The Town

I'll tell you what I think happened. I think Ben Affleck watched 'Heat', and thought he'd have a crack at remaking it. In fact, I think he played that bit of Grand Theft Auto 4 that's a bit like Heat, and thought he'd remake that.

The 'Town' in question is Boston's Charlestown, which seems to be one of those places populated by Americans labouring under the misapprehension that they are Irish. It seems that until the 80s, it was dominated by the Irish Mobs, and there's still a hard core of "irish" crims and ne'er-do-wells living there. And it would seem that it's with this community that Ben Affleck's continuing the love-hate relationship he started with Good Will Hunting.

Ben Affleck's the leader of a gang of bank robbers. There's four of them, including Ben, the leader, and Jeremy Renner, the near-obligatory pillock who's apparently only in it for the thrills and violence. During one of their heists, things go a bit pear shaped, and they end up taking the assistant manager, Rebecca Hall, hostage, only to release her once they've made their getaway. They're not sure, however, whether she would be able to ID them, so Ben decides to stalk her a bit, get to know her, and find out what she knows. Jeremy's more into the whole 'kill her' idea. Ben, perhaps inevitably, however, begins to fall in love with her, as much for the better life she represents as anything else.

Meanwhile, John Hamm (Don Draper out of Mad Men, nice to see him in a film role) is an FBI agent trying to work out who Ben and his gang are, and starts leaning on Rebecca to see what she knows.

So, crims are continuing their criminal behaviour, the FBI are closing in on them, Ben's pursuing a relationship that's only going to expedite that, and so obviously, something's going to give sooner or later, and it's all going to come to a head during one last heist which goes a *lot* pear shaped.

In a lot of ways, this is a pretty familiar movie. It's a lot like Heat, and that was hardly original in its day either. So it's not a question of "is this new and original?" so much as "what's Ben Affleck's take on this like?" Well, it's not at all bad. If I have a problem with it, it's that I didn't really feel that Ben Affleck's character had enough good points to redeem his bad points; i.e. that he robs banks. We're meant to feel that he's laudable in some sense because a) he wants out of this life having been born into it, and b) he doesn't personally beat the shit out of anyone, he just brings his mate along who does it for him.

In that sense, he's quite ambiguous, and it's far from clear that he deserves anything other than to serve a lot of time in prison. And in a strange way, it's that ambiguity that elevates it, as you're allowed to go at least some way towards deciding for yourself how you feel about the whole situation. So, overall, I'd say it's a pretty good film, if you're in the mood for it.

Five Easy Pieces

A Jack Nicholson film from 1970, which is on re-release at the moment.

Jack Nicholson, aged 33, predicts his current film persona as a charismatic grumpy old bastard, playing a younger grumpy, frustrated bastard. As the film opens, he's working a blue collar job on the oil rigs in California. He's got a girlfriend, a best mate with whom he drinks and goes bowling, and from the very outset, it seems that something's not exactly right. He clearly thinks he's better than the life he's leading, looks down on his friends, and seems set on sabotaging his relationships.

He goes to visit his sister, who it appears is a session pianist in Los Angeles, from whom he learns that his father is seriously ill with a stroke. So, he goes to visit his family up in Washington, reluctantly. When we get there, we find that he too is a talented pianist from a wealthy family with a musical heritage. And he's not happy there either, finding his family as pretentious as he finds his peers down in California superficial. Pretty soon it becomes obvious that he doesn't feel he fits in anywhere.

Overall, it's a character study, and this is an exercise in watching Nicholson rage against the banality of existence. Oddly, I became aware of this clip the other day, which serves as a great trailer for the film, and which is what prompted me to go see it when I noticed that it was on the cinema: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wtfNE4z6a8

It's a great film, if a bit unstructured. Doesn't really explain what's going on, which can be a problem if you're sitting in front of a pair of idiots in the cinema constantly asking each other what's going on. And rustling their bloody sweet wrappers. But really, it's all about Nicholson's performance, and he's got a real knack of keeping the audience on edge; there's a simmering rage and violence just under the surface, and the joy of this film is that you never know which way he's going to go next. Definitely worth checking if it's on near you. (http://www.parkcircus.com/now-showing/)

Empire Top 100: #96 - American Beauty

This was a lot of fun :)

Echoes a lot of feelings I have about having a tedious, humdrum life, and how it can all fall apart if you poke at the status quo even a little. Definitely my kind of nihilistic movie.

The Girl Who Played With Fire

This is the sequel to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, of which I have spoken earlier. In many ways, it's the continuation of that film, rather than a sequel proper. In the previous film, we were introduced to Lisbeth Salander, a deeply troubled, highly intelligent and often ruthless computer geek. In this film, we get to learn a bit more about her, and what makes her the way she is.

At the end of the last film, she'd escaped from her evil guardian, a court appointed lawyer appointed to manage her affairs because she has been ruled, for some reason, incompetent. She had done this by embezzling a huge amount of money from a bad man, gone on the lam with it, and blackmailing her guardian to send in glowing reports about her, on pain of exposing him as the rapist he is.

As we start the film, this status quo is changing, with Lisbeth deciding to end her exile overseas, and with Persons Unknown conspiring with the Evil Guardian to deal with the Salander situation permanently.

Meanwhile, Mikael Blomkvist's magazine, Millenium, is working with a couple of young journalists, to publish a story exposing the depths to which a human trafficking operation has corrupted Swedish officialdom. Inevitably, this leads to some deaths, and Lisbeth ends up framed for them.

Thus, Lisbeth is on the run again, attempting to track down who framed her and why, and god help anyone who gets in her way. Meanwhile, Blomkvist is attempting to track down the real murderer, convinced that Lisbeth is innocent.

Dramatically, it's not as good as the first film; there's less of a plot, less of a mystery. The mystery that there is - Who is Lisbeth Salander, and why is she so important? - is obviously something we're very interested in, but the trail of skeletons in the closet is less intriguing than in the first film. I'm led to believe that the intrigue gets into full swing again in the third film, so in the second, what we're really doing is getting to know Lisbeth a bit better.

And of course, that's a really good thing, because Lisbeth is a very interesting character, and played pretty magnetically by Noomi Rapace. She's got a really interesting look about her, and conveys the contradiction in her between her being a small, damaged, vulnerable girl, and an iron-hard willed badass who's determined not to let anyone hurt her again. She's simultaneously surly, incommunicative and unlikeable, and somehow deeply charming because of it. So for all that there's little else but her performance in this episode, it easily carries a two-and-a-bit hour film.

Overall, I don't suppose you can be recommended to see this film; if you didn't see the first film, then this one won't make a lot of sense, and if you did, you'll already have marked in your diary when you're going to see this one. So what I will say is, see the first one, and that the second one won't disappoint.

Scott Pilgrim vs The World.

I'm going to split this review into two parts. The first part will be for people who have not read the original graphic novels, and will be very positive. The second part will be an addendum for people who have read the graphic novels, and will begin with the word "but."

Ok, part the first. Scott Pilgrim vs The World is a comedy about teen comedies. Essentially, Scott Pilgrim is a charming geeky slacker who basically thinks the world is a movie starring himself. He dates, he slacks, he plays in a band. Soon enough he meets a girl who he really likes called Ramona Flowers, who's a new girl in town, and the two attempt to form a relationship despite the fact that she's got a lot of baggage from old relationships, and he really needs to grow up and stop being self-centred. And, if written and directed by John Hughes, it'd probably be a lot like Pretty In Pink.

However, this is that story told through the psychotically pop-culture obsessed allegorical lens of a cartoonist called Bryan Lee O'Malley, and this means that when Scott is measured up to one of her exes, that really means that he has to fight a video game style boss battle against them, her seven exes forming The League of Evil Exes. And hence, rather than a drippy film with Molly Ringwald in it, it's awesome knockabout fun. And of course, this already pretty bananas story is then passed through the psychotically pop-culture obsessed allegorical lens of the director, Edgar Wright, co-creator of Spaced and Shaun of the Dead, and hence, that lunacy is pretty much magnified. Right from the start when the movie is about to start, the Universal logo comes up, and is presented in 16 bit graphics style with accompanying 16 bit console style music.

...but. (Here comes part 2!) It's the same kind of problem I had with Sin City. When you adapt something, you have two choices essentially; get as close as you can to the original, or go your own way. And if you try to get close, anything not quite right can stick out. And what's not particularly right is the casting. Specifically, I'm afraid, Michael Sera. Now, I am no enemy of Michael Sera. I liked him in Juno, I loved him in Youth In Revolt. But he has a certain persona. He is the likeable, well meaning, nerd, meek and mild. He is the good guy. And that's how he plays Scott Pilgrim. And that's not who Scott Pilgrim is. Scott's an asshole. A likeable asshole who has been coasting on charm for too long, and needs to realise he's not a teenager anymore. That's his story, and I don't think it fits Michael Sera. So there's not really a point where I accepted him in the role.

The other thing that makes me less than thrilled is that the insanity and pop culture references are dialled down, way down. There's a bit in one of the books, for instance, where they break fourth wall, and suddenly one of the characters is talking us, the readers, through the recipe for the dinner the characters are all eating. That's gone, and no attempt is made to similarly play with the format. The original novels are meta-textually thick with references to anime, video games, pop culture, and a lot of that is cut out, which I found odd, since that's something that Edgar Wright did pretty fearlessly in Spaced (i.e. 'here's an episode that's a parody of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest throughout. Didn't see it? Tough.') To see all the obscure stuff dropped for a popular movie was strangely disappointing.

Overall, though, it shouldn't matter. It's still clever, funny, insane, just how it should be.