Plus, I've dipped my toes into Jane Austen waters and found myself pleasantly surprised by the 1995 epic adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. Who knew I'd actually like it? *(not me!)
INTO THE WOODS
* * *
2015 // In U.K. cinemas now
"A witch tasks a childless baker and his wife with procuring magical items from classic fairy tales to reverse the curse put on their family tree."
(ALL IMAGES SOURCED FROM www.imdb.com)
Normally when I give 3* I'm either pleasantly surprised by a film I was expecting to be rubbish or feeling enormously let down by one that promised excellence. However, Into the Woods is one of a handful of films that I've seen that I felt immediately and justly deserved 3* - it's simultaneously neither a disaster nor a triumph. It's a good, solid film that's entertaining and holds the audience's attention for the full two hour running time, but it never quite reaches the dazzling, show-stopping highs expected of a production of this magnitude. It may not be wonderful, but it's still worth your time.
Visually, Into the Woods is pretty spectacular. Transferring beloved musicals from the stage to the screen allows for directors to physically create the worlds often largely left to the audience's imagination during the show, and here I think it works. The eponymous woods are huge and sprawling, becoming darker and scarier as the film progresses: I'm sure it's successful on stage, but there's something about actually seeing the expanse of the trees that highlights the enormity of the magical world. Apparently Anna Kendrick (Cinderella) and Chris Pine (Cinderella's Prince) got lost in them on set only to be rescued by a production assistant, and it's ridiculously easy to understand why. As the characters disappear into the woods one by one there's a definite sense of foreboding, but (un)luckily Disney is on hand to stop the plot veering off the path and descending into darkness.
I may be wrong, but from what I'd read before stepping into the cinema Sondheim's celebrated musical was meant to question the neat, happily-ever-after finish of the famous Disney stories. I thought this particular version of the fairy tales everyone knows and loves echoed the sentiment of the Grimm originals, rather than the animated Disney films. Not everybody can have a happy ending, tied up neatly with a bow, and not everyone gets to skip off into the sunset with their prince at the end: after all, that's just horrendously unrealistic. Looking at a plot synopsis of the original musical, it's clear that director Rob Marshall has really toned it down here. The film felt very tame throughout: any violence takes place off-screen; a certain song between Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford) and the Wolf (Johnny Depp) features significantly fewer inappropriate undertones; and - spoiler alert - the film does contain several happily-ever-after moments, albeit they're not as obvious as in traditional Disney films. In this sense the film's a little disappointing: it could have been deliciously dark and a real antithesis to the saccharine tales we're fed all the time, but instead it's a sort of safe half-way house, dark enough to suggest it's not an idealistic, perfect world, and light enough to satisfy the need for a happy ending.
A couple of songs have been cut, but on the whole the music is stunning. My main criticism is that at times there was a theatrical pause after a couple of songs - at the point where you would be prompted to spontaneously clap at the theatre - but it's just odd in a film, if anything making it look like clumsy editing. Marshall has managed to find actors that can actually sing - a welcome departure from the recent cringe-inducing likes of Russell Crow in Les Misérables and Colin Firth in Mamma Mia!. Anna Kendrick shines during the beautiful "On the Steps of the Palace", but a personal highlight has to be the duet "Agony" performed by the two princes (Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen) on a waterfall. It was unexpected and hilarious: camp, over-the-top sincerity and overblown egos were expertly acted and Pine has never been better in such an overdramatic and pompous role. Emily Blunt yet again steals the show this time as the Baker's Wife, but it's Meryl Streep that seems to be garnering all of the praise. I, for one, cannot for the life of me fathom why, other than the fact that she's Meryl Streep. Yes, she gives good Witch, and her voice is a million times better than her last musical turn in Mamma Mia!, but she 100% does not deserve an Oscar nomination for this role. Her performance isn't even the best supporting role in the film, so why she's been singled out and nominated is beyond me. In a poor year for women in film anyway, selecting Streep over other notable and brilliant performances - Rene Russo and Jessica Chastain immediately leap to mind as snubbed in favour of Streep - just seems lazy.
As far as musicals go, Into the Woods isn't bad at all. It does lose its way a little after the magical scavenger hunt is over and giants begin to wreck havoc, but on the whole it's entertaining and just good fun. Unfortunately though, thanks to the suffocating shackles of Disney, this is Sondheim with stabilisers.
PREDESTINATION
* *
MyTimesPlus Screening // 2015 // In U.K. cinemas Friday 20th February 2015
"The life of a time-traveling Temporal Agent. On his final assignment, he must pursue the one criminal that has eluded him throughout time."
Oh god, where to begin? I hated it. It's hideously confusing; full of contrived, poor performances and is so boring I considered walking out of the cinema. I almost never want to do that: I'm sorry, but I found Predestination to be a genuinely awful film.
The plot description looked intriguing. The trailer looked promising. What's a Temporal Agent? What has Ethan Hawke been doing all his life for it to lead to this one, final case? Why has this criminal continued to escape his clutches? Why are the characters cryptically named "The Barkeep" and "The Unmarried Mother"? What does it all mean? So many questions going in to the film, so few actually answered 97 minutes later.
Based on a short story, All You Zombies by Robert Heinlein, Predestination is a time-travelling conundrum and complete mind-fuck. Ethan Hawke plays a Temporal Agent - a time-traveller who hops around the twentieth century with a violin case preventing crimes before they take place. He is instructed by his boss (Noah Taylor) to complete a final mission, to find The Fizzle Bomber, a terrorist who threatens to blow-up 10,000 people in New York. Heading back in time Hawke recruits a mysterious man he meets in a bar to help, John Doe, (Sarah Snook) - a man who was born intersex, had a child as a woman then chose to live his life as a man. After 45 minutes of a hideously boring conversation between the two main characters in the bar outlining John Doe's back story, the two of them set about jumping across decades in order to find the lunatic bomber and stop him from taking action. That's when it all stops making any sort of sense.
This isn't 'normal' time travel, if there's even any sort of convention when it comes to a made-up science fiction concept. The standard threat of the potentially catastrophic butterfly effect doesn't really feature in this film, instead characters deliberately seek to change the past and even when events happen that should technically be life-altering and horrendously damaging to the plot it's all swept over and forgotten about. This isn't like the Time Turner problems in Harry Potter - if anything characters are actively encouraged to speak to their past selves and just go with whatever happens. As a result it's ludicrously confusing.
The plot is excruciatingly hard to follow as it loops in on itself and eventually gathers pace. A week after seeing the film I'll concede that it's actually a really clever concept, but it's taken me a week to finally get my head round it, and even then every time I think I've made sense of it trying to write it down or unravel a part of it for this review just ties me in knots again. The metaphor of a snake eating its tail is shoved down your throat from the beginning of the film, and jokes about what came first, the chicken or the egg, are banded about with about as much subtlety as a bull in a china shop. Keeping those concepts in mind throughout the film really helps, and stepping back from it really does show how intricately detailed and twisted the Spierig Brothers' film is. It's pure science fiction, and very originally done. However it takes creating a distance between you and the film to appreciate it: swept up in the middle of it is absolute hell.
Predestination doesn't build to much at all. Don't expect a giant revelation regarding The Fizzle Bomber or any sort of exciting action - it's more of a character piece despite all the advertising suggesting otherwise, so if you just focus on Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook it'll make much more sense. It's an agonisingly slow burn with pretty bad acting (I do not understand the hype surrounding Sarah Snook at all), but it's very thought-provoking. If you like a challenge and don't mind it taking over your head for several days after the viewing then this could be the film for you. Maybe you'd like it more than me. But if you prefer your films to have actually made sense by the time the credits start to roll and that don't require having to put pen to paper in order to decipher the mess on screen, then I'd give it a wide berth. I wish I had.
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
* * * * *
Sky Movies // 1995 // DVD
"Rich Mr. Dashwood dies, leaving his second wife and her three daughters poor by the rules of inheritance. The two eldest daughters are the titular opposites."
Apart from horror films - which I absolute cannot stand and refuse to watch - one of the only other types of film in which I have little to no experience with are Jane Austen adaptations. I've never read the books, and when I've tried the films in the past I've absolutely hated them to such an extent that I don't think I'd ever finished one. I figured that enough was enough this week, and finally gave Sense and Sensibility a go. I stand corrected on the Jane Austen front. What a film!
The plot may be mildly ridiculous, but there's something about this particular film that drew me in and wouldn't let me go. I can't work out if it's Ang Lee's wonderful direction; the incredible cast of virtually every single celebrated British actor at the start of their careers; or Emma Thompson's expertly penned script. It's just fantastic. It's cheesy at points but utterly charming throughout, and for once I didn't feel the need to roll my eyes at the characters or sigh at how silly it seemed, because there's something special about it that made it believable.
At no point did it appear like it was taking itself too seriously, and although it's undoubtedly a masterpiece fully deserving of all praise, it didn't appear to fall into the trap of obviously pandering to awards bodies. The film might tick every awards box going, but to me it came across as much more subtle in that respect than most films these days. I might be getting cynical about movies now awards season is coming to an end and we've spent months being continuously bombarded with extensive campaigns, but Sense and Sensibility came across to me as a film made for the right reasons and not merely to fill the cast and crew's mantlepieces with golden statues. I could be - and probably am - completely wrong, but I love how that's how it made me feel.
CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER
* * * * *
Sky Movies // 2014 // DVD
"Steve Rogers struggles to embrace his role in the modern world and battles a new threat from old history: the Soviet agent known as the Winter Soldier."
Captain America: The Winter Soldier blew me away in the cinema, and having now seen it approximately 100 times since it came on Sky Movies at Christmas I'm surprisingly still just as enthralled with it as I was the first time I saw it. It's brilliant.
The fight scenes are fantastically paced; the score is excellent; and it finishes with one of the best animated credits sequences I've ever seen. Plus, it contains one hell of a plot twist in the middle. It's not exactly a secret now, but the revelation still gives me goosebumps. Captain America is at his absolute best here at the helm of a witty and action-packed film and surrounded by no end of interesting secondary characters.
THE BOURNE LEGACY
* * *
Channel 4 // 2012 // DVD
"An expansion of the universe from Robert Ludlum's novels, centered on a new hero whose stakes have been triggered by the events of the previous three films."
Expanding the Bourne trilogy without the titular main character was always going to be tricky, but director Tony Gilroy has managed to so successfully, ensuring that with numerous nods to the past the franchise can actually move forward. It may not have the tension and adrenaline-surging power of the previous films, but it's still good, containing high octane action sequences and a great ensemble cast.
Casting Jeremy Renner as the hero was inspired: as an actor he is wonderful at concealing emotions under the surface and relishing in conveying complexity and intensity through stillness. His Aaron Cross is conflicted and calculating, and Renner comfortably jumps from smaller, character driven scenes to those where he's chased across rooftops with ease. He's no Matt Damon, but he's a good choice to carry the franchise into new, original territory.
Legacy has pretty much tied up the trilogy before it and left it open-ended for new instalments in the future, following Cross and Rachel Weisz's Dr Marta Shearing. It's a solid, engaging action film that initially rides on the success of the trilogy but ultimately carves it's own path well. My main criticism: finishing with a 20 minute motorbike chase is just excessive by anyone's standards...
BETTER CALL SAUL
* * * *
Netflix // 2015 // New episodes released every Tuesday
It's showtime!
I have a feeling Better Call Saul is going to take over my life in the same way Breaking Bad did two years ago… I'm almost glad Netflix are drip-feeding episodes weekly rather than dropping the whole series in one go and letting you unceremoniously binge without having to suffer waiting for the next episode.
I take it back: two episodes in and I can just tell that this waiting malarky is going to be torture.
So what have you watched this week? Have you seen any new releases or stayed in and watched old favourites? Do let me know in the comments below!
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