USA

Captain Phillips (2013)

André Crous

True story about piracy off the Horn of Africa is tense and showcases the talents of Tom Hanks as the titular skipper.

captain-phillipsUSA
3.5*

Director:
Paul Greengrass
Screenwriter:
Billy Ray
Director of Photography:
Barry Ackroyd

Running time: 135 minutes

What stands out more than anything from Captain Phillips, master director Paul Greengrass’s film about a hostage drama on the high seas, is how ill-equipped the cargo shipping industry was for the wave of piracy around the Horn of Africa in the mid-2000s instead of being prepared to face the very real threat, known to everyone else around the world, of its crews being kidnapped.

The film tells the true story of Richard Phillips, captain of the MV Maersk Alabama container ship, who was kidnapped by pirates, many of them looking like they are mere teenagers, in 2009. This moment marked the first time in more than two centuries that an American ship had been taken by pirates.

Phillips, played by Tom Hanks in a welcome return to form, is a serious man who likes to think he is prepared for all eventualities. He is aware of the dangers that he may be confronted with on the way from Djibouti to Mombasa, and therefore he ensures the crew knows what to do if pirates suddenly decided to attack.

However, there is a bit of a credibility issue here, as it is obvious the fire hoses that the ship uses to repel the pirates’ little boats are not up to the job, and yet Phillips is confident that by pushing his ship to its limits and using the hoses, he and his men will triumph over the greedy Somali pirates.

Common sense prevails, however, and the pirates take the ship, because they have guns and the crewmembers don’t want to risk their lives for cargo that isn’t theirs, which is a completely understandable position. But things take a turn for the worse, as the younger leader of the pack, the gaunt Somali named Muse (Barkhad Abdi), decides to kidnap the captain and demand a ransom more in line with his desires of millions of U.S. dollars.

Greengrass, whose previous project was Green Zone, the best film so far to treat the madness of the Iraq invasion and the subsequent bureaucratic nightmare on the ground, is no stranger to docudrama (he also directed United 93, about the only 9/11 plane that didn’t crash into a government building), and his work here is exemplary.

He keeps the tension by hanging the threat of death over Phillips like a Damoclean sword. We are always aware of the possibility that he may be killed at any moment, but while the tension is dramatically successful, we have to ask ourselves why the pirates don’t know the rules of the game: If Phillips dies, they die.

Greengrass pretends to give us a balanced impression of the pirates, with one even having second thoughts about carrying out aggression against the captain because he seemed to be taking care of his injured foot, which his fellow pirates don’t deem necessary despite the obvious pain he is enduring. He also suggests the pirates have their own bosses who demand their workers to make big money on the open sea, or he will take their heads.

It is a savage business, and although Muse says he would like to go to the United States one day, when given the chance he still decides to take the money back home to his boss rather than flee. That may be the principled decision, but it doesn’t make us like him all that much.

Besides Hanks’ stunning portrayal of the captain, especially in the film’s closing scenes when the events leave him speechless, the film is at its best when it digs deeper into the fight for power among the pirates. Although Muse chose Najee (Faysal Ahmed) to help him, Najee constantly second-guesses the orders of his “captain”, and at many points in the film he almost takes out Phillips. He is scared and hysterical, and he keeps on screaming when everyone else is keeping calm, but while we may question his behavior, it keeps the dynamic between him and Muse interesting and tense.

Captain Phillips is nerve-racking even when the actions (or the lack of actions) don’t always make sense. Greengrass’s use of a hand-held camera is effective and so are the hollow sounds on deck, often only of feet on metal.

It remains a stunning revelation that the shipping industry didn’t see this kind of situation coming, or that the respective shipping lines kept hoping it wouldn’t happen to their ships. Even if just for that reason alone, the director’s use of film to highlight historical (and historic) breakdowns that led to some big and dramatic moments is one that should be seen.

Star Trek: Into Darkness (2012)

André Crous

The famed science-fiction franchise is firmly on track to having a long life full of prosperity under the direction of J.J. Abrams.

star-trek-2012USA
4*

Director:
J.J. Abrams
Screenwriters:
Roberto Orci
Alex Kurtzman
Damon Lindelof
Director of Photography:
Dan Mindel

Running time: 130 minutes

Although the freshness of the Star Trek reboot may have worn off a little, its second instalment, titled Star Trek Into Darkness, is every bit as majestic and engaging as the first one that was released in 2009.

Only two films in, director J.J. Abrams has our complete confidence he has brought the franchise back from near-oblivion with films that invigorate the viewer and may even shape a new generation of fans seeking to travel to distant lands scattered among the galaxies. Abrams’s risky decision to include a few bouts of sentimentality is handled with extreme care and pays off in the end, proving this director is strong where it counts.

The major character arc involves the spontaneous, sometimes rebellious, Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), who showed his mettle in the first film, despite his rivalry with Spock (Zachary Quinto), the most intelligent officer on the ship and the one with whom he clashed with most often.

In the opening moments, Kirk and Spock are outrunning primitive beings on the planet Nibiru before Spock is catapulted into a volcano that threatens to destroy the entire civilisation before it has even had a chance to develop. Although their presence is mostly unexplained, except for a suggestion they had an urge to save the planet, even though there was no vested interested in taking such dangerous action, this sequence is important because it establishes Kirk’s nascent feelings of friendship for Spock. Flaunting Starfleet regulations and potentially altering the course of history, he reveals the ship to the spear-wielding populace in order to save Spock from certain death.

It is an act the pointy-eared Vulcan doesn’t quite grasp, but by the end of the film his half-human heart will have come round, and we will realise how much the two opposites have shaped each other’s behaviour. Abrams walks a very treacherous road by reminding us of Spock’s loss of his mother and his entire planet in the previous film and Kirk’s loss of his father. At times, it seems like the film is headed straight for primal territory where passionate reactions are only possible when the past is dug up, but luckily the characters are complex enough for us to assume these past incidents are part of their makeup and do not dominate their actions.

But Kirk’s proclivity for adventure leads him into a sticky situation at the heart of the film, which involves one of the series’s most notorious figures: the genetically enhanced Khan Singh, also known as John Harrison. That Khan is played by the pale Benedict Cumberbatch may come as a shock to Trekkies, but the actor’s depiction of the ominous character, whose intellect rivals that of Spock and whose cells have the ability to regenerate at warp speed, is effective because he is soft-spoken but firm, very persuasive and ultimately terrifyingly cold-blooded.

If you are a diehard Star Trek fan, you may relish the opportunity to practise your Klingon, as this is the first time the language of this warrior race appears in the new series. The relatively short scene features expert “xenolinguist” Uhura (a constantly weepy and emotional Zoe Saldana, whose character is the weakest in an otherwise very strong cast) producing the guttural language during negotiations with jittery fighters.

The storyline isn’t as clear as it was in the first film, and it does not generate the same kind of awe at the magnitude of space travel until the very last scene, but much of the interest lies in the development and exploration of personality, as even a relatively small character like Lieutenant Sulu (John Cho) is given room to grow in a visible, memorable and satisfying way.

Into Darkness is by no means a film that can only be appreciated by the Trekkies, but it ought to offer committed fans of the franchise a smooth viewing experience as well. It is popcorn science-fiction entertainment writ large that focuses on human stories (or human feelings, as in the case of Spock, who still pines for the planet he lost in the previous film) rather than grand ideas or scientific minutiae. Michael Giacchino’s sweeping pieces for orchestra, sometimes boosted by a choir, accompany large sections of the film in a rousing way.

We will have to wait until the next instalment to assess whether Abrams can break the curse of the “bad odd-numbered Star Trek film”, as he did with his 2009 motion picture, but for now, the voyages of the USS Enterprise and its crew will continue to enthral even the sceptics of science fiction.

Spring Breakers (2012)

André Crous

Nipples, mounds of flesh galore in this love letter to drunk and unruly teenagers spending their spring break in hedonistic Florida.

spring-breakersUSA
3*

Director:
Harmony Korine
Screenwriter:
Harmony Korine
Director of Photography:
Benoît Debie

Running time: 90 minutes

If blond teenage girls watched more James Bond movies, they’d be able to better spot a bad guy. One giveaway, which the girls in Spring Breakers discounted, proving an unfortunate lack of wisdom: The bad guy often has metal teeth. In this particular film, he also sports cornrows, raps to pleasure-seeking spring breakers and makes his money the same way his idol Scarface did: with lots of guns and drugs.

This film is a very superficial depiction of slow-motion, sunlit hedonism, complete with an orgy of alcohol and the odd lesbo-curious moment between two or more drunk girls, usually writhing together to make the men around them even hornier. At the end of the film’s first act, the girls encounter Alien (James Franco), said rapper with the metal teeth, who has taken a liking to them and bails them out of jail when they are arrested at one of the city’s many locations where hedonism is taking place en masse.

The rest of the story, which luckily runs only 90 minutes in total, goes downhill fast, as some of the girls decide to head back home, having seen too much they can never unsee, while the survivors get lured in by Alien’s devious ways, his money and his power. However, unlike the mediocre drug film Savages, the characters that stick together show very little depth, and we skip from scene to scene with very little sense for the danger in which the girls find themselves.

This artifice afflicts the entire film, which plays more like a music video than anything else. There are numerous flash-forwards, which don’t really make us curious about the direction of the story as much as they disrupt our desire to have some grip on the sequence of events. At the beginning, the viewer may easily find herself wondering whether this will all turn out to be a dream, or perhaps just a side effect of all the liquor we see young people downing, often through a funnel.

It all starts in a small town in the South, where four girls with little money and fewer prospects desperately want to get out of this hell hole of a place and make it to spring break in Florida, where all the other kids their age have headed. The three blond girls (whom, by the end of the film, I still couldn’t tell apart) decide to rob a store with a sledgehammer and a squirt gun. Hot off a successful heist, they approach naïve churchgoer Faith (Selena Gomez) and take her along for the ride to St. Petersburg, Florida.

A believer of the goodness in people and in things she cannot see, we hear Faith often speaking on the phone to her grandmother about what a spiritual place Florida is, how nice the people are and how she wished to come back the next year to spend spring break with her.

Naturally, Faith will be the first one to either get hurt or be wholly disillusioned by the experience, or both, but while director Harmony Korine could have used this for dramatic purposes, he dumps her character as soon as she has second thoughts about spending time with the smooth-talking Alien.

In the role of Faith, Gomez is better than expected, although she has too many annoying bits of dialogue that overtly explain how unhappy she is in her home town and why she had her heart set on spring break.

The film refuses to dig below the surface, and in the end, the girls who end up enjoying the high life the most are the ones whose actions have them led them to next to no moral reflection.

Many sequences are stretched beyond their limits – most prominent among them the slow-motion opening scene that may or may not be a fantasy and another in which a drunk Alien accompanies himself on the piano as he contemplates his troubles.

But there are also two excellent scenes: the robbery, staged in a single take as the driver circles the building, so we can see everything happening through the windows; and a cleverly edited swimming pool scene in which the camera constantly dips below the water level but when it seems to rise up out of the water again there are no droplets on the lens. The film also delivers a constant sense of impending doom by adding the sounds of guns being loaded to the soundtrack at unexpected moments.

Spring Breakers is almost exactly what you would expect: a silly little movie about drunk girls who like to party and eventually party so hard they end up living with a drug lord. If you’re into boobs and many slowed-down close-ups of gyrating, thonged bottoms, you might like it. If you watch films for their stories, you’ll be disappointed.

Savages (2012)

André Crous

An unconventional relationship takes a backseat in Savages, Oliver Stone’s disappointingly conventional film about the drug business.

savagesUSA
3*

Director:
Oliver Stone
Screenwriters:
Shane Salerno
Oliver Stone
Don Winslow
Director of Photography:
Dan Mindel

Running time: 130 minutes

Drug films are usually all the same. The build-up shows one or two likeable stoners lounging on a beach dreaming of making it big, so they start off with their knowledge of fine weed and hatch a business plan that ultimately makes them so rich they don’t have any space left in their house to put all the cash. Bunkers full of genetically engineered super marijuana appear below the house, but, before they know it, the friends have turned on each other, there is some big shootout, and everybody loses.

Oliver Stone, the director of significant films in the 1980s and 1990s who hasn’t been at the top of his game since the landmark projects that were JFK and Natural Born Killers in the early ’90s, has fashioned a drug film that feels slightly different from the others, but not much.

The central relationship – two guys and a girl – in Savages is the film’s most important hook, but while it sets up a nice bit of drama, the questions it raises (or rather, the questions some of the characters raise about this romantic combo) are never addressed. Only near the end of the film, as the two guys drive towards a meeting place in Southern California, not far from the border with Mexico, do they finally express their love for each other, but, despite the camera swirling above them, this exchange has nothing on Thelma and Louise‘s famous final moments.

The girl in the trio, O. (Blake Lively, who acts like she’s being fed her lines through an earpiece), believes her living situation is perfect because she shares her life with these two attractive men who seem to share her willingly with each other. But, as the crime boss Elena (Salma Hayek) makes clear in one of their heart-to-heart discussions, they very likely share her only because she means less to either of them than they mean to each other. But nothing comes of this very convincing insight into the men’s psychology.

The two men, botany and business graduate Ben (Aaron Johnson) and former soldier in Afghanistan Chon (Taylor Kitsch), have grown some of the most potent marijuana anyone can produce, thanks to the fusion of Ben’s green fingers and Chon’s sticky fingers (he brought back some premium seeds from a tour in Central Asia). They are running a multimillion-dollar business, but Ben wants to move on and invest more in helping children in Africa.

Chon isn’t quite sure what he wants yet and spends the day, as O. puts it, giving her orgasms, while he just has “wargasms”. No, this is not the informative nor informed kind of writing one would expect from Stone, but perhaps it is not entirely out of place in this genre.

Despite their not being sure exactly where they stand – both with each other and the small business they run – they go to a meeting with a representative from a nasty-looking Mexican drug cartel, whose skills in the art of decapitation are well-known. The Mexicans make them an offer they plan to refuse, but, before they can start a new life elsewhere, O. is taken prisoner, and her life remains in the balance until the end of the film.

Elena, the head of the cartel, is a woman who seems to be in complete control of her business, one she inherited from her late husband. Hayek is unimpressive as the drug queen, and the black wig on her head in this film makes her look a bit like Elvira, though without the semi-beehive. The viewer is kept in suspense throughout as to whether her soft-spoken demeanour is actually just cold-heartedness or whether she is genuinely vulnerable, as suggested by the fraught relationship with her estranged daughter.

Benicio Del Toro and John Travolta also star in the film, both playing to type, the first as a drug dealer, the second as a bent cop also heavily involved in the trade, though one shouldn’t underestimate Del Toro’s character, who, despite a very bad mullet, can dispatch his enemies at the drop of a hat.

Savages starts with O. telling us, “Just because I’m telling you this story, doesn’t mean I’m alive at the end of it.” Stone has a nifty surprise in store for his audience at the end of the film, as a big twist is suddenly twisted out of shape even more. The film will give you your fix of mellow drama punctuated by sudden acts of violence, particularly when Del Toro wields a pistol, but overall the film lacks a vision for depicting with real insight the drama of the drug trade and the three young people caught up in it. We don’t get any real joy out of the characters using drugs, but nor do we get a firmer grip on their lives beyond their smoke-filled bubble.

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

André Crous

Wes Anderson, stuck in a creative marshland, needs a new muse because Moonrise Kingdom is just more of the same.

moonrise-kingdomUSA
3*

Director:
Wes Anderson
Screenwriters:
Wes Anderson
Roman Coppola
Director of Photography:
Robert Yeoman

Running time: 95 minutes

The worlds of Wes Anderson, the ones he created in Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Fantastic Mr. Fox, among others, can be magical in a way few others are. His images are immediately recognisably his, and his characters are quirky and endearing despite them never being very complex.

In Moonrise Kingdom, arguably his least interesting film since his 1994 début, Bottle Rocket, he focuses his energy on a very small love story about a 12-year-old orphan boy and a 12-year-old girl with some anger management problems and presents it in his cute but formally conscious way.

In 1965, when Sam (Jared Gilman), a nerdy boy scout, escapes from his camp on New Penzance Island, somewhere off the New England coast, and Suzy (Kara Hayward) disappears from home on the other side of the island at the same time, many parties, including Suzy’s mother’s boyfriend, the simple-minded but good-hearted policeman played by Bruce Willis, try to track him down.

Small details about Sam’s childhood are uncovered along the way, and there is an adorable flashback to the first time Sam saw Suzy, a year earlier; we are also informed a hurricane will strike very soon and, in typical Wes Anderson style, the artifice of the fictional reality is taken one step further by having a play performed that employs flood imagery.

Moonrise Kingdom’s highlights are in the vein of that famous moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Indiana Jones comes up against a large and very intimidating sword-wielding fellow in a Cairo marketplace, whom he quickly and unexpectedly dispatches with a mere gunshot. Anderson surprises us in ways we couldn’t have imagined.

As a result, the film is consistently charming, even though there is very little plot to hold on to. Anderson has always liked to play around with form and here too, he uses the narrator character played by Bob Balaban to inform us point-blank, in shots that are mostly empty save his headway at the bottom of the frame, about upcoming events or to fill in the background at some points.

But while the director’s playful approach to the construction of his images – including the great number of smooth lateral or vertical tracking shots that almost exclusively comprise the opening sequence – has evinced enormous creativity in the past, his film this time around is oddly stripped of emotion. Think back to the emotion conjured up in the scene by the sighting of the jaguar shark in Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Moonrise Kingdom mimics the previous films’ form but not their concomitant emotive force.

The film is more of a cardboard spectacle than any of his previous films, and Anderson seems to be treading the water of his imagination. This fact can also be surmised from the intertextual references he makes, always well integrated in his previous films but here not quite on the same level. A nifty but completely out-of-place reference to Citizen Kane occurs in the opening sequence when the camera literally passes through a table, and it’s easy to guess where Anderson got the idea of having Sam’s escape route from his tent masked by a poster.

Such references are quaint but become burdensome when we realise McDormand’s character is not all that different from the wonderful performance she gave in Almost Famous. Not to mention the Looney Tunes moment when Sam gets hit by lightning.

The director appears to have fallen into a creative rut. He would need to cut down on the big names and find his next muse because when Jason Schwartzman briefly appears in this film, he only makes us long for the good old days of Rushmore.

For those who have never seen a Wes Anderson movie, Moonrise Kingdom will be a wonderful entry into his world. For those who are familiar with his work, the film provides more of the same – a safe retreat to gorgeously framed images and perennially eccentric characters, but nothing more than that.

The Bling Ring (2013)

André Crous

Celebrity-obsessed teenagers who seek to emulate their favourite stars by stealing, wearing their stuff, get their comeuppance in terrible Sofia Coppola production.

bling-ringUSA
2*

Director:
Sofia Coppola
Screenwriter:
Sofia Coppola
Directors of Photography:
Christopher Blauvelt
Harris Savides

Running time: 90 minutes

Three of Sofia Coppola’s five films have been about teenagers. The Virgin Suicides, her début feature, was a poetic period drama about five enigmatic sisters who committed suicide; Marie Antoinette was another period drama but also an explosion of colour and exuberance from beginning to end and featured a teenage queen being her own kind of rebel. The Bling Ring is a mindless 90-minute film – one that could have told its story in less than half the time – based on real events about bored teenagers who robbed celebrities, wore their clothes and posted photos of their stylish lifestyle on Facebook.

Even the premise doesn’t sound particularly enticing, and Coppola simply cannot make her own product appear less shallow than the frequent discussions about shoes and dresses in which the vapid characters engage. This is a kind of Sex and the City, but whose protagonists are not yet allowed to drink, apparently have no sex drive and spend their evenings in the Hollywood Hills where they steal a few items from celebrities who live in excess (and don’t even notice the multiple burglaries) before getting coked out of their skulls.

Although the group changes over time, the main characters are Rebecca (Katie Chang) and Marc (Israel Broussard), who first break into a friend’s house before ganging up with others to up the stakes and look online for the addresses of celebrities who are currently out of town – like Paris Hilton, most of the time.

A worthy point could have been made about the addiction some people have with following the lives of the rich and the famous to the point where they know when someone’s house will be open for a ransacking. The consequences of such a lack of privacy could have been interesting in a better film, but Coppola is wholly uninterested in the larger ramifications of her story.

In keeping with the omission of their surnames on their Facebook profiles, the director mostly prefers to treat her characters like cardboard, virtually forbidding growth and never focusing on the supposed friendship or camaraderie between the individuals. Right at the beginning, Marc is clearly an outcast at his new school, where he first meets Rebecca, but over time and thanks to a much-improved wardrobe, he gets significantly more attention wherever he goes. Yet such developments are not examined with any kind of a critical eye and may even be irrelevant to the shallow-as-a-puddle storyline.

Some big-name celebrities appear as themselves in the film, including the aforementioned Hilton and the star of Coppola’s other two teenage films, Kirsten Dunst. One would think the presence of such stars would help us identify with the group of teenagers who believe themselves to be entitled to the glamorous lifestyles of the stars whose every move they follow online. But there is a glitch, and that is Emma Watson.

Watson, best known for her role as Hermione in the Harry Potter films, is immediately recognisable as a star, which makes it very difficult for the viewer to take her antics very seriously, especially as she is surrounded by cast members we have never seen before.

But all is not lost. Despite a constant feeling of déjà vu, we can also appreciate some very crafty conceptions that suggest the film was indeed made by someone with a filmmaker’s eye. The first example comes one night when the teenagers are driving without paying attention to the road, and a car comes out of nowhere seemingly straight at us from the side, and the vehicle suddenly starts to spin. It is a powerful reminder that these children cannot remain in their fantasy land for too long, but unfortunately (for us and for them) such reminders are too few and far between.

There is also a shot that stands out because of its relative minimalism as compared with the other scenes of housebreaking. Rebecca and Marc arrive at the home of television star Audrina Patridge, run through the house, which has enormous glass windows on all sides, switching lights on and off and finally making off with their loot. The shot is unbroken, taken from far away though shot to zoom in slowly throughout the scene, while the action unspools in near silence, which is something the rest of the film could have benefitted from.

There is also another scene with gunplay that is incredibly tense despite the structural flaw that we know the character of Marc will survive to tell the tale physically unharmed.

One major problem the film has is its inability to make its characters human. In the past, even when her characters were the target of derision, Coppola put them in a certain context that explained their behaviour or at least made us laugh. The Bling Ring rarely makes us break a smile and mostly just bores us to death with a story whose conclusion is revealed in the film’s opening minutes. The friendship between Marc and Rebecca could have been fertile ground for an examination of any number of issues, including betrayal, which is hinted at early on, but we get no human-interest angle.

Frankly, although this is an improvement on her horrendous previous film, Somewhere, we expected much more from Sofia Coppola.

Her (2013)

André Crous

Romantic drama inside a colourful science-fiction framework puts its finger on the reasons why people stay together and/or grow apart.

her-spike-jonzeUSA
4.5*

Director:
Spike Jonze
Screenwriter:
Spike Jonze
Director of Photography:
Hoyte van Hoytema

Running time: 125 minutes

It can be a constant battle for those in a relationship to remain together even as the two individuals grow in their own direction. Whatever sparked that initial euphoria may soon become nothing but a memory of two people meeting each other at a point in their lives that now seems vastly different from where they find themselves today.

This is but one very astute insight from Spike Jonze’s romantic drama Her, one of the most perceptive films about people and relationships since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry’s work of art that perfectly welded intelligence, emotion and comedy back in 2004. Her is similarly accomplished, as it takes a situation where a happy ending appears to be inherently impossible and makes us experience not just the emotional but also the intellectual fluctuations of its evolution by plumbing the depths of the human soul.

Set in a Los Angeles of the near future, the film examines the consequences of a decision made by the recently separated Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) to upgrade to a new operating system. Like most people, his current OS is functional but rather impersonal, and his physical and emotional isolation, along with the late-night porn, indicate that he needs more intimate interaction in his life.

The new OS, which he speaks to and which speaks back to him in a way that is cosy and understanding and with a sense of humour, has a name, and even though it doesn’t have a body, it resembles a person in most other ways. It is “Samantha”.

One of the best casting choices for this film was the voice of Samantha. It is important that we can visualise her, and that many in the audience will feel an attraction to her. The moment she starts speaking, we know it is Scarlett Johansson, and we can “see” her just as well as Theodore thinks he knows her.

In no time, it becomes obvious that this is not just going to be an OS to read back Theodore’s e-mails and proofread his online documents, but that Samantha will be an operating system for his soul – one that fills the void that was created when his wife left him. From the very first moment, we know Theodore will fall in love with Samantha. We also know that a relationship that is purely virtual, in which the couple can’t touch each other or be touched by a facial expression, is unlikely to last very long.

And yet, Her goes about its subject with the utmost understanding for why people come together, stay together or grow apart. It doesn’t frighten us with unnecessary drama, as it could so easily have done by transforming Samantha into a hysterical, mayhem-spreading virus that blackmails him to satisfy her own needs. On the contrary, Samantha remains a mostly level-headed being that is aware of its own development and is unsure how to handle the impact of change on a relationship she obviously cares about.

But while she has the world’s knowledge at the tips of her cables, she doesn’t have the same experience as Theodore when it comes to actual social interaction. No relationship is easy, but when you are used to interacting with a physical person and now you suddenly switch gears and expect the other person’s voice and intellect alone to keep the two of you together, it is going to be particularly tough. “What’s it like to be alive?” Samantha asks him.

Interestingly, as if to make herself believe that she is as real as Theodore, Samantha often uses the word “actually” in her speech. She is an artificially intelligent organism that can use its interactions and experiences to develop and adapt, and she is obviously unlike anyone Theodore has ever dated before, but the relationship can only grow to a certain point before her invisibility becomes a serious obstacle. Her artificial origins also raise questions such as whether her feelings are “real” or programmed, and whether it matters, since many of our emotions are also responses based on conditioning or context.

One of Her’s highlights is a scene in which an escort, who has been hired by Samantha to be the body while she provides the voice, arrives at Theodore’s apartment to be a surrogate for his virtual girlfriend. All at once, the problems of the relationship are crystallised, as Theodore suddenly has to confront the fact that his girlfriend will always remain just beyond his grasp.

This disconnect is visible in other ways in film, as we see busy streets and corridors filled with people, all of whom are talking to the operating systems plugged into their ears, but almost no one is talking to anyone else.

Throughout the film, the rich and deeply resonant score by Arcade Fire enriches our experience by seemingly channelling exactly what the characters are feeling with its gentle, wordless numbers. And the product is a glorious mix – just as one would expect given the theme of the story – of sounds and images, that moreover has understanding for the maturing of a relationship, from two people sharing a laugh to them meeting and getting along with each other’s friends, to making sure the other person feels like they are being heard, listened to and understood.

This emotionally intelligent film, a love story for the 21st century, marks a return for Jonze to the world of entertaining think pieces, such as Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, after his disappointing previous project, Where the Wild Things Are.

Gravity (2013)

André Crous

At once intimate and epic, Alfonso Cuarón’s space drama does things differently than its counterparts – and way better.

gravityUSA
5*

Director:
Alfonso Cuarón
Screenwriters:
Alfonso Cuarón
Jonás Cuarón
Director of Photography:
Emmanuel Lubezki

Running time: 90 minutes

Films like Gravity are one in a million. Besides reminding everyone of the incredible visual talents he has that never overwhelm the story he tells, Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón, who has honed his skills at directing long but dynamic scenes with a single take, ambitiously faced the challenge of a minimal cast and has delivered a film for the ages.

Although an opening title card informs those viewers who have never seen Alien or read its famous tagline, “In space, no one can hear you scream,” that there is no sound out in space, and that life for humans is impossible in such a void, the silence throughout the film is truly deafening.

Drifting high above the blue marble, NASA scientists Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney) are leisurely at work on the exterior of their spacecraft. The experienced Kowalsky is listening to some music, propelling himself from side to side with his jetpack and having a lot of fun. Stone is a little more tense. She’s young, and until recently her familiarity with space had been limited to time spent in a simulator, always with disastrous results.

NASA’s mission control, on the other end of the line, patiently listens to Kowalsky tell his stories for the umpteenth time, and all the while we are immersed in the beauty of Planet Earth’s blues and greens in the background. This may be the first feature film that actually warrants the IMAX ticket.

But even while we are awestruck by the beauty of the scene, shot in a seemingly unbroken take for several minutes, there is a gentle shift toward exceptional danger. First, Stone asks Kowalsky to switch off the music, which is being pumped through her headset as well, so that she can concentrate. The silence, only disrupted by the duo’s breathing, suddenly makes for a much more dramatic soundtrack. Stone is struggling to finish her work, and Houston is not picking up whatever she is doing. And then, suddenly, chaos envelops the scene.

Debris from the destruction of a Russian satellite hurtles their way, causing a chain reaction with far-reaching effects that will last until the end of the film. It’s mostly small bits of material, but at the velocity they’re travelling they are miniature mobiles of death, and when the spacecraft starts to break up, we realise how quickly this can turn catastrophic.

What makes Gravity so exhilarating is not only the very obvious technical mastery of its director, but the combination of elements that are perfectly controlled yet never feel like they are calculated to elicit a particular response from the viewer. The minimalism of the cast, the setting and the action may well lull us into a false sense of comfort, but every so often we get another jolt to the system because we are reminded how perilous the vast emptiness of space can be to an earthling. 

As Stanley Kubrick knew all too well when he made his landmark science-fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, silence is not only necessary because it faithfully recreates the conditions in space but also because its effect on the viewer can be devastating. Whereas Kubrick’s film had an astronaut’s oxygen supply cut during a spacewalk by a disgruntled computer, and a soundtrack that cut all sound as we saw the poor man drifting out into space, Gravity has scenes of large-scale destruction in complete silence, which is absolutely chilling to watch.

Stone and Kowalsky survive the first incident, but as the story progresses, their oxygen tanks running empty and them having to face recurring disasters, all the result of that Russian satellite exploding offscreen, we see how small things can lead to heavy damage.

Cuarón, whose director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki already did some terrific visual work with single takes in the director’s Children of Men, here again uses special effects in ways that bring us closer to the story. At one point, the camera is right up against Sandra Bullock as she tumbles farther and farther away from Earth. Every time she breathes, we edge closer, until the camera seems to penetrate the helmet of her spacesuit. It continues, until it turns around (inside the helmet!) and shows us her point of view.

The only misstep takes place late in the film when the camera becomes an invisible presence pointing out a potential hazard that the character in the scene fails to notice.

But Gravity is not only about the visuals. While mostly focusing on the drama to survive the constant ordeal and steer clear of flying debris that only accumulates, it also has some beautiful moments that create a connection between us and them. To reveal the content of these moments would be to give away too much, but one particularly effective gem comes in the form of a radio conversation in which neither speaker can see or understand the other but ends with us emotionally wrecked.

Gravity does not stand in awe at the mystery of space that made 2001: A Space Odyssey such a hit and still fuels discussions about its meaning. It does not try to reinvent the wheel; it is a story about staying alive in the most desolate place imaginable, and Cuarón’s handling of the space-fiction material is epic but never self-important and takes our breath away.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

André Crous

Gorgeous images and rich sounds enrich the Coen brothers’ glum story of folk singer in New York City in the early 1960s.

inside-llewyn-davisUSA
3.5*

Directors:
Joel Coen
Ethan Coen
Screenwriters:
Joel Coen
Ethan Coen
Director of Photography:
Bruno Delbonnel

Running time: 105 minutes

Two-thirds into Inside Llewyn Davis, the titular main character, a folk singer with a beautiful voice but no money, finally gets the chance to perform for a major record producer in Chicago, Bud Grossman. Grossman, whom Davis has wanted to impress for a long time, sits calmly just a few short feet away while Davis sings his heart out. The song moves us beyond belief, and we can’t help but expect that Grossman will feel the same. However, in case we still haven’t realised how desperate the situation is for this musician, we will find out very soon.

The question the scene raises, at least on the surface, is whether we want so badly for Davis to succeed because we have got to know him quite well over the first two acts, and we know he is down on his luck despite being a nice guy and an excellent singer. Perhaps Grossman doesn’t feel the same way because he doesn’t see the full picture.

But that is not true. In the film’s opening scene, when Davis performs the traditional folk song “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” in the New York City’s Gaslight Café in the winter of 1961, we are immediately mesmerised by his evident talent and sincere emotional connection to the material despite not knowing anything about him. We would only recognise, towards the end of the film, what had led up to that opening scene, but actor Oscar Isaac is captivating in the role and gets our attention whether we know his story or not.

There are many more songs throughout the film, sometimes complete numbers that Davis performs in clubs or in private, sometimes a recording from the LP he had made with his previous duo partner, Mike Gorfein, who recently committed suicide. In between the many songs, Davis’s circular existence of desperation is slightly modified by his interactions with his kind friends, who allow him to sleep on their couch, and by his not-so-kind friends, like the unsmiling Jean (Carey Mulligan), who tells him she thinks she is carrying his baby and generally behaves like a real cow throughout the story.

Luckily, Davis doesn’t seem to let all this negativity get him down. He is dead broke, doesn’t even own a winter jacket despite the polar temperatures all the way through the film and has no career to speak of except for the odd performance for a small group of nightly revellers at the Gaslight. And yet, he is not depressed, and neither are we. Directors Joel and Ethan Coen are very clever in lulling us into a false sense of security by having the main character cope despite the obstacles, until the very end when we realise this is just the latest round of misery to strike him, and in all likelihood, this will still be his life for some time to come.

His failed performance for Grossman notwithstanding, perhaps the most heartbreaking moment is when he crashes on the couch of Al Cody (Adam Driver), another singer, and is looking to store his box full of unsold records somewhere. Davis looks under a small table, only to find a similar box of Cody’s unsold records. This is a brief but powerful blow to our sense of optimism.

Even the moments that do offer some hope, like a jovial and uplifting performance with Jean’s straitlaced husband, Jim (Justin Timberlake), are deflated by our realisation that, no matter how popular the song is, he will barely see enough money to pay his immediate debts.

The cinematography is some of the best of any Coen brothers film since their 2001 hit O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a suitable comparison given the musical connection between the two and the importance of a character named “Ulysses” in both. Tones of green and grey are central to the palette, and so is the play of light and darkness, sometimes verging on chiaroscuro, most evident in the Chicago scene with Grossman (F. Murray Abraham). The director of photography is Bruno Delbonnel, who has only worked with the brothers once before, on their hilarious short film contribution to the Paris, je t’aime anthology film.

There are many things here that should spell utter gloom for the viewer – mean individuals who feel nothing for others’ feelings, a central character whose best friend is his guitar and a cat whose name he doesn’t even know, the same commuters on the subway day in and day out, and a life slipping more and more quickly downhill – but thanks to the music and a spellbinding performance by Isaac, we remain a captive audience for most of the film.

He steals the show with his renditions of folk songs and, bathed in Delbonnel’s lush cinematography, sometimes with the cat draped over his shoulder to keep him warm, this period film is as beautiful as the story it tells is tragic. We may not get inside his head, but we certainly get a very good impression of the mood of the time and of his life.

August: Osage County (2013)

André Crous

A drugged-up Meryl Streep goes on a two-hour rant, but gradually the onion’s many layers are peeled back.

august-osage-countyUSA
3.5*

Director:
John Wells
Screenwriter:
Tracy Letts
Director of Photography:
Adriano Goldman

Running time: 120 minutes

August in Osage County can be scorching – with temperatures in the 90s (mid-30s in degrees Celsius) – but even in the sweltering heat, there is nothing that is quite as oppressive as the atmosphere around the Weston household.

In August: Osage County, the matriarch is Violet (Meryl Streep), who has been popping pills on a regular basis for a long time and was recently treated for mouth cancer. Her hair is short, and she stumbles from room to room speaking her mind (or “truth”, as she calls it) and lobbing insults at the small group of people one would call her family.

The man who has put up with her the longest is her husband, Beverly (Sam Shepard), whose opening words, “Life is very long”, taken from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”, suggest to us that he has had enough of this and that this will be his last time round the prickly pear. By the time the subsequent opening credits sequence finishes, he will have disappeared forever from this earth.

With the departure of their father, the three daughters arrive at the house deep in the Osage Plains, in north Oklahoma, to pay their respects to an individual who, although a heavy drinker, was also a very good man, especially so because he put up with Violet for so long.

Barbara (Julia Roberts), her father’s favourite – a point that elicits particular scorn from her own mother – arrives with her teenage daughter, Jean (Abigail Breslin), and husband, Bill (Ewan McGregor), from whom she has unofficially separated.

Ivy (a captivating Julianne Nicholson), a diffident, freckled girl who has recently decided to straighten her hair, is the only daughter who has stayed behind to take care of the elder Westons, for which she has not received any kind of financial or emotional support from anyone.

And then there is Karen (Juliette Lewis), the youngest, who lives in Florida and doesn’t stop talking about her fiancé, the Ferrari-driving Steve (Dermot Mulroney), who will take her to Belize on their honeymoon. Steve is nearing 50, but we notice he has his eye on the 14-year-old Jean.

The film does not have the most original of plots, as this family gathering inevitably leads to countless revelations, the one more stunning than the last, until there is little more to do except to head off into the taboo territory of incest. As is to be expected, Streep sucks all the oxygen out of the room when she speaks, but she accomplishes more than that: In this film, she also sucks all the light out of the room, as her sharp tongue lashes everyone around her. “Nobody slips anything by me”, she says, and she is right, but when she decides to reveal others’ secrets, we cringe because we know she is deliberately stepping over the line to make the point that she is a know-it-all.

Director John Wells’s adaptation of Tracy Letts’s play (Letts also crafted the screenplay) keeps most of the story indoors, and he fashions this space to resemble a cave, with blinds and curtains drawn, and on the day of the funeral with the women dressed all in black, we only see their heads, and therefore their words sting with so much more power.

There are two exemplary scenes around the dining room table. In the first, on the day of the funeral, Violet, at the head of the table, doesn’t so much speak as gush her mind. It is a gamble that churns our stomachs as her words become more and more inappropriate, and we end up cheering when someone eventually wrestles her to the floor. We are not only angry with her, but also with the rest of the family who by their silence enable her to keep going.

The second scene, with Violet and two of her daughters, is much more interesting, as it involves characters that have become infinitely more complex since we last saw them huddled around the table an hour earlier. This time around, there is a struggle for power and truth, but although there is no clear winner, it is just as painful as before.

August: Osage County is filled with moments where the skeletons come tumbling out of the closet in slow motion. People are hurtful, but even if we don’t empathise with many of them, because their behaviour is at times revolting, we do gradually comprehend that there is more to everyone than what we may perceive at first. People can also be secretive to a fault, and many of the secrets we discover here only lead to heartache and misunderstandings.

But even when there is a torrent of emotions and hysteria, there is still hope. Chris Cooper, who plays Violet’s brother-in-law, is nothing less than a prince, and his character’s love for his son, “Little” Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch), is tender and sweet and beautiful. When it seems like all hope is lost, Charles takes to the piano to sing a love song. He makes the world stand still, and that is when we realise that, even in a family as messed-up as this one, all is not lost.