Capturing the Friedmans

Anyone still wondering what all the fuss is about with documentaries should take a look at Capturing the Friedmans. What starts off seemingly as a heartwarming account of a suburban family that enjoys capturing their quirky day-to-day lives on film soon reveals itself to be an unsettling exposé on paterfamilias Arnold Friedman, who may or may not have molested dozens of his pupils in the 80s with the aid of his son Jesse. Making the whole experience all the more disconcerting are the inconsistent accounts put forward by police officers and alleged rape victims, as well as the unexpected revelations that emerge throughout the court trials. Less a documentary about abuse, more about how obscure a concept the truth really is.

5/5  

22 Jump Street

Much like its two protagonists, 21 Jump Street was a buddy cop movie that posed as a hilarious high school comedy. While 22 Jump Street doesn’t quite manage the same hat trick with the college scenario, it does however succeed as a parody of blockbuster sequels that is not afraid to poke fun at itself. As one character notes, nobody gave a shit about the Jump Street reboot to begin with, but after its unexpected success a lot of money has been invested to make sure this program keeps going (wink wink). The movie is made all the more enjoyable by Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum’s side-splitting and occasionally touching bromance.

3/5   

X-Men: Days of Future Past

You’d think that, seven movies in, the X-Men franchise would start to show signs of fatigue. And while there have been a few missteps over the past 14 years ranging from the awkward (X-Men: The Last Stand) to the outright embarrassing (X-Men Origins: Wolverine), the balance was recently readdressed with the appropriately titled First Class, a film that thrilled and entertained in a way that prequels usually don’t.

But reenergising a series is one thing. Bridging together two existing ones is a rather less enviable task. And before you point out that Joss Whedon managed to pull off the triumphant feat of tying in four separate titles with The Avengers, he did not have to contend with the time-travelling loop holes that Bryan Singer is burdened with in Days of Future Past, not to mention an ensemble of characters that spans across two separate timelines. As a result, this makes DOFP effectively an “inbetweenquel” and arguably the most ambitious comic book adaptation to date.

The set-up alone requires some serious mental gymnastics. In a post-apocalyptic future, mutantkind is being systematically decimated by a legion of unstoppable killer robots called the Sentinels. Realising that the introduction of these systems stems from the 1973 assassination of a public figure at the hands of shape-shifting mutant Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), the X-Men decide to send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time in order to persuade the younger versions of Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and Professor X (James McAvoy) to team up and prevent the murder from happening.

As you can deduce from the above premise, this is one film where a toilet break could prove fatal to your grasp on what’s going on. If DOFP had an overarching flaw it’s that, with so much going on both in the past and future storylines, it demands a lot from viewers’ attention spans. Also, because it does its best to reference events from all of the X-Men movies to date (yes, ALL of them) and tie up loose ends left hanging throughout the franchise, the movie is virtually impenetrable to newcomers.

The fact that the quality of the film does not suffer from the convoluted narrative structure is a testament to Singer as a filmmaker. While he certainly possesses a keen visual sense – the filming of one scene through the lens of an 8mm camera manages to single-handedly nail the 70s aesthetic – he is more importantly a director with a natural talent for handling large ensembles, and one astute enough to understand that it’s not his mutants’ powers that make them colourful, but their personalities. Stick two characters with polar opposite moral/political views in a tentative game of chess and you know you’re going to get an electrifying scene without the need of a CGI-fuelled bust-up.

Adding more intrigue to the proceedings is witnessing just how different the younger incarnations of Magneto and Professor X are to their older, much wiser counterparts. Fassbender easily channels Ian McKellen’s gravitas and even manages to outdo him in the bastard stakes, making this Magneto’s most threatening on-screen portrayal to date, yet there is no arguing that this is James McAvoy’s show. Bitter, boozing and with the shaggy long hair to match the tortured soul, this is Charles Xavier like we’ve never seen him before – less Professor X, more Lieutenant Dan. It’s his emotional journey of redemption we’re invited on, and it is the stuff of compelling drama. Despite remaining cool and reliably charismatic, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine definitely takes a backseat to these two characters, not to mention Jennifer Lawrence’s more fleshed-out Mystique.

The X-Men that don’t get as much screen time certainly make up for their lack of depth and lines in the action sequences. Nicholas Hoult’s Beast sadly does not get to do as much as he did in First Class, but enjoys a game of tag team (stop snickering) with Logan in the final showdown. Evan Peters’ Quicksilver is a hoot in the film’s most memorable set piece and makes a serious case for sonic speed as the coolest superpower ever. And the future mutants make sure the Sentinels realise they won’t be going down without a fight, in a series of visually inventive battles that are sure to have kids (and adults) re-enacting them in the playground for weeks to come.

Factor in a perfectly executed finale and a couple of surprising twists and what you have is the best X-Men movie to date. Plus, if the tantalising post-credits sequence is anything to go by, we’re possibly in for an even bigger movie in two years’ time. Who knows? In Bryan Singer’s hands, the Apocalypse might just be something worldwide audiences will want to eagerly sit through in 2016.

4/5  

Godzilla

Back in 2010, a young British director by the unassuming name of Gareth Edwards made his debut with Monsters, a low-key sci-fi movie that chronicled a couple’s journey through a Central America infested by gargantuan extraterrestrial creatures. Shot on a shoestring budget and, more impressively, digitally rendered by said director’s visual effects software on his laptop, it played out like Them! meets Lost in Translation: a slow-burning romance that happened to have giant monsters in it. As unlikely a premise it may sound, it worked in its own, quietly affecting sort of way.

So when Edwards landed the gig of rebooting Godzilla, the mother of all monster movies, expectations were understandably high. Here was a filmmaker who clearly had a love for the genre, but also demonstrated he knew not to forget about the human element of the story by portraying characters the audience could truly identify with. Of course, there was always the risk that Edwards might sell out to the Hollywood corporate machine and end up churning out a soulless, pixelated mess for a fat paycheck…

… And yet, while it is safe to assume that what’s on screen reflects the indie director’s vision and not the studio’s, there is something undeniably underwhelming about Godzilla’s latest reboot. For starters, he’s hardly in it. His name is on the poster and at 350ft tall you’d think he’d be pretty difficult to miss but, as evidenced so clearly in the first two acts, the giant lizard’s more reclusive than Banksy.

One could argue that, despite the $150 million budget, the director is staying true to his indie roots and is more interested in telling a human tale about survival in the face of insurmountable odds or that, like Jaws and Jurassic Park, the choice to conceal his creature is a clever tactic designed to mount suspense until the big reveal. Both would be entirely valid arguments if it weren’t for the fact that, for some inexplicable reason, Edwards dedicates more screentime to the other multi-limbed, dragon-winged MUTOs (that’s “Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism” to you and me). It’s an odd, even frustrating narrative decision that leads you to question the rationale behind it and ultimately makes it seem like Godzilla is gate-crashing his own movie.

The human cast, made up of some of the most intriguing talents working in Hollywood at the moment, also feels a little wasted. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is on Orlando Bloom mode (i.e. bland leading man), David Strathairn barely registers as a US Admiral, Ken Watanabe is on obligatory exposition duties, and all the lovely Elizebeth Olsen has to do is show up in a pair of hospital scrubs. Bryan Cranston almost steals the show from everyone involved (and yes, that is including the monsters), all teary-eyed and snarling his dialogue like he is the danger, but he’s regrettably whisked off the screen all too soon.

The final brawl between Godzilla and the MUTOs is admittedly the stuff of monster mayhem dreams – colossal, thundering and gloriously chaotic – but by then the pay-off doesn’t make up for the lumbering build-up. Even more awkwardly, the plot holes are of the gaping kind, similar in size to the craters left behind by the film’s MUTOs. How can a team of soldiers tip toe their way around a monster grudge match without getting squished? Surely Elizabeth Olsen’s character was hiding in a building that got flattened just now? And isn’t it a little too convenient that Godzilla seems to be siding with mankind despite being repeatedly fired at?

Granted, most of these questions could be posed for countless summer blockbusters that make their way onto our screens every year, but considering the serious tone Edwards is going for, you can’t help but be less forgiving with the lapses in logic. Godzilla is certainly not the most disappointing blockbuster of the season (that dubious honour goes to The Amazing Spiderman 2), but given the pedigree involved, it could’ve been so, so much more. A monstrous success, even.

2/5     

The Amazing Spider-man 2

You could say it all boils down to release dates. The Amazing Spider-man, the much maligned yet surprisingly enjoyable reboot that featured a wall-crawler truer to the comics, was released in June 2012, just five years after Tobey Maguire hung up his webs and called it a day. With The Amazing Spider-man 2 opening not even a full two years after the last instalment, you’d be forgiven for questioning whether Sony and Columbia Pictures are being a bit precipitous with the Spiderman franchise.

You wouldn’t be wrong, for what we have here is a shiny-looking blockbuster with an astonishingly clunky plot that feels disjointed and unfocused, the key signs of a film that was rushed into production, the script a mere afterthought. The fact that Shailene Woodley’s scenes as pending love interest Mary Jane Watson were shot and subsequently cut from the film only adds further validity to this theory. With the pace never truly picking up, TAS2 can often prove to be quite a laborious viewing experience.

For starters, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman’s already crowded screenplay dedicates far too much time to Peter Parker’s parents’ death, a mystery which was never a big concern in the comic books and that only bogs down the film’s lengthy running time. Secondly, director Mark Webb’s insistence on having his central couple Peter and Gwen Stacy caught up in a never-ending game of break-up/make-up is also perplexing, especially as it seemed like he’d surmounted that issue in the closing scenes of the previous film. Throw in the decision to populate the movie with multiple villains, and suddenly you realise you’ve got quite a bit of material to cover in 140 minutes.

Speaking of which, there are also a few glaring missteps in the portrayal of the villains, especially Jamie Foxx’s Electro, who the posters and trailers reliably inform us is the main big bad. His human alter-ego, Max Dillon – a sad, forgotten loner longing for attention – is an interesting proposition, someone that should creep us out and elicit our sympathy in equal measure, but for some reason Foxx plays the role for laughs. Post-transformation, he’s a blue-skinned, gravelly-voiced nutter with the power to shoot electrical discharges. Pure eye candy, granted, and he’s also at the centre of the film’s more memorable action sequences, but it also means that Electro feels more like an end level boss, rather than a fully rounded character. And as for Paul Giamatti’s Russian mobster Rhino… what a waste of a good actor and comic book character.     

Dane DeHaan’s Harry Osborn on the other hand, is a far more intriguing villain. Financially privileged but despised by his dying father and colleagues, he could’ve easily ended up as a spoilt rich kid caricature, but thanks to DeHaan’s jittery performance, he comes off instead as a plausibly disturbed young man dealing with a plethora of insecurities. And while his issues fittingly culminate in a horrific transformation into the Green Goblin, his sudden urge to don a battle suit, not to mention his dexterity at surfing a flying glider, is rather baffling.

Mind you, it’s not that TAS2 gets everything wrong – in fact, there are a few neat touches that ensure it’s not a complete failure. The web-swinging sequences are getting more inventive (although with the constant developments in CGI, that’s to be expected) and are brought to life both by 3D vision and Hans Zimmer’s sumptuous score (but we could’ve done without the dubstep in the Electro sequences). The chemistry between real life couple Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone is still a joy to watch, which also means that TAS2 will go down well as a first date movie. And while the third act momentarily steers proceedings into much darker territory, Mark Webb is smart to enough to realise that, unlike Batman, Spidey is a character that thrives out of the shadows and ends the film on a reassuringly upbeat note.

At the centre of all this well-intentioned confusion is Garfield (the actor, not the cat), who once again proves that, while Sam Raimi may have directed better Spider-man films, Webb undeniably has the better Spider-man. Witty, charming and unapologetically verbose, he manages to embody the true essence of the character from the comics. More crucially, he has not yet done a Saturday Night Fever strut down the street à la Spider-man 3. Here’s hoping that, with bit more time at disposal and a better script at hand, The Amazing Spider-man 3 won’t go down that route too.

2/5  

The LEGO Movie

It could’ve so easily ended up as a 100 minute toy ad – which, if we want to be cynical, it kind of still is. Instead, high concept masters Phil Lord and Chris Miller have pulled off one hell of a hat trick and turned The LEGO Movie into a visually inspired comedy that also has a beating heart underneath all those plastic bricks. True, the irreverent humour often borders dangerously on chaotic and adult viewers are likely to figure out the twist early on, but you sure can’t deny its emotional punch. As long as Lord and Miller are directing, can we also have Hungry Hungry Hippos movie, please?

3/5

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Despite playing not a small part in the almighty success of The Avengers back in 2012, there seems to be a recurring opinion among film audiences that Captain America is the most boring of Marvel’s superhero bunch. Lacking the distinctive powers of his teammates and dressed up in the American flag, it’s not difficult to see why he’d be dismissed as a jaded US allegory, but that would be an unfair assumption. The truth is Cap is a character that’s very easy to get wrong. However, stick him in the right context (preferably, one in which he is at odds with current socio-political events rather than being defined by them) and he instantly becomes a far more compelling proposition. Thankfully, that just happens to be the case with The Winter Soldier.

It’s been two years since Earth’s mightiest heroes disassembled and man out of time Steve Rogers (Chris Evans, always watchable and evidently more comfortable in his red, white & blue skin) is adjusting to life in the 21^st century, all while working as a highly effective covert agent for S.H.I.E.L.D., often alongside fellow Avenger Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson). But Rogers is increasingly uncomfortable with the secret organisation’s Orwellian methods, going so far to accuse director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) of “holding a gun to everyone on Earth and calling it protection”. When terrorists appear to be attacking S.H.I.E.L.D. from the inside, including a bionically enhanced ghost agent known as the Winter Soldier, it is up to a rogue Captain America to identify the perpetrators and restore order.

The problem with The First Avenger was that, despite an enjoyable first half in which the Captain’s origin was effectively handled, the rest of the film was marred by uninspiring combat montages and a camp sci-fi flair that jarred with the WWII setting. It was almost as if screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely felt that turning in a script featuring Nazi villains would’ve been too politically incorrect, a creative license that did not prove detrimental to the Indiana Jones movies, which were clearly a source of inspiration. In stark contrast, for The Winter Soldier the writers have not shied away from tackling topics that we are confronted with on the evening news, such as cyber-terrorism, wire-tapping and information leakage, making this sequel the most socially relevant Marvel movie to date.

Directorial duo the Russo Bros. (whose previous high-profile gigs are restricted to, surprisingly, Welcome to Collinwood and You, Me & Dupree) have also made the impressive choice to limit the CGI set-pieces to a minimum and instead opt for well-choreographed action sequences more akin to what we’ve seen in 90’s classics Speed, Heat and Ronin, or the more recent Bourne trilogy. The claustrophobic scene in which Cap takes out an elevator full of assailants (“Before we get started, does anyone want to get out?”) is the stand-out of an impressive assortment, while Nick Fury’s messy car chase on the streets of Washington DC comes a close second. By keeping proceedings grounded, the action feels more brutal and believable. In comparison, the gargantuan final set-piece above three airborne helicarriers may get the adrenaline pumping, but admittedly feels slightly out of place with what came before.

TWS may officially be a solo outing, but Steve Rogers has nonetheless surrounded himself with another team of heroes, each one helping to bring the film to vibrant life. Scarlet Johansson gets to add more layers to the Black Widow, now officially the most rounded female character in the superhero genre (shame the same can’t be said about Cobie Smulders’ Maria Hill, who barely features this time round), while Samuel L. Jackson turns in a more vulnerable performance as the enigmatic Nick Fury. However, it is Anthony Mackie who steals the show as Sam Wilson, aka The Falcon, a forgettable C-list character in the comics that’s been brilliantly adapted for the big-screen – it’ll be hard for you not to cheer him on as he straps on those mechanical wings and takes to the skies. As for the titular Winter Soldier, he feels admittedly a little underdeveloped, but remains nevertheless a threatening presence and a visually striking villain.

Factor in the filmmakers’ decision to avoid the OTT comedy that ran a little too rampant in Thor: The Dark World and you have a confident superhero flick that also functions as an astute political thriller. For that reason, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is the most mature and quite possibly the best in Marvel’s Phase Two set of movies.

And while we’re at it, make sure you stick around for the obligatory mid-credits sequence at the end of the movie which, considering certain character rights difficulties going on between 20^th Century Fox and Marvel, may well be the ballsiest PR stunt the latter studio has pulled off to date.

4/5