Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005): Despite being a friend of the
darker kinds of humour, I often find myself nonplussed with comedies when they
become too cynical, or rather, when they seem to dislike their own characters so
much they can’t seem to find any shared emotional ground with them.
Consequently, I have a complicated relationship with Shane Black’s stuff as a
writer as well as a director. Here, at the start of the man’s career in the
latter role, I find myself rather taken with what he produces. While the
characters are certainly not all around loveable, Black doesn’t only wallow in
their misfortunes, and his tendency to fourth wall breaking and ironic distance
is very controlled and indeed responsible for many of the film’s funniest
scenes. It’s also remarkable how good Black here is at scenes that are at once
playing with genre conventions in funny ways and actually highly effective
expressions of genre.
Add to that charming performances by Robert Downey Jr., Michelle Monaghan and
Val Kilmer, and a lovingly absurd mystery plot kinda-sorta based on a Brett
Halliday story, and you’ll find me with very uncomplicated feelings towards this
particular Shane Black film.
The Big Sick (2017): Staying with comedies for a bit,
Michael Showalter’s film based on a script by Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V.
Gordon that’s based on their own early relationship, with Nanjiani playing
himself and eternal indie romance heroine Zoe Kazan as Emily should by all
rights be a mess of a film, or a terrible tear-jerker. As a matter of fact, it
is anything but, and rather ends up being a highly successful quirky romantic
comedy where that “quirky” isn’t code for “too twee”, a film about the specific
problems of the children of immigrants, a sometimes drama about family, and a
film that may on paper sound like a bit of an ego trip but that’s very much
about people not called Kumail Nanjiani too, showing every character as complex
and complicated trying to manoeuvre through the messes of life, love and so
on.
It’s a fantastic film. The script is funny and moving and clever and so well
plotted it feels completely natural, the acting (with people like Holly Hunter
and Anupam Kher giving support) is great, and Showalter’s direction is all
brilliant pacing and timing, so much so you might forget it’s there – which is
an art to achieve.
The Guard (2011): And while I’m at it, why not finish up on
another comedy, this time around John Michael McDonagh’s very Irish homage to
buddy cop movies – or is it his answer to 80s action movies as a whole? Anyway,
the film’s a showcase for the copious talents of Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle
and others, and feels like a bit of an ode to the virtues that might be hidden
under very dubious surfaces, with some excursions into actual tragedy (the
scenes between Gleeson’s character Gerry Boyle and his dying mother played by
Fionnula Flannagan are absolutely heart-breaking; also funny), realpolitik, and
the sad fact that in some places, the abrasive, politically un-correct man of
dubious morals in little things might just be the only moral guy in big things
around.
Showing posts with label robert downey jr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label robert downey jr. Show all posts
Saturday, September 8, 2018
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Three Films Make A Post: Heavy metal goes medieval
Iron Man 3 (2013): If someone had told me ten years ago that a few years later, some of the best non-stupid blockbuster movies around would be a series of interlocked Marvel superhero movies produced by Disney, I'd laughed him off, but there you have it. Shane Black's Iron Man 3 is a very fine example of its species, hitting all the mandatory Hollywood blockbuster beats with relish and talent, but adding some intelligent twists to certain parts of the formula without trying to completely deconstruct it. It's a film absolutely impossible for me to dislike, seeing as it - as most of the other Marvel movies - is the kind of pop high budget cinema the blockbuster concept should be ideal for; of course, far too often, we get Michael Bay movies or whatever that Green Lantern thing was even supposed to be instead. Happily, there's a difference between "far too often", and "always".
The Midnight Meat Train (2008): With hindsight, you can see this Clive Barker adaptation as director Ryuhei Kitamura's first step away from his old show-off direction ways towards tighter and moodier approaches to filmmaking. About half of Midnight Meat Train is a pretty swell tale of big city paranoia told in ways that often remind me more of 70s horror cinema than of video clips. The film's second half is a bit of a mess, though. Particularly the murders see Kitamura fall into his old direction pattern featuring too much CGI and braggart editing and camerawork distracting from what should be gritty and unpleasant. The film also suffers from a script that doesn't quite seem to know how to sell the film's supernatural aspect, nor how to make Bradley Cooper's increasing obsession with the true heart of the City believable. Neither Kitamura, never much one for actual humans on screen, nor Cooper himself seem to know either.
In fact, in true Kitamura style, most of the performances (except Leslie Bibb's lamely doomed girlfriend Maya) are rather drab, leaving as Midnight Meat Train a film lacking an emotional core.
Sleeping Dogs (1977): Believe it or not, before Roger Donaldson went to Hollywood, he made some fine movies in his native New Zealand. Case in point is this pretty bitter, very 70s sort-of thriller about Sam Neill trying his best not to get involved in or against a new and improved fascist New Zealand but ending crushed by the wheels of history anyway. The film does avoid heroic, mostly even defiant gestures like the plague and instead shows flawed incompetents like you or me as they stumble through a world that suddenly has turned nasty on them, with no way out and no control at all regarding their own fates. Not even violence does change much.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
In short: The Avengers (2012)
Sometimes, it's easy being me. I'm not one of those cult movie fans always in desperate need to proof they're part of the cool kids (not unlike certain friends of art movies who would not be found dead ever being entertained by a movie, or smiling watching one), so I can allow myself to like those blockbuster concoctions that are good, or - as is the case here - pretty fucking great.
Given the overabundance of money director/writer/king of nerds Joss Whedon had to blow up (often quite literally,) it's not much of a surprise The Avengers' spectacle is fantastic to watch. Although even that part is not always a given if one keeps the body of work of Michael Bay in mind, who knows how to make big explosions and giant robots boring. Whedon, on the other hand, knows how to make the big and loud things big and loud and actually interesting.
Not surprisingly, he also understands that the big and loud things become inherently more interesting, more fun and more important to an audience if you anchor them in smaller and quieter moments that are in reality much more important, and therefore spends as much - if not more - time and effort on these.
As an old comic fan, Whedon also inherently gets what his characters are about (so no Bendis-style Captain America silently condoning torture, and no Kenneth Brannagh-Thor as a jock with a hammer), and uses this knowledge, a cast that can act their asses off if given the opportunity (and isn't by the way, Mark Ruffalo the best Bruce Banner you've seen, and Scarlett Johansson a much more convincing Black Widow than anyone could have expected?), and a script that manages to squeeze an insane amount of subtlety in to make what would in a lesser movie be just the connecting tissue between action scenes sing.
Other typical Whedon virtues are also in and accounted for - the quick and clever dialogue, the sudden reversals of genre tropes, and the ability to naturally shift from comedy to tragedy and back again in the course of two lines of dialogue. The real beauty of the film is how well this aspect of The Avengers connects with the more usual blockbuster virtues, as if having a heart and a brain and big explosions in a movie wasn't a big thing.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Three Films Make A Post: Featuring the Longest Kiss in Cinema History!
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011): Guy Ritchie's second movie about the adventures of a very pulp hero Sherlock Holmes played by Robert Downey Jr. and his especially long-suffering Watson Jude Law shares all the virtues of the first movie, and is therefore pretty much as good as mainstream adventure cinema gets. It's fun, it's silly, it's playful, and so totally divorced from Victorian reality or the self-image of Victorians as evidenced in Doyle's work, it develops something of a subversive edge simply by treating both with as little respect as they deserve yet also with as much - probably more - love as they do.
Bonus points for a Moriarty who doesn't act like a hyperactive twelve-year-old, Noomi Rapace (who would make a pretty great pulp Holmes too, I think) and the most off-handed Reichenbach Falls ever.
The Life of the World to Come (2010): For some reason, this film doesn't appear on Rian Johnson's IMDB page, but this was made by the director of Brick and The Brothers Bloom anyway. It's a one take/long take concert film without an audience of The Mountain Goats (in this case in the form of John and Rachel) performing the whole of "The Life of the World to Come", the (not exactly religious) album on which all songs are titled with bible verses - which honestly is much better in practice than it may sound in theory; a description that fits The Mountain Goats in general.
For the most part, the film consists of the camera shifting position around Darnielle while he plays on the piano or the guitar, providing the film with an aesthetic that is minimalist and - thanks to the long take business - just a bit awkward at times, which again fits The Mountain Goats nicely, for this is the music of a guy who has always been willing to accept and own moments of awkwardness instead of excising them.
I'm too much of a fan of Darnielle (whose music, together with that of the Go-Betweens, Lucinda Williams, Epic Soundtracks, and the Fellow Travellers may very well have kept me sane at one point in my life) to say much about the quality of the music or the performance, except that the film made me cry just a little.
Finalmente… le mille e una notte aka 1001 Nights of Pleasure (1972): As a genre, the Italian sex comedy, even in its (in theory) more classy aspect, never did much for me, despite sharing at least the female half of its casts with those Italian genres of the same eras I do love. Their ideas about what's funny and mine just disagree a bit too much with each other.
So I found myself rather surprised when (house favourite) Antonio Margheriti's provoked quite a few smiles and even two or three guffaws from me here. The film's combination of low-brow comedy, nudity graciously provided by actresses like Barbara Bouchet and Femi Benussi (and, if that floats your boat, to a lesser degree actors like Gino Milli and, well, whoever plays the other semi-nude guys), and pretty nice to look at production design doesn't exactly add up to something everyone should see, but the film is a fine enough piece of exploitation for those evenings when something deeper, cleverer or less friendly would be too much. This is also another film that supports my theory of Margheriti being - generally (let's pretend we don't know his war movies) - one of the most good-natured of all Italian genre directors, for there's really nothing nasty about the film, even when the joke's by all rights should feel nasty. I imagine Margheriti as a happy man.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Three Films Make A Post: They Thought They Were Alone
Iron Man 2 (2010): No wonder mainstream critics looked less favourably on Jon Favreau's second Iron Man movie than they did on the first one. Instead of going in the direction of the serious and the dark (and we all know only the serious and the dark can be good, unless your making comedies about neurotic New Yorkers not featuring any explosions), Favreau goes on an all-out binge of the silly and the slightly to heavily ridiculous while trying to tell about half a dozen stories at once without including much of an actual plot holding them together. Not surprisingly, this leads to a highly distractible film that is lacking in coherence and dramatic power and prefers spending its time on play and having (often dumb) fun with whatever it can get its hands on.
Fortunately, I do like the silly and the ridiculous parts of superhero fiction as much as I do the more serious interpretations of the concept, and approve of a director spending ridiculous amounts of big company media money on playing around, so I had just about as much fun with the film as Favreau, Downey and the gang seem to have had.
Machete (2010): I know, as someone mostly specializing in cult movies, I am required by law to look down on the efforts of people like Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino mining everyone's favourite cult movies for fun, art and profit, and to mumble some stuff about "stealing" from "my genre" that has nothing whatsoever to do with my understanding of the way cultural products feed on other cultural products or - more specifically - the way classic exploitation movies themselves have been built from other people's ideas and the lust for money (which of course doesn't say anything about their qualities as art or entertainment).
Fortunately, I don't care about that law, and have enjoyed nearly anything Rodriguez (or Tarantino) has ever made. Machete is no exception to that rule. As in Favreau's movie, there's a lot of wallowing in silliness on screen here too, but also a whole bunch of silly/cool pretend violence, a bit of sledgehammer political satire, Steven Seagal actually moving and speaking his own lines (though he does both with the expected problems), mainstream Hollywood actresses not daring to undress, and Danny Trejo doing what Danny Trejo does best. It's all in good fun; most of the time, Machete is a lot of fun.
Spirited Killer 3 (or whatever it is actually called, though this might actually be the spiritual sequel to what usually goes under the name of Spirited Killer 2; 199x): Two groups of people (one Japanese, the other Chinese) are tromping through a well-known patch of Thai jungle in search of a black crane's egg. Alas, an evil shaman played by Panna Rittikrai (who else?), has called dibs on the egg and sets his undead servants (including two ninjas who just love to shout "Nin-nin-nin-nin-ja!") on them. Only when the Japanese, the Chinese and the Thai people of a nearby village unite and team-up with a girl with demonic blood (don't ask) can they hinder the bad guy from using the egg for world domination.
Unfortunately, what sounds like a perfectly awesome piece of weird fu cinema gets dragged down into that very particular brand of Thai slapstick humour that makes me want to bash my own head in when I have to witness it. Not even the ninja or a gut-munching old woman are enough to alleviate the pain of dozens of sped-up chase scenes and pratfalling. Of course, not everyone is as allergic to this sort of thing as I am, so you (yes, YOU!) might well like it.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and his associate/common-law wife Dr. Watson (Jude Law) are putting the finishing touches on the case of the fiendish Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), who has delighted London with a series of black magic murders.
After Blackwood is caught, Holmes falls into his usual, bored funk, in this case deepened with his annoyance about one of the facts of life even a bastard genius has to live with - people are leaving. To be exact, Watson is about to get married to his fiancée Mary (Kelly Reilly) and is going to leave Holmes behind in their Baker Street abode.
A sudden appearance by Holmes' old flame/enemy Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) who has been hired by a shadowy character to convince Holmes to search for a certain Reordan (Oran Gurel) is proves to be an excellent distraction for our unheroic hero. But the life of a consulting detective can never be interesting enough, and so it is very much to our hero's delight when news reach him that the freshly hanged Lord Blackwood seems to have risen from the grave. That seems like an excellent excuse to keep Watson away from the married life! And might Irene Adler's missing person have something to do with the Blackwood affair?
After having suffered through more than one bad British Tarantino rip-off directed by him, I didn't think Guy Ritchie had anything good (beyond distracting Madonna from making records; something he also isn't very good at) in him. I'm happy to say I was wrong.
Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes imagines the character as a two-fisted pulp hero who has more in common with Doc Savage or (to take a British example) the mid-period Sexton Blake than with the way most other interpretations of the consulting detective show him. This might distress or annoy a certain part of Holmes fandom that can't abide versions of Holmes which put their weight less on the armchair detective side of the character and more on Holmes as a man of action. Others, like me, will probably be glad about a Holmes film taking liberties with a character that has become part of our cultural background, and turned into a piece of modern mythology that is based on much more than Arthur Conan Doyle's writings. Like all mythology, Holmes gains his strength through re-interpretations and re-imaginings. I really wouldn't see much point in a film about the detective that's trying to copy the Brett or the Livanov version. After all, these interpretations of the character already exist on screen; re-hashing them without Brett and Livanov would be an exercise in futility.
Watched as the pulpy adventure movie it is supposed to be, Ritchie's film succeeds quite brilliantly. Ritchie shows a firm hand at throwing Holmes and Watson into silly-awesome set pieces, racing them through them and just stopping for enough breathers to nod in the direction of various other Holmeses and Watsons, and to put a bit more emphasis on the complicated emotional relations between Holmes, Watson, Mary and Irene. This would probably not be all that exciting if the set pieces didn't work, but work they do, with all the breathlessness that a contemporary Hollywood blockbuster and classic pulp storytelling share. There's a sense of utter glee hanging over the film, as if Ritchie had finally been let loose to play with his perfect toy box. This enthusiasm and sense of fun is what divides Sherlock Holmes from other pieces of mainstream cinema as produced by people like Michael Bay; where Bay and his ilk are filling their films with the things their focus groups demand, Ritchie seems to put the things on screen he himself finds fun. As should be obvious, I'm all for a well-placed bit of fun.
Just as obviously, I can't stop talking about this Sherlock Holmes and its sense of fun and glee without mentioning Robert Downey Jr.'s performance as the title character. After this and his work on Iron Man, I'm convinced that Downey is the perfect actor for the well-paced screen spectacle, perfectly fit for physical acting and possibly the most note-perfect over-actor since Vincent Price (whom I'd loved to have seen as Holmes). As you know, Jim, a good over-actor does not merely chew the scenery, but knows exactly how much of this treatment a film needs and - more importantly - can take, and does not bite off more of a given film's face than necessary. Downey is really glorious as Holmes, and he is expertly supported by Jude Law's straight man with a fist and a sense of irony.
My only problems with the movie are Hans Zimmer's score, which sounds a bit too much like something written by a man who very desperately wants to be Ennio Morricone, but just isn't, and Rachel McAdam's inability to project the charisma the script demands of its Irene Adler. Both problems are notable, yet never grow large enough to endanger the film's exhilarating effect.
Sometimes, Hollywood blockbusters do deliver what they promise.
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