30 Monday Apr 2012
Tags
2012, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, Benjamin Walker, Dominic Cooper, Rufus Sewell, Timur Bekmambetov
Director: Timur Bekmambetov
Stars: Benjamin Walker, Rufus Sewell, Dominic Cooper
Plot: Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, discovers vampires are planning to take over the United States. He makes it his mission to eliminate them.
Release Dates: 22nd June (USA), 2nd August (UK)
29 Sunday Apr 2012
Director: Bennett Miller
Stars: Brad Pitt, Robin Wright, Jonah Hill
Plot: A biography of Billy Beane’s trials and tribulations, as he puts together an Oakland A’s team based on mathematical principles.
Sports films are a particularly tricky genre to take on. Not only does the idea need to appeal in some way to non-sports fans, but also to those who follow their chosen sport with such fervour that they can roll off statistics from a famous game played years ago. This is why taking real-life stories or setting them against the backdrop of a famous event appears to do the trick. Escape to Victory (1981), set during World War II and features a stellar cast of actors and real-life sportsmen. In recent years however, there has been more of a focus on straightforward triumph-over-adversity stories, such as We Are Marshall (2006) and The Blind Side (2009), which both centred on loss and sacrifice, but ultimately the glory of defying the odds. Moneyball follows this path, but on a much more subtle level – the battles here are mostly behind the scenes, rather than out on the baseball field.
Oakland Athletics baseball team’s general manager Billy Beane (Pitt) is frustrated at his player’s loss to the New York Yankees during the 2001 postseason. With three of his star players – Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi and Jason Isringhausen – set to leave to free agency, Beane consults with his advisers on how to improve for the follow season, bearing in mind their significant lack of funds. Whilst visiting the Cleveland Indians, Beane encounters Peter Brand (Hill), a Yale economics graduate who has a brand new take on how to assess the value of players. Beane checks Brand’s theory by asking him if he would have drafted him – Beane was regarded as potentially a very gifted player, but turned down a scholarship to Stanford University, instead choosing to play in the Major League but to little acclaim. When Brand admits he wouldn’t have drafted him until the ninth round, Beane employs him as his assistant.
Oakland’s scouts are initially dismissive of Brand’s non-traditional sabermetric methods, believing that their years of experience are being undermined by someone who knows little about the game. Instead of relying on the scouts’ experience and know-how, Beane chooses players based on their on base percentage (OBP), also looking for characteristics and manages to put together a team which is seemingly undervalued. Tensions between Beane and his more traditional staff are raised, as he and Brand identify and recruit players such as unorthodox submarine pitcher Chad Bradford (Casey Bond). Beane also finds himself at loggerheads with Athletics’ manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), when he trades away the team’s lone traditional star player Carlos Peña, in order to make Howe play the team in the style he desires. With plenty of criticism and cynicism about his methods, Beane goes to task in trying to make the Oakland A’s a competitive team despite their lack of financial clout.
On the face of it, Moneyball appears to be essentially about sport statistics, but beneath this belies the fact that Brad Pitt gives one of his career-best performances. What could have been a dull film aimed at baseball diehards not only transcends sports in general, but also gives weight and meaning way beyond your common all garden, triumph-over-adversity formulaic schmaltz. There is little sentimentality in Pitt’s subtle portrayal of Billy Beane’s struggle in bridging the gap between the haves and the have-nots, thoroughly deserving his Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in this year’s Oscars. Even to those who are far from well-versed in the intricacies of baseball will be able to identify with Beane’s frustration on, but especially off, the pitch.
Jonah Hill, usually typecast as the token-fat-guy-to-laugh-at-for-being-fat, takes on the role of Peter Brand which looks completely out of his comfort zone, but here looks anything but uncomfortable. Hill is a superb foil for Pitt’s Beane, despite the fact that he doesn’t have an awful lot to do, there is at last a glimpse that he can improve on the same old Superbad-style comedy. Screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin place a great deal of emphasis on the behind-the-scenes action, rather than the on-field shenanigans which tend to overwhelm film where sport is the predominant element. This reflects the true notion that the game itself is only a very small part of the bigger picture – sports clubs are first and foremost businesses and here the Oakland A’s are shown as such. Much credit must go to scribes Zaillian and Sorkin for creating a script that is wonderfully nuanced, in perfect keeping with Bennett Miller’s direction and Brad Pitt’s central character.
Moneyball doesn’t spark into life immediately but once Beane and Brand team up, the world of economics never looked so fascinating. If you have a passion for any sport or just love a great story, then sit back and enjoy a film that is a fine example of how a simple plot and a fine lead performance can go a long way.
Rating: 
27 Friday Apr 2012
Director: Oliver Stone
Stars: Taylor Kitsch, John Travolta, Uma Thurman
Plot: Pot growers Ben and Chon face off against the Mexican drug cartel who kidnapped their shared girlfriend.
Release Dates: 6th July (USA), 28th September (UK)
26 Thursday Apr 2012
Director: Roland Emmerich
Stars: Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, David Thewlis
Plot: Contrary to popular belief, it was Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, not William Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet, Macbeth et al. Here we learn his story and the reasons behind the conspiracy, set against the backdrop of Elizabeth I’s reign.
“Plays are the work of the devil!” yells one stereotypical medieval God-fearer in Anonymous, a film that suggests that not only William Shakespeare was in fact an illiterate fool who didn’t write a single word of ‘his’ plays, but also that our dear Virgin Queen Elizabeth I was in fact a bit of a floozy who played the field and bore a son (or two). If you can swallow all this, then read on.
After an exceedingly luvvie introduction from Sir Derek Jacobi in the present day, we see Ben Jonson (Sebastian Arnesto) in the early 17th century, who is running along a rain-soaked London street while being pursued by Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury (Edward Hogg). Cecil is searching for a pile of valuable manuscripts which Jonson hides in the Globe Theatre, which is then burned down by Cecil’s men. The action then jumps back five then forty years as we follow the life of Edward de Vere (Jamie Campbell Bower, Ifans) which runs parallel to much of Elizabeth I’s (Joely Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave) reign. The succession of Elizabeth is discussed in detail between the Tudors and the Cecils, father William (Thewlis) and son Robert. Edward de Vere is seen as a child prodigy, performing the role of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Queen at the age of about eight or nine. He is later sent to live in a Puritanical household of William Cecil, where he kills a servant who is spying on him.
Cecil blackmails de Vere over the murder into a loveless marriage with his daughter Anne (Amy Kwolek, Helen Baxendale) and also to stop writing. De Vere later becomes the lover of Elizabeth I and unknowingly fathers an illegitimate son, later known as Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton (Timo Huber, Xavier Samuel), whose parentage is hidden from everyone except the Cecils. Not only is de Vere hamstrung by the restrictions to write plays and his wife’s impatience, his father-in-law is concerned about the royal lineage and plans to have James, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, crowned as king but is concerned about Henry’s possible claim to the throne. De Vere visits a theatre to see a play by Ben Jonson, but it is stopped halfway through as it is considered by the royal militia to be seditious and Jonson is arrested and imprisoned. De Vere then secretly writes Henry V and Richard III as propaganda against Cecil’s cause, but when Jonson turns down the opportunity to take the writing credit, it falls to an actor – William Shakespeare – to do so.
Anonymous is an almost impenetrable mess of a film, which introduces characters at an incredible rate of knots whilst confusingly jumping back and forth between time periods. Just when you were beginning to follow one timeline, in comes the same character a few years older/younger and we have to start all over again. With such a huge number of faces (most of whom have incredibly long titles) to keep track of, this is ironically similar to watching one of the plays of Shakespeare himself. Rhys Ifans’ posh Edward de Vere is a far cry from his scruffy Spike in Notting Hill (1999), the role that launched his career on a global scale, but, as the main focus of the film, is actually convincing if a little too camp at times. The supporting cast is pretty anonymous (no pun intended), except for Sebastian Arnesto’s Ben Jonson and that is only because he has one of the film’s more meatier roles.
Casting mother and daughter Joely Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave as Elizabeth I is inspired. Not only do you have two accomplished actresses, but also the ready-made look complete with red hair. These are the only plus points as far as the acting is concerned – most of the time there is too much grandiose thespianism instead of playing characters with a little more restraint. The plot might be absurd and difficult to follow, but the superb recreation of Elizabethan England is in complete contrast to the pretty dire events surrounding it. Roland Emmerich, who directed and produced the futuristic and slightly less-than-subtle films The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and 2012 (2009), here takes on a historical world and though it might be a little too Hollywood, fans of The Tudors will no doubt lap it up.
Anonymous is a tame effort at suggesting that Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare led fraudulent lives. There maybe some demand for Da Vinci Code-style conspiracies, but one look at the poor box office takings will tell you all you need to know.
Rating: 
24 Tuesday Apr 2012
Director: Christopher Nolan
Stars: Christian Bale, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Gary Oldman
Plot: Eight years after Batman took the fall for Two Face’s crimes, a new terrorist leader, Bane overwhelms Gotham’s finest, and the Dark Knight resurfaces to protect a city that brands him an enemy.
Release Dates: 20th July (USA, UK)
23 Monday Apr 2012
Director: Justin Kurzel
Stars: Lucas Pittaway, Daniel Henshall, Louise Harris
Plot: A teenager living in a rough suburb of Adelaide, is drawn into a world of violence and murder.
Broadly speaking, the subject of serial killers in film can be approached in two ways. You can either create an anti-hero, a type of murderer who revels in his deeds and proactively toys with his victims, much like Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs (1991). In complete contrast (we now tend to see this more frequently) there’s the intense, scary perpetrator who seems to be normal on the outside but actually harbours a horrifying way of life and could quite easily be living down your street. This latter tack is followed by Snowtown, which is similar in tone to the Australian gangster film Animal Kingdom (2010), but is moodier, creating an atmosphere far removed from our sunny perception of Neighbours and Home & Away.
Snowtown beings with James (Jamie) Vlassakis (Pittaway), recounting a strange dream in a very melancholic manner. He then awakes in his bedroom – he lives with his dysfunctional family in the Adelaide suburb of Salisbury North. Jamie’s mother Elizabeth (Harris) looks after her sons on her own, despite their struggles and the obvious lack of a father figure. When she discovers that her boyfriend, who lives across the road, is a paedophile who has been taking indecent pictures of her boys, she flies into a rage and lashes out at him. After the police release him without charge, Elizabeth is contacted by one of her friends, Barry (Richard Green) who introduces her to John (Henshall), who despises homosexuals and paedophiles. He harasses Elizabeth’s ex with the help of Jamie and they manage to eventually drive him out-of-town.
John takes Jamie under his wing, providing the male role model he was looking for. At the same time he becomes increasingly homophobic, in line with John’s extreme views and begins to take on more violent tendencies – Jamie is unable to escape John’s control and becomes his reluctant passenger. John starts to influence the neighbourhood with his views, separating Barry from his boyfriend Robert (Aaron Viergever), who violently retaliates against Barry. As a consequence, Barry isn’t seen again, leaving behind a message for his brother that he has gone to Queensland. Jamie visits his drug-addict friend Gavin (Bob Adriaens), to whom John takes an instant dislike – a few nights later John and Robert take Jamie to the garden shed and show him something incredibly disturbing. From this point on, Jamie finds himself inextricably linked to the murders of John Bunting – Australia’s most notorious serial killer.
Snowtown charts the early part of a killing spree that may not be familiar to many people outside Australia. While the name of John Bunting may ring a faint bell, you will more likely find this more involved without knowing too much about the real-life story beforehand. There’s a particular bleakness throughout – the use of dark camera filters gives us the impression that a malevolence is breeding away in the background and will soon rear its ugly head. Director Justin Kurzel effectively drains the life out of the screen, which is certainly appropriate given the plot. By doing this though, Kurzel also reduces our chance to be gripped by the characters, who are pretty dour except for Daniel Henshall, who plays Bunting with the arrogant intensity you would expect.
The only criticism you could level at Henshall would be the muffled delivery of his lines, especially at the dinner table, where most of the chatty scenes take place. Such an important character needs to be heard and this is of little use to us, if he spends most of the time with his mouth full. Lucas Pittaway’s Jamie is a compelling watch but if you look at the film in hindsight, there are only one or two scenes in which he is called upon to stretch himself. The cast share screen time pretty equally – no-one really stands out except Henshall and Pittaway, who have a convincing relationship as they carry the storyline. There will be the inevitable comparisons drawn with Animal Kingdom, but while David Michôd’s film also had a young, impressionable teenager getting swept away in the violence surrounding him, Kurzel hasn’t managed to coax the same accessibility to his talking props in quite the same way.
Snowtown employs a cast of virtual unknowns and as a result, lacks a quality star to really shake things up. It’s a valiant effort to shed a different light on an infamous event, but by the final reel there’s more a feeling of being dazed and confused rather than a sense of shock and disbelief at Bunting and his accomplices’ crimes.
Rating: 
21 Saturday Apr 2012
Director: Ridley Scott
Stars: Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron, Patrick Wilson
Plot: A team of explorers discover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading them on a journey to the darkest corners of the universe. There, they must fight a terrifying battle to save the future of the human race.
Release Dates: 1st June (UK), 8th June (USA)
20 Friday Apr 2012
Director: Martin Scorsese
Stars: Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz, Christopher Lee
Plot: In 1930s Paris, an orphan boy who lives in the walls of a train station, tries to find the story behind a robot and a former filmmaker.
Martin Scorsese might be most famous for directing iconic, violent films such as Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980) and Goodfellas (1990), but he has never been shy of trying something a little different every now and then. Aside from the occasional documentary, Scorsese was at the helm of Bringing Out the Dead (1999) and Shutter Island (2010), two films that showed he could try his hand at genres that aren’t his norm. Hugo goes one step further – this is essentially a film aimed at children, which is arguably more akin to asking Quentin Tarantino to direct the next Chipmunks Squeakquel.
In 1930s Paris, Hugo Cabret (Butterfield), lives with his widowed father (Jude Law), a clockmaker, who regularly takes his son to the cinema and particularly enjoys the films of Georges Méliès. One day, Hugo’s father dies in a museum fire and he is taken in by his uncle (Ray Winstone), an alcoholic watchmaker whose job is to monitor clock maintenance at the train station Gare Montparnasse. He shows Hugo his job, but is later found drowned in the Seine. Ever since then, Hugo has lived within the walls of the station, looking after the clocks, stealing food and trying to rebuild an automaton (a mechanical man), which is supposed to write with a pen. Believing that the automaton contains a message from his father, Hugo steals the mechanical parts needed to fix it, but is caught by the owner of the toy store, Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley) who takes his notebook which has all the notes and instructions for the repair.
In order to recover the notebook, Hugo befriends Papa’s god-daughter Isabelle (Moretz), who promises to help him. The next day, Georges gives Hugo a pile of ashes which he claims are the remains of the notebook – Isabelle, to Hugo’s relief, tells him that the notebook has not been burned. Georges decides that Hugo can earn the notebook back by working for him in his shop until he pays back everything that he stole. Hugo manages to fix the automaton, but is missing one vital component – a heart-shaped key that will bring it to life. He shows Isabelle the movies that he had grown to love and she introduces him to a bookstore whose owner Labisse (Lee) initially displays distrust towards Hugo. Isabelle turns out to have the key to the automaton and they activate it to finally see what happens. When it draws a famous scene from a Georges Méliès’ Voyage to the Moon (1902), Isabelle recognises the signature underneath as being her godfather’s. Hugo and Isabelle go ask Papa Georges for an explanation and learn a startling revelation about his past.
Hugo is proof that appearances can be deceptive. What starts out with a particular focus on two young protagonists, avoiding the attentions of their elders with the use of slapstick humour, eventually turns into something altogether magical. Asa Butterfield, who was launched into our cinematic consciousness with a fine performance as Bruno in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, is perfectly cast as the wide-eyed Hugo Cabret. There would be many other young actors who would have taken on this role and made it too mawkish, but Butterfield tackles both the comic and more serious scenes with aplomb. Moretz takes on a character that is in complete contrast to her incarnations of Mindy Mcready/Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass (2010) and Abby in Let Me In (2010) – her portrayal of Isabelle as Hugo’s companion in their journey together is conveyed very well indeed.
Now to the adults. This is Ben Kingsley’s best film for a good while. When we finally discover Papa Georges tragic secret, the plot takes an about turn and since the whole film depends on how this character is played, his casting in this role is an absolute masterstroke. We initially feel his antagonism towards Hugo and world, so there is little sympathy for him, but at the halfway mark, the whole mood of Hugo changes and this is in no small part down to Kingsley’s magnificent performance. There are small roles for Christopher Lee and Jude Law, who are not really given time to develop their characters, but Sacha Baron Cohen, who looks for all the world like Allo Allo’s English gendarme Arthur Bostrom, provides the main comic relief which generally sits well. Scorsese’s direction is exquisite – perhaps there was a feeling that he would be out of his depth here, but every scene is intricately poised and his love for cinema is clearly evident throughout.
After watching about half an hour of Hugo, you may think that only children are invited to the proceedings, but once Papa Georges story is revealed it is the adults, particularly those who love early cinema, who will be in awe at Scorsese’s latest offering. The first half may not be perfect, but once it gets going, the rest most certainly is.
Rating: 
18 Wednesday Apr 2012
Director: Larry Charles
Stars: Sacha Baron Cohen, Anna Faris, John C. Reilly
Plot: The heroic story of a dictator who risks his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed.
Release Dates: 11th May (USA), 18th May (UK)
17 Tuesday Apr 2012
Director: Drew Goddard
Stars: Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison
Plot: When five friends decide to spend a weekend in an isolated cabin, they discover there’s infinitely much more lurking beneath the surface than they could ever imagine.
Why do we watch horror films when we’ve got a fair idea what’s going to happen? The horror book cliché has many chapters, but we’re all familiar with the stereotypical lead characters, who have set personalities and have to die one-by-one, each time more gruesome than before. The Cabin in the Woods looks at this genre in a similar way that Scream (1996) did with slasher films. But do writers Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard deliver something that is original, managing to be ‘knowing’ without falling into a parody of itself?
There are two plot strands that run parallel to each other for most of the film, but to avoid spoilers, only the primary one is detailed here. Five college friends – Dana (Connolly), Curt (Hemsworth), Jules (Hutchison), Marty (Fran Kranz) and Holden (Jesse Williams) – drive to a remote cabin for a quiet weekend break in the country. When they reach their destination, they arrange themselves into separate rooms and, after some amusement involving a one-way mirror and a scary-looking picture, manage to settle in. Having entered the basement through a trapdoor they find a number of artifacts such as a sphere, a pendant and a music box ballerina. Dana finds a diary and begins to read an incantation in Latin – she unwittingly unleashes a family of zombies outside, who rise from the ground and make their way towards the house.
Meanwhile, Curt and Jules wander into the woods to have sex, unaware of the danger approaching. They are interrupted by one of the zombies, who attacks them, killing Jules. Curt makes it back to the house and gets the others to help him barricade the doors. The survivors find themselves trapped in their bedrooms – Marty makes a shocking discovery before he is grabbed at the window by a zombie and dragged away, presumably to be killed. Holden, Dana and Curt get away in the RV, but are stopped from getting through a mountain tunnel by a landfall and are unable to go any further. Luckily, Curt has brought his motorbike and claims that he can jump the gap to get to the road on the other side. He almost makes it across, but he hits something unforseen and falls to his death below. Having seen what Curt collided with, Holden and Dana realise they cannot escape by this route and decide they must head back to the cabin to find another way out.
Most horror films introduce their main protagonists in an obvious way and The Cabin in the Woods is no different. A jock, a nerd, a virgin, an intellectual and a dumb blonde are all present and correct – for this most satirical of films to work we must have the stereotypes. Actually, the very first scene is about as far removed from a horror film as you can possibly imagine. Beginning with characters spouting witty one-liners in an unusual environment, combined with an unsettling undercurrent, makes for an odd tone throughout. The plot goes back and forth between the standard horror fare and a collection of individuals who we quickly realise have some kind of agenda that is very closely linked to the fate of our leads. As a result, it is these mystifying people we feel more interested in rather than the horror film fodder, in other words, the main characters.
There is a surprising amount of comedy throughout the screenplay, which actually devalues many of the attempts to scare the audience. The trouble with placing in obvious ‘nods’ to many other famous films in the horror genre, is that the unpredictability is removed and we begin to look instead for references to films such as The Evil Dead (1981) instead of wondering where the next scare will come. Whedon and Goddard have fashioned a real thinker nonetheless, but their execution of the film’s final raison d’être is pretty weak and undoes a lot of the originality and sharpness shown in the first hour or so. There are no awards for acting here, especially Sigourney Weaver’s cameo in the finale, which feels completely out of context and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Having said that, there are some stunning visuals, most notably in one scene when a corridor spews forth its contents onto an array of victims in one of the most visceral scenes you’ll have seen in a long time.
The Cabin in the Woods entertains in places and will be a real treat for horror film geeks, but you may feel let down by the ending. It’s interesting to note that Drew Goddard was an executive producer and writer on Lost and, just like that most spectacular of anti-climaxes, he has once again helped to build up a terrific premise, only to come up short.
Rating: 
