How I Live Now

No vampires or demon hunters in this one: Kevin Macdonald’s triumphant adaptation of the teen-fiction bestseller by Meg Rosoff deals with some very real issues without even a single appearance from a supernatural being (who’d have thought it was possible?).

 American girl Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) enters an entirely different world when her father sends her away to live with her cousins. Initially she plays the irritable goth chic who excludes herself from any sort of fun and spends her time moping around the country mansion trying to get phone signal, but after her aunt inexplicably flies off to Switzerland for work she develops a relationship with the eldest cousin Edmond and actually begins to enjoy herself. Frolicking around to the music of Nick Drake in the Hobbity-Narnia countryside either down by the waterfall, in

the woods nursing injured hawks or putting party hats on goats, everything’s very idyllic and feels almost too perfect. Which is why when the effects of war really hit hard and they find themselves split up and the girls evacuated to a suburban home, the film takes a darker turn and they begin to fear for their lives.

 World War III is how it’s described by the youngest cousin Piper, but nothing is ever explained in any greater detail; bombs fall on London and widespread evacuation and forced recruitments are the norm, yet it remains ambiguous as to who or what Britain is fighting. How I Live Now is a film that explores the effects of large-scale war from a teenage perspective rather than the conflict itself and does so with a much greater nerve than you’d expect. Of course it’s got that romantic edge to it that all films aimed at a teenage demographic are obliged to include, but that doesn’t stop it from punching you in the stomach every now and then. The rural settings are powerful contrasts to the cities and towns now transformed into factories of war so that from the second half onwards the atmosphere descends into a post-apocalyptic fight for survival.

Ronan demonstrates again that she’s more than capable of playing any role she sets her mind to, and both Tom Holland and George Mackay are equally watchable, though highest praise goes to ten year old Harley Bird (youngest BAFTA winner for voicing Pepper Pig) for a genuinely moving performance. Though a little unfocused at times, How I Live Now goes places where other films of this genre do not, confronting the terrors of isolation, war and even death in a narrative that never fails to carry itself forward. 


Original article published on: http://www.impactnottingham.com/2013/10/review-how-i-live-now/ 

The Conjuring

  The new film by modern master of horror James Wan is a strange concoction. On one hand it manages to reel off every single genre cliché of the last decade or so without pausing for breath, but on the other it’s one of the few genuinely terrifying experiences produced in recent years. Wan began his cinematic career with Saw, a film which, however formulaic its sequels have become, was a big step in the quest for originality, proving that you don’t need a shaky camcorder to make a low-budget horror. Now, after the relatively low-key Dead Silence, the hugely popular Insidious (with its sequel due mid-September) and the news that Wan is swapping ghosts for gearboxes and is now in the process of filming no. 7 in the Fast & Furious franchise, The Conjuring feels more like a conclusion: a summing up of what has come before.

  Set on Rhode Island in a farm house typical of any horror released in the ‘70s (Amityville being the obvious comparison, though Psycho must also be an inspiration), The Conjuring is based on real life paranormal investigators Lorraine and Ed Warren’s most infamous case. In 1971 Roger and Carolyn Perron move in with their five daughters and begin to experience the usual: doors slam, the clocks stop at 3.07am, a funky smell of rotting meat follows them around the house and one of the girls finds a music box that she uses to see her ‘new friend’. Reaching the end of their tether they seek out the Warrens, who come laden with night vision cameras, UV lights and a Bible, intent on destroying the sinister presence before it latches onto the family itself.

  Credit must be given to the writing partnership of Chris and Carey Hayes (the brothers behind House of Wax, The Reaping and Whiteout) whose characterisation of the Warrens is what gives The Conjuring that extra dimension. The two ghost hunters, played by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, are themselves parents who are forced to leave a young daughter at home with her nanny while they travel the country relieving the possessed and putting minds to rest, but more importantly they fervently believe that what they’re doing is real (which is where the comparisons to Mystery Inc. end). Farmiga, already a horror veteran, having appeared in Orphan and more recently A&E’s Bates Motel as Norma Bates, is undeniably the star of the film as Lorraine Warren, a clairvoyant on the brink of a psychological breakdown. Her obvious care for the wellbeing of the Perrons while at the same time having to deal with her own inner-turmoil gives The Conjuring proper substance, making it more than just another horror flick.

   Here Wan does what he does best, creating a tight two hours of built-up suspense, slowly cranking up the tension until suddenly it snaps and everything comes crashing down. The director understands the needs of his audience; the scares are predictable, yet so persistent that even the flick of a light switch can set your heart racing. Yet perhaps this gathering-together of haunted house conventions is a sign that they’ve run their course, that maybe it’s time for mainstream horror to come up with something original rather than simply sticking the clichés together in different ways. It’s hard to say - more likely The Conjuring just proves that the old tricks are the best, and if that be the case, who better to perform them than James Wan?

World War Z

Zombie films are flooding in so thick and fast these days it’s a wonder that there’s anything original out there; we’ve seen the classics, the sequels, the parodies, the zom-rom-coms – we’ve seen nazi zombies, cyborg zombies, voodoo zombies and even an Osama bin Laden zombie, so why did Brad Pitt and his production team ‘Plan B’ fight so hard to procure the rights for Max Brooks’ novel World War Z? Perhaps he wanted to trump Woody Harrelson at being the ultimate destroyer of the undead, or maybe he just needed somewhere to show off his new haircut? The more likely answer is that the story had the potential for director Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Quantum of Solace, etc.) to create something truly epic, on a scale that encompasses the entire planet (no wonder they had budget problems).

 It’s a global disaster movie where instead of the ocean, the world is subjected to wave upon wave of the undead, whose main objective (as with any zombie) is to kill and eat as many of the population as possible. Pitt plays Gerry Lane, an ex-investigator for the UN who has to protect his wife (Mireille Enos) and two daughters from the zombie virus while attempting to discover a cure at the same time. Accompanied by a scientist and a military squad he travels to East Asia where it is rumoured that the outbreak first began.

As an action thriller Forster delivers a relatively engaging contribution to the zombie genre. It’s incredibly fast paced (exactly like the zombie attacks: if you’re bitten, you turn within fifteen seconds) and any scenes that don’t involve running or shooting are usually full of breathy and sometimes incomprehensible exchanges of dialogue. Most of the time this works in carrying you along with the plot, but the sheer speed of the film is so limiting to the actors that for the audience, investing any kind of emotion proves difficult. Pitt never actually has time to give a performance – all he seems to do is demonstrate his sprinting skills. Same with Peter Capaldi, who spends his time strutting angrily down the corridors of a medical research centre in Cardiff.

The zombie genre has always been a perfect vehicle for reflecting the fears of the contemporary audience through metaphor: in White Zombie (1932) it was slavery, where the resurrected corpses were forced to work in the sugar cane mills; in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), the zombies attacking the mall represented mass-consumerism, and in more recent years films like 28 Days Later and [REC] dealt with incurable diseases and world-wide pandemics. What’s interesting about World War Z (and actually one of its strengths) is that it could come to resemble our declining economies and the steady rise of unemployment, or even (and the title gives it away) the fear of another world war. Lane’s journeying to the army bases of South Korea and Israel evokes the setting and atmosphere of many present day war films, especially Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, and serves as a reminder that the film is very much grounded in reality. Apart from a few scenes here and there, the film never shies away from depicting the brutality of the zombie attack and its effects: there are moments that are genuinely quite shocking – at least we’re not given another dumbed-down Die Hard 5.

Pitt made a gamble with World War Z, but it seems to have paid off. Forster’s directing and Damon Lindelof’s re-hashing of the script may have angered fans of the original novel, but the end result is not as terrible or as commercially-driven as it could have been.

Original source: http://www.impactnottingham.com/2013/06/review-world-war-z/

Mud

Written and directed by Jeff Nichols, whose last two features Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter thrust him blinking and shivering into the public eye, Mud is a deep-southern drama about loyalty and the consequences of love and sees Matthew McConaughey continue his ‘McConaissance’ as the enigmatic title character.

The story follows Ellis and Neckbone, two teenage boys living in Arkansas, who travel to an island on the Mississippi river where they find a boat wedged firmly in the branches of a tree. On climbing up they realise that someone has been living below deck and decide to leave, but when they return to their own boat they meet Mud, a man with a gun in his belt and a tattooed snake running up his arm. Distrustful at first, eventually they form a strong friendship with Mud, and bring food to him while attempting to help fix his boat. Out in the real world however, Ellis’ parents are on the verge of a divorce and Mud is wanted for murder.

As last year’s Killer Joe proves, McConaughey has shed his romantic-comedy skin and has now been reborn Christ-like into the world of dark indie dramas. Gone are the days of Failure to Launch and Fool’s Gold; just watch him eat a can of baked beans with his fingers to see that he’s a changed man. In the character of Mud he seems to have found a comfortable niche for himself, playing someone almost fantastical in how he lives – governed by superstition (the crosses in his boots, his lucky shirt to protect him from snake bites) and unwilling to confront his less than admirable past, he appears at first to be a father figure for the two boys, but as events unfold he becomes almost tragic, literally depending on them for survival.
 Tye Sheridan, who rose to fame as Brad Pitt’s son in The Tree of Life, plays Ellis with the sort of innocent determination that, along with his co-star Jacob Lofland, injects the film with the naivety of Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me; it’s because the story of Mud is told primarily from their perspectives that makes the film so engaging.

Nichols’ main strength lies in his Malick-esque ability for capturing the atmosphere of a place, while also including an underlying layer of the supernatural; in this case the influence of Beasts of the Southern Wild is unmistakable: the river location, a tone that verges on the Southern Gothic, even the boat in the tree – the two films are not that dissimilar in terms of aesthetics or character. However Mud, like Take Shelter before it, suffers from an over-long running time; at just over two hours the film feels stretched and unable to support the fast-paced events of Nichols’ screenplay. The dialogue is masterfully concise but in the end it’s left with too much space to fill and the film would benefit from removing several scenes and even certain plot strands. A good example would be Reese Witherspoon’s character, for though she might be an important character, she is entirely uninteresting and forces Mud at times to lose its focus.

A modern American fairytale, Mud is perhaps more enjoyable than Nichols’ previous work, but you get the feeling that his best is still to come.

Evil Dead

A long, long time ago when CGI was a thing of wonder; a toy that only the most experienced filmmakers were allowed to play with, director Sam Raimi and his good friend Bruce Campbell created The Evil Dead, a low-budget horror film that shocked and amazed critics and fans alike. Now, just over 30 years later, Uruguayan director Fede Alvarez (with Raimi and Campbell as producers) has made what its poster describes as ‘the most terrifying film you will ever experience’: a remake of the original, simply titled Evil Dead. 

 The premise is simple: five friends are terrorised by the spirits of the dead in a cabin in the woods. Mia (played by Suburgatory’s Jane Levy) is the film’s focus, a girl who suffers from a serious drug addiction and has asked her brother David and three expendable friends (all you need to know is that the initials of their first names spell DEMON) to keep her company while she goes cold turkey. After a quick trip into the cellar on arrival they find the fabled Necronomicon: a book wrapped in barbed wire and bound in what looks like human skin, which, unsurprisingly, they read from.  

   As with most horror remakes, the charm of the original has completely vanished. Tongue is always in cheek when watching Raimi’s classic, but with Evil Dead nothing is ever particularly funny; the horror-comedy genre is left far behind and you get the feeling that Alvarez is seriously trying to create the scariest film ever made. Does he succeed? Not even close. The film just seems to be a succession of increasingly disgusting self-mutilations; something that isn’t entirely a bad thing, but it’s safe to say there’ll be more wincing in the cinemas than screaming. There are certainly a few moments of terror – and this is largely due to Jane Levy’s ability to pull the most disturbing faces imaginable – but it lacks the low-budget, paper-maché atmosphere that makes the original such a thrill to watch.

   What must be applauded though, is Alvarez’s complete disregard for CGI. Nowadays any old film can afford a few computer graphics, no matter the budget (watch Birdemic for proof), so to actually make a film that features double the amount of gore than in all the Saw movies combined without even a single green screen is actually very impressive – and there’s plenty of arm-slicing, cheek-gouging and nail guns in the face to be getting on with.    

 Also praiseworthy is that Evil Dead doesn't rely too heavily on the original; the references are there for fans to pick out, but they certainly don’t weigh the film down. The plot isn't even an exact copy - the inclusion of Mia’s drug problem is topical and also provides a legitimate reason for actually staying in the cabin in the first place; after she rushes in screaming and covered in blood, her friends simply attribute her behaviour to ‘crazy withdrawal symptoms’ and leave it at that (of course, they quickly change their minds when she starts slicing her tongue in half). If you take a step back Evil Dead is really not a bad film for its genre, especially when compared to the recent Texas Chainsaw 3Ds and Paranormal Activity clones we've been subjected to; it may not be as revolutionary as its predecessor but at least it’s not afraid to try.

Spring Breakers

For those who aren’t familiar with the films of director/hipster Harmony Korine, Spring Breakers will look just like another Project X, one of those coming-of-age, ‘finding yourself’ teen movies that seem to come around every summer, similar to a Playboy shoot by the sea perhaps, or an Instagrammed version of Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents. It can’t be denied - that is basically what Spring Breakers is: beach parties, girls in fluorescent bikinis and excess of alcohol and cocaine, but there’s a whole lot more to be got from it if you’re willing to endure the initial blast of colour and dubstep.

 Korine began his career in film at the age of 18 by writing the script for Larry Clark’s Kids, a low-budget indie film about a gang of teenagers living in NYC, and went on to direct his near perfect debut Gummo two years later, the story a group of earthquake survivors in Ohio. Julien Donkey-Boy, Mr Lonely and Trash Humpers slowly followed, and now Spring Breakers, his most commercial feature yet. The attention is due, unsurprisingly, to the presence of James Franco and the two ex-Disney girls Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez. 

 It begins with Skrillex (you know the one) and a full-on hyper-sexual montage of dancing and beer bathing on a beach in Florida. Then, after robbing a restaurant with balaclavas and hammers to get coach money, the four girls (Hudgens, Gomez, Ashley Benson, and Korine’s own wife Rachel) arrive but are immediately arrested following a drug bust in a stranger’s apartment. Enter James Franco as Alien (‘I’m from a different planet, y’all!’), a ‘gangsta’ rapper with gold teeth and shoulder-length braids who bails them out of prison and brings them to his house overlooking the sea where he shows them his AK47 collection. He becomes a sort of mentor to the girls, providing them with food, money and guns; Franco plays him with a sinister arrogance, a man who has fully embraced his criminal lifestyle but still yearns for something deeper. His piano cover of Britney Spears’ ‘Everytime’ is the best scene of the film.
 Out of the four girls, Gomez’s character is perhaps the most interesting and surprisingly well-acted; she’s the only one who believes something to be deeply wrong about their situation and is the first to leave. The ominous click of a loaded gun and Franco’s repeated ‘Spring Break forever…’ leaves the audience with no doubt that the rapper’s intentions are not entirely respectable. 

These are just the bare bones of Spring Breakers. Korine’s style is not to write scenes chronologically, but to create sketches – stories within themselves that may or may not relate to the main narrative. This cut-and-paste technique might not sit well with some people, but it’s certainly interesting to watch – you get a sense of how the film’s going to play out even before the girls get to Miami: the flash of a bloody hand, a muffled scream – it’s addictive cinema.

 But what’s the point of Spring Breakers? Is it just pornography disguised? Is it a social commentary on today’s youth culture? It’s difficult to say, but it seems to be more an exploration of its darker side; the desire to be free, to have fun and ‘live life to the fullest, y’all!’ is so strong in these characters that it leads to them becoming full-blown criminals just to be a part of this unattainable lifestyle. Of course, the usual controversy surrounding a Harmony Korine film is present (see the exploitative nature of Kids, the drowning of cats in Gummo) and it’s hard to ignore – some of those camera angles must be illegal - but the film is actually very enjoyable. If anything, go and see it for James Franco.

original article: http://www.impactnottingham.com/2013/04/review-spring-breakers/ 

Mama

The amount of films that Guillermo Del Toro has leant his name to over the past few years makes him seem like an eccentric collector, or perhaps a nurturing father trying to keep his children close; they’re all in the same vein as his widely acclaimed masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth, usually combining elements of Spanish fairytale and European horror with a dysfunctional household setting (it’s hard not to generalise, but this is essentially what happens in each film). The Orphanage was the first, and probably the most well-known of the group – a well-constructed twisting of the missing-child genre. There then followed such films as Julia’s Eyes and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, both individual and both excellent examples of Del Toro’s influence. Mama, the debut from Spanish director Andrés Muschietti, is a welcome contribution to this already rich genre.

 A man drives home after shooting his ex-wife in the head and kidnaps his two young daughters, Victoria and Lilly. While speeding down a remote snow-covered road in the mountains, the car skids and goes over the cliff, and, unhurt, they stumble to a deserted cabin where the father is taken by a tall, dark figure and never seen again. When the girls are found five years later by their uncle Lucas they have become feral: thin, unwashed and snarling – when under observation they seem to talk to an invisible being they call Mama, who seems to act as a maternal substitute for the children. Only Victoria, who has retained parts of her vocabulary, is willing to re-enter the human world; Lilly, on the other hand, remains unresponsive and sits in the corner eating moths. Lucas and his girlfriend (Jessica Chastain) decide to raise the girls themselves, but they soon come to realise that Mama is not just a product of over-active imaginations.

Credit must be given to the child actors in Mama. As in most horror films of the ‘pedophobic’ genre (The Exorcist, The Omen, Village of the Damned etc.) it’s hard to imagine how directors get their actors to give such unnerving, and sometimes terrifying, performances, particularly when surrounded by older, more experienced professionals, but these girls are very, very good. Their roles demand a certain seriousness – unhinged yet innocent, hardened by their experiences in the wild and uncertain about their new guardians. Jessica Chastain is also enjoyable as the black haired, bass-playing girlfriend - the rock-chick attitude is authentic and very watchable as we see her struggle to adapt to family life and is certainly a different change of pace from her character in this year’s Zero Dark Thirty.

 What raises Mama above the steady flow of mediocre horror is not just Del Toro’s influence, but also the way in which the director is unafraid to take risks. The standard horror tropes are still very much present (creepy crayon drawings, loud noises in the night, camera flashes in a dark room etc.) but there are countless other ways in which Mama surprises its audience. There’s a dream sequence, for example, that feels as if it shouldn’t belong in the main narrative at all, so different is it in style and tone that it could easily pass as a surreal little short film of its own. Similarly, the glimpses we get of ‘Mama’ herself are brilliant; so fleeting, fantastical and unexpected that you want to see more of her, yet at the same time you really don’t.

A satisfying combination of fantasy and horror, if you yearn for more of what Pan’s Labyrinth offered, Mama might not be able to fill the gap, but it undoubtedly tries hard.

Original source: http://www.impactnottingham.com/2013/03/review-mama/

Warm Bodies

 At first glance Warm Bodies doesn’t look too appealing – another paranormal romance, but from the perspective of a zombie? A zom-rom-com? It looks like the kind of thing small teenage boys will take their girlfriends to see come Valentine’s Day, but no, it’s actually a lot better than it sounds – adapted from the novel by Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies is a film that realises how ridiculous it appears and just goes with it. It doesn’t try to be a full-blown zombie thriller like 28 Days Later (though there is a brilliant reference to Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters - see picture) and it surprisingly doesn’t attempt to shove an unrealistic message of enduring love at its audience, as you’d think it would.

 It’s set after (or during) the zombie apocalypse and R is a zombie who lives in an airport with the rest of the un-dead population. Something of a hipster, he lives alone in an aeroplane listening to old vinyl records and only emerges to eat the living or to groan at his good friend M at the baggage reclaim desk. Then, when out on a hunting trip, R saves the life of Julie (whose dad is John Malkovich – if that doesn’t make a film worth watching, then what does?) and feels the need to protect her. As their relationship develops, he slowly recovers his humanity and they attempt to establish a bond between the human race and the un-dead.
 Even with names like R and Julie, it’s not immediately obvious that Warm Bodies has Shakespeare at its heart – not until the balcony scene half way through do the audience eventually realise that this is an un-dead version of Romeo and Juliet. Humans and zombies = Montagues and Capulets. It’s quite clever really, structuring the film around the original love story, and it doesn’t becoming overpowering at all; it’s simply there in the background for the audience to pick up on. 

 It’s hard, though, to applaud Nicholas Holt for his performance. He’s obviously having fun in the role, but to be honest, if most people stumbled down the street groaning like a zombie they’d probably be doing a pretty good job. Holt’s shown he can act well in films like X-Men First Class, A Single Man and the TV series Skins, but he seems to have been chosen for Warm Bodies simply because of his dashing-zombie good looks. Still charming though.
 The best thing about Warm Bodies is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously; it’s more a light-hearted comedy than a miserable tale of forbidden love and the bleak reality of death. No doubt there are people out there who’ll take one look at the poster and pass it off as a piece Twilight-inspired rubbish, like many of the other teen-orientated soft horror films that are circulating the cinemas these days (just to be clear: Twilight has its moments, but anything that tries to imitate it is usually not worth watching). R’s internal narration is what makes it such an enjoyable watch; endearing, observant and most importantly, self-aware – his mind seems to be completely human. ‘Don’t say anything creepy’, he repeats to himself as he sits down next to Julie. His insightful monologues and passing comments, coupled with Jonathon Levine’s sharp direction, is what makes Warm Bodies stand out in this stiff corpse of a genre. There is hope for us yet.

The Keep (1983)

Written, directed and produced by Michael Mann, and very loosely based on the F. Paul Wilson novel of the same name, The Keep was both a commercial and critical flop, but that didn’t stop Kino Klubb from hosting a screening of it at Broadway cinema, Nottingham, last night on a beautiful 35 millimetre print from the BFI.

The Keep begins with several armoured Nazi trucks travelling down a long, winding road through the Carpathian Alps in Romania. They arrive at a small village and disembark, and as the soldiers begin to walk the inhabitants run into their houses and slam the windows and Tangerine Dream starts to play. Something weird is going on.
 And then they reach The Keep, a great fortress of black stone stretching from one end of the screen to the other, and the dark entrance looks cold. Fearing nothing, the Nazis walk over the drawbridge and into the darkness and are immediately greeted by the janitor, a bearded man in a golden robe who gives them no words of welcome, but warns them against touching any of the 108 nickel crosses that adorn the walls of The Keep. As they walk its many passages, the Nazi captain remarks, ‘these walls are built backwards, almost as if it were designed not to keep something out, but to keep something in!’. Definitely weird. 

 Of the more well-known actors to star in The Keep, (Sir) Ian Mckellen is certainly the most bizarre, not least because we’re so used to seeing him as Magneto or Gandalf. He plays Dr Cuza, a Romanian scientist with an American accent brought to The Keep against his will to decipher a message written on the wall in a 500-year old dead language. Speaking about his fond memories of filming in a 2004 interview, he said he thought he had been ‘ill-cast’, going on to reveal that he had narrowly avoided a mental breakdown and had to be flown back to London from the filming location in a disused quarry in Wales. His character has a rare wasting disease that makes him appear thirty years older so that most of the time he travels about in a wheelchair looking sullen and uncomfortable.

 Mocking aside, however, The Keep is actually a very enjoyable film, and this is mostly, but not all, due to Tangerine Dream’s soundtrack. Nazis run in slow motion through the bright mist and the eerie synth begins to play like a distorted, less uplifting version of Chariots of Fire; these are the kind of moments that give the film its unexplainable power. The symbol of the nickel cross present throughout the film (and all over Broadway’s cinebar) combined with the somehow-beguiling special effects, makes The Keep look oddly attractive, giving it an 80s charm similar to Back to the Future or Lost Boys. It’s easy to see why it has such a cult following. The atmosphere is just brilliantly constructed – it’s very Lovecraftian and very surreal, so much so that even if the plot is at times incomprehensible, it doesn’t really matter.

 None of it matters: it’s just a lot of fun. It’s certainly not perfect, and not even that well-acted, but nowhere else can you get the simple joy of watching Nazis absorb mist through their eyes and then explode. Sadly The Keep has never been officially released on DVD or Blu-Ray in any country, so it may be hard to get hold of, but if ever you get a chance, prepare to face the evil that drives people out in the middle of a rainy night.

Original article: http://www.impactnottingham.com/2013/02/kino-klubb-presents-the-keep/

Zero Dark Thirty

After the success of Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker, it made perfect sense for director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal to continue in the same vein as this intense, highly realistic war epic, their original intention being to portray the failed attack on Osama bin Laden in 2001. When news came in 2011, however, that soldiers had actually managed to kill and capture bin Laden at his residence in Pakistan, Bigelow realised that a completely new film would have to be created, one that chronicled the ten years leading up to this historic moment. They shelved the original script, started again from scratch, and the result, just 18 months after the raid itself, is Zero Dark Thirty.

Bigelow has said in interviews that what she was attempting was a journalistic approach to film, and this is certainly true of Zero Dark Thirty. Events on screen are (one has to assume) strictly fact-based and, more importantly, un-biased; this is the right way to shoot a modern war movie, with the opinions of the film-makers left back at the office. That being said, ZDT is a lot more interesting as a story than it is gripping. To those without a detailed knowledge of the inner-workings of the CIA, younger members of the audience especially, much of the plot will be unknown, and ignoring some of the more overly-dramatised portions, the film could almost be viewed as a documentary. The problem is that ZDT tries to cover too much in such a short space of time: ten whole years in just over two and a half hours, particularly with the amount of detail that the script has to get across. There are moments, the London bus bombing and the explosion at the Islamabad hotel especially, that are only briefly touched upon - there is simply too much going on and it becomes hard at times to assess the impact that these kinds of events had on the operation itself.

 The performances are what hold it all together. Jessica Chastain is incredible as Maya (whose real life counterpart remains undercover); her previous on-screen appearances in Lawless and The Tree of Life didn’t do her enough justice. She carries the lead role with such an unemotional determination interspersed with moments of lightness and alacrity that it’s clear to see why she got the Oscar nomination (although her resemblance to Claire Danes’ character in Homeland is unfortunate). Jason Clarke also gives a surprising performance as a tough, but friendly CIA operative and the appearance of Mark Strong is a delight as always.

For those unaware of the controversy surrounding ZDT, several critics have argued that its depiction of torture (and there’s a lot of it) is not only unnecessary to the narrative, but actually an endorsement; ‘pro-torture’ is the phrase being thrown around. At the start of the film, Ammar, a captive with supposed terrorist contacts, is subjected to beatings, waterboarding and is forced into a small box – it’s horrible to watch, but it in no way endorses torture. This brings us back to Bigelow’s idea of a ‘journalistic’ approach to film; it’s made clear that the CIA do not take any pleasure in these interrogations but the film remains neutral in what it shows to the audience and the torture is neither approved of nor condemned – it’s merely part of the story.

The last act, however, is where it all comes together. The raid on bin Laden’s hideout in the early hours of the morning (zero dark thirty, to be precise) is reminiscent of some of the tenser scenes from The Hurt Locker and is such a brilliant piece of film-making that it’s difficult to look away. Obviously the audience knows the outcome (apologies to anyone living under a rock), but it’s how the soldiers actually carry it out that makes it so fascinating. Zero Dark Thirty may not be as perfect as Bigelow’s previous effort, but it comes very close; it’s masterful, analytical and a fresh and impressive contribution to its genre.

Texas Chainsaw 3D

Texas Chainsaw 3D: a film that has to resort to throwing chainsaws at its audience to make sure they’re pay attention. It ignores all other sequels and prequels of the Chainsaw franchise and carries on from the events of the 1974 original, beginning with the townspeople burning down Leatherface’s house along with his entire family. Years later, teenager Heather Miller inherits a Texas estate from her grandmother and travels there with a group of friends, only to discover that the house harbours a chainsaw-wielding serial killer with a mask of skin sewn to his face. Leatherface is back… again.

 One of Texas Chainsaw’s biggest failings is its insistence that it is a sequel to the original. If they had marketed it a sequel to the 2003 remake, that would have been bearable, but to actually try to snuggle up to the warmth of the original in the hope that some of its greatness would rub off just doesn’t really work.  The film even begins with a muddled two minutes of actual clips from Tobe Hooper’s classic – an attempt to remind its audience of what happened, treating it almost as though it were a condensed prequel, but it essentially just acts as a comparison. Big mistake. It’s like if a small child showed its parents an oil painting by Picasso and then held up a scribbled pencil drawing beside it, except you’re not thinking ‘this is so cute, at least he tried’, instead you just want to go home and watch the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, without having to go to the cinema and pay an extortionate amount of money to see it in 3D.

 The 1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre is held in such high regard because of its ability to shock even forty years after its release (consider, too, its tiny budget of $80,000; TC3D’s budget was roughly 1000 times that). The film has a unique grainy, yellow quality that makes it instantly recognisable and somehow vaguely comforting, but Texas Chainsaw 3D is more in the vein of a Saw movie (in fact, a sequel is being considered even as you read this), and so the beauty is gone and the characters have been replaced by wooden stereotypes who spend more time in their underwear than fully-clothed.

 What is most interesting about Texas Chainsaw 3D, and perhaps its only redeeming quality, is the way in which Leatherface is humanised: as the film unwinds, he becomes less of a chainsaw-wielding maniac, and more of a man who cares for the members of his own family that have fed and clothed him throughout his life, for after all ‘blood is thicker than water’.  Yes, this element of sympathy has been explored before, most obviously in TCM3, but here it comes as a surprise, particularly when the film is just another money-making vehicle for the ‘spectacle’ of 3D, which is itself underwhelming and for the most part unnecessary (a few bloodspurts here and there, and an occasional chainsaw in the face are not enough to merit its inclusion in the first place).

 Other than that, there’s not much more you can say. If you revel in watching teenagers being hacked into unrecognisable pieces and more ass-shots than you can keep count of, then Texas Chainsaw 3D does the job. The acting is alright (note the rooky cop played by Scott Eastwood, son of Clint), the special effects are tolerable and the story is good enough, but overall not exactly worth the admission price.  

Original article: http://www.impactnottingham.com/2013/01/review-texas-chainsaw-3d/