Rango

An animated western starring a chameleon and directed by the man who brought us the Pirates of the Caribbean series, doesn’t instantly install confidence. However Gore Verbinski (who also directed The Ring and The Mexican) with the help of an impressive voice cast, has actually given us something withRango that is very intriguing. Despite this being a Nickelodeon film, the content seems very much directed at the accompanying adults in the audience. With its many allusions to other films like Chinatown, The Three Amigos and any number of spaghetti Westerns, Rango seems to have pulled off the Pixar trick of entertaining both young and old.

Rango (Johnny Depp) is a chameleon with an identity crisis (animal stereotype anyone?), who is thrown from his comfortable, but boring, life as a pet only to find himself lost in the Mojave Desert. He is pointed in the direction of a town by a cryptic armadillo (Alfred Molina, Spiderman 2) and finds himself in an Old West town populated by lizards, amphibians and rodents. Rango uses the opportunity of being unknown to create a tough persona for himself, which sees him being made sheriff. The town, Dirt, is in the midst of a water crisis and Rango isn’t aware of the danger he has put himself in, or the responsibility he has taken on as the town’s people look to him for a solution.

Dirt is populated with typical western characters, the iffy authority figure in the tortoise Mayor (Ned Beatty, Deliverance, Toy Story 3), the psychopathic gunslinger, Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy, Love Actually) and the precocious child-mouse, Pricilla (Abigail Breslin, Zombieland). The film’s fellow hero alongside Rango is Beans (Isla Fisher, The Wedding Crashers), an iguana who is trying to save her family’s ranch, and who has become suspicious about how the town’s water supply is being managed.

The film has been inspired by Clint Eastwood westerns, but added to this it has also borrowed from wider sources. The film’s narrative is very similar to Polanski’s 1974 noir film Chinatown, though it obviously avoids the less savoury aspects of the plot. Another notable adult reference in the film is Terry Gilliam’s 1998 film Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas, which also starred Depp.

The CGI animation is beautiful and while the animals are all given personalities through the design, it is the landscape that is amazing.This was ILM’s (Image, Light & Magic), a division of LucasFilm, first animated feature (to read more about the animation process click here) and their careful attention to detail makes it appear to have been shot as opposed to created on a computer.

Bearing all this in mind what is there for the younger audience? There are some nice touches in terms of a fun (though at times absurdist) owl mariachi band that narrates the film, and there is plenty of slapstick comedy for kids. But overall it is easy to suspect that older audiences will get far more enjoyment out of this film than the seemingly target audience. While the film’s pacing could have done with some tightening and at times the film pastiches are too many, on the whole Rango is an enjoyable trip down cinematic memory lane.

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First published on Trespass

Wasted on the Young

Coming out firing with more style than substance, Australian Ben C. Lucas‘ feature film directing/writing debut, Wasted on the Young is a slick and fast-paced high school drama. Tackling meaty themes of bullying, violence and the role of the bystander with flashy visuals and a thumping soundtrack, this is a film that shows promise but is ultimately unsatisfying.

Set around an exclusive high school where the swimming jocks dictate the social hierarchy, the film follows the fall-out from a party held by leader of the pack, 17-year old Zack (newcomer Alex Russell). Awash with A-class drugs the party sees the pretty and sweet Xandrie (Adelaide Clemens, X-men Origins: Wolverine) roofied, gang-raped and left for dead. Darren (Oliver Ackland, The Proposition) who is at the opposite end of the social spectrum to his popular stepbrother Zack, is determined to find out the truth about what happened to Xandrie and who was involved.

In this teenage world dominated by social media and devoid of any adult role-models, rumours about Xandrie spread like wildfire through the school, with the techno-savvy students debating the events of the party on facebook. But despite the control Zack exercises over his peers he is threatened by the quiet Darren, and as he tries to maintain his grip on power the atmosphere at school threatens to topple over into violence.

Zack (Alex Russell)

Lucas has spoken in interviews about wanting to make the film more thematic than realistic, and he has been somewhat successful in creating a morality play of sorts. The central idea of the film is that if you allow bad things to happen to people, without protesting, you too are culpable. The responsibility of the bystander is definitely interesting to investigate and the film’s initial set-up is very intriguing, but unfortunately all too quickly the story sinks into a revenge fantasy, which as the film progresses becomes increasingly preposterous and frustratingly squanders the potential of the film’s premise.

Ella (Geraldine Harkwill) and Xandrie (Adelaide Clemens)

Unfortunately for a film about high school dynamics, few of the cast look young enough to be 17 or 18 year olds. Adelaide Clemens is most certainly the shining light in this film. As Xandrie she embodies the ultimate high-school sweetheart. Good-looking and bubbly, she isn’t concerned with popularity and goes to Zack’s fateful party in order to see the shy and passive Darren. Clemens’ has a face for film, and is quickly able to influence the mood of each scene she is in.

Bret Easton Ellis-lite this new Australian film has been designed to appeal to an under-30s audience with Lucas seemingly using every visual trick in the book to try and make this film exciting. And it is aesthetically where Wasted on the Young is the most interesting and inventive, sadly the plot falls short of its director’s aspirations, and given his obvious filmic talents this is all the more disappointing.

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First published on Trespass

The Girl who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

So we come to the third and final film instalment of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. Following feisty hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) and tenacious journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), the trilogy has gone from murder mystery (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) to a political conspiracy (The Girl Who Played With Fire). The final film gives Lisbeth, who has been falsely accused, a chance to clear her name and expose the men who have been plotting to keep her silent for years.

Starting with a very brief recap, the third film swings straight into action; and given the film’s large cast of players it is certainly an advantage to have read the books. While subplots have been necessarily pared down or omitted, director Daniel Alfredson (brother of Tomas ‘Let The Right One In’ Alfredson) does make some odd choices at times, including partial sequences from the book that hang rather uselessly in the film due to their lack of context.

While director Niels Arden Oplev started the trilogy off with a bang, sadly the second film (also directed by Alfredson) failed to capture the freshness and excitement of the material. The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest is an improvement on his last effort, but Alfredson still seems to be lacking a cinematic vision. This film feels more like a long TV episode than a feature film.

In a series that champions the power of women, with strong female characters, it is no surprise that the film’s major strength is Noomi Rapace. Playing the complex heroine Lisbeth, a role that is light on dialogue, Rapace conveys a huge amount of emotion with her eyes, giving us the character’s fury and fear.

The Millennium Trilogy’s Swedish telling has been a mixed bag that ultimately hasn’t lived up to the promise of the books. Given that David Fincher (The Social Network), a director renowned for his distinct visual style, is in charge of the English-language version of this trilogy, will this be one of those rare instances where the American remake is an improvement on the original?

2.5/5

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First published in The Brag 28/02/11

The Way Back

The Way Back charts the journey of a group of seven men, who escape from a Siberian gulag in 1940 and make their way across a number of countries to safety in India. This film marks Australian director Peter Weir’s (Master and Commander, The Truman Show) return to filmmaking after a seven-year hiatus. While the renowned director has tried to use the film to show the resilience of the human spirit, ultimately the end result is very pretty but sadly emotionless fare.

British actor Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) stars as Janusz, a Polish man transported to a labour camp in Siberia by the invading Soviet forces for being a spy. Here Janusz stands out because of his kindness and quickly recruits a group of Eastern European political prisoners, and a solitary American prisoner, Mr. Smith (Ed Harris, A History of Violence) to plan an escape. During a ferocious snowstorm, they break out along with an unexpected companion, a violent Russian criminal, Valka (Colin Farrell, In Bruges) in tow.

Janusz (Jim Sturgess)

The Way Back has been adapted from Slawomir Rawicz‘ memoir, The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom (1956). However the truth of his story has long been debated and records show that although he was imprisoned in Siberia during WWII he didn’t escape but was released. It is widely believed that Rawicz’ book was based on accounts he heard during his time stationed in the Middle East after 1942. Weir has been very careful to state that this film is inspired by, as opposed to based on Rawicz’ account. Perhaps it is the director’s apprehension towards the material that has caused him to focus much more on the landscape than the film’s characters?

Mr Smith (Ed Harris) and Irena (Saoirse Ronan)

Creating an epic film that travels across Russia, Mongolia, China and Tibet (which was actually filmed in Bulgaria and Morocco) the film’s impressive cinematography (thanks to Russell Boyd) frames the desperate men against the imposing landscapes they must overcome. But watching this film it feels like nature wins out in the end. The characters are so underdeveloped that there exists no real relationship between them on screen or in fact between characters and the audience. Saoirse Ronan’s (Atonement) appearance as an orphaned Polish waif lends the film some emotion as her character is used to bring out backstory details about the men, but the only real benefactor of this is Harris’ character. The other characters are all pretty much reduced to singular traits; Good guy- Janusz, bad guy- Valka, priest- Voss (Gustaf Skarsgård), comedian- Zoran (Dragos Bucur), artist- Tamasz (Alexandru Potocean) and weakling- Kazik (Sebastian Urzendowsky).

Weir who co-wrote the screenplay fails to inject any real sense of human drama into the film and it is pretty apparent from early on which characters will make it and who will die along the way. The four time Oscar-nominated director seems to have lost his way with this film, and this is especially disappointing considering his calibre as a filmmaker.

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First published on Trespass

Unknown

To say Unknown is perfectly adequate cinema-fare sounds like a negative appraisal of the Liam Neeson (Taken, Schindler’s List) vehicle, but it isn’t meant to. Giving audiences everything it promises in the trailer, Unknown requires very little mental energy to follow. With no aspirations above its genre, Unknown embraces the implausibility of its tale and delivers fun but rather forgettable viewing.

Neeson stars as Dr. Martin Harris, a biologist who has travelled to Berlin with his wife Elizabeth (January Jones, Mad Men) to give a presentation at an important biotechnology conference. After the couple arrive at their hotel Martin realises he’s left his briefcase at the airport. Jumping into a taxi manned by Gina (Diane Kruger, Inglourious Basterds) he rushes to retrieve it, only to be waylaid by a freak accident that leaves him in a coma for days. After waking Martin finds another man (Aidan Quinn, Sarah’s Key) has taken over his life and that his wife has no recollection of him. Has his memory been confused by the accident, is he going mad, or is something more sinister going on?

Elizabeth Harris (January Jones)

Unknown is blessed with a good cast, including some fantastic German actors. Kruger is obviously completely miscast as a taxi-driver, but she doesn’t let this put her off delivering a strong performance. Bruno Ganz (The Reader, Downfall) as Ernst Jürgen, an ex-Stasi private investigator brings a nuanced performance that deserves to be in a far better film. His scene opposite Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon) contains the best dialogue in a film centred on strong action sequences.

Martin Harris (Liam Neeson), Gina (Diane Kruger) and Ernst (Bruno Ganz)

Neeson is obviously the driving force in the film and while it isn’t clear when he became a thinking man’s action hero, here he is yet again in high-speed car chases and fighting off would-be assassins. If you enjoyed Neeson’s recent turn in Taken (2008), you are probably going to enjoy this film as well.

Unknown doesn’t pull off its climax despite building momentum and sadly the ending sees the film crumple in a heap. Certainly if you thought too hard about the plot and its many gaping holes your head might explode, but this really is a film with no pretences of being art or breaking new ground, it is a paint-by-numbers thriller. Very light on substance Unknown is probably best relished on DVD or as part of the in-flight entertainment it is sure to become.

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First published on Trespass

Inside Job

We’ve all sat in the cinema terrified by a knife-wielding psychopath on screen, or a liver-eating genius. We’ve subtly tried to avoid looking as suspense grows and we know some sort of evil incarnation is lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce on a nubile Hollywood starlet. Horror films offer harmless thrills, the usual reaction after been frightened is laughter as we realise something rather inane has got the better of us just for a moment. However the new documentary Inside Job, which looks at the causes and consequences of the 2008 economic collapse, is truly terrifying cinema-viewing, and there will be no nervous giggling after watching this film.

Charles Ferguson the filmmaker behind 2007’s No End In Sight, which investigated America’s complete mishandling and lack of understanding of Iraq in the lead up to and during the first year of invasion, has taken on a humongous task. Using the 109 mins running time to try and understand and explain the reasons for the economic crisis and the roles that different groups played in the collapse, Ferguson conducts a series of interviews with Economists, Lobbyists, Advisors, Politicians, Bankers, Regulators and Journalists. Narrated by actor Matt Damon, the documentary examines the historical background and increasing deregulation of banking in the US, the criminalisation of an industry and the on-going problems and issues that are impeding any reform even after massive bailouts.

Christine Lagarde- The French Minister of Finance, Economic Affairs,
Industry and Employment

The wealth and greed of Wall Street comes as no surprise with the obvious villains of the piece being companies like Goldman and Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns. By now most of us understand that the root cause of the recent stock-market crash has to do with deregulation, and that the subprime mortgaging system and something called ‘derivatives’ led us to the brink of an economic Armageddon. But as the film delves deeper into banking and investment practices and the use Credit Default Swaps (CDS) the true ethics of modern banking are revealed. Watching this doco you feel first angry then afraid. You certainly never fully appreciated the immense greed that permeates not just the banking institutions but that has also corrupted many of those who are meant to keep checks on the industry and the academics who are suppose to advise and lead it.

Robert Gnaizda- General Counsel and Policy Director of the Greenlining Institute in Berkeley

Thankfully for those less economically-minded the film gives succinct explanations of complicated financial practices, without making you feel like you are being talked down to. Ferguson is a consummate interviewer and while he has final editing powers, many of his more hostile interviewees fall prey to their own egos. More often than not it is what they won’t and don’t say that proves to be the most telling.

Barney Frank- Democratic Representative for the state of Massachusetts

Offering a comprehensive understanding of the financial meltdown and its causes, Inside Job is a highly accomplished documentary. Unlike Horror movies where you can remind yourself it isn’t real, it is hard not to leave this doco with a sense of dread, because those responsible for the World’s recent economic woes are still in the driving seat and despite the political promise of regulations, little to nothing has really changed.

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First published on Trespass