WATER FOR ELEPHANTS- Review

Water for Elephants arrives in cinemas with the Robert Pattinson train still rolling along. I hate to ascribe locomotion to a bloke so utterly incapable of motion or emotion in his films, but hey, teenage girls will have their figures of hype. Pattinson is just one of a number of elements that come together to be better than they really should be, but he's easily the weakest link.

The story is framed a la Titanic, with nonagenarian Jacob Jankowski telling the story of the biggest circus disaster in history to the manager of a modern day circus. Then we flash back to 1931, as the fresh faced but recently orphaned Jacob runs away from the final exams of his Ivy League education in veterinary science to hop on board a train that houses the Benzini Brothers' Circus. He's soon recruited by August, the ruthless and charismatic boss, to act as a vet for the menagerie of animals on board.

In a way, it serves Water for Elephants best to compare it to a circus itself. The director is Francis Lawrence, more known for his work on Constantine and I Am Legend than for nostalgic romantic dramas like this one. The cast includes the aforementioned Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon as romantic leads, and Christoph Waltz, the Oscar-winning villain from Inglourious Basterds as August. This carnival line-up mostly works very well.

To begin, let's separate this one paragraph from the rest of the film, simply because the film mostly works. And also because this paragraph is about what doesn't work, and that's Robert Pattinson. For starters, he's miscast, in a role that plays like it belongs to an older man than Pattinson. Then again, he can't be totally absolved of blame, because as in Remember Me and the Twilight films, he's incapable of evoking any emotion that doesn't look vaguely like he's trying to remember his lines. The guy is a rubbish actor, simply enough, and whatever the contribution of his star power towards getting the film made, it doesn't counteract how much he pulls the film down.

However, he's also the reason I'm being so positive about the rest of the film, which is so buoyant that even his dead weight cannot sink it. His woodenness does make the forbidden love aspect, between his character and Witherspoon's circus wife and perpetual passenger, Marlena, slightly unbelievable. They're made to look good together by the gorgeous cinematography, but there's nothing beneath the surface- that's probably one of the greatest illusions in this circus.

The star attraction is, as expected, Christoph Waltz. As ringleader August, he is the most charismatic and well-developed villains I can remember since... well, Hans Landa, the Jew Hunter. Apparently, in the book on which the film is based, a plot point is made of the fact that August is a paranoid schizophrenic. This isn't overtly stated in the film, but you can tell Waltz took it on anyway. He's the aggressor in an abusive relationship- not with his wife, at first, but against practically everything with which he comes into contact. By turns, he is charming and gentle and winsome, but he'll stab you in the gut at the tip of a hat.

Waltz gives my favourite performance of the year so far, and you can see him holding the entire big top up all the way through the film, even seeming to try and up Pattinson's game in every scene they share. He's certainly one part of the compelling storyline, which drew me in and urged me onwards. However, the Titanic-style bookends, with the wonderful Hal Holbrook playing the elder Jacob, makes promises about a tragic denouement, and the film can't quite keep those promises in the final event. By that stage, I didn't mind as much- it kept it fresh when it could have been predictable, and the only real loss is in the way that August is short-changed by the end.

On a more thematic level, the film reawakened my interest in prohibition-era America. I wrote an essay on the period in college, and I like to watch films set around that time in American history. What's fresh about this one though is that it's not about prohibition or the Depression, per se. It's not The Untouchables or Cinderella Man, but it is a film set in that time, and is informed by that historical context all the way through.

Water for Elephants is held back by Robert Pattinson's performance in a way that's really sort of sad. He drags my rating of the film to the low end of four stars out of five, just by being there and being terrible. That still makes it a four out of five film though, and I recommend it to anyone who misses the kind of romantic drama Hollywood used to make. The romance may be the lesser part of it, but Christoph Waltz's performance and the rich and visual direction assure that it's more engaging than what first meets the eye. 

Water for Elephants is now playing in selected cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Water for Elephants, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

NORWEGIAN WOOD- Review

The showing of Submarine I reviewed yesterday was immediately preceded by a much less warm and fuzzy sermon on teenage angst, Norwegian Wood. It wasn't my idea to go and see this, but Rob Simpson's, and seeing as how there were a few hours to kill before Submarine, I thought I'd go along. I didn't know it'd be quite so heavy-going, but typically, I eventually had more time for it than Rob did.

If you do copy this plan and see this in a double bill with Submarine, make sure the happy one goes after, because Norwegian Wood is based on Haruki Murakami's novel about teenage anguish and suicide. Watanabe is a college student at a time of tumultuous student protests against the establishment. After his best friend Kizuki kills himself, a chance meeting with Kizuki's ex-girlfriend leads to a volatile relationship, and ultimately towards impending tragedy.

And golly, it is a miserable film. In that respect, it's kind of difficult to write about in the same way as it's hard to review good comedy. There's no amount of time that can make this kind of tragedy funny, and I saw in this one the kind of malaise and miserablism that many seemed to complain about in the actually very good Never Let Me Go. Where Kathy, Tommy and Ruth were programmed in their upbringing, there comes a point in this film where Watanabe almost seems programmed by the sheer amount of shit that weighs down upon him.

So as you can imagine, it's not an easy watch. It runs to 133 minutes long, and the miserablism almost becomes predictable over time. Certainly, the final 20 minutes or so seem distended in the wake of the inevitable scene that occurs before this denouement. Maybe the reason why Murakami is considered by his fans to be an unadaptable author is because the story on the page holds the kind of detail that doesn't usually translate to a visual medium. Then again, reading the blurb for the book suggests that there's still plenty of stuff cut from the film too.

And watching it also reminded me that there's an international difference in filmmaking that has nothing to do with subtitles. I see enough English language films to get a good grasp on the way they're constructed, but this one in particular seemed puzzling in the way it was edited. Although I learnt that the elbow is the least sensitive part of the body in one very short scene, I couldn't tell you why. I think part of why I stuck with it was because of the fine performance by Kenichi Matsuyama, whose Watanabe grows visibly more weary and aggrieved as events unfold. Likewise, Rinko Kikuchi, who was previously one of the few redeeming features of Babel, makes for a deeply mercurial and disturbed Naoko.

Norwegian Wood has a score by Jonny Greenwood that is so jarring that I was convinced more than once that a music cue was diegetic, and that we were about to see a violinist in the corner of the room. But the jarring qualities of the film inject some life into a morbid and miserable movie that audiences might just mistake for boring. I think there's more to it than that, but unfortunately, I'm least qualified to comment on exactly why I found it to be pretty good, on balance. And so I don't know if I could recommend it, but I can tell you that what it has to say about sex, love and growing up is very striking stuff.

Norwegian Wood is now showing in selected cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Norwegian Wood, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

The Cinema of Attraction

One of the pitfalls of reviewing movies is that even someone like Michael Bay or Allan Loeb can turn around and appear to dismiss any and all criticism of their awful shit by simply asking the reviewer if they've done any better. So Roger Ebert went and made Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and more recently, Mark Cousins gave us the documentary The First Movie.

Those guys are proper film critics, and I am decidedly not. If anything, I want to be a screenwriter myself one day, and hopefully avoid doing any of the rubbish things I've criticised in the time I've been reviewing films on this here blog. But it's still with some trepidation that I give you my first short film as a director, The Cinema of Attraction, which you can see after the jump.

While I admit the concept is a large one, The Cinema of Attraction is a short film I took from the idea to the finished product in just over a week, and on a budget of no more than £4.35. It's the story of James and Donna, whose relationship we follow over several days. Their relationship is constantly being reassessed and redefined by the development of cinema, meeting in a silent film with intertitles and the whole shebang, and continuing to develop through talkies, technicolour and the arrival of the multiplex cinema.

As you'd expect from a Mad Prophet production, there's a bit of a rant at its heart, but I'd like to think that it does have a heart. It's also got a fuckton of allegorical cinema stuff and occasionally quite overt references to classic romantic films, but it would be pretentious of me to talk about what they are and why you should like it. I'm not so arsey as to review my own film, but I'm not above promoting it to you, the good people who read this blog.

The Cinema of Attraction arose as another project for Writers' Block North East, that veritable hive of creative talent in Middlesbrough, and I managed to recruit two very good actors, Bonnie Hibbs and Tim Marshall, to star as Donna and James. They elevate the whole thing, of course, but there's not a lot more to talk about- it's better to just let you enjoy the film yourselves.

Next up, I'll be seeing if it wins the competition at Writers' Block in its truncated and admittedly slightly less interesting form, and submitting the full version for various short film screening events in the area. And after that, it'd be nice to make more films, frankly. Hope you enjoyed this one.

THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU- Review

In the echelons of inaccurate pull-quotes, there shall be a special place for the Total Film assessment of the snappily titled sci-fi romance, The Adjustment Bureau, which appears on the poster and in many of the TV spots. Total Film called it "Bourne Meets Inception", when it's not really like either of those things, but hey, we're in a week where everything is "Bourne Meets" something or other.

So, what The Adjustment Bureau is really like is the Phillip K. Dick story from which it was inspired. David is a Congressman who looks set for a meteoric rise in the world of politics. He has a chance encounter with a dancer called Elise, and he's instantly smitten. However, when he meets her again a short while later, a powerful force interferes. A bureau of men in hats and suits posit that David and Elise were never meant to meet again, and they try their utmost to rectify the course of the plan that is rapidly unravelling as this couple fall deeper and deeper in love.

If we have to compare The Adjustment Bureau to something other than what it actually is, which is a romantic thriller with an otherworldly and theological concept, the comparison that most immediately struck me while watching it was with A Matter of Life and Death. Particularly in its later movements, the similarities are obvious when you're looking at a film about a couple trying to prove that they're destined to be together, even in the face of a higher force that is trying to divide them.  

A Matter of Life and Death is one of my favourite films of all time, so this film would inevitably suffer from that comparison, but it also means that I enjoyed it quite a lot. The masterstroke as far as this one is concerned is either in the casting or in what the lead actors managed to construct when they were thrown together. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt are on fire in this film, whenever they appear together, with a scorching and yet very charming chemistry that really gets you on side.

However, throughout their extended Meet-Cute scenes, the sci-fi elements are established via these men in hats and suits being rather sinister in what they believe is doing right by David and Elise. In the lower rankings of the titular bureau, you get Anthony Mackie, who's ultimately quite friendly and pragmatic, but further up, you get the more rigid and authoritarian John Slattery. Go higher, and you get Terence "General Zod" Stamp, which gives a sense of the ingrained values of this powerful organisation.

They are the opposing force in what is basically a debate about determinism, and the role of free will. If there's a problem with the film, it is that the rules are too vaguely established. We are intended to follow that the Adjustment Bureau give human beings less individual choice in their own destinies because actual free will is a failed experiment that threw up the Dark Ages, two world wars and the Cuban missile crisis. That doesn't explain how their level of control allows for the current atrocities committed all over the world after those events.

These men work in mysterious ways, which is as much as I'm prepared to say without just spitting it out and telling you what we're meant to figure out ourselves while watching the film. In that framework, I can kind of forgive the film some of its vagaries, not least because it's just a very engaging watch. On the downside, I was less enamored of the abrupt time-skips that were brought in throughout the film, because nothing disrupts the momentum more than a sudden "Three years later". The film doesn't exactly outstay its welcome, but there are surely better and more inventive ways to illustrate a vast leap in the narrative.

The Adjustment Bureau was put back to this month from its original release date last summer, and despite having highly anticipated it for a long time, I can now appreciate the wisdom of that decision. In a relatively quiet month at the cinema, it has room to breathe, rather than being shot out of a cannon as counter-programming to Piranha or The Expendables. It's very easy to like, and slightly harder to dismiss some of its flaws, but crucially, it pitches a compelling romance between Damon and Blunt while working through a passage between romantic thriller and sci-fi parable.

The Adjustment Bureau is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Adjustment Bureau, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.