Film Review | Sinister, dir. Scott Derrickson

Perhaps it's a lack of imagination on my part, but I cannot conceive of a trope more typical of the horror genre than the haunted house. In film and in literature, there exists a rich tradition of outwardly unblemished human habitats which the shadow of some ancient evil or recent violence has taken a secret shining to — and for good reason.

That darkness could impress itself upon a place, to play out again and again over the years on anyone who dares in their ignorance or their innocence to set foot in these sacred spaces... it's a powerful idea. One that we are immediately, even intimately familiar with, such that the haunted house requires only a slight suspension of disbelief on our part, and the most minute alterations to the classic narrative which invariably accompanies it can affect play in a major way.

Nowadays, however, we have haunted children, haunted hills, haunted histories and so on - hell, relatively recently I read and reviewed Michael Koryta's So Cold the River, which was about a haunted bottle of mineral water, if you can credit it - and with this expansion of horror's horizons, the archetypal haunted house has begun to look a little long in the tooth. I dare say there's life left in the old dog yet - see my high hopes for Adam Nevill's House of Small Shadows, coming Halloween 2013 - but give me a new idea over even an innovative spin on a predictable proposition any day of the week.

I don't know if Sinister represents a new idea, exactly - its core conceit, which is to say the haunted image (the haunted film, in fact) rather recalls Ringu - but at its best, it feels as fresh as it is ultimately familiar.

It's been a decade since true crime writer Ellison Oswalt had an actual hit on his hands, and with two point four children to support, he understands that there is but one last chance for literary lightning to strike twice. Failing that, a life of editing textbooks at best awaits. So motivated, our author, ably played by an edgy Ethan Hawke, uproots the Oswalts a final time. They move into a house which was recently the scene of a macabre multiple murder - the very uncanny hanging with which Sinister begins - though Ashley, Trevor and Tracy know little of this.

The weather seems to be with Ellison when, whilst unpacking, he comes across a box of home movies in the attic: Super 8 snuff films, after a fashion, documenting the deaths here in the Oswalt's new home — as well as a series of similarly sinister killings across the country. Sensing an extraordinary story, he opts to investigate them himself instead of alerting the proper authorities.

But when things begin to go bump in the night - when his son starts sleepwalking and his daughter takes to drawing pictures of the last tenants' little girl - Ellison realises that there may be more to these vile crimes than he had imagined, even in the darkest of his dreams.

Aside the miscasting of newcomer Juliet Rylance as Ellison's partner, who has little to do other than make ultimatums anyway, Sinister's actors are absolutely adequate. The kids aren't as central to the terror as you might suspect, given the genre, which is as well; it allows Hawke to shoulder most of the movie's most potent moments, and as aforementioned, he does so solidly. I hardly thought about his role in Dead Poets Society at all!

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Scott Derrickson directs. A fledgling filmmaker most notable, I suppose, for The Exorcism of Emily Rose, he also remade The Day the Earth Stood Still as a thankless Keanu Reeves vehicle, and developed the fifth Hellraiser film, Inferno. I'll say that he equips himself better here than he ever has in the past... but then poor direction has rarely been the ruin of his previous pictures. 

Simply put, Sinister is blessed with a better script than the rest of Derrickson's efforts were, thanks to a screenplay co-written with C. Robert Cargill. If this unnerving experience is any sort of barometer for his impending debut - Dreams and Shadows, out in the US and the UK at the end of February - I expect smart, if not necessarily seamless modern horror.

The film is far from perfect, then, but I had a fair bit of fun with it. Neatly conceived, competently composed and respectably well executed, Sinister seems to me one of the strongest scary movies of recent years. You may interpret that phrase in any number of ways, so go knowing that it's more insidious than Insidious, and approximately ten times as interesting as The Possession.

Film Review | ParaNorman

From afar, Laika Entertainment's first feature film since Coraline in 2009 looks questionable at best.

But come a little closer. Look again. How about now?

Coraline was of course adapted from the charming Neil Gaiman novel of the same name, whilst ParaNorman springs from an original script by a first-time filmmaker. Likewise, Coraline was directed by stop-motion maestro Henry Selick, whereas Laika's latest has its own unknown author at the helm, chaperoned by Sam Fell of Flushed Away fame. One can't help but wonder where all the talent went, and why.

ParaNorman's premise is similarly discouraging: there's this little outcast kid called Norman - voiced by The Road's Kodi Smit-McPhee - and he can see dead people. That old chestnut again, then.

And isn't the title terrible? On the other hand, inappropriate capital letters are a real pet peeve, so maybe that's just me.

But never mind the title, and rest assured that the premise improves. Finally, forget the apparent lack of talent, because ParaNorman wants for nothing once it gets going. Admittedly it takes a little too long to get to the good stuff - the story goes, though very slowly - but beyond this belated beginning the pace improves, the narrative arc becomes darker, indeed deeper, and once the ante is upped, the cartoonish characters come into their own.

It's hard to express how different this film is before and after the half-hour mark... suffice to to say some shock of creative energy seems to possess ParaNorman at this point. Make it that far and you'll be blown away by the array of fantastic surprises the filmmakers have been holding back.

ParaNorman deals in a very real way with bigotry, religion, peer pressure and yes, death; astounding and encouraging in what is ostensibly a children's film. The film tackles such topics lightly but not loosely, investing the proceedings with meaning enough to last past the end credits. More movies like ParaNorman, and perhaps there's hope for the next generation yet!

In terms of entertainment, writer/director Chris Butler - alongside Sam Fell - equips himself incredibly well. Its iffy offing aside, ParaNorman builds and builds towards a remarkable finale, and all the while it's bloody lovely to look at, and beautiful musically, too. 

Overall, ParaNorman is a less consistent film than Coraline, but at its best? I'm as surprised as anyone to find myself saying that it's actually rather better.

Film Review | The Dark Knight Rises, dir. Chris Nolan

The question of expectations, especially as regards a tentpole flick like this, is a necessary evil in any account of The Dark Knight Rises, but for once in my life, I went into a thing without my blinkers. I was neither primed for a pale imitation of the pitch-perfect previous film, nor desperate to declare The Dark Knight Rises the greatest film since Citizen Kane. I'll admit to high hopes... but there's no harm in those.

Above all, I was aware that the last chapter of Christopher Nolan's re-imagining of all things Batman would have to change things up hugely to escape the long shadow of its immediate predecessor, and the tragic absence of its stunning star.

I don't know that it does, ultimately. In fact The Dark Knight Rises is such a deliberately different film from the summer smash it succeeds that it invites the very comparison one suspects the filmmakers were attempting to sidestep. In a sense, it begs the question. And alas, it can only answer in the negative.

That is certainly not to say this final chapter is a failure. On the contrary, it trumps Batman Begins, the above-par but sub-sterling origin story which kicked off this trilogy, and which The Dark Knight Rises hearkens back to both narratively and thematically. Beyond the initial set-up, however, so little of this series' centerpiece survives that Nolan's lavish new movie feels almost... compromised.

 

Eight years on from the events of The Dark Knight, crime in Gotham City is at an all-time low because of an act championed by the late DA. Accordingly, the caped crusader - having taking the fall for the death of the very fellow: the duplicitous Harvey Dent - is in retirement. Yet when a new threat arises, Bruce Wayne dons the mantle once more to meet the challenge posed by what amounts to a muscle-man in a gas mask — only to be found unequal to Bane's brute force. Beaten, if not wholly broken as in the pseudo-source material of the surprisingly straightforward screenplay by the brothers Nolan, The Dark Knight must now rise again... again.

Of course it's not a question of "if" but "when" - and perhaps "how" - and in this protracted act The Dark Knight Rises is at its weakest. We who have seen films before know perfectly well that Batman is going to come back, and the time Nolan takes to patch up his protagonist is inexcusable. Superficially this seems a mere over-indulgence, but beneath the sheen the sequence is more insidious still, for what does it offer except a convenient means to a predestined end? How many times must we watch the same Bruce Wayne defeat the same demons in the same film, one wonders.

This repetition does The Dark Knight Rises a disservice, made doubly more damaging because of its incredible length, and the various ways in which - even then - this second sequel fails to flesh out the vast majority of its supporting characters. Lucius Fox, Alfred Pennyworth and Commissioner Gordon are all sidelined or saddled with thankless arcs, meanwhile a few of the major new players also fall flat: Marion Cotillard's Miranda is as wasted as the franchise's past attempts at a love interest, and as Blake, an idealistic young police officer who just so happens to have worked out Batman's deepest secret, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is nearly meaningless.

Almost without exception, however, the star-studded cast makes a herculean effort. In the title role, Christian Bale is a substantially better Bruce Wayne than he's been in the past, and Tom Hardy's Bane is a more credible antagonist than his silly voice suggests, however short-changed he is by the last act. Finally, Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle strikes a smart balance between a damaged femme fatale and the Catwoman of the comic books, complete with cartoonish antics.

Credit where it's earned, incidentally: hers is a character you can imagine easily oversexed, objectified with precious little effort, and yet - despite a few long shots of her bum on the back of the Batbike - she is by a large margin the best-developed woman the Nolans have written into existence. Which may not be saying a great deal, given the caliber of the last candidates.... but every little helps!

I've raised a fair few of my issues with it over the course of this review, but you mustn't misunderstand me: at the end of the day, I had a pretty fine time with The Dark Knight Rises at the IMAX. The unbearable sense of tension that made its predecessor so remarkable may have taken a time out, yet the action is every bit as astonishing, and if Hans Zimmer's score is more of the same, it's more of the same stunning score — plus, it adds at least one memorable new dimension.

It must stand as a testament to how very much the filmmakers do right in this crucial conclusion that even with so much wrong, still The Dark Knight Rises rises above the vast majority of comic book movies. It's more of a sequel to Batman Begins than The Dark Knight, and it fares far better in the former comparison than the latter... but then, what wouldn't?

Film Review | Prometheus, dir. Ridley Scott

I really need to stop listening to the internet.

The internet, if I'm reading it right, does not approve of Prometheus. That's why it took me a month to get to the cinema to see it, despite the hype, and my initial excitement. Because after Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection and the two loathsome films in the Aliens vs Predator franchise, I did not need another crushing disappointment in a series I'd come of age in abject awe of, and according to the fast-gathering critical consensus, then the me-too fan reaction that followed in its footsteps, that was all Prometheus was.

Culled from the conclusions collected by Metacritic: "Alien's poor relation" is "hardly a masterpiece," but at least "it's not boring." Instead, "it's clumsy revisionism," "derivative and passe," even "overreaching." One reviewer goes so far as to suggest Prometheus a pale shadow of Brian de Palma's Mission to Mars.

Seriously, Slant Magazine? Why don't you shove that assertion up your angle?

The most honest opinion of the lot comes from the Austin Chronicle, whose pet critic admits that Prometheus is "a glorious mess well worth seeing, but light-years away from what fans were expecting," and that, if you ask me, is the issue underlying almost every inch of moaning about this movie: namely, unreasonable expectations.

So let's be clear here. Prometheus is indeed an Alien prequel. It occurs in the same world. It involves, eventually, the exact antagonists. But think on this: none of the original sequels, right through to the rubbish ones, were mere reiterations of the previous films' principles. Each of the Aliens has a mood of its own... a different genre descriptor and a characteristic slant on the continuing narrative. Why, then, does it appear that what people wanted from Prometheus was Alien all over again? And how is Prometheus' inevitable failure to effect the same sublime sense of terror as the first and finest instance of the franchise anyone's problem but our own?

Better that critics had taken issue with those aspects of Prometheus that underwhelm independently rather than the above array of issues outwith it. Damon Lindelof's script, for instance, co-written with The Darkest Hour's Jon Spaihts, has a tendency towards the obvious: there's some truly terrible banter, and some of the narrative's supporting characters are ripped right out of the Alien playbook. In more prominent roles, Charlize Theron and Guy Pearce and Idris Elba do what they can with what they have, but what little they're given to work with is so crude and/or transparent that it's practically laughable — they're completely wasted.

Meanwhile, a week on from my trip to the cinema, I'm still not sure what to make of Noomi Rapace as our scientist protagonist Elizabeth Shaw. She's certainly no Sigourney Weaver... but let's leave that aside, because as established, Prometheus need not be Alien to be a fine film in its own right. Even then, though, Shaw came across as too passive a protagonist to command the audience's attention. At the outset she's a believer, and Rapace at least carries her character's faith, but shortly after the crew of the spaceship Prometheus touch down on the promised planet, she seems more sheep than shepherd. Furthermore, she's saddled with a borderline offensive arc. Rather than a strong female hero in righteous remembrance of Ripley, Shaw, for the most part, is a demurring woman who wears very little, and suffers from some very gender-specific issues.

One last niggle before I get to the good bits: though the vast majority of the visual effects are excellent - indeed, in a rare turn, I even appreciated the 3D - a few stand out in their amateurishness. During the silica storm, a flying doll put me in mind of that dreadful shot from Spider-man. The Engineers - formerly known as space jockeys - aren't so awful, but they are, I'm afraid, wholly inappropriate to the Alien aesthetic. (If you've seen a few of Tool's terrific music videos, you'll have glimpsed these massive babies before.) And when the snake-aliens first "interact" with our cast... oh, don't even get me started!

On the other hand, some of Prometheus' effects-heavy scenes are astonishing. From the monumental opening sequence, as powerful as it is picturesque - props to the Isle of Skye for looking so like an alien landscape - to the grisly, Cronenberg-esque emergency procedure Shaw undergoes in the middle of the film; and from the unbound wonder of the Engineer's chamber after it's been "activated" on through the explosive climax planet-side, Prometheus is as visually stunning as it is aurally bombastic.

Presence-wise, Michael Fassbender as the android David steals his every scene. He brings an impression of of wide-eyed innocence tempered by a sparkling sort of intelligence to the token role, rendered so simplistic in the script, and though I dare say there's little question as to whether he's one of the good guys or a calculating company man to the last, Fassbender's nuanced performance elevates the entire affair. Without him, one can only wonder what would have become of Ridley Scott's return to his roots.

That said, the film's legendary director equips himself magnificently, considering. In fact, for my money, Prometheus is Scott's most impressive movie since Gladiator. Here, his eye for grandeur has never been better, and his capacity to startle is on fine form; the threatening sense of tension he establishes may fall somewhat short of that dominating the original Alien... but then, doesn't everything?

And the script, for all its aforementioned faults, has an absolutely fascinating idea at its heart. Prometheus is a philosophical rumination on the origins of the species: an account of how humanity came to be, by way of some evil aliens. If you're interested in a film that'll make you think, Prometheus has that. Prometheus is that. Days later, the questions it asks, and the daring implications it makes, are as alive in my mind as they were while I was sitting in the cinema.

Prometheus is very far from a perfect film, but let's not hate on it simply because it isn't Alien. Ask yourself: is that really what you wanted? Or just what the internet, in its infinite wisdom, led you to expect?

Film Review | Hugo, dir. Martin Scorsese

I almost saw Hugo at the movies. Almost, but not quite. For one reason or another, I waited for the Blu-ray, and come the appointed day, as beautiful as the thing looked, here at home it felt... flat. And I think there's a reason for that. It's overgenerous in my estimation, but you could call Hugo a love letter to cinema, and maybe if I'd seen it on the big screen the experience would have been more memorable. As is, I almost liked it, but not quite.

In many ways the latest from Martin Scorsese marks an outlandish change of pace for the filmmaker. He's one of the greats, of course, and if we were in any danger of forgetting that fact, he's had rather a renaissance of late, with The Departed, Shutter Island and his involvement in HBO's Boardwalk Empire.

In such storied company, Hugo seems almost an aberration: it's an uplifting, Amelie-esque movie about movies, complete with cartoonish characters, a saccharine-sweet narrative, and that most romantic backdrop, classic Paris. It's about a little orphan boy who lives in the walls of an ornate train station in said city, and longs for one last message from his dearly departed father. This Hugo (Asa Butterfeld) hopes he'll have if he can just fix the broken automaton they were working on in advance of the accident that left him bereft.

However, were it so simple, he'd have done it already, but Hugo's life - hard enough as it is - is made still more miserable by Sacha Baron Cohen's nameless Station Inspector, meanwhile Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley), the owner of a small magic shop, seems to have it in for him. When the monstrous Monseiur holds Hugo's precious notebook hostage, our little fellow's only hope is his adopted daughter, Hit-Girl. No! I mean Isabelle! In any case, Chloë Grace Moretz - who you might also recall from Let Me In - as a precocious creature desperate to have an adventure the equal of those from the stories. Together then, Hugo and Isabelle uncover a mystery involving the automaton, an early film long thought lost, and a strange, sad man haunted by his past.

Hugo is a no expenses spared adaptation of The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick: the 2007 Caldecott award-winner described by its author as "not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things." Whatever it is or is not, I'm afraid I haven't read the thing - poor show sir! - so I can't speak to where exactly the issues I had with Hugo originated, but at a glance, the filmmakers don't appear to have taken any great liberties with the source material.

Perhaps that's the problem, because Hugo is truly two movies, about an hour long each. The first is a meandering farce, featuring Cohen in Borat mode, whilst the second is a deeply human and moderately moving story, starring Ben Kingsley at his best, Helen McRory as his wistful wife, and a star-studded cast of bit-part players. The kids hardly factor into this latter half, and it's as well, because they're only ever so-so. As Isabelle, Moretz does her best Hermione, which is fine, but Butterfeld's moody Hugo is an accumulation of nervous energy and emo eyeliner. In his absence Hugo seems like it might just together; to wit, the older actors bear the lion's share of the movie's most powerful moments, in vignettes that have more heart than Hugo's whole story.

These asides are nice, but the entire enterprise is oriented around Hugo himself, and Butterfeld just isn't up to snuff. Nor is the narrative paced or structured in such a way as to take the onus off this miscast young actor. As I was saying, around the midpoint of the film, everything changes - for the better, from my perspective - but while children might be entertained by the first bit, they'll be bored to tears by the second, meanwhile older viewers are apt to appreciate the touching meta-movie with which Hugo concludes, though most everything before that point will drive them to distraction.

Were Hugo one thing or the other, I could simply say this isn't for me, and let that be that, or praise Scorsese for an affectionate celebration of cinema. As it is - which is to say a bit of this, and a bit of that - I honestly don't know who this film is for, and I doubt the director does either. Though the occasional 3D sequences stick out like sore thumbs, it certainly looks the part, and Howard Shore's score is a modest success as well, but beyond its incredible presentation, Hugo is oddly hollow; a beautiful, but broken automaton.

Film Review | Take Shelter, dir. Jeff Nichols

There's a storm coming. And not just any old whip of wind and water: the storm. The perfect storm. An unfathomable maelstrom of gale and tornado, thunder and lightning, with its unseeing sights set on home sweet home. For one family, it could mean the end of everything.

There's a storm coming. Curtis knows it. He knows he knows it. He's seen it, even... in dreams; smelt it and felt it in harrowing nightmares he's been having night after night, during which he loses everyone he loves. He envisions his beautiful wife Samantha lost to the storm, and then, worst of all, he watches it take his dear deaf daughter Hannah. And then he wakes.

Curtis will do anything and everything in his power to protect his family from the storm, but what storm is that, exactly? No-one else can even bring themselves to consider that there might be something coming, so when Curtis begins to build an expensive storm shelter in the back yard - risking his job, his home and the health insurance that's going to pay for the expensive surgery Hannah needs in the process - people start talking, and not in a nice way. Tongues wag, and soon the community rounds on Curtis, sure that he's lost his mind... like his mother, who was institutionalised in her 30s with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

This, Curtis realises, is a very real possibility. But he's still having the dreams, and they're as real as anything else in the quiet life he leads. He can't simply ignore them, can he? What if they're a warning he doesn't heed, and his wife and daughter are the price he'll have to pay for his arrogance?

Take Shelter could be a little sharper off the starting mark, sure, but I beg you: batten down the hatches and bear with it, because in every other respect it's an incredibly thoughtful thriller. Tense, gripping, and intelligent, Take Shelter is as much a meditation on mental illness as it is a film about survival. It is about a family holding onto one another for dear life as dear life takes them for an almighty ride, which they might not all see the end of.

A palpable and powerful sense that something's not quite right pervades Take Shelter from the first. Exactly what it is that's amiss takes a little long too come clear, as aforementioned, but from the moment Curtis starts to unravel on through to Take Shelter's unforgettable final frame, writer/director Jeff Nichols is in impeccable control of his narrative, and his characters. The story is spun slowly, but just so, meanwhile the husband and wife at its deceptively silent heart come into their own - whether towards or at odds with one another - to tremendous effect.

On a not unrelated note: both of the leads turn in truly bravura performances. As a man out of step with his sanity, whose mind and body have begun to rebel against him, Michael Shannon is intense, unselfconscious and brilliantly unreadable. You won't be able to look away as Curtis comes apart, nor indeed as Samantha calmly and then frantically tries to keep the fraying ends of her husband in some semblance of order. Jessica Chastain, for her part, spends perhaps a disproportionate amount of time preparing food, but her character's support of her husband through these hardships is the emotional core of the role. Her patience, her anxieties and her attempts to understand Curtis' break are not easy things to convey, but Chastain internalises her struggles incredibly. She's a perfect foil for an ideal character actor.

Without these powerful performances, Take Shelter would only have been a fraction of the film it is, but the leads are not the only reason it soars so. Writer/director Jeff Nichols cut his teeth on 2007's terrific Shotgun Stories - another Michael Shannon-starrer - and he carries over more than that movie's smouldering main man. His script is spare, and sure-footed; he has refined the relentlessness of his first film into a more manageable sense of the tense; and though Take Shelter's pacing is not without its own issues, it's certainly an improvement over the infrequent unevenness of Shotgun Stories. Jeff Nichols, I think, is a filmmaker to watch like a hawk.

Take Shelter would have been worthy of applause for its ineffably sensitive treatment of mental illness alone, but that idea of restraint, of the unspoken things we think, also parlays into the stunning central characters, and the gathering narrative. In the end, there's so much more to this movie than a man and some worrisome weather. That the Academy opted to overlook Take Shelter and its breathtaking array of talent so that the likes of War Horse and George Clooney could have a nomination is absolutely damning, to all involved in this latest shameful oversight.

Film Review | Project Nim, dir. James Marsh

In 2008, filmmaker James Marsh won an Oscar for his startling documentary Man on Wire. An unsentimental record of "the artistic crime of the century," as perpetrated by Philippe Petit, it told the tale of a daring tightrope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and so powerful was this strange story that as the credits rolled I resolved to follow Marsh to the ends of the earth, if in his next non-fiction narrative he felt it necessary. With my breath baited, I've been waiting to see where he'd spirit me away to ever since.

Marsh's subsequent subject is a guerrilla of a very different description: namely a chimp named Nim. In the 1970s - in the same period during which the events chronicled in Man on Wire occurred, in fact - Nim was the subject of a sensational experiment whereby he was taken from his monkey of a mother and placed with a human family, to be treated as if he were indeed a human child. In short, it was The Jungle Book backwards... or rather, it was supposed to be.

The ostensible aim of Project Nim was to test the nature versus nurture hypotheses that had such cultural currency in those halcyon, hippie-dippy days. The leader of the team, Professor Herb Terrace, was a primate specialist out of Columbia University, with a particular interest in the question of communication: could a chimp, raised by people, lean to articulate - via sign-language - his needs and feelings in the same way a human would?

As it happened, the answer to the aforementioned question was not so straightforward as either yes or no, so when his study had run its course, Terrace simply washed his hands of Nim, to the dismay of everyone involved in the experiment, and equally, decades later, the unadulterated disgust of all those viewers of this Academy Award-shortlisted documentary.
  

Project Nim narrates Nim's life from birth to death, and it is thus a real tear-jerker. At times, Nim appears more man than animal, meanwhile those "scientists" who surround him, many of whom Marsh has interviewed for this film, seem more animal than man. A very few are perfectly pleasant: most notably Bob, a sweet soul who cared for Nim in the last years of his life, and one of the couples under Terrace's dubious direction, but the only character (as such) to rival our main monkey is the aforementioned Professor, and he is no hero; oh no.

Indeed, if there's a villain of the piece then it's him, and make no mistake. Marsh does take Terrace to task on a number of occasions - over his shocking treatment of Nim, first and foremost, but he also goes so far as to ask whether Terrace had affairs with all his attractive young female employees, and it's a very reasonable question - but for all that I think the professor's portrayal in Project Nim is commendably even-handed.

Marsh summons such restraint in this sense that the viewer never feels bullied into one corner or another. Instead, in the mode of the best documentaries, he asks the hard questions, lays out the evidence for and against, and leaves us, duly informed, to answer them. One instance of this is when an adolescent Nim - more trouble than he's worth apparently - is unceremoniously sold to the testing facility at LEMSIP; it's a heart-breaking moment, but by then we have seen this chimp at his worst as well as his best, and something had to be done, didn't it?

"An unsentimental biography" this is not - indeed it is so moving, in such contrary ways, that it feels almost abusive - but Marsh never manhandles the facts when they could come between him and his narrative, thus the experience of Project Nim is one of bipolar peaks and troughs; highs and low which will have you in hopeless tears one moment, only to bring out a sad smile or a great grin the next. But of course life is not lived in a straight line, as in the stories... neither for man, nor for monkey.

That James Marsh has managed - yet again - to fashion such a gripping narrative out of the colossal disorder of actual events, without intruding upon them or particularly directing our perception of them, is all the testament to his tremendous talent there needs be. Project Nim is for its part an incredibly powerful and poignant film, and though it is lamentably absent a final nomination at this year's Oscars, I can't imagine a worthier would-be winner than this.

Film Review | Super 8, dir. J. J. Abrams

I don't know what his actual involvement was behind the scenes - producer credits are about as anomalous as credits get - but Steven Spielberg's name features prominently in the marketing materials for Super 8, and even if he had nothing to do with it, this film owes such an incalculable debt to his definitive early efforts that had there not been some such tip of the 80s baseball cap, J. J. Abrams would probably have been looking at a lawsuit instead.

As Alasdair Harkness wrote in his review for The Scotsman - that is to say the actual newspaper - Super 8 is "the most authentic Spielberg film Spielberg never directed," which is one of those snappy summations I wish I'd come up with first. But I don't know that I'd agree with the rest of his write-up... particularly with the dismissive attitude Harkness adopts as regards Abrams' latest, the better to dovetail with the anecdote he seems determined to describe, of how J. J. Abrams met and emulated his hero You-Know-Who.

I would add, though I need not, that Harkness was far from the only critic to speak out against Super 8. In fact, though the reviews were almost uniformly glowing, at least on paper - the Tomatometer has it at 82% fresh at the time of this writing - looking through them, a worrying trend emerges: of tonally negative articles pared with positive scores. Positive, indeed near-perfect scores, because you'd have to be a completely off your rocker to conclude that Super 8 is anything less that pretty gosh-darned great.

So why the downturned tone? Because Super 8 is like a Steven Spielberg film? Well... sure, yes, absolutely. But so what if it is? How is that such a bad thing? Didn't the man make some great films, back in the day? And pray tell me: who's making them now? For the most part, Spielberg himself has long since graduated onto less commercial endeavours. There is thus a great gaping hole in the field of family-friendly films, and if anyone's up to filling it, it's J. J. Abrams. Super 8 is the proof of that pudding.

Leading a large and largely delightful cast, two young actors: newcomer Joel Courtney as Joe Lamb and Elle Fanning - Dakota's little sister, coming into her own after playing so many helpless children - as Alice Dainard. Joe is still coming to terms with the death of his mother, meanwhile his father Kyle has that to deal with, his job in the police force, and the responsibilities of being a single parent to boot. Needless to say, it's not been going great for either of the Lambs, but Joe at least finds a happy distraction in Alice, who he meets while helping his friend Charles Kaznyk (Riley Griffiths; a fine find) make an amateur zombie movie, in which Joe's kindred spirits - an unaccountably sad lass - is to star.

While they film a scene one evening, things take an unexpected turn when a train packed full of strange metal cubes - and TNT, apparently - crashes into a car parked on the tracks, and derails to the tune of ten thousand explosions. Thankfully the kids escape with hardly a scratch on 'em, and as luck would have it, they manage to capture the calamity on super 8. Little do they know their camera has also captured something else. Something... wicked?

Well, no. Not so much. Something misunderstood is more like it. But remember: it's the 70s. It's going to take three days and nights to develop their shocking home movie, and a lot can change in three days and nights, during which time the gang are as in the dark as anyone as to why the military have moved into Lillian, Ohio, or why people - people including one of their number - are suddenly going missing. Meanwhile a wildfire has caught, and it could burn their little town down to the ground.

There's conspiracy afoot in Super 8, impressive spectacle on a regular basis, a few cartoonish villains for us to love to hate, and, eventually, an extra-terrestrial too. Abrams direction is excellent, stylish but not so stylised as to take one out of the experience; the script - also by Abrams - is sound, if somewhat obvious on occasion, most egregiously in the movie's lastmost moments; and the effects, from the train derailment on out, look exceedingly expensive... which is to say good. The story is engaging, the characters are endearing, and the pacing is perfect. In short, Super 8 is classic family filmmaking.

It's also The Goonies meets Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with lens flare everywhere. The debt it owes to Steven Spielberg, not to mention Superman man Richard Donner, is felt in almost every frame, but I won't agree that that's an issue in and of itself. We are not, as an audience, somehow better than such things these days, or better at such things, and if that misguided notion isn't the cause of all the mean-spiritedness surrounding Super 8, then I don't know what is. 

So Super 8 isn't particularly profound - specifically the subtext about learning to let go is a superficial sham - and it isn't any sense original, either, but nor is it dumb, or dull, or insultingly derivative. In fact I dare say it's a good movie. A very good movie, actually. But if it's one of the best films of 2011, and at a push, I think it probably is, then that's primarily because 2011 was such a stinker of a year at the cinema.

Film Review | A Lonely Place to Die, dir. Julian Gilbey

I had high hopes for A Lonely Place to Die. I don't know why. Perhaps I'll die?

In all likelihood it was the spectre of several other, far better films that did it. Almost every review I'd read of A Lonely Place to Die made reference to The Wicker Man, that bastion of creepy Scottish cinema - though it was made by an Englishman, funnily enough - and the opening moments reminded me a great deal of Scotch director Kevin Macdonald's majestic Touching the Void.

Fitting, then, that this is another film involving Scotland. Sadly it's a bad one; ambitious, but ultimately utter rubbish.

For a few moments at the very outset - before the credits have even rolled - A Lonely Place to Die seems like it might be worth the film it was shot on. Melissa George out of 30 Days of Night, which I didn't actually despise, and a couple of her mates - never mind their names - are rock-climbing up a sheer cliff somewhere in the nightmarish highlands of my great nation. They're getting Away From It All... including any real hope of help, should things go poorly.

Then, as if on cue, there's a near miss.

All the major players come away from it unscathed, but even so, it's quite thrilling. I'll give the film this: for nearly an entire minute, it does make you think... that halfway up a windswept mountain in the middle of nowhere would indeed be a dodgy place to bite the proverbial bullet.

It's hardly a claim to fame, nor indeed is it a reason to watch this nonsense, but I'm sorry to say A Lonely Place to Die doesn't get any better. In fact, immediately after the titles, things take a turn for the worse: our characters reveal themselves to be useless city-mouse idiots, to a one, and incredibly unpleasant people to boot.

Thankfully someone starts knocking them off in quick succession after they come across a Serbian girl buried in a chipboard box in the midst of the wilderness the next day, whilst eating Mackerel and egg sandwiches. They dig her up like good tourists and formulate a daring plan of action. Melissa George and one of her associates will throw themselves head-first off the nearest rocky outcropping, the better to raise the alarm a little quicker, meanwhile all the other folks will run about like ninnies until someone shoots them too.

I mean... really. Mackerel and egg sandwiches!

Melissa George is singularly dreadful in the lead role - mawkish, moody, and thoroughly unconvincing as someone with the slightest clue what they're doing - but she's still amongst the best of a bad, bad lot. A couple of supporting players manage to come out of A Lonely Place to Die largely unscathed: The Borgias' Sean Harris makes for a suitably cold-blooded killer, and Eamonn Walker from Oz is decent as mercenary muscle on the other end of the spectrum, but unless there was a huge wad of cash on the table, and I can't see how that could have been the case, I don't even want to know what drove them to this new low.

That's just a taste of all that A Lonely Place to Die has to offer. On the bright side, I suppose there are some bleakly beautiful establishing shots of Scotland... director and co-writer Julian Gilbey stages a few reasonably interesting scenes... and there's certainly some small promise in the premise. But it's every inch of it squandered by bad acting, an obscenely obvious script, and in general an overwhelming sense that no-one, whether behind the camera or before it, has a notion as to what they - or this film - is about.

One other thing: there are far too many characters in service of what is essentially a story that's been told a hundred times a hundred times better before. Think Hostel in Scotland meets Dog Soldiers without the dogs, or better yet: don't bother. To be fair, by the point at which this particularly pitiful attempt to make a uniformly miserable movie interesting had become altogether unwieldy, I could have cared less; I just wanted A Lonely Place to Die to be over.

Eventually, it was. So it could have been worse!

Film Review | Sucker Punch, dir. Zack Snyder

Have you ever wondered just how much stuff you could fit into a single film?

Evidently Zack Snyder has. Sucker Punch is like the entirety of The Lord of the Rings trilogy - the Extended Editions, of course - meets The Matrix, by way of Devil May Cry, Onimusha, and Alice: The Madness Returns, with Hermione from Harry Potter running about in a close-fitting miniskirt the whole time, shooting dudes and gyrating to show tunes, presumably because Baz Luhrman is behind the scenes somewhere, and since she's dressed to impress... well, why not?

Sucker Punch is a mouthful of a movie, make no mistake, and a lot of it falls flat on its ass; enough to ruin any other single film. But at the same time, I think the latest from the writer/director who made his most lasting mark with 300 has been quite unfairly maligned. It's certainly not all bad, and not a minute of it is terrible. You might say some moments are even entertaining. And from first to last, it sure does look good.

Sounds alright, too. Boy can Baby Doll sing!

But Baby Doll: there's as good a place as any to start. Before Baby Doll was Baby Doll, see, she was an older sister, and an alluring prospect for the abusive monster of a man she has for a stepfather. This she tolerates, because what other choice is there for an orphan girl like her? But one night Baby Doll-to be watches her stepfather sneak into to her little sister's room. She uses her imagination... and snaps. Or does she finally see sense?

In any event, the result is the same: her stepfather has her locked up in an exclusive asylum for virginal young women, which just so happens to double as a harem for high rollers like Don Draper from Mad Men. He's coming to do what he will with this beautiful new blood in five days, incidentally, but Baby Doll doesn't mean to take this latest cruel twist of fate lying down either. Rather, she resolves to escape this utterly corrupt institute whatever the cost, and so sets out to enlist the assistance of some other pretty young things, namely Rocket, Sweet Pea, Blondie and Amber, in exactly that order.

Which is all perfectly sensible, give or take some early incoherency. Sucker Punch only goes off the deep end when Baby Doll and her attractive associates take to shared hallucinations in order to recover five MacGuffins which will somehow enable their happily-ever-after exit to stage left: fire, a map, a knife, a key, and one other thing; a sacrifice sure to cost these dancing queens dearly.

It's all very video-gamey, needless to say. The search for mostly meaningless objects to move the plot along is rarely so thinly-veiled in film, and it's strange to see it foregrounded in this fashion. Yet I could see past that. I even reached deep and found it in myself to not gawp for altogether too long at all the skimpy fetish gear Zack Snyder's deemed it appropriate to dress up his barely post-pubescent cast in, which I gather has been quite the issue amongst many of Sucker Punch's most vociferous critics.

Leaving aside the fact that there's quite a bit of skin on show here, and there is - apologies if you came expecting some impassioned argument about the propriety of such titillation in cinema; I've seen a lot worse done a great deal less professionally - if you ask me, Sucker Punch's greatest obstacle is its own boundless ambition. Because it's not enough that it wholesales borrows all the most distinctive tropes of steampunk, science fiction and fantasy - never mind gun porn, hellish Nazi horror and the superhero movie - it also feels the need to be a bit of a musical, too; also an extravaganza of apparent girl power, a pseudo-Shakespearian tragedy, a visceral visual feast, and I could go on. That's maybe a third of all that Sucker Punch is, or aspires to be.

The thing of it is, even if fully two thirds of everything in Sucker Punch ultimately comes to nothing - and there is so much to take into account here that it would be beyond tedious were I to endeavour to do so; these broad strokes are I think in everyone's best interests - even then, there is enough left that does work, that does thrill and excite and amuse, to fill five lesser films than this, the biggest, brashest, ballsiest movie I've seen all year.

On the one hand, I couldn't wait for Sucker Punch to be over. It's absolutely exhausting, and it does go on... oh yes. On the other hand, however, I wouldn't take back the experience of seeing it, and hearing it - it's worth mentioning that the soundtrack is one of the most memorable since Underworld - for a single, solitary moment. It looks, then, fantastic; it sounds simply superb; the ensemble cast put on a solid song and dance - certainly everyone seems game for a bit of fun; Sucker Punch feels, finally... just fine. 

For good or for ill, it is truly a movie like no other. Too much of one, if anything. But I wholeheartedly applaud Zack Snyder's grandiose ambition; his inimitable and impeccably rendered vision. Even if you never want to see another hint of it henceforth.

Film Review | The Thing, dir. Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.

What an odd thing The Thing is.

All year long - further back than even that, in fact - I've been hoping that The Thing would be worth the wait, and the weight of my anticipation, as opposed to being some dreadful pretender to the throne I like to think the original film sits upon. It's personal preference in part, but I'm of the mind that the 1982 adaptation of John W. Campbell's Who Goes There? chronicled John Carpenter at the utmost peak of his powers, Halloween be damned; it is certainly the film of his that I've returned to most often, and if it doesn't all hold up today, then it's a testament to its essential greatness that so very much of it still does, thirty-odd years on.


So when news of this remake first broke, rather an age ago now, I was in two minds. Of all the classics that could do with a good updating, I could conceive of few worthier candidates than The Thing. On the other hand, how many of these modern-day takes on the good old horror movies of yore have truly had any business existing? Would The Thing be another in the long line of cold-blooded cash-grabs Hollywood is responsible for, or something more meaningful?


Well, as it happens, it's kind of both of those things. Both... and neither.

The Thing begins with Mary Elizabeth Winstead's new character, Kate Lloyd, a scientist specialising in the recovery of ancient remains. At the outset she's approached by the man in charge of an Antarctic research facility where, as Dr. Sander Halvorson explains, both a specimen and a structure have been found deep beneath the ice, many centuries old and largely intact. He senses a discovery that could change the way we see the world forever after, and asks Kate for her help.

She goes. Of course she goes! But things take a dark turn almost immediately after her arrival. There's an almighty storm coming in, and the Norwegian base is about to be completely cut off from the rest of the world. And then the specimen, safely extracted and awaiting a proper postmortem, goes missing. The only witness to its inexplicable disappearance claims to have seen a monster erupt from the ice... but that cannot be, can it?

We know what comes next: an alien that can replicate the shape of anyone it absorbs, in hiding amongst the scientists at this increasingly isolated camp. Paranoia follows. Tension rattling like a pot too long on the stove. There will be blood, more bodies than you can keep track of, and uncertainty on the fringes of every decision.

Oddly, what follows on from this new beginning to The Thing is a middle third lifted practically like-for-like from Carpenter's revered film; almost an hour of the same situations and the very same scares that fans of the original will be intimately familiar with. For the longest time there are no surprises at all, except for the thing itself, which the director recasts as - of all things - a spaghetti monster.

And then The Thing takes another turn, because its ending is original too, and very well done indeed. In fact it ties in wonderfully with the premise of Carpenter's masterful film, paying homage to both old and new in the same moment.

The thing about The Thing is, it can't seem to decide whether it's one thing or the other: a remake, or a prequel. It can't very well be both - there's really not so much to this story, at the end of the day - but god love it, it tries ever so hard to do just that... to serve two or more masters, and in the attempt, it only disappoints both.

Saying that, it fails neither entirely. The Thing inherits a great many of the original film's most potent moments, and short the spaghetti monster's all too frequent appearances, they are as effective now as they ever were. The Thing also serves to embellish the preexisting mythos with a few neat new kinks; it takes some unexpected turns here and there, smart twists that dovetail nicely with what we imagine may or may not have happened to the Norwegian crew. We learn more about how the thing got here, how it was awoken, and what it wants.

However absorbing all this is - and at times it absolutely is absorbing, particularly when it diverges from Carpenter's narrative - there's no getting away from the fact that if you're in the least familiar with the original film, you'll find the larger part of this iteration of The Thing a needless retread.

Sadly, sandwiched squarely between the old and the new, the fresh and the over-familiar, The Thing seems second-hand at best. But it's been well kept, I'll give it that. Newcomer Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. equips himself remarkably given the limitations of the script, and in the lead role Mary Elizabeth Winstead is suitably serious. The Thing isn't all it could have been, then, but it's enough - just - to warrant a watch.

Film Review | Captain America: The First Avenger, dir. Joe Johnston

Do I love my country?

I don't know that I do. Maybe that's because I'm Scottish. Maybe that's because Scotland isn't from the inside - or the outside - a very loveable country; we highlanders are a violent and violently unhealthly people. Some of the sights hereabouts sure are pretty to look at, but wherever there are large numbers of people? If you can possibly avoid it, you probably don't want to go there. I know I don't.

In a larger sense, though, I think a country, and all the concept of country entails, is a difficult thing to feel for with such intensity... such unquestioning acceptance.

But Steve Rogers? Boy oh boy does he love his country! The Second World War is in full swing, and Steve wants nothing more than to take to the front-lines with his best buddy Bucky. But the military won't have him, no matter how often he applies - and he applies often. Alas, he's a lanky young man, physically a complete and total weakling with a long and sordid history of chronic conditions to boot.

So on the eve of his best friend's departure, when a doctor in charge of a top secret research project offers Steve another way to play some part in the ongoing war effort, the little fella - God bless him - jumps at the chance. Several vials of super-serum later, Captain America is born. All too soon, sadly, the doctor dies, and when it transpires that his super-serum can't be reproduced, Steve's only option is to help sell war bonds. In a year he has becomes an icon of purity and patriotism to the people at home, but abroad, where it actually matters a damn, he remains an object of ridicule: a man in tights, if he's any sort of man at all.

Oddly, Joe Johnston - the director who gave us Jumanji, The Rocketeer and Jurassic Park III amongst many other fondly-remembered Hollywood movies, not least Honey, I Shrunk the Kids! - Joe Johnston takes, I'm afraid, an awfully long time to tell this origin story that needn't (truth be told) have been told at all, given how intimately familiar it is... even to me, and I haven't read a Captain America comic book in my life.

Thus the first hour of Captain America: The First Avenger is an at-times excruciatingly slow build-up to a second hour that seems relentless by comparison. Indeed it is: one elaborate set-piece picks up where the last left off, and the next is always hot on its overheated heels. By the end you're basically dazed, if not confused, for this is after all an exceedingly simple film.

Simplicity is no slight in itself, of course. Often the best stories can be reduced down to one of a few boilerplate premises; it is in how a story is told that it can become exceptional, or else. But there's not a lot of nuance in Captain America: The First Avenger either. At one point, as the worm turns, Hugo Weaving as the only other person besides Steve Rogers to have survived the super-serum - so it should come as no surprise that Johann Schmidt is the bad nasty apple to Steve Rogers' delicious and nutritious orange - anyway, Hugo Weaving, somewhere around the halfway mark of the movie, actually tears off his face, to reveal the evil red skull beneath!

If you can swallow that - that, and swear an oath that you won't take anything in this film in the least seriously, up to and including a few objectionable moments - there's actually a fair bit of fun to be had with Captain America: The First Avenger. It's compromised in almost every sense, yet there's a certain purity to it. It's dated already, but right down to some horrendous special effects, it looks the part. Needless to say, none of the characters are anything resembling interesting, but an impressive cast put forth some solid performances in any event: Hugo Weaving hams it up marvelously, mostly, I expect Billie Piper fans will watch to watch the charming Hayley Atwell closely, and there is just enough humility to Chris Evans' performance that his Steve Rogers is every bit as credible as his Captain America is incredible.

So. Patriotic shenanigans, decently done if you can overlook the vast imbalance between the first half and the last, and some dodginess here and there. Fun for the whole family; that is, assuming the whole family is doing something else at the time.

I'd recommend a comic book!

Film Review | Never Let Me Go, dir. Mark Romanek

Never Let Me Go should be a brilliant film.

From One Hour Photo director Mark Romanek to screenwriter Alex Garland, who originated the scripts of such genre touchstones as Sunshine and 28 Days Later, all the pieces appear arrayed in readiness for something truly transcendent. And of course the cast - led by the thinking man's crumpet Carey Mulligan (late of Drive and An Education) and ably supported by Academy Award-nominee Kiera Knightley and Spider-man to be Andrew Garfield - the cast is marvelous.

Never mind that Never Let Me Go is based on a contemporary classic if ever there was one; the book by Kazuo Ishiguro stands among the new century's most celebrated - "the best of the decade" according to Time Magazine - and Garland's painstaking adaptation is fairly faithful to it. In fact the single biggest difference between the estimable source material and the film is the revelation that the three characters at the heart of Never Let Me Go's narrative are clones - Donors - bred from test tubes specifically for their organs. This harrowing circumstance only becomes apparent to the reader around the midpoint of Ishiguro's novel; in the adaptation, however, the audience knows from the get-go... though Kathy, Tommy and Ruth remain woefully unaware.

 

Now change is never easy, nor easily received, but in this instance, I think, it's a change for the good of all involved, at least in theory, because Never Let Me Go has had such a wide reach that few viewers are likely to see the film of it, six years on, without some precognition of the twist, such as it is. Romanek and Garland are wise to cast aside such pointless obfuscation, and the decision to let us in on the terrible truth of these characters' lives implicates the audience in an interesting way.

Otherwise, Never Let Me Go the movie is in narrative and thematic terms much of a muchness with Never Let Me Go the book. It is the tale of three Donors coming to terms with what they are, yes - and sooner rather than later - but also who they are. In the face of utter nonchalance on the part of those people whose lives they have been bred to extend, and those institutions which have arisen to supervise the system, Kathy, Tommy and Ruth long to find love and live life in what little time they have left to them.

They needn't look far. But though Kathy and Tommy seem born to be with one another, Ruth - a sociopath of sorts played with pitch-perfect hysteria by the oft-underrated Kiera Knightley - Ruth cannily beats Kathy to the punch, winning Tommy's lust, if not his love, before quiet little Kathy can tell him how she feels. It's this heartbreaking love triangle that carries the viewer through the lives of these three star-cross'd Donors, from the austere boarding school at Hailsham where they spend their formative years to the homes and hospitals they each end up in, as they edge ever closer to "completion."

As aforementioned, Knightley equips herself very well as Ruth, and Andrew Garfield is an acceptable Tommy, but it's the two young actresses who portray Kathy at various stages of her short life that really steal the show. It doesn't hurt that Isobel Mielke-Small and Carey Mulligan actually look quite alike, yet the correspondence between their respective performances - all nervous energy and thousand-yard stares - runs much deeper, lending a real sense of continuity to Kathy's character that the other leads lack in comparison.

Nor does Mark Romanek disappoint. A director only occasionally given to come outside his comfort zone - which is to say the music video - Romanek's first feature since One Hour Photo seems somewhat removed from the clinical imagery of that Robin Williams vehicle, but not entirely: here however the filmmaker's sterile sensibilities are filtered through the necessarily more naturalistic lens of rural England in the 60s and 70s. In feeling and appearance, then, Never Let Me Go is a bleak, bleached thing - windswept, you sense, and bitterly, bitterly cold - yet it is beautiful, too.

So what's the problem? Because there is a problem. Never Let Me Go should be a brilliant film - all the parts are in place - but in the end it is no more than a faithful but unremarkable adaptation of a remarkable novel. The fault, I think, lies with the decision to arrive at the revelation that our characters are clones early on. Much as I understand the reasons for it in principle, in practice this gloss of the period during which the three Donors wonder what in God's name is going on comes at a cost: namely the development of a halfway heartfelt dynamic between Ruth and Kathy and Tommy. Lacking that, the betrayals of fate and friendship that Never Let Me Go turns on feel not exactly empty, but inevitable.