Quickfire Reviews (Part 4)

It's been a while. Here are some films I prescribe next time you find yourself on the hunt for DVDs, and some that I advise you avoid at all costs:

Sunshine

Danny Boyle's 2007 follow-up to the slightly manic 28 Days Later seems to have received a lukewarm reception, and I admit I'd never heard of it until I explored Mr Boyle's filmography. Nevertheless, this is a loving tribute to what Boyle calls "serious sci-fi films", and works with the templates created by Alien and 2001. It combines the horror of the former film and the imagination of the latter to create "a thinking man's thriller".There are buried religious themes, but bizarrely you can interpret them as both confirming and denying the existence of God, depending on which perspective you look at it from. The visual style is characteristically visceral, and we move from a low-key start to a gripping, if slightly confused, climax. My only criticism is that the ensemble cast of characters means you never really get to emphasise with any of them, but that's a common feature of these types of films. Cillian Murphy still performs admirably as our unwitting lead without really saying anything.

Rating: 8/10

Mars Attacks!

Speaking of filmographies, this is a surprise entry from Tim Burton. It seems to be a film without a real cause, tracking the lives of various oddball characters as badly animated Martians invade America. Unfortunately, oddball in this case means two dimensional characters with occasional propensities for strangeness. Nevertheless, there are some little gems. Jack Nicholson as the self-interested and incompetent oath who happens to be President is a highlight, and Tom Jones pops up near the end of the film for no apparent reason. As much as I admire Burton's stab at social commentary (saying that technologically advanced nations can't be barbaric is a bit rich coming from the USA), the characteristically beautiful "twisted fairytale" vibe that came to dominate his later films hasn't yet been established fully, and this is no Big Fish or Edward Scissorhands.

Rating: 5/10

The End of the Affair

Graham Greene's shocking and engaging book is turned into a slightly less shocking and engaging film. Although the soaring violins give the film a romantic dimension that was lacking in the book, there's been an annoying reshuffling of characters, and Sarah eventually gives up on her promise to God in the cinematic version, which seems to undermine the whole religious/redemptive element. Nevertheless, Ralph Fiennes excels as Bendrix, becoming the type of obsessive monster that develops when the moral laws he should have used to check himself with are slackened by the mid-20th Century. Julianne Moore arguably steals the show with the bomb scene, while elsewhere Stephen Rae is a truly dishevelled husband and Jason Isaacs (forever Jackson Brodie) is a condescending priest.

Rating: 7/10

Twelve in a Box

Pitching itself was a low-key comedy without the inherent quirkiness of In Memory of My Father, Twelve in a Box turns into one of those comedies where the best you get out of it is faint amusement. Essentially, it's a big game of  'spot the British sitcom actor'. The absurdly convoluted plot should lead to giggles, but doesn't. Twelve old school friends have to spend four days in a stately home to earn £12,000,000. Lives are ended and marriages are broken, but it plays out like the concoction of a few bored amateur dramatics. The worst part is that we're promised on the box that Miranda Hart will take the lead, only for her to be hysterically bungled into a spare room. A disappointment.

Rating: 6/10

The Boat That Rocked

Now here's how comedy should be done. We have nostalgia, a whole host of lovable characters, a killer soundtrack and an anarchic sense of humour. We're aboard a less than sea worthy vessel that broadcasts the popular pirate radio station: Radio Rock. Unfortunately, Kenneth Branagh is employing the evil Twatt (Jack Davenport) to close down the station for its promotion of sex, drugs and rock and roll. All three of these are in abundance, as James (Charlie Rowe) somehow ends up on board to correct his wayward nature (not the wisest idea) and embarks on a quest to lose his virginity and find his father. This is another film where the lead barely says anything (you're not the first Cillian Murphy!), but with a supporting cast this good, it's hard not to take a back seat. We have 2/3 of the cast of the IT Crowd, and Bill Nighy is always ready with a wonderful one-liner. Richard Curtis has delivered an absolute delight.

Rating: 9/10

Topical Ponderings: What Makes the Perfect Ghost Story?

Horror: one of the most repetitive genres out there.  But what is the winning formula? What makes the perfect ghost story?

Tonight (26/4/13), disappointing supernatural drama Lightfields, which had been about as pale and insubstantial as the ghost at the heart of the story, comes to a presumably disappointing end. Anyone with half a brain cell is way ahead of the lazy, meandering plot, which makes it all the more infuriating when it casts suspicion on people we know didn't kill Lucy Felwood. The parallel lives of the three different generations are too disparate, with a few of the same characters crossing over but no thematic links apart from the ghost of Lucy Felwood, who is irritating.

Lucy isn't a particularly good ghost. In Lightfield's 2011 precursor Marchlands, at least the little girl was inventive when she chose to pounce on you, at one point being in the washing machine. Lucy is just very good at counting, which isn't particularly terrifying. So if Lightfields fails, what makes a really chilling ghost story?

If asked to name the best haunted house film of recent years, many would say The Woman in Black. We are presented with good old fashioned scares involving a seemingly omnipresent spectre and an ensemble of dead children. And because somehow it was only a 12A, it's probably succeeded in condemning several children to nightmares involving ghosts attacking Harry Potter. Speaking of our protagonist, Daniel Radcliffe isn't very good, but mercifully all he's called upon to do is look scared. However, beneath the creepy music, it's fairly run of the mill. The thought of children committing suicide is repulsive, but I prefer something a little more chilling in more supernatural yarns.

Films like The Woman in Black are brilliant when you're in the cinema, and Insidious is another example, but they don't leave much of a lasting impression afterwards (other than the embarrassment of clutching one of my friends knees in sheer panic, but we wont go into that). Proper ghost stories send a shiver down your spine whenever you recall them.

The Awakening is a better film for me. While the scares are less frequent and sometimes less impactful, a shock twist at the end makes the film stick in your memory. And it's creepier than The Woman in Black or Insidious, as dead children are always worse and we all fear the spectres that may be lingering in our memory. Another shock ending is The Sixth Sense, but the rest of the film is fairly average so doesn't live up to the final revelation.

\But yet again, these films don't quite cut it, as the movie needs to be brilliant all the way through, it can't just have a good ending. And with all the dramatic music and sharp editing, its easy to become detached and not care about our hero's fate. We need to feel like we're stuck in the same situation as our protagonist, to fill our pulses rise in sync with theirs. And if that's going to happen, the film needs to have a lower budget.

Lets talk about Blair Witch Project. In the great scheme of things, it's done more bad than good, Cloverfield and the boring Paranormal Activity series. But although many disagree, I thought it was brilliant. The atmosphere was so electric that you could really feel our heroes isolation and desperation growing, and it was as if you were in the forest with them. Yes, the plot is almost non-existent, but it generally is in ghost stories. The ending, which many find insubstantial, I think makes the film. We never discover quite what caused the death of our intrepid film makers.
spawning an overwhelming number of found footage films, including the appalling

Another ambiguous ending concludes the equally experimental Silent House. Featuring Elizabeth Olsen, who was so brilliant in Martha Marcy May Marlene, the film is made to look like it was shot all in one take, moving in strict real time rather than the days that Blair Witch Project spans. Olsen is very good at being scared as she dashes through the darkened house, and we feel everything with her. The jaunty camera work means that sometimes we're not quite sure what's set her off, and robbing us of this knowledge is a master stroke. The movie sets itself up to be fairly low key, but it spirals into a surreal nightmare. In a strange nod to to The Evil Dead (you just can't escape that film), Olsen finds herself in a bathroom with a strange girl in a bath and blood pouring out of a cistern that's facing out of the wall for some reason. By the end, the trust we've invested in our fellow sufferers is shattered. Of the cast of four: three of them are murderers, one of them's a child abuser and one of them's a figment of the imagination.

These two films are fantastic, but can what we've learnt about disorientation and ambiguity be applied to a traditional ghost story? For anyone who's read The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, the answer is yes. And the book is such a good ghost story because it's never really about ghosts, in fact it's questionable if there's any ghosts in it at all. It seems to be about the disintegration of the upper class, the ghost of country house dramas is still a reminder of a simpler life before the woes of the modern age. But it's also about madness, family ties and love. The whole book is fantastic, but with the ending it really hits the nail on the head. Because we're never sure who killed the final inhabitant of Hundreds Hall. The easy explanation is that it was the ghost of the little girl (and this is an improvement on the norm, we have a homicidal ghost), which is in keeping with all the oddities that have occurred thus far. But if we move away from the comfort of supernatural explanations, we're left with the bare facts that our protagonist, the kindly Dr Faraday, chucked his jilting lover down the stairs. And if you think about it, this does seem the more rational explanation. After all, there has to be a touch of evil about a man who takes advantage of a woman's fragile mental state to seduce her. And if there's no ghost, then the family was mad, or maybe our doctor killed the rest of them. The moral of this story, living people are infinitely more scary than dead ones.

So, in our discussion of Lightfields we've made many important discoveries. First of all, you have to be moderately interesting before you die. Lucy Felwood is about as insipid as they come. Secondly, it's not all about the shocks if you want long term impact, a creepy concept will serve you well. And finally, for a killer ghost story, you need a touch of uncertainty. It can't be clear cut, there must be some detail that haunts the viewer, like a ghost that just refuses to go away.

Journey of a Gentleman in Search of Culture (Part 1)

The perilous voyages of a bourgeois gentlemen to the theatre and the cinema.

The RSC is like a theatre on steroids, in fact it is the only such establishment in which I have found a bewildering hall of mirrors and a restaurant that serves divine lamb and delicious mushrooms with feta cheese. But once they'd gone to all this trouble with the theatre, I regret to say the advertising of Hamlet left a little to be desired. The poster was simply a fencing helmet. I want portraits of renowned actors who look like they're engaged in existential puzzles, not a bloody fencing helmet!

After this minor disappointment, an ominous voice instructed me to "turn of my mobile telephone" and "proceed into the auditorium". It's always a treat seeing what elaborate concoction the RSC have dreamed up for their latest attempt to bring deeper context to Shakespeare's plays. The Globe are satisfied in giving you  strangely nostalgic treat in trying to recreate traditional Shakespearean performances, but the RSC go the extra mile, taking each play individually and styling it according to its unique character.

The set for this latest take on Shakespeare's most famous play was a curious mix of a school gym and a Bavaria hunting lodge, with a dramatic roof stretching overhead which created a sense of claustrophobia. It was all pleasingly rustic, with the central stage surrounded by filth and skulls embedded in the dirt (I felt it represented the death and decay at the heart of the play and all our lives, my theatrical companion was less sure). Lighting was used to striking effect, we were plunged into neon darkness at each appearance of Dead Hamlet and the lighting for the rest of the play perfectly matched the tone of that particular scene.

It turned out the minimalistic poster was set to reflect a minimalist take on Hamlet. Following David Tennant's renowned take on the Prince of Denmark, which played out like a slick version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, David Farr had chosen to take the play back to basics. Taking inspiration from the line "O that this too too solid flesh would melt", the creative team had chosen to portray Hamlet as suffering from depression from the start, making the play a savage attack against the modern stigma of depression. Although I admired the fresh take, the central mystery of Hamlet is whether he's really mad or simply putting on "an antic disposition". He was clearly bonkers in this one, Jonathon Slinger coupled moments of delirious madness with sober contemplation of "self slaughter".

Now I know this is a rather peevish criticism, but Hamlet was definitely a mature student, and his interaction with the considerably younger Ophelia (Pippa Nixon), Horatio (Alex Waldmann), Rosencratz (Oliver Ryan) and Guildenstern (Nicholas Tennant) was frankly quite odd. After a string of brilliant younger Hamlets (Branagh, Tennant, Wishaw) why abandon this tradition now? Speaking of Horatio though, it seems the reason he's not "fortune's slave" in this one is because he's too drugged out of his skull to care, in fact the general trend was retro 60s attire coupled with some hideous jumpers surely knitted by The Killing's Sarah Lund. Indeed Horatio is portrayed as a pathetic figure here, rather than the soft spoken and wise version that consoled David Tennant. This made it all the more poignant that Hamlet holds him up as a shining example of a man and that he's the only one who has got anything good to say about the Philosopher Prince, and let's be honest, Horatio was always Hamlet's bitch.

The effect of removing the majority of the glitz and glamour means that you can almost envisage the play taking place in a much colder Middle East, especially with the added emphasis on the multiple disturbances and attempted coups. Strangely they cut Fortinbras again, which is a shame as now three and a half  hours of play tails of with Horatio getting soaked (don't ask) instead of the nice summing up Shakespeare had in mind.

Stand out performances came from  Robin Soans's Polonius and Pippa Nixon's Ophelia, two characters which are usually portrayed as a blithering idiot and an annoying subplot respectively. Greg Hicks's isn't bad as Claudius either. He's certainly mastered a thin smarmy political veneer and makes an excellent ghost, but when he finally gets round to confessing his crime it falls a little flat.

The next day, I exchanged the beautiful suburbia of Stratford for the gritty reality of Stoke. After dodging several knife attacks and gang shoot outs, I arrived at Costa coffee and celebrated my survival with a Mocha Latte that was slightly too heavy on the chocolate. However, as I sipped my drink I felt a sniper trained on me in the distance by a rather disgruntled member of the proletariat. Thankfully, I was saved by the arrival of my cinematic companion, the dog-dying-laugher Oliver Getley, and we retreated from certain doom to the safety of the Odeon.

Here I could appreciate Danny Boyle's latest masterpiece, Trance, starring the fabulous James McAvoy and two other people (Rosario Dawson and Vincent Cassel). The two other people actually turned out to be just as good (and just as nasty) as McAvoy, in a bizarre cross between Boyle's Shallow Grave and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with possibly a dash of Inception in the dream sequences. But it all played out spiffingly, with Boyle's characteristic off key charm and visceral imagery. True, I was slightly dazed by the end of it, and wasn't entirely sure what happened, but this simply demands a second viewing. Donnie Darko made a lot more sense by the fourth time.

So, I had survived the perils of Stoke-on-Trent, whilst finding time to appreciate the works of Shakespeare and Danny Boyle. But how will this posh twit fare on further cultural exploits? Will the Disgruntled Proletariat Sniper finally get his revenge on the bourgeoisie? Find out in Part II.....