Noah - Danny's review

There's been a spate of old world epics lately, maybe partly inspired by the success of Game of Thrones. I expect I'll watch Pompeii soon, though it looks terrible. At first glance Noah looks like the same kind of trash, but then you notice its directed by Darren Aronofsky, who for me is among a small group of directors who I'd watch anything by.

I was well rewarded. It was a good movie, with a lot to think about in it.

The first issue when retelling a well known story is how faithful to be to the 'original', especially when it's a biblical story which some people might be sensitive about. This gets dealt with early on, when the film begins with a rapid cartoony catch-up in a silly font about how mankind began, which does not match Genesis (instead I think they've embellished ideas from the non-canon Book of Enoch). The Noah myth is pretty confusing. I think most people know it's based on an even older Babylonian myth of King Gilgamesh (who possibly did really exist), but its been retold lots of other times too, including an ancient Greek version. The version that appears in the Bible is probably merged from two different stories, hence the confusion about things like how many pairs of each animal there were (two of each, or seven of the clean and two of the unclean) and the length of the flood.

As well as the flood, Noah is also known in the Bible (and the Koran), as the man who first discovered wine and got drunk. There's a weird bit where he gets drunk, his son Ham sees him naked, so he curses Ham's son. This is presumably some sort of biblical euphemism that I don't understand.

What all agree on though is that Noah was chosen by God, and was a man on a mission. At the start of the movie him and his family are the only good vegetarian descendants of Seth on Earth, with a very extreme moral code. He chides his son for picking a flower out the ground, and is deeply dismayed when three of the bad descendants of Cain kill a dog to eat it. Such are Noah's morals that he casually kills all of them and doesn't mention it again - though there is a touching funeral for the dog. Clearly Noah has given up on the rest of mankind.

Incidentally, it's not clear how Noah's family managed to keep their blood line pure, without some serious inbreeding. The kids all look very healthy though. The problem of inbreeding reoccurs when Noah's family are the only ones left at the end to repopulate the Earth, and of course at the start, when the only men on Earth leave the Garden of Eden and have children.

Noah is a really tough patriarch, and his word goes in the family. He's intense and single minded, a bit like his Inspector Javert, and indeed he does sing briefly, but not very loudly. His one act of kindness is rescuing Emma Watson as an extra family member and wife for his oldest daughter. In the good Christian tradition every man needs a (fertile) wife, and there's some interesting sexual tension between Emma Watson and the son she's not marrying. Ham wants a wife too, but Noah pointedly doesn't rescue the girl Ham likes. To be fair this is a girl Ham's just met, and she would presumably be a bit alarmed to discover Ham wanted to kidnap her and live with her forever on a huge animal boat, but still, Ham takes it personally, and doesn't forget. There's no confronting Noah so he just simmers in resentment.

Noah's counterpart is the local bad man Ray Winstone, who looks a lot like a Klingon villain. Ray also tries to talk to God, but God keeps ignoring him, so he takes matters into his own hands and is a King among men. Noah literally has God on his side though, and is fearless. When Noah tells Ray that the end is coming, he's so sincere you really believe him, and Ray does too, and makes plans to steal the Ark. You've a lot of sympathy for Ray, as he's in the position most people are in. God certainly doesn't speak to me, why should I do what other people claim God wants me to do? If God really cared, he could deliver the message personally. I think that, although Ray is obviously the evil version of Noah, it's an interesting parallel and they're not so different. Ray only wants to feed the city-folk who can fight for him, which seems callous, but remember Noah is only letting his own family on the massive boat he's built. He doesn't even give the rest of the world a chance to repent or build their own boats.

The Ark itself is not much of a boat, just a big box. It looks like a Maersk shipping container. There's a nice practical touch when Mrs. Noah sedates all the animals when they get on. I thought they could have made more of the montage of building the Ark, although I can understand why they didn't as it heavily involves the Watchers, who I've so far avoided mentioning. Let's just say, the film would be better with just humans (and animals and demi-god Anthony Hopkins).

On the Ark the tension cranks up, like it should do in any good submarine film. Noah reaches the uncomfortable conclusion that his family are not so different from everyone else. His reaction to this is not to try and save other people, though he can hear them screaming outside the boat and the rest of the family are urging him to help them. Instead, he concludes his family are equally wicked, and they all have to die too. There's a harrowing scene around the dinner fire where Noah calmly explains the suicide pact they must all enter into, with the order they're going to lay each other to rest once the task is completed and they've made dry-land.

This is when the film gets really interesting, when Noah starts to over-interpret the visions he's had from God. You've got to blame God for this again, he could have just told Noah exactly what to do rather than giving him riddles in his dreams. Noah becomes a religious fanatacist, and is a dangerous man. The film shows what can happen if people start to believe things with a religious fervour. It's an eloquent argument against the dangers of being obsessive, which is a theme of Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan). When Noah decides he needs to kill some babies too his family draw the line and turn against him, and the madness and anger on the boat is no better than Cain and Abel. In the Bible God told Abraham to kill his own son Isaac, and Noah has his own moment like this with a knife poised above his grand-daughters. In fact, in the last five minutes on the boat it all happens in some action-packed scenes. No one's even that surprised when Ray Winstone pops up from behind a goat, having hidden there for the last nine months.

When they do shortly hit dry-land, the family are still a bit shaken. Noah sets himself apart, discovers wine and nudity, and is found naked by Ham. I'm still not sure of the significance of this.

Overall, a good looking and thought provoking film.

Grand Budapest Hotel - Danny's review

This is a typical Wes Anderson film. If you found The Royal Tanenbaums irritating and unbelievable you certainly won't like this. The characters are wilfully odd and the sets deliberately cartoony. The pace of the film is uneven and jerky, with unexpected turns of action and comedy.

In the middle of it all there's Ralph Fiennes playing the concierge Gustave H. He's an eccentric living by his own with strict code of morals, which includes first class service at all times and a weakness for romantic poetry. He's a throwback to a time where concierges not only existed, but were important.

Gustave H. is from a bygone era, and of course so is the Grand Budapest Hotel itself. There's something instantly nostalgic about a huge dilapidated building, that was once full of life. Places like that don't exist any more, mostly I think because since the introduction of a Minimum Wage it's no longer viable to have a huge hierarchy of servants. There's also a traditional sweet shop, known by the name of the proprietor, that only makes one type of cake. You don't get them any more.

To add to the feeling of delving into the past the main film is couched inside two outer stories. In the present day a writer records his memoirs, which are about meeting with the hotel owner in the 60s, who then recounted his story from the 30s. I'm not normally a fan of the story-within-a-story technique, I see it as a cheap way to give a sense of gravity to the conclusion when you zoom back to the present day. I'm not sure how I feel about the story-within-a-story-within-a-story.

There's a very impressive cast, with some big name actors taking quite small roles. As well as all the names on the poster I think I spotted George Clooney at one point. Most of the characters are too odd to really relate too, but you see enough of Gustave H that you being to sympathise with him by the end. I also really liked the bittersweet love story, which was tangential to the main plot but added a lot to it.

My favourite bit was when Gustave H. was in prison, being unfailingly polite to the other prisoners. At this point you know the character well enough that the situation is already funny. The escape sequence (spoiler alert) was good too.

Overall this was good, but not as fantastic as I'd hoped.

12 Years a Slave - Danny's review

I saw this on the day it was awarded Best Picture at the Oscars. Given that's it's a major film about American History, and it's not terrible, it was always likely to be an Oscar contender. But should it have won? Having seen only about half of the nominated films I can't really say. But I can say that it wasn't as good as Gravity.

12 Years a Slave is a fairly straight-forward story of a guy called Solomon who get's his identity stolen. And it's a thorough identity theft. This isn't just someone dealing with unauthorised purchases on his credit card, he literally loses his identity as a free man, and, as the title suggests, becomes a slave for 12 years.

The first part of the film is a concerted effort to convince us what a fine gentleman he is, and there's lots of dandy clothes and curt nodding to other fine gentleemen. In one flashback to happier times a shopkeeper invites him to peruse a new cravat.

Once he gets kidnapped you get to see all the different thoughts in Solomon's mind, as represented by what happens to other captives. There's one who tries to stand up to the captors (it doesn't end well for him), and one who is lucky enough to be re-captured by his previous master.

Solomon decides to keep his head down on the plantation, can't resist occasionally showing what a superior man he is. My favourite part of the film is a very standard prison-drama type section where one of the guards (Paul Dano) is picking on him, because he's annoyed that Solomon is so good at everything, in this case something about a creek. Solomon is also really good at being humble, which further enrages the guard. Things come to a head with an extended hanging scene, where McQueen deploys his technique of lingering on a shot for noticeably longer than you expect. Sometimes this is quite effective, sometimes it just slows things down.

There's a few other unusual shots, for example when you first see Solomon playing the violin it's shown from inside the violin itself. I'm not sure if this is important, or just the director keeping himself busy. There's one bit where he needlessly cuts to some leaves in the tree, and I got a bit worried there'd be a ten minute fade out on a single leaf, like a Terrence Malick film. The sound is also quite intrusive, and during the church scenes you sometimes get overlapping sounds.

Any time you hear any scripture it's used for justification of evil slavery, and the Church is overall shown in a very bad light. The happier alternative to this is the slave singing, which is very powerful, especially during a funeral scene where Solomon (Chiwetl Ejiofor) looks incredibly anguished.

Since you already know Solomon's story arc (free-slave-free) it's more interesting watching what happens to the other characters. The star is undoubtedly evil plantation manager Michael Fassbender, who Steve McQueen also directed in Hunger and Shame . There's some good bits where he forces the tired slaves to get up in the middle of the night to dance in a party that clearly only he is enjoying. Echoes of the madness of Django Unchained. I also enjoyed the character of his wife, Mistress Epps, who is always there in the background chiding him for his incompetence, and urging him to take it out on the slaves, especially the pretty slave girl he likes the most. She's played by Lupita Nyong'o, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

The message of the film is nicely layered, as you see different types of slaves, including those who try and play the system to their advantage and become favoured, and those who can't take it and just want to die. There's a good bit where an overseer tells his story, which gives some insight into slavery from a slavers perspective. This food for thought is always subtly delivered, at at least until Brad Pitt arrives. He plays a very pious voice-from-the-future character who patiently explains to a frenzied Michael Fassbender why slavery is wrong.

The final line of the film ("There's nothing to forgive") may also be significant, if it's taken to be about slavery in general. Could this be McQueen, in the voice of Solomon, forgiving the slavers? It's unlikely Solomon is feeling too forgiving, he's had a rotten decade.

In summary, this is a very good film. The scenes in Mississippi (I think) all look great, and there's plenty of stylistic touches and colourful characters to make me want to see it again. Most of all, it's a cracking story.

If only it was set in space.

The Wolf of Wall Street - Danny's review

The trailer makes this look like a silly film about a rich banker who likes to play hard and work hard, and everyone has a wild time. I thought they were just showing you the funny bits, but actually the whole film is like that. It's a three hour comedy romp, and it's good.

The cult of personality around Belfort is the main excitement of the film, and you notice the lack of energy from the few scenes without Dicaprio in them. There's some crazy moments when he walks into a room and everyone goes wild with excitement, and starts shouting "Wolfie! Wolfie!". I'm sure the real Jordan Belfort (who has a cameo at the end in New Zealand) would have loved that.

Actually, I'm not sure Wolfie is such a good guy. He's a massive fraudster, and when he's in trouble he easily betrays all his friends. But then, they're not good guys either, and there's a hint that his best pal, played by Jonah Hill, is also working with the Feds. His gold-digger second wife leaves him when things turn sour, and although Wolfie acts surprised I think everyone knew she was a fair-weather bride. It's a shallow world they live in.

The madness of Wolfie's life means there's always something fun around the corner, and it's entertaining from start to finish. The main story arc of Wolfie's rise and fall is strong enough that I could do without the sub-plot of him stashing his money in Europe, which becomes a bit of a distraction with some odd cameos from Jean Dujardin (The Artist) and Joanna Lumley.

There's some classy touches, for example the bits where Wolfie turns to the camera and explains something directly. Overall, I'm going to rate it as the second-best Dicaprio-Scorsese collaboration. Here's my full ranking:

1. The Departed
2. The Wolf of Wall Street
3. Shutter Island
4. Gangs of New York
5. The Aviator

Robocop - Danny's review

The premise here is that America is robo-phobic, and the public don't want to deploy the robo-police they export to the rest of the world. To get round this Omnicorp put a blown-up (exploded) cop inside a machine. They're a bit naughty though, and when the man-machine hybrid is reacting too slow they develop a combat-mode mode where the computers takes over and bypass his slow human decision making. Then when he gets a bit unstable, and misses his family, they pump him full of dopamine to keep him on message. Don't worry though, the human spirit is irrepressible and he soon overrides his programming and solves his own murder and takes on his creators.

The original Robocop was sleazy and violent, had the distinctive style of Paul Verhoeven, and was well worth an 18 Certificate. This 2014 remake is a 12 Certificate, and has been made to appeal to a much wider audience. It's very much a studio picture, and you can almost feel the scenes which have been altered or added to make it easier to understand. The low point is when Murphy's wife and daughter are waiting for his home-coming. It's been thoroughly explained what's going on, but just to make sure you're keeping up there's an absolutely enormous "Welcome Home" sign, Then, unbelievably, the wife turns to her son and unnecessarily says "That's a nice sign you've made". That's their whole conversation! It's a really poor bit of dialogue.

The ending also smacks of studio tinkering. They want Murphy to get his revenge, sacrifice himself, and also stay alive in case they want a sequel. He goes on the rampage against his creators and shoots the Omnicorp chief executive, and the Doctor who's been working on him also turns whistle-blower against the company. This ought to be the end for Murphy, how and why would Omnicorp keep repairing him now? But, sadly and predictably, you see him recovering again at the end.

It plays out a lot like a super-hero film, though his powers are very limited, and consist mostly of watching lots of CCTV feeds at the same time. He's a less fun Iron Man in grey and black instead of red. The one amazing scene is when Murphy sees just the real bits of himself, and doesn't like it. There's quite a bit of philosophising in the film about who's really in control, man or machine, and it really hits home when you're looking at what's left of Murphy - just his brain, one arm, and lungs pulsing unpleasantly.

Gary Oldman is good as the Doctor. He starts off ethically using technology for medicine, but gradually gets talked round to building a Robocop. I also enjoyed Michael Keaton as a very laid back and scarcely believable Chief Executive. Having played Batman twice himself, he knows what it's like to be known only by the shape of your chin. He's fun to watch, much more so than the hectoring Samuel L Jackson. His role as a newscaster is to tell bits of the story (often bits we already know), in a way which is supposed to be dazzling as it's got holograms in, and of course SLJ himself. I was unimpressed.

In summary, on the plus side this is a slick production with some interesting ideas about the future of robotics. But on the minus sign it's made for kids.

Inside Llewyn Davis - Danny's review

This review contains spoliers

I really enjoyed this. Every scene is beautifully made. The Coen Brothers have an amazing knack of making very slow movies which are never boring. In this one the music comes centre-stage, and it sounds good.

In the first scene of the movie Llewyn gets punched outside a nightclub, and in the second scene he wakes up on a friend's couch. At the time it looks like that's the very next morning, but by the end of the movie you realise that that second scene actually takes place a week earlier, and most of the movie is showing that week leading up to being punched. At the time this comes as a bit of a surprise, and it took me a minute to realise what's going on. Normally in a film when you get shown the ending first something massive happens in that scene (usually the main character dying), so that you realise that the next scene must be taking place in the past. Here though, there's no clue that's what's going on. It's a clever device that makes me want to see the movie again straight away just to work out the chronology.

I think the idea of looping back to the start is that he's made no progress. It's a sort of Groundhog Week; a Road Movie with no destination. He tried to go to Chicago, he tried to rejoin the navy, but he didn't get anywhere. As Llewyn says about his music "If it's never new and it doesn't get old, it's a folk song". But there are a few signs he's moved on - he manages to stop the cat getting out the door the second time, and after it's cut short twice we finally get to hear him play his old partner's song all the way through at the end.

Oscar Isaak is good as Llewyn Davis. It's a tough character, as he's got to be both charismatic and lazy, a bit like The Dude in The Big Lebowski. You feel for him as he keeps getting given opportunities, and keeps on throwing them away. The surrounding cast is much more colourful, and I'd even say the normally very good Carey Mulligan is a bit over the top.

The ginger cat Ulysses looks very handsome, and there's some very atmospheric scenes in the car where characters are drifting in and out of sleep on the way to Chicago and back. Although the film is always exciting by the end you do feel the fatigue of Llewyn, and this probably isn't a good movie to watch if you're very tired.

Llewyn's folk songs are good, and the pacing of the movie allows you to hear them all the way through. Each of his songs describes his mood, especially when he has an audition and rejects commercial music by doing a wilfully obscure song about Henry the Eighth. "There's no money in it", says producer F. Murray Abraham, and I think he's right. The folk songs from other artists are much worse, not sure if they're meant to be deliberately bad or not.

Overall, a fantastic film, and I look forward to enjoying it again.

All is Lost - Danny's review

Warning - all reviews could contain spoilers, this one definitely does in the last paragraph.

This is a remarkable film, featuring only a boat and a 77 year old man with blonde hair. It starts with Robert Redford on his yacht, with no hint as to how he got there. We don't know who he his or what he's doing. He could have terminal cancer, he could be a millionaire or about to reunite with his long lost son, we don't know. He doesn't even have a name, and is just listed in the credits as Our Man.

He hardly speaks at all in the whole film. There's a little bit of talk on the radio, but this is strictly functional, and there's no attempt to tell the story via his monologue. If they wanted to do that, he would have had a dog to explain things to. There's no dog.

You need to watch quite carefully to notice things, as it's all explained by visual cues. This is OK though, as there's no dialogue you have a lot of time to concentrate on the picture. For example, at one point he heads towards a shipping channel, which is made very clear to the audience by repeated looks at his map where a series of X marks on the map show his approach to the channel.

Our Man is pretty resourceful. He starts whittling a broom handle in a mechanism to bale out the ship before you even know that he is going to do any baling. He's one step ahead of the viewer, and as you watch in admiration you're trying to work out what he's up to. He has a slightly weary air about him, but never gives up and meets each new crisis with dogged resolve and a grim fatalism. As he floats around you get a sense of the vastness of the ocean, and it's very vast indeed. Just at one point the film gets a bit Life of Pi with some CGI sharks circling him, which doesn't last too long then it's back to a standard marooning.

The only hint of any connection to friends or family is when Our Man is unpacking a special old wooden box of navigation equipment. In the box there's an envelope with a card in, which to me looked like some sort of birthday card. He picks it up, then shrugs and puts it down to pick up his sextant (or whatever it is). He never returns to the envelope. In a film with so little human contact this is quite a big moment, and very eloquently shows Our Man's lack of sentimentality. Even his message-in-a-bottle doesn't have much warmth to it.

I'm not sure if Robert Redford's acting is brilliant, or if in fact there's any acting involved at all. This film might have worked just as well with any old man playing the lead. He just goes about his business on the ship, in a fairly natural way, and the power of each situation lends gravity to his impassive face.

He's looking spritely for a 77 Year Old, but I did notice he dozes off an awful lot. I suppose some of this is from exhaustion, but in the second half in particular nearly every scene begins with Our Man coming out of another long nap.

Spoiler alert - in the end he nearly drowns, but is suddenly saved when you see a bright light and a hand reaching down. To me this is actually just a metaphor for him dying and accepting his death, and he's not really saved. Though sadder, this interpretation is more satisfying in completing the story then the corny ending of a last minute rescue.

In conclusion, this was a very good film. Probably not the best kind of thing to put on at a party, but good to get into on your own.