I reckon it’s time to shake out the cobwebs on some of the movies we’ve seen recently…
I’ve almost definitely forgotten some, by the way. You will excuse the lack of bells and/or whistles, yes? As always, I’d love you to tell me what you think of these movies, or my assessment of them, in the comments!
Valkyrie
Tom Cruise is, despite being a bit barmy, almost always watchable in movies. His work in “Valkyrie” is no exception, despite offering him a lot of chances to be Very Serious Indeed.
His performance is bolstered by a great ensemble cast, though admittedly Bill Nighy’s wonderfully slippery performance stands out and puts Cruise in the shade. Bryan Singer does a super job of delivering the story as crisply as possible, managing to avoid many of the melodrama landmines left lying around by previous cinematic visitors to the subject matter.
One of the only real problems with the film is that, with Singer’s often clinical, detail driven approach to the story, the historical inevitability of the eventual plot outcomes don’t have the tragic emotional build you’d expect – like “Ice Age”, it’s difficult to engage with the characters because you already know that they’re dead, and the only lesson this particular story has for us to learn is that sometimes planning and ingenuity can be brought down violently by little more than dumb bad luck.
It’s a lovely piece of film-making, and a great story, but at times this makes it feel like the most expensively casted docu-drama ever made.
Valkyrie is available at Amazon here.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
By now, you know whether you like Judd Apatow films or not, and if you’ve been reading my reviews for a while, you also know that I’ve got a soft-spot for these “loser comes good” movies, if only because the irreverent humour in them is normally pretty well aligned with my tastes.
Most of the recent Apatow movies we’ve seen have been a little disappointing, but “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” isn’t. This might be something to do with the gorgeous Kristen Bell, who makes the whole thing seem a little less shambolic than “Pineapple Express” as she seems to be actually working from a script, or it might be the fact that the story itself is particularly close to Jason Segel’s heart, and he wrote the movie.
Tiny Mila Kunis is full of character and cute enough, though as the fairly obvious fall-girl for Segel’s recovering heart, as the movie progresses she seems to be almost as problematic a mate as Bell’s control junkie superstar. Russell Brand, pretty much as Russell Brand, is curiously winning throughout – I don’t normally find his humour appealing, but here he’s a very generous actor, and the usual Apatow ensemble members are a less intrusive bunch here than in other movies, making things fun without being tiring.
If there’s a genius to the film, it’s that as bad as Bell’s Sarah Marshall gets, there’s a feeling that she isn’t really the problem, and that if Segel’s Peter is having trouble getting past his relationship with her, it’s as much his willful unwillingness to do so as it is any real deliberate hold she has over him.
At the moment, the movie is under £5 at Amazon. It’s well worth the budget price.
Push
“Push” is what happens when a half-decent director and cast decide to take a stab at remaking the appalling “Jumper”.
No, I’ll try that again – “Push” is what happens when the director of “Lucky Number Slevin” decides to make a super-hero team movie, without bothering with any of that pesky licensing nonsense.
Like “…Slevin”, it’s a nicely made movie that narratively falls apart ever so slightly in the final act. The cast is likeable and carry off their roles well enough – typically, when it comes to Fanning, surprisingly where Evans is concerned.
Cinematically it looks like the “Bourne” movies by way of Ridley Scott’s 80s Tokyo fetish, with some gorgeous locations and beautifully designed set-pieces, with very slick action sequences brushing up against jump-cut auterism that wouldn’t be out of place in Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire”.
The whole story is about super-powered people running from shady organisations who would exploit and experiment on them, and as far as that goes it’s all well and good – there’s a colourful maguffin sitting in a briefcase of the sort that people see as a plot-hole in films like this, but a plot-device in films like “Pulp Fiction”, as well as plenty of opportunities for personality conflict, intrigue and wise-cracking while the world falls apart.
If the cohesion of the narrative goes to pieces in the final act, it’s only forgivably so – there’s a point where the movie-makers find themselves having to deal with precognition as a story element, and that hardly ever works out for Hollywood; of course they get themselves tangled up in too much plot.
There is shameless sequel baiting at the end, as well, but you know, I’d pay to see further installments, so I didn’t mind it all that much at all.
Push is out soon, and it’s pretty cheap at release, it seems.
Pathfinder
In “Pathfinder”, Karl Urban plays a young man, born to Vikings, who is lost and raised by native Americans. Never quite fitting in with the peaceful tribal culture, but having nightmares about the violence he saw in his forgotten childhood, Ghost – because of course, as a pale boy among redskins, that’s his name – is away hunting when his adopted village – and family – are torn apart by the returning Viking horde.
Escaping to the next village, and hungry for revenge, Ghost has to embrace his ancestry if he is to yadda yadda yadda…
Yes, so, okay, the film pretty much contains every “raised by wolves” cliche, “noble savage” stereotype and sexy dry-ice eighties music video forest-lighting trick known to man. It’s also got a serious hard-on for early Michael Mann movies.
But put another way – it’s a film where Karl Urban seeks revenge with a sword, and Clancy Brown rules the screen as the leader of a rampaging and suitably grotesque band of barbarians. Moon Bloodgood delivers pragmatic New World mysticism with a gorgeous pout as the obvious love interest. And it is way more graphically violent and slickly made than we were expecting.
The film is a self-contained love-affair with the “vengeful but honour-bound hero” genre typified by films like “Braveheart” and “Last Of The Mohicans”, but if you’ve got a soft spot for movies like that, like we do, you can’t go far wrong with this largely overlooked movie.
It’s worth every penny of the roughly £4 you can get it for. You can buy it here at Amazon, but most high-street outlets are budget pricing it just as much. If nothing else, there is limitless potential for drinking games in it.
