Margin Call – Review

January 14, 2012 3 Comments

Margin Call (2011) 

Directed by J.C. Chandor. Starring Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci, Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Simon Baker, Demi Moore.

This film could work beautifully as a perfect double bill with Charles Ferguson‘s documentary “Inside Job” from 2010, after which you might as well sink into the deepest depression just like our economy has been doing for the last few years…

“Margin Call” is inspired by the 2008 meltdown of the banking system, and although it is officially set in a fictional trading firm somewhere in Wall Street, you can’t help feeling the Lehman Brothers’s shadow lurking over the whole thing. I would not have been at all surprised to read a Merrill Lynch sign at any point during the film. Yes, this might very well be a work of fiction but by the end of it I challenge you not to think that this is exactly how it might have happened.

Despite what is potentially a fairly dry , cold and even complicated subject, “Margin Call” manages to make an absolutely gripping and tense thriller out of what’s essentially a group of people looking at computer screens and talking about things most of us, common mortals, don’t quite understand. Kudos to a tight direction and of course some great stellar cast!

However, unlike many movies where having many big A-listers takes something away from the actual story itself, because of their star persona, here it makes absolute sense to have so many of them, as each of them brings aura of gravitas which makes these characters and their story even more believable and more tense.

The movie confidently relies on the expressions on their faces to convey the power of the drama, more than any other tricky filmic devices or even action scenes.

Stanley Tucci shines as always and makes the most of his little screen time (essentially he only has 2 scenes, but boy he nails them both!) and Kevin Spacey shows us that he can do a lot more than just another caricature a-la-Swimming-with-Sharks. It’s great to see “The Mentalist” Simon Baker playing this kind of part and swearing like we’ve never seen him before and of course Jeremy Irons, who is clearly having a ball playing the ultimate boss of bosses who arrives with a helicopter and delivers the classic line “If you’re first out the door, that’s not called panicking”.

Each of them is a boss of a somebody else: and just when you think we’ve reached to top of the pyramid, a new one comes a long, richer and greedier, even more powerful and more ruthless. However what makes “Margin Call” so compelling is its refusal to play the expected clichés of the genre, to criticise or demonize the people who were behind the economic collapse or worse to attempt any kind of forced redemption at end. This isn’t another Oliver Stone “Wall Street” (a film which has actually aged quite badly, if you go back at look at it today with a more cynical eye). All these people working in the finance business are not just two-dimensional sharks and though the ending is exactly as we might expect (as it’s now written in the history books), the actual journey is not as obvious.

You really feel the tension on the faces of those people most of whom don’t even seem to understand much about how the economy works (that is quite an unexpectedly fun, if grotesque, twist on the subject) and never for a moment you doubt that it was all filmed in the darkest and earliest hours of the morning.

The script may sometimes be a bit cheap and too much in your face (the lines “please explain it to me in plain English” are quite welcome but they also feel a bit forced), however the film manages to create an atmosphere that it is so tense, so dense that it’s almost palpable. Once again a proof that you don’t need special effects, big twists and action scenes to create a powerful thriller.

This is what Wall Street 2 should have been.

7.5/10

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Captain America – Review

July 31, 2011 3 Comments

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) 

Directed by Joe Johnston. With Chris Evans, Hayley Atwell, Tommy Lee Jones, Hugo Weaving, Stanley Tucci, Toby Jones

My son, like many children of his age (he’ll be 10 in September) is a superhero fanatic; no surprise there. Up until very recently, we’ve somehow managed to keep him away from most of the films (with the sole exception of “Spiderman”) as I believed some of them are a little bit too strong for very young kids. But the time has now come to succumb to his will. Recently we started watching Iron man and when tonight’s choice for our weekly “movie night with family” fell on him, he chose this film.

I had seen it once when it was first release in a time when superhero movies were still a relatively new thing, though even then people were beginning to talk about the market being slightly saturated with the comic book genre (little did we know…).

The film-makers were obviously well aware of the cynicism towards anything which seemed to over-emphasise that All-American gun-ho/patriotic spirit, especially in a post-9/11, post-Bush post-economic-crisis era where a certain anti-American feeling was starting to spread across the pond. A misstep too far in bringing this latest superhero to the screen might have not only jeopardize their international box office takings, but also (and more important) their long-awaited “Avengers” (due to be released a year later, as the post-credit sequence reminded everyone) of which “Captain America” was the last missing link.

And so what they cleverly decided to do, was to to stay true to the origins of the hero and keep the story rooted in 1940s, at the height of World War II. By making this a period film, they were able to get away with a lot more than if they had set the story in our modern world right from the start: the old-fashion moral decency of the characters feels more appropriate when set in the 40s and so does the Patriotism which is clearly innate with this type of superhero, who’s essentially wearing an American flag.

Once again the film-makers in trying to have their cake and eat it, even poke fun at that jingoistic sensibility fun as they have Captain America performing in front of live audiences around country to rally soldiers and boost morale, looking more like a clown than actually a real superhero.

In fact it’s surprisingly how well “Captain America” works especially in the first half.

The period feel is perfectly recreated through the sepia tones of the cinematography, the muted colours of the costumes. It’s reminiscent of another superhero film from 1991,”the Rocketeer”, which interestingly was made by the same director, Joe Johnston.

But it’s not just the look, overall the type of film-making used here, also seems to arc back to the way good action films used to be made, before a certain Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay decided that it was all going to be about one-liners, big explosion, idiotic plot-lines, fast editing (possibly to disguise the fact that they were all pretty bad) and sexual sensibility (those Transformers film, just to mention the worst offenders).

It’s a film as much about humanity and characters than it is about big set-pieces and visual effects, because in the end, action and explosions work a lot better when we really care about the people involved.

Yes, of course, it’s all preposterous and plainly silly, but so is a radioactive spider, a man who flies in tights, a Viking looking guy with a giant hammer, and the idea that a tiny mask that only covers your eyes can make you un-recognisable to your friends. We are talking about Superheroes after all!! But as long as you can suspend your disbelief, cast aside any cynicism, you’ll definitely enjoy this one.

To help it all there’s a splendid array of supporting actors too,  from Stanley Tucci, Toby Jones, Tommy Lee-Jones and even an-over-the-top Hugo Weaver who’s clearly having a lot of fun in this film, putting on a fabulous (and close-to-parody) German accent!.

And of course Chris Evans in the titular role, who embodies not just the physicality of a superhero but also enough charisma, warmth and even dignity to make him extremely likeable and make us actually care for him.

The fact that in the first 40 minutes we get to know him as a frail and skinny young men makes him even more sympathetic.

The special effects to achieve that transformation are truly astonishing, even 11 years later. The CGI in a later train sequence were less satisfying, but certainly not distracting.

Ironically for an action film, the actual action scenes were generally rather modest, though all competently made.

The film does run slightly out of steam in the last part and it becomes a little bit more generic and less interesting, but as far as popcorn movies go, this is was lot better than one might have expected expect (especially considering the blandness of the original character from the comics) and more enjoyable than most of the stuff that Hollywood tends to regurgitate during the summer season… and in my humble opinion, better than some of the over the top and much-too-messy latest output from Marvel.

7.0/10

OTHER REVIEWS: 

thor

Green Lantern 

Tron: Legacy

The Avengers

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