This is a film I have wanted to see for quite a while. I actually managed to get a ticket for the premiere in Brussels last year, but the passport office here went on strike as my passport was being renewed, so I couldn’t leave the country, which was unfortunate. But I received it on DVD as a Christmas present today, so I finally had a chance to watch it. It became clear fairly early on that I should write a review for the site, as just about every male character in the film has a very prominent and rather stereotypical moustache.

The opening to the film reminded me of Amélie. It has a similar style of narration, describing odd facts about seemingly unrelated characters and events. By the end of the first half hour, though, it was already very clearly a Luc Besson film. The man has a way of packing an awful lot of action into an interesting storyline, while keeping everything somewhat surreal. Of course, one of the main elements of the film is the existence of a pterodactyl in 20^th century Paris, so of course it has to be surreal.

One thing the film has which I find increasingly unusual these days is a female protagonist I actually admire. Most female leads in films tend to be one dimensional, hopeless romantics, dependent on other people, or just underdeveloped entirely. And any time a character appears to be something outside of the generic mould, they always fall into one of those traps during the film. Adéle Blanc-Sec is introduced to us as a dry-witted writer, and during her first few minutes on screen we learn that she’s intelligent, quick-thinking, well-read, adventurous, independent and somewhat impulsive. And she doesn’t change that. Like all of Besson’s main female characters, she does of course have a weakness, but rather than that resulting in her putting on a tough façade while secretly weeping to herself and becoming weaker, it just strengthens her determination, and we see that her characteristics were developed before her sister, whom she is trying to save in the film, became ill, ergo they are not just a symptom or disguise prompted by the loss she feels.

I’m not entirely sure how I would class this film, to be honest. It’s action-packed, with elements of a detective story, some bits and pieces of pseudo-science, a lot of supernatural elements, some very physical humour, jests that reference historical information, some nice character development in parts, and more. The characters range from the well-developed Adéle to characters with half a back-story, to characters who clearly have a history that is never really delved into, to comic relief in the form of a couple of what are essentially slapstick comedians. The film is clever, but subtly so. It’s funny in subtle and blatantly obvious ways. It encompasses so much into one film that it’s hard to think what to make of it. And yet, it doesn’t make me doubt my love for Luc Besson one bit.

I was a little annoyed towards the end, as it unfortunately happens to be one of those films that have multiple “endings”. It could have ended a little sooner than it did, but then again it did keep up the tradition of the film as a whole of having a lot of stories happening at once, and left the final ending open enough that we know this isn’t just an enclosed story and Adéle does have other adventures outside of this.

8/10

This is a very strange film. I decided about halfway through it that I wanted to write a review, but my opinion changed on it somewhat since then. It’s a fairly bad film overall. The writing was pretty atrocious, and the acting wasn’t great for the most part. However, it wasn’t quite as bad toward the end as it seemed like it was going to be (although, the actual final ending could have been left out).

I don’t like making negative sweeping statements like my earlier “the writing was atrocious,” but if someone throws lines into their film like ”Remember what my grandmother used to say – All sorrows are less with bread!” and expects to be taken seriously, they’re not going to get anywhere. The writing annoyed me from the very beginning of the film, considering ten minutes in we’re told the protagonist’s sister has died… a sister who isn’t mentioned or shown prior to this, despite the fact that the introduction was supposed to show her life spanning ten years. This would be alright if the sister was to be considered completely unimportant, but no, it appears we’re supposed to feel distraught over the loss of this previously nonexistant character, and it just doesn’t work. I had also expected to mention here the fact that the ending was extremely predictable from the very beginning, but thankfully I can say they actually did put in a twist that I didn’t see coming, which has kept me happy.

But that doesn’t make it a good film.  The characters are completely unbelievable, and the audience is treated as though we’re complete idiots who wouldn’t pick up on any kind of hint unless it was thrown in our faces. We’re introduced to two characters who are apparently in love with our protagonist. One is labelled as a “bad boy” from minute one, and the camera cuts to him glaring pretty much any time the werewolf is mentioned, and someone goes to the trouble of picking him out from the crowd and shouting unconvincingly about how he “disappeared” right before the wolf killed someone… And yet no-one suspects he’s the wolf. And the other is a nice, friendly guy, who seems to be far from the sharpest tool in the shed, and completely oblivious to the possibility of someone he knows being the wolf even though it is explicitly said that the wolf is someone from the village.

Not that the protagonist of the film is much more intelligent than the guy who wants to marry her. Her one clue to the wolf’s identity is the colour of its eyes (and its clearly male voice when it speaks to her with its mind, but she seems to conveniently forget that part). In case we don’t realise this is her clue, of course, the filmmakers have cut to the wolf’s eye, changed it from a yellow wolf’s eye to a human eye, and made the character exclaim “A brown human eye!” But of course, it would appear that every single person she interacts with in the village from that point on just so happens to have brown eyes. And she suspects every one of them. Except the most obvious suspects. And even has a lovely montage of memories where she just recalls how many brown eyes she’s seen and is ever so confused by the fact that she doesn’t know who the wolf is.

The writers try to throw us off the scent of the wolf by shifting suspicion onto the girl’s grandmother. They do this by making her oddly creepy for no apparent reason, having our unintelligent suitor accuse her of being the wolf with no evidence, and using the age old interaction (albeit in a dream) of “Grandmother, what big teeth you have!” “All the better to eat you with!” Now, as I’ve said before, there is actually a genuine twist in the ending with regards to the wolf’s identity. I’m not going to reveal it in case for someone reason someone reads this before watching it and still wants to see it, since it’s one of the only good things in the movie. The twist made sense, which is good, but it did require some explanation. I think it could have been done better if there had been subtle hints along the way so that when the wolf’s identity was revealed, the audience would take a moment to realise how much sense it made and wonder how they hadn’t realised… But this movie and subtlety were clearly never meant to be.

As far as the acting goes, it leaves a lot to be desired. Most of the characters were rather one-dimensional, and some that didn’t seem like they should have been were made that way by just bad acting. Amanda Seyfried herself  was quite good, especially in comparison to others, and so was Gary Oldman. I’m a big Gary Oldman fan, so I’ll probably say that about every film he’s in, but I do genuinely think he’s a great actor. That being said, this is far from his best work, and he’s not quite as brilliant as usual. And surprisingly, my favourite part in the whole film was actually his death.

Overall, the film was just bizarre. Completely bizarre. It had some redeeming points, and some bad points, but a large portion of the film was just incredibly strange. The main offenders possibly being the telepathic conversation with the wolf, the wolf feeding Seyfried her own grandmother in the guise of soup, and her filling a dead body with rocks to push it into a river. And I feel sorry for the poor guy who loved red riding hood without getting any love in return. He saved her from a fire, took an arrow in the throat for her, protected her from the wolf, and didn’t get so much as a thanks.

4/10

This movie was amazing. I saw it in 3D, and can honestly say that I have never in my life seen a live action film use 3D so well. I could possibly even say I’ve never seen any film use 3D so well. Most films use 3D either as a gimmick to make something jump out of the screen, or as a way to make money without actually benefitting the film at all. I’ve seen several animated films using it well, especially Pixar’s films, and this makes sense since animated films can use it to give a depth to them that they would otherwise find difficult to achieve, but no live action film I’ve seen to date has done anything with 3D that seemed necessary or beneficial for the film. Hugo uses it for depth the way animation does, but also uses it to make the shots in general so much better and more believable, and makes a point of doing to its audiences what the first ever film did to audiences in the 1880s, by making a train come at the screen, as well as using it to its advantage in a couple of terrifying dream sequences.

One of the things I liked most about the film was how much of a history it was of film in general, telling the tale of Georges Méliès and the beginning of cinema as we know it, yet I had already fallen in love with the film before the title came on screen. The film opens with a boy, who we can already presume is Hugo, going about his daily life… living behind the walls in a train station and winding the clocks. Already in the opening sequence, we feel sympathy for the boy, and can tell that he is essentially homeless, clearly has no-one looking after him, and yet gets by and is definitely intelligent.

Hugo has a natural talent with clocks, and the easiest thing for filmmakers to do would be to just make him a genius, or a prodigy, or both, but they didn’t do this. We’re shown his life before where he is now in a flashback, which is shown the sound of an old-fashioned projector, which is like a foreshadowing of sorts of the importance of films later on. We see that he once had a father, a man whose job was to make and fix clocks, who taught him all he knows about clocks and clockwork, and we see that after his father passed away, he was sent to live in the train station with his uncle who wound the clocks there, and was removed from school, and that all he has left of his father is the clockwork machine he is working to fix. The boy isn’t a genius, he hasn’t been to school in a long time, and knows little beyond the workings of clockwork and what he has learned on his feet to keep him from being caught and sent to an orphanage.

and even a moment near the end of the film where we see that he isn’t actually a bad guy. Not to mention, the character is played by Sacha Baron Cohen, who I would not have expected to produce such a performance. He is just one of many great supporting characters working in the train station, along with Christopher Lee as a kindly bookshop owner, and, of course, Ben Kingsley as “Papa Georges” the toyshop owner.

Asa Butterfield, the boy who plays Hugo, is a fantastic actor. The girl who plays opposite him for a lot of the film is noticeably less of a natural in front of the camera, which possibly makes his performance seem even better than it is, but I genuinely enjoyed his performance. He plays an orphaned, homeless boy trying to find one last connection with his father, but is held back by Georges taking his notebook after catching him stealing from his shop. He also has to hide constantly from the station inspector, who seems to also live within the station. Hugo is a character with a lot of depth and emotion, and who also is used to being alone and not sharing his emotions with anyone, and Butterfield plays him wonderfully.

If there’s one thing a Christopher Nolan film never fails to do, it’s make me think. The man has a fantastic talent for writing and directing, which never seems to end, and after watching this film I can say it’s been there since the beginning. It’s really no wonder he’s gotten to where he is now.

This film is essentially the little brother of The Prestige. It uses the same concept of time, switching between three different timelines at seemingly random intervals (Which timeline you’re in being indicated by whether or not the main character has long hair and a beard, is looking formal, or has a black eye and bloodied nose), following the same characters the entire time. It’s a shorter, slightly less professional and more artsy version of the Prestige with burglars instead of magicians. Like the main pair in the Prestige, Borden and Angier, the two men in Following have a pseudo-friendship based on observing and tricking other people, which turns from professionalism and friendship to something far more sinister.

It really is like watching a jigsaw puzzle being made. Like the Prestige again, it opens with a segment of the ending of the film, before returning to where the story actually begins. From that point onwards, the story follows one man mainly, whose name is given as both “Bill” and “Danny” when confronted by different people, yet never confirmed. We see “Bill” as he was to begin with, an unemployed writer who just likes to observe people, we see him later following a particular woman, and we see him after seemingly having been beaten up by someone. The story unfolds from all three points, yet it isn’t clear for the majority of the film how exactly he came to shift from one section to another. As it stands, the film is good, the character is interesting, the style is very nice, and the storyline is intriguing. Not to mention the fact that not knowing how he came to end up where he has forces you to pay attention and try to work it out for yourself.

It’s when you get to the point that the blanks start to fill themselves in that it gets really interesting. There are certain sequences that make his situation become apparent, and as these lead into what we already saw as the beginnings of another timeline, the picture becomes very clear. This is aided by showing snippets of conversation between two other characters that explain more to us than we could see without their inclusion. There’s only so much we can deduce from following the one man. While at first I was somewhat annoyed by these interjections, once it came to the ending it was obvious that it was necessary to have become used to these to get the full impact of what comes in the ultimate moments of the film.

And this brings me to another thing I love about Chris Nolan’s films – I never know the ending until it happens. My mind is constantly ticking over in films, so I find far too often that I have predicted the ending long before it appears on screen. Yet with The Prestige, Memento, somewhat with Inception, and now with Following, the ending came as a genuine surprise. His films make you think, but even then what you may have deduced is never quite right. The ending of Following is what really makes the film. Without it, it would still be a great film, but with it… It’s a completely different film to what it might be otherwise.

9/10

This is a film I have been waiting to see for a long time. It falls into a class of what I refer to as “Lisa films” – films that combine a number of elements that usually make me want to see a film (usually certain actors, writers, directors, composers, plot elements, etc.). In this case, the combination of Peter Dinklage and Tim Roth, in a film directed by Alexandre Rockwell, with a title that alludes to my favourite play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Unfortunately, I have seen no indication of the film ever having a theatrical release in my country, and have no idea if there will ever be a DVD release (though if there is one, I will definitely buy it), and so was forced to search for an online version, and check for one regularly until this week when I actually managed to find one. And boy, am I glad I did.

This isn’t a film that’s been widely advertised, and I don’t know a single person whose heard of it through anyone besides myself. And yet, it is a complete gem. It’s cynical, yet heartwarming. The acting is perfect, the direction is great, the whole thing is brilliant. The film has a fair few somewhat surreal elements, from the opening shot of Pete Smalls dangling in a harness on a film set to the fake corpse, which the other characters go so far as to state “looks like he’s made of marzipan”. And surreal really is the best word to describe it, since like any Magritte or Dalí painting, it’s got a fair amount of realism with touches of the impossible thrown in.

The film opens with our main character, KC Monk, a grumpy, cynical ex-filmmaker turned Laundromat owner (with a lovely scruffy beard), telling us about himself and his best friends. This is where we see Smalls (Roth) on his film set, as well as another surreal image of the third friend, Jack (played by Mark Boone Junior), teaching a class of people in cardboard boxes, contrasted to the more realistic image of Monk in a shabby room counting money and watching the news on an old TV. Within the first few minutes, we find out that Smalls has died, KC owes a loanshark a lot of money, and that the thing he loves most in the world is his dog. The loanshark takes his dog, Jack offers to help him pay the money he owes if he comes to Smalls’ funeral, and the whole film takes off from there.

A lot of the film centres around relationships. There’s the central duo of KC and Jack, two misfits who used to be best friends but haven’t been together in years – Jack is enthusiastic and full of ideas and conspiracies, but with no action to back his plans, and KC is a cynical, practical man who has been beaten down by life. Dinklage and Boone get a great dynamic going between the two, and the fact that they were once friends but drifted in opposite directions seems almost tangible. KC also finds a love interest of sorts, a French editor who he is convinced was in love with Smalls and thus does not pursue. And through narration, clever shooting, and Jack’s reminiscing, we learn a lot about KC’s past relationships, with both Pete Smalls and an ex of his who passed away – the only thing he has left from her is the dog.

The surrealism in the film is rather typical of Rockwell’s directing, as is his use of Steve Buscemi as a minor character (he has also worked with both Tim Roth and Peter Dinklage in the past too, so he was true to his auteur style in this), and every shot was great. However, there were several moments in the film where the best thing about it – and the most important, key factor – was Peter Dinklage’s face. That sounds odd to say, but it’s quite true. There were a few shots where not much was shown besides Dinklage himself, and his facial expression said everything that needed to be said. I can think of three instances off the top of my head, where a subtle change in facial expression was enough to tell the whole story of the scene, one of which I think was a key element to the movie in general – the first time he smiles. That one movement of facial muscles was enough to tell us that within the film, the character had changed for the better, possibly reverting back to who he was before life had given him hell and turned him into the cynic we see for the majority of the film.

Needless to say, I really enjoyed this film. And I do hope it gets a DVD release because I would love to own a physical copy of it, and want to be able to pay Rockwell back for his great direction. I feel that way about films in general, but with truly independent films like this, it seems so much more important. If it does get a theatrical release here, I will certainly drag all my friends to see it.

10/10

This film was fairly spectacular. Right from the beginning it showed promise, and delivered. The shots were fantastic and clear, and every instant had a purpose. I don’t think there was a single shot wasted in the entire film. My one big problem with the film was the amount of flashbacks and stories and memories. While it wasn’t really that much of a problem, and every one aided the story and gave deeper insight into the events that lead to the main narrative, they were a little hard to follow. I’d put it mainly down to the sheer magnitude of them, combined with the fact that they were often out of sequence and didn’t generally show much obvious indication as to whether or not they were occurring in the “present”, or if they had already occurred. Then again, I am a little jet lagged, so it could just be tiredness, and maybe when I rewatch it I’ll find it easier to determine the sequence of events.

Gary Oldman’s performance was stunning. And while I love the man, and I’d like to say this is purely because he’s a fantastic actor, I think the casting, direction and editing really added a lot to it. Oldman is typecast far too often as an angry, over-the-top, loud person. Obviously, this is most evident in nineties films where he was regularly cast as a hyperbolic villain, but even in “good” roles like Jim Gordon in Nolan’s Batman series, he gets his fair share of shouting done. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy had him playing George Smiley, a wonderfully subtle and subdued character. And his against-type casting was emphasised by the fact that he didn’t speak a single word for the first twenty minutes or so of the film. He remained completely silent, and a large part of the opening sequence is a montage of Smiley (and John Hurt’s character, Control) walking, and going about mundane, ordinary, every-day tasks in silence. Oldman portrays Smiley as old, quiet and reserved, with an air of calm that makes it hard to determine whether he’s entirely unflappable, or has just had the spirit beaten out of him over the years. We do see through the flashbacks and stories in the film that he was once at least somewhat more spirited and energetic, and that life has crushed him to a degree, but he has a consistent calculating cunning that allows him to do his job well and keep calm in all situations. Nothing seems to surprise him, and it is clear from the beginning that he will stop at nothing to figure out if there is a spy in his midst, and who it is.

The other actors seemed more in type in the movie. Colin Firth is a slight more cunning and, for want of a better word, slimy than other roles, and Benedict Cumberbatch’s character is just a far less eccentric version of his Sherlock Holmes. All of the performances were good or great, but none stood out quite as much as Oldman’s.

The film overall was well executed, and played out perfectly. The shots were great, the acting was great, it was edited seamlessly, everything was ironed out to perfection. As for the storyline, the ending was a little predictable, especially for anyone who enjoys a good detective story, and I would have liked some kind of nice twist thrown in, but it was still a good story regardless. The characters were all left as mysterious people, which I really loved. We didn’t get to see deep into each of their lives, we just saw the surfaces, what they chose to share with the world. It really emphasised the fact that none of these men truly knew each other, and any one of them could potentially have been a double-agent. Even Smiley was mysterious, and cunning and clever enough to leave viewers suspecting him almost as much as the others.

9/10

This movie pretty much just… happened. It’s not a movie I’d rave about being great, and not a movie I’d rant about being awful. I wouldn’t even classify it as good or bad. It’s just there. I think I’ll probably have forgotten fairly soon that I even watched it. I don’t feel like I wasted time watching it, but I certainly wouldn’t ever bother watching it again.

I liked the concept of the movie, and thought it could be interesting. Essentially, it’s about a group of people who wake up locked in a warehouse without their memories. The idea is that some of these people have been kidnapped, and the others are the kidnappers themselves… but none of them know which they are. I was intrigued to find out how they’d explain this shared loss of memory, and I have to say I was a little disappointed that the answer was that they’d all inhaled some gas, of which one possible side-effect was memory loss…. And every person in the room just happened to inhale it (from a small canister) despite their location in the room, and just happened to experience the same side-effect to the same degree.

The film depended largely on random bursts of memory coming back to the people in the room, and how they pieced them together to make sense of them. Despite some unnecessarily odd camera shots in a few of these sequences, I thought this aspect was actually done quite well. It had somewhat of a genuine feel to it in that the memories weren’t complete, weren’t always relevant, and it was unclear to viewers and the actual characters how much of them was truth and how much was fabricated.

The sequences inside the warehouse were interspersed with scenes featuring the wife of one of the kidnap victims working with the police, and a couple of cops trying to find the location of the hostages. The wife storyline seemed pointless and random up until the awkward ending of the film, in which it was vaguely revealed that she had instigated the whole thing somehow, and the tracking just appeared to be a way to lengthen the movie by showing some guys driving around. Neither side-story really added much to the main events, and the movie could easily have done without them.

Even at a short eight-five minutes, this film dragged on too much for my liking. Which is never a good thing. The idea was good, but the film could have been made much better. And too much of it felt like the filmmakers were just trying to extend it to reach a reasonable feature film length. Yet, as I said before, I didn’t watch it and think “Wow, this is bad”. It’s an alright film, and it is enjoyable to watch, but it’s far from being a very good film. While I wouldn’t discourage anyone from watching it, I don’t think this will ever be a film I think to recommend to my friends.

5/10