and of course Matthew McConaughey seems to have his own show all together.

It all comes together into a final act which is (intentionally) so over-the-top that it cannot leave you but completely baffled. The audience I was with went absolutely wild as if they were watching Airplane! or a Naked Gun movie, which leads me to think I am certainly in the minority of those people who didn’t find it all that funny. It’s a completely personal thing, I understand, but I find it quite fun to laugh at what’s essentially rape… Whatever the message underneath might be.

The episode with the Kentucky Fried Chicken leg will probably remain imprinted in your head for years and years to come, and it might even become as classic moment in cinema as the Royale with Cheese speech in Pulp Fiction; it’s certainly a non very subtle visualisation of the message the film is trying to carry, but to be honest at that point I had already lost my patience and when the ending finally came, as abruptly as it did, I was as happy to leave the theatre as I have rarely been. Was I offended? Not particularly. That would give the film more credit that I’d like to give it. I just thought it was all a bit pointless.

5.0/10

Filed under latest movies, Reviews Tagged with Emile Hirsch, Fargo, French Connection, Gina Gershon, Juno Temple, Killer Joe, Matthew McConaughey, Pulp Fiction, The Exorcist, Thomas Haden Church, William Friedkin

Friends with Kids – Review

June 12, 2012 8 Comments

Friends with Kids (2011)

Directed by Jennifer Westfeldt. Starring: Jennifer Westfeldt, Adam Scott, Jon Hamm, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Chris O’Dowd, Megan Fox, Edward Burns.

Making a good romantic comedy is not as easy as you might think. Comedies in general have always been the overlooked genre when it comes to recognition or even awards: there is a certain (unfair) snobbery about them and an even greater misconception: because they talk about lighter subjects than, let’s say, the holocaust or war or cancer (just to mention the few obvious ones), we should not consider them as serious films… Obviously calling them “rom-com” doesn’t quite helped their case either…

Isn’t it incredible that people still look at the 50s and 60s for the favourite comedies (Some like it Hot or the Apartment)? Or that we still quote those classic Woody Allen movies from the 70s? And when asked about the best rom-com (there you, I’m saying that too!) many will go back 23 years to that little jewel of a movie called When Harry Met Sally. It’s not surprising then to see writer/director Jennifer Westfeldt going back to exactly those types for her directorial debut.

Friends with Kids owes a lot the best Wood Allen (nowadays we must specify ‘best’, as there’s good Woody and dreadful Woody), both in its settings (New York, of course) and in the sharp and witty dialogue exchanges. But there are lots of echoes from When Harry Met Sally too, in fact it could almost be called “When Harry and Sally had a kid“. But while in Rob Reiner‘s classic the question was “Can a man and a woman be friends without sex getting in the way?”, in Friends with kids the question gets updated to “Can a man and a woman have a child, without getting stuck into the trappings of married life?”.

The actual premise and the excuse for the film is definitely rather out-fetched, gimmicky and to a degree it might feel a bit forced, but if you’re willing to go with it, what you’ll find beyond is an incredibly well-observed and smart piece of comedy about the painful truths of parenthood, about getting older, about responsibilities and friendship.

Westfeldt relies more on her characters and their dialogue to make us smile, or cry, or simply think, as opposed to resorting on cheap gags, or shots of cute babies (well OK, you get a couple of those too… But you get my point). This is an actors’ film, first and foremost and the cast is truly impeccable.

Adam Scott had already shown what he could do with the underrated (and rather harsh and depressing) HBO series Tell Me You Love Me: in this film he makes a potentially unlikable and tricky character, warm, sympathetic and charismatic.

However the film is also packed with other characters, which once again remind us of Harry and Sally’s types of friends: these are all people rooted into the real world, instantly recognizable to anyone struggling to find love before the clock runs out, anyone dating, anyone who’s been married for a long time, anyone who’s had kids or who’s about to have some. Like in the real world, there’s no black and white here: each relationship in the film feels true, people are not simply bad or good, they fall in and out of love, they come and go in and out of your life.

Everybody is perfect, even if they just appear in a few scenes. Jon Hamm shines, as he always does, and makes the most of his tiny role, even Edward Burns manages to be incredibly likeable and there’s even a surprisingly turn from Megan Fox, who shows she’s not just a pretty face… and body, and legs.. and… OK well, you get it.

It all comes to a head during an excruciating dinner sequence with no less than 8 people sitting around a table, which is not just beautifully directed and skilfully handled, but also it’s where the film really shows its cards and goes beyond the simple rom-com boundaries.

It’s interesting to see this film only a few weeks away from the clichè-riddled What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Both stories essentially tackle the same issues, but while WTEWURE goes for the easy Hollywood way (i.e. schmaltzy, A-list packed-cast, cheap jokes and so on), this one takes its time to work around its characters and aims at reaching a much more mature audience: it’s not just the situation that feels real but way the characters behaves in that particular situation.

Unfortunately there are some slips here and there: the excessive and unnecessary vulgarity of some of the dialogue does feel a bit forced and some jokes to do with kids seem to belong to a different kind of film (It’s “Three men and a Baby” territory, more than Annie Hall‘s)… And the ending might make some people cringe a little bit… However most of Friends with Kids is so honest and balanced that it feels wrong be harsh about it. In an age where good romantic comedies are so rare (they only come once every two years, if we are lucky!) we should treasure films like these, which at least try to be a little bit more intelligent and step away from the clichés of the genre.

7.5/10

Check out my review of What To Expect When You’Re Expecting

Filed under latest movies, Reviews Tagged with Adam Scott, Chris O'Dowd, Edward Burns, Friends with Kids, Jennifer Westfeldt, Jon Hamm, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Megan Fox, Rob Reiner, When Harry Met Sally

Ill Manors – Review

June 7, 2012 4 Comments

Ill Manors (2012)

Director: Ben Drew. Cast: Riz Ahmed, Ed Skrein, Natalie Press, Anouska Mond, Lee Allen, Mem Ferda.

This is a very hard film to review… And as a matter of fact it was a very hard film to watch too. More than once I found myself having to look away from the screen, just to be able to catch up with my breath and I had to remind myself “It’s only a movie… It’s only a movie”… Or is it? Sure one would want to give the film some credit for attempting to talk about some really serious issues in a stark and crude realistic way. However I find myself wondering: just because a movie touches important issues and goes to places where many don’t even dare looking, does that make it a good film?

Ill Manors (still trying to work the meaning of the actual title) is clearly a film made by a first time director: it’s full of energy and ideas. It’s inspirational too… But unfortunately some of the inexperience shows up on the screen too. It’s almost as if director Ben Drew didn’t feel confident enough of his own material and felt he had to pepper the film (unevenly, I may add) with a series of flashy visual devices: some of them work, but then, once the story takes over, the film almost forgets to keep up with them. It makes me wonder if Ill Manors could have been a much more powerful film, if the director had actually restrained some of that rather showy visual style and un-linear editing and had just concentrated more of the story. I’m not against time-laps or montage sequences edited to rap music (some of which were actually beautifully done), but I think once you establish a style, you should stick with it. In Ill Manors everything felt rather random and arbitrary: a hotchpotch of visual ideas and devices, borrowed from many other films before (Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting, just to mention the most obvious ones), but all without any real reason. And the proof is in the pudding: the strongest and most interesting bits in the film are also the plainest and the ones where the director focused just on his actors (or actually non-actors apparently) to tell the story of a broken society alive and well right in the heart of London.

Despite the claims of realism, this bleak vision of Britain feels a bit contrived in places: lines like “Can I try some crack?” the endless prostitution scenes and the final sequence in particular when a fire takes place in a pub, all feel a bit heavy-handed and wildly exaggerated. Also most of the characters are a little bit too stereotypical and the film seems to rely more on the charisma of our main lead, Riz Ahmed (from Four Lions), for the audience to sympathise with, instead of giving him a full fleshed-out and a much more believable persona.

In the end the amount of horror and depressing bleakness is just too much and what was already a fairly long film, with too many subplots, eventually just imploded. An exhausted audience during my screening even burst into laughing during the final climax (yes, it might have been a hysterical laugh, but still a laugh… and that’s just the wrong reaction to have for such film!). The points Ill Manorswants to make are made quite earlier on and after a while it all becomes just too repetitious, over the top and indulgent. All this makes it loose its edge and diminishes its important message.

It is a brave film and certainly must be commended for trying: there are some very intense and good moments, which I am really praising, however, even though I might talk to people about Ill Manors, I don’t think I’ll ever reccomend anyone to watch it (aside for our prime ministers and politicians).

6.5/10

Sunday Times (June, 10th)

For all its gritty realism, Ill Manors has a streak of sentimental fantasy to it. It’s one thing to suggest that the characters aren’t all bad, and that they are capable of moral virtue(…) But when we see an uncaring thug risking his life to save a baby from a burning building, we have left the mean streets of London for the fantasy world of Hollywood. So much for keeping it real.

Filed under latest movies, Reviews Tagged with Film, Four Lions, Ill Manors, London, Nathalie Press, plan b, Pulp Fiction, Riz Ahmed, Trainspotting

Men In Black 3 – Review

June 3, 2012 5 Comments

Men In Black III (AKA: MIB3) (2012)

Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. Starring Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Jemaine Clement, Emma Thompson.

10 years after the disappointing Man in Black 2, and 15 years after the first original one (which, needless to say,was the best by a very long stretch), raise your hands if you really felt the need for yet another sequel… Anyone? … Please, anyone? ANYONE?!

These days Hollywood’s willingness for getting new ideas out there, or at least ones which are not based on comics, or at least are not sequels or remakes, is becoming increasingly rare! But then again, this a whole other subject which I’ve tackled again and again (you can check my post about it here) and I bore even myself talking about it. So granted that nobody really wanted this film, I am happy to be on record saying that MIB3 is actually rather watchable (yet fairly forgettable).

The film starts off looking pretty tired as if trying to resuscitate from that previously dead sequel. It is permeated by a sense of Déjà vu and only relies on that already-proven chemistry between the two original leads and especially Will Smith whose charm and likeability doesn’t seem to have faded in the last 13 years (in fact he looks exactly the same: God, what’s his secret?!). Even his co-star Tommy Lee Jones once said in an interview “All I need to do to be funny is stand as close as possible to Will”. So true.

The film finally gets into the right gear and stops limping once we travel back in the 60s. The reason for the time travel is very reminiscent of the plot from the underrated Back to the Future – part 2: Will Smith has to travel back in time to prevent the baddie from the future to meet his own self from the past and thus change erm… the future. It all sounds very complicated but, unlike the mind-screwing BTTF2, this is all pretty straight forward (and it fact with plot holes all over the places) and at the end of the day it’s just a device so that we they can probably avoid paying Tommy Lee Jones a full-fee, but also it allows Josh Brolin to have the time of his life, acting as the young K (Tommy Lee Jones‘s character).And for once the sense of fun that the makers must have felt behind the scenes manages to transpire onto our screens too. The similarity between the two is indeed uncanny and amazingly the joke sustains itself for pretty much the entire length of the film. I’m sure in years to come, Josh Brolin aping Tommy Lee Jones will be the only thing people will remember from this otherwise forgettable MIB3.

Don’t take me wrong, there’s a lot to enjoy here: some of the action set-pieces, Emma Thompson‘s (sadly too) brief appearance, the deliciously nasty, and rather gross turn by Jemaine Clement as Boris the Animal, the villain of the piece, and the usual special effects extravaganza, which is now almost taken for granted in this types of movies. There is nothing really as cringe-inducing as in the previous sequel, but sadly most of that spark of fresh humour from the original seems have been replaced by an unexpected sentimentality, which is sweet enough and I suppose it’s probably befitting a Steven Spielberg production, but it’s not really what we want from a Man in Black film.

They got away with it this time, but they should really put this trilogy to bed and start something new.

6.0/10