Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas

A quick note to wish you all a very merry Christmas and all the best for the season.

Thanks for your support over the year, and stay with us as 2016 is looking like a cracker!

The Revenant: Film Review

The Revenant: Film Review

Cast: Leonardo di Caprio, Tom Hardy, Domnhall Gleeson, Will Poulter
Director: Alejandro G Innaritu

The savagery of survival is just one of the elements explored in the adaptation of the 2002 novel by Michael Punke, The Revenant brought to the screen by Alejandro G Innaritu, the award-winning director of Birdman.

Already nominated in the Golden Globes for both its lead actor and director, the film’s about Leonardo Di Caprio’s Hugh Glass , an 1820s frontiersman in uncharted America. When the group he’s working with are attacked by Pawnee Indians, they’re forced to flee. And things get even worse when Glass is mauled by a bear and is left for dead by those charged with his care….

While The Revenant is essentially a spiritual piece about rebirth and revenge, Innaritu’s created a film that’s visually rich. Working with his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, Innaritu’s made a great fist of the backgrounds on offer in the wilds as well as ensuring the fight for survival is intensely personally shot. A final shot is surprising and ensures The Revenant is burned into your brain as it leaves.

The story’s not exactly original, given the themes of vengeance and the rape of the land from Native Indians and while it’s adapted from a book, it’s not entirely successful in making the transition.

Narratively, the Indians provide the impetus at the start only to disappear as the story progresses and then re-appear when it suits (a thread about a chief’s abducted daughter seems to dawdle and lose steam as it circles the main thread) before re-appearing on the scene at the end. Equally, the French elements in the hills who seem so instrumental in Glass' group's demise are tossed casually to one side.

But perhaps in many ways, this is the way to structure the at times viscerally raw story of this fur trapper because it's Leo's film through and through.

After the intensity of the savage CGI bear attack (a sequence which only shows a few animated cracks as the bear protects its cubs in the most vicious way possible), Glass is left physically shattered and with a slashed throat and therefore our actor without a mouthpiece.

But Di Caprio manages to seethe and struggle through, with a physical performance that is both commanding and watchable. It's helped by a few surprising moments of breaking the fourth wall - notably in the very last shot - but not in the way we've become accustomed to. Fuelled by revenge and a desire to survive instilled in him by his slaughtered wife, Glass's journey, both spiritual and physical is a compelling one. By depriving him of a background and injecting him with a raw primordial push to live, Inarritu almost makes him mythical like Clint Eastwood's Man with No name (even if Di Caprio's throaty whisper is Dirty Harry like towards the end)

Poulter, Gleeson and Hardy deserve mention too as supporting players in this wilderness tale. Perhaps Hardy as the antagonist of the piece Fitzgerald is the one who emerges with a bit more of a rounded character as he expands on his own past and his scalping at the hands of the Pawnee Indians is a subtle tale, showing the horrors of colonialism and the anger of the natives. But his nagging self-preservation starts to strike a chord and make a lot of sense as he compels others to leave Glass behind.

While this odyssey could have done with an expeditious trim of some 20 minutes, there's no denying the power of the visual execution of The Revenant. Doused in spiritual edges and executed with visual precision by Inarritu, this tale of man vs nature with lashings of personal vengeance sprinkled liberally throughout becomes a story of resilience and a film of bravado.

Rating:

Joy: Film Review

Joy: Film Review

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, Edgar Ramirez, Virginia Madsen, Isabella Rosselini, Elizabeth Rohm
Director: David O Russell

David O Russell reteams with his Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle dream team to breathe some life in to the story of Joy Mangano, who invented the Miracle Mop.

However, in bringing this biopic to life, he manages to some how pull together a story that doesn't quite fly like it should.

Lawrence (a little too young to play Mangano, but still on crackling form) is Joy, a woman whose life is a whirlwind of domestic chaos. Thanks to an ex living in the basement (Ramirez), a father who's just moved back in (De Niro) and a bed-bound mother (Madsen) who's addicted to soaps, she barely has a moment to herself.

But when she hits inspiration one day while cleaning up spilt wine glasses on a boat, she decides it's her moment to shine and designs a self wringing mop.

However, she faces a fight to get people to believe in both it or her...

Joy is a mixed film that bundles family dysfunction into an easy to swallow pill and cleans it up round the edges, forgetting to make this journey feel like one of extreme catharsis as it reaches the end.

Lawrence feels slightly miscast, almost a little too young to hit the straps she needs to as Mangano through the decades (even if the film feels like it takes place over a time period of a week), which is a surprise; it's not to detract from her performance, which is the one constant of Joy and certainly stands out from those around her. And it doesn't help that Russell goes heavy on the imagery with Mangano actually doing DIY around the home, while mentally doing DIY for her family. There's no subtlety in this rags to riches story and it's a damn shame because of it.

It's predominantly Russell's direction and the script which are the main reasons it never fully rises above its intentions. There's too much of an almost farcical approach to proceedings and when it comes time to inject the drama into the moment, it never quite fully catches like it should.

The sequences where Mangano heads to the fledgling QVC studios and makes a pitch to Bradley Cooper's Neil Walker and the subsequent scenes where Mangano sells her mop on screen are really where the film briefly stutters into life. The excitement of the new format, of the TV pitch, the fervour of the orders coming in as the camera circles around Walker is electrifying; but nowhere else in the movie does Russell ensure that this lightning strikes twice.

Interestingly, the potential for drama comes in the final stages of the film with Mangano heading up her own empire and finding others heading to her with ideas. It would have been a smarter move to see her having to balance the attitude she has of "I can't accept your answer and I won't" and "I don't need a prince" when facing business ideas from others. As it is, Russell settles for a saccharine "You can have it all" attitude that sticks in the craw with dramatic platitudes and cliches as Mangano lops her hair off to demonstrate her own turning point and self-reinvention.

Ultimately, Joy gets by on the strength of Lawrence alone; and while she does feel miscast, her presence on screen helps the film out of its own predicament. It lacks the catharsis that you'd perhaps expect and instead produces a more muted film that doesn't inspire as much as it should given the stellar talent involved.

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege: PS4 Review

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege: PS4 Review

Platform: PS4
Released by Ubisoft

First person shooters don't come with more prestige than under the Tom Clancy umbrella.

The latest, Rainbow Six Siege, comes at a time when the world's reacted to real-life terrorism and sieges in Paris which gives it a sort of unwelcome prescient sheen that's hard to shake off.

But just managing to shake it off, it does.

You play a member of a counter-terrorism team in a predominantly online game, that's aimed at giving you control of situations and seeing how you react in them. It's all about tactics in many ways and ensuring that your team survives.

Alternating between attack and defence, there's no denying that Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege is a tense game and will rely on you using some smarts rather than blundering in and firing willy nilly. Playing through levels helps you unlock equipment and operators, and helps you realise the potential of the team and its players.

And it's really here in the online multiplayer that Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege comes into its own.

Forced online means that you have to play with others or with friends and it's a little trickier if you're a solo player by nature. Picking a good team helps a lot, as you can't respawn in the middle of the game - once you're gone, you're gone. Which ensures that you play the game in a way which feels real and serious, something the Tom Clancy games have always done. The team works best with the headset environment, there's no denying that with the team out scouring the sites and scoring intel, it gives you an extra insight into what's around.

While there's been a few issues connecting to the server, it's been no worse than in Battlefront, and hasn't really prevented the play from coming to the fore.

If you're after a deep-dive immersive game this festive season that appears to have chilling overtones of current world events, then you can't go much further than Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege; it's tautly executed and thrilling.

Trumbo: Film Review

Trumbo: Film Review

Cast: Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane, Louis CK, John Goodman, Helen Mirren
Director: Jay Roach

There's nothing Hollywood loves more than a tale about the wronged getting final justice.

So, coupled with the fact that this tale takes that and wraps it up in the past of one of its own, and you could see how Trumbo would be a shoo-in for awards season with its prestige veneer and stand-out performance by its lead.

Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston plays Dalton Trumbo, an American screen-writer and heavyweight of the industry in this biopic which follows Trumbo's ostracism from the Hollywood community because of his political beliefs.

In 1947, Trumbo was put on the Blacklist and ultimately jailed for his beliefs, before entering the Hollywood community again under a veil of secrecy.

Predominantly known for his comedy films like Austin Powers and Meet The Fockers, director Jay Roach heads down the traditional path for the genre, choosing to recreate a myriad of scenes and moments from Trumbo's life.

Consequently, the almost made for TV film occasionally feels like it's too choppy and frenetic with the areas it decides to land on; it's an odd idea and rather than simply concentrating on one particular time-span or thread, there are parts which feel massively underdeveloped and characters which go to waste. Chief among these is Trumbo's long-suffering wife Diane Lane, who simply shows to offer support before crumbling. Granted, by concentrating solely on the domestic stress of dealing with the idealistic approach to the Red Menace and Trumbo's exorcism the film would have felt over-blown, but there are plenty of dramatic fruits to be successfully mined here.

Thankfully, it's Cranston's actorly portrayal of the clearly witty and urbane Trumbo that helps propel the film along. He's clearly having a ball with his pronounced intonations delivering lines that are of a Noel Coward withering nature ("I'd say go on, but you will" just being one of the examples) He delivers the film's script with a dazzling theatricality that's called for that helps elevate the rather average ideas and execution from its own intentions.

There are moments when Trumbo becomes a film of characters and impersonations - chiefly Helen Mirren's harpie horrible Hedda Hopper and Dean O'Gorman's double-take Kirk Douglas - but it's in the execution of the spoken word and the recreation of the era that Trumbo excels. (Plus John Goodman's appearance adds a great deal of vim in the back as movie mogul Frank King, a peddler of B grade trash that Trumbo finds himself writing for)

Perhaps the criticism for this tale is that the choice of canvas is too wide and given the bath-dwelling Trumbo's a rich source for the plucking, it could have paid dividends in its final fight back against his vilification.

While Trumbo gained two Oscars writing under nom-de-plumes or selling the work to others as it was the right thing to do, the moment when he's welcomed back among his own, unfortunately lacks quite the emotional punch that it needs to resonate.

All in all though, Trumbo is a small triumph; had it chosen to hone in a little more on some key moments in his bath-dwelling life, it could have soared a lot higher than it actually does.

The worst films of 2015

The worst films of 2015

It's time for the annual hall of shame.

And looking back over what has been a terribly average year, some cinematic stinkers have really stood out.

Here are the worst films of the year - in no particular order:

1) Daddy's Home
2) Fantastic Four
3) The Gallows
4) Terminator: Genisys

5) Hot Pursuit
6) The Scout's Guide to the Apocalypse
7) The Transporter Refuelled
8) Dumb and Dumber To
9) Vacation
10) Irrational Man
11) Mortdecai
12) Taken 3
13) Get Hard
14) Unfinished Business
15) Jupiter Ascending

So, did I miss any? hit me up with your worst films of 2015!

The Best films of 2015

The Best films of 2015

It's fair to say that glancing back through the year, it's not been a vintage one for cinematic experiences.

Most have fallen into the middling category; not offensive films, but not massively enjoyable - which is in many ways, the worst experience to have at the movies. Films should move you, stir something in you and see you rise from your seat in ecstasy or agony.

That said, there's been some strong stuff out there this year - and here in no particular order - are some of the best,

1) The Ground We Won
2) Sicario

3) Creed
4) 99 Homes

5) Inside Out
6) A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
7) Mad Max Fury road
8) It Follows
9) Girlhood

10) The Martian
11) Song of The Sea
12) Cartel Land
13) Love and Mercy
14) Birdman
15) Foxcatcher

Here's hoping 2016 will be incredible!