Author: BRWC

A landmark and tourist attraction of New York City, Columbus Circle, often seen from aerial shots in Film and TV works set in Manhattan, is located at the intersection of Eighth Avenue, Broadway, Central Park South and Central Park West. It is also a fairly tedious crime thriller that was released this week on Blu-ray and DVD.

Columbus Circle, directed by George Gallo, is a brilliant example of why you should be wary of any film with too many recognisable names in the cast. In fact running in at only 1 hour and 22 mins, the last 5 of which are credits, we can assume the majority of the films budget went on hiring said cast in a vain attempt to get people to watch what would ordinarily make for only a mediocre episode of Law and Order.

The story follows a wealthy heiress in hiding as she unwittingly, at first, fends off at attempt to steal her money. Selma Blair, as Abigail, does her utmost to depict a victim of abuse become agoraphobic, replete with overwrought face touching and intense staring off camera so frequently that you begin to wonder if she just didn’t remember her lines. The plot is moved forward by a preponderance of exposition from bizarre television news stories and awkwardly stilted dialogue – despite the fact Jason Lee seems perfectly capable of acting in other movies every time he’s on screen here he delivers lines with stagnant ineptitude.

The dialogue isn’t the only thing in trouble, the editing is a mess. There are bizarre digital crossfades throughout scenes, flash through whites, screen wipes, flashback quick cuts, slow motion, and bizarre colour and grain overlays all of which is attempting to mask the fact that the movies pace is crawling. Actions and movements seem to be drawn out in an attempt to make them seem more ‘tense’, the real effect of which is that by the end you’re no longer surprised when an obnoxious bank clerk keeps finding an unnecessary amount of narrative stalling tactics like he’s checking off some obscene list.

The film spends the better part of an hour setting up the emotional state of Abigail, her avoiding all human contact and hiding her identity – although she’s incompetently nonchalant about serving anyone food or beverages on china with her true family crest upon – and generally portraying her as barely capable of stepping past her doorway. But then in the last 5 minutes she’s so blasé about running around Manhattan in crowds of people that the character becomes bafflingly unbelievable.

It would be remiss to recommend anyone watch this film but if you do chances are you’ll have guessed the way things eventually pan out by about 25 minutes in. All in all it’s a very predictable, poorly constructed crime thriller whose ending is devoid of satisfaction by its sheer ludicrousness.

3 out of 10 – a whole point of which is for Beau Bridges, whose name is fun to say.

In Time is set in a dystopian future where every human is genetically engineered from birth to stop ageing at 25 – sound too good to be true? Well obviously there’s a downside, at 25 a timer kicks in and once the timer hits zero the person dies or “zero’s out”. In this envisioned future time becomes the currency, you work to earn it, pay for things with it, win or loose it to people, and are perpetually fighting for the time to remain breathing. It’s a very interesting concept, does it work as a movie?

Well yes and no. Let’s skip straight to the problem and then backtrack. In Time has a fairly large issue that shouldn’t really have been overlooked in the pre-production casting process – the main character is played by Justin Timberlake. Yes, that Justin Timberlake. The one from such cinema greats as Southland Tales and Bad Teacher… Ok so it’s probably not that bad, he did a passable job in The Social Network.

Let’s overlook Justin Timberlake being Justin Timberlake and look at In Time as it is. It does boast a supporting cast of Olivia Wilde, Amanda Seyfried and Cillian Murphy which is definitely a plus. I also really enjoy the concept, and the film is remarkably clever in how it deals with ‘time’. The script intelligently switches the meaning of time now that it is the only currency and plays close attention to the tense of sentences. People who have time, or “come from time” as the movie puts it, perform tasks slower and don’t rush whereas people betray being poor by their speed – running between places, eating too fast, etc. “I don’t have time” takes on a more prescient meaning.

Timberlake’s character Will suddenly gets his hands on a lot of time attracting the attention of the “Timekeepers” (the lead of which is played by Cillian Murphy) which leads to various hi-jinks, the result of which is that he kidnaps a wealthy mans daughter. Just prior to the kidnap a perfectly creepy moment happens when Will is introduced to the Mother-in-law, Wife, and Daughter of said wealthy man and all are frozen at 25 – age as a distinction between people has become irrelevant.

Time zones have a new meaning, now taken to signify the different levels of economic distribution of time – those with and those without. The movie is an exaggeration of the 1% argument, taken to the extreme that when those less ‘well off’ run out of time, they literally stop (i.e. die). It’s thinly veiled and I think few people would watch this without realising the true motive of the film is to hold up a mirror to certain aspects of our own world – which is the point of any good dystopian story.  There is only so much time to go around and as the film says “for a few to be immortal, many must die”.

I won’t recount the whole story, needless to say the film’s concept is perhaps slightly more interesting than its delivery – again not helped by the lead actor being Justin Timberlake. In Time has an odd style, things seem curiously retro in design with the addition of some LED’s to try and signify ‘the future’ and whilst I do sort of like the juxtaposition of this old and new it also seems at odds with itself. A friend with whom I watched this was infuriated with the sound made by the cars – it’s akin to the noise made by vehicles in the cartoon The Jetsons or some sort of crazy futuristic hair dryer. The soundtrack on the other hand has this constant electro beat/pulse theme which is reminiscent of several tracks from The Animatrix. It is also quite beautifully shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins.

I feel like after setting up the world the film gets a bit lost plot-wise. Rather than giving into the slightly more realistic despair in, and eventual loss to, ‘the system’ that we might have got if this film had been the work of Kubrick it succumbs to the Hollywood agenda of ‘happy endings’. It also doesn’t have the balls to kill off the main characters, I had this feeling about halfway through that they were going to Thelma and Louise the ending but they pull out of it at the last second. That being said, the ‘good guys’ essentially triumph, ‘the bad guys’ get what they deserve in the process and the movie is reasonably entertaining.

Overall I want to like the movie because the concept is quite interesting and it thoughtfully changes the perception of time from a system of measurement to an absolute currency. I am not shocked to find out that Andrew Niccol who wrote and directed In Time is responsible for Gattaca and S1mOne both films that explore interesting, if slightly dark, sci-fi concepts. It’s certainly not perfect, I don’t buy Justin Timberlake as a fighter for the people for one second (pun intended), and it gets quite preachy towards the end without the gravitas to pull it off convincingly. In Time is flawed but good entertainment with a nifty, if slightly underworked, concept.

6 out of 10

I can sum up my review of this movie fairly quickly: This Means War fucking rocks. Now let me qualify that statement.

This Means War sounds on paper like your average rom-com-action flick – Tom Hardy and Chris Pine play CIA agents, Tuck and FDR, who kick ass fighting international ‘bad guys’ (they’re always German or Russian in these movies aren’t they?) who both end up dating the same woman, Reese Witherspoon’s Lauren. What follows is a spiral into games of espionage against each other in order to see which one gets the girl. This movie is directed by McG, a man whose cinematic output is almost consistently awful – with the exception of Charlie’s Angels which is so awful it has swung back around and is actually good again.

That being said, This Means War is great entertainment and hilarious to boot. The story is more about the bro-mance between the two male leads than it is about their respective romances with Reese Witherspoon. The pranks played by Tuck and FDR in attempts to sabotage each other’s progress with Lauren have hilarious consequences and show a comical misuse of CIA resources. The spy element to the plot is very much just a vehicle to support the escalating competition between the two and really only shows up as ‘day job’ filler and to spark the predictable third act climax. It’s fast paced and doesn’t loose your attention at any point. The action is fun, fairly constant, and for a McG movie not over the top or completely ridiculous. In fact I didn’t realise this was a McG movie until his name came up at the end.

A vast majority of the laughs go to the gloriously slutty, married, but vaguely cougar-ish Trish played by notorious author and stand up comedian Chelsea Handler. Few people can really carry off the line “and guys will really go for that camel toe” as an off the cuff compliment, but she does it marvellously. Reese Witherspoon, for her part, looks fantastic in this film – I’m assuming there’s some L.A. secret about sacrificing babies that keeps everyone looking so young. But the show obviously goes to Tom Hardy and Chris Pine who didn’t simply phone this one in in-between filming the slightly more serious (but infinitely more likely to induce geeks to orgasm) big budget movie sequels The Dark Knight Rises and Star Trek 2. Hardy is definitely the better actor (see Bronson, Inception, or Warrior) but since Pine’s role is not too far removed from his Star Trek role of James T. Kirk he is well within his comfort zone.

This isn’t ‘a great work of cinema’, it’s one of those fun, glossy, light pieces of entertainment. It’s a buddy movie with some laughs, some explosions, and a soft underbelly of romance. Don’t go into this movie looking to be intellectually stimulated or moved to tears by the raw power of emotion, just go for an amusing, easy way to spend approximately two hours and you won’t be disappointed.

7 out of 10 – Fun and frivolous.

This Means War is in cinemas now.

Reviewing a Tarsem Singh film is always an interesting prospect as he creates incredible, visually enthralling movies, that are oddly paced, and usually have a harsh and/or violent edge to them that makes them difficult to access. Immortals is no different.

First thing first, this movie was obviously marketed very hard at people who enjoyed 300 – the “From the Producers of 300” tagline was almost as large as the title on the first one-sheet posters. I feel it could have done without that marketing, it was unavoidable due to the massive success of 300, but a Tarsem movie would really benefit from people not having that expectation. In fact I’m not surprised to learn that Tarsem tried to fight this comparison. But such is Hollywood.

I’m not going to compare Immortals to 300, I’m going to relate it to Tarsem’s previous two movies The Fall and The Cell, as well as on its own merits. Happily there’s plenty to talk about. The film is a visual treat – and I’m not just referring to a constantly half naked Henry Cavill (Theseus) or Luke Evans (Zeus)… Greek mythology is often a great treasure trove of complex or entertaining narratives, and it turns out that this borrows here, there, and everywhere from the Greek canon, perhaps a little too freely.

Tarsem creates overly elaborate set pieces, fights break out in villages carved out of ocean cliff tops, overly elaborate temples, a plethora of marble stairs or hallways, and all manner of other CGI creations. The principle cast are gorgeous, the Gods have been chosen because they are stunning actors (visually if not otherwise), Freida Pinto (who I recently reviewed in Trishna) plays the oracle Pheadra and I’ve already mentioned Cavill as the lead character of Theseus. Micky Rourke (who’s fantastic, but perhaps not a ‘looker’) is thrown in there as King Hyperion, the antagonist, but it’s OK he mostly acts from the shadows or wears a mask with lobster claws on top – something that given the wildly eccentric costume design seems perfectly natural.

And here is where we hit on the crux of the movie, it’s so visual and action centric that I can barely remember what actually happens. Hyperion is the antagonist, seemingly just wanting chaos and destruction by unleashing the Titans to fight the Gods of Olympus. Theseus is apparently the only one who goes to the gym enough to stand a chance of defeating him – it helps that Zeus has been hanging around in the body of John Hurt most of his life guiding him and presumably being his spotter on the bench-press.

So are visuals enough? I really enjoyed Tarsem’s The Fall because it was ludicrously surreal and also about tricking a girl into supplying the main character with morphine. The Cell, whilst featuring Jennifer Lopez in what was sadly not her first or last attempt at ‘acting’, was again marvellously eccentric; it was Salvador Dali meets Silence of the Lambs. Immortals has that visuality, if in slightly more muted colours (a move that screams of the aforementioned Producers’ desire to allude to a certain box office smash), but I didn’t enjoy the story half as much as his previous two movies.

Also, as built as Cavill is, he isn’t strong enough as an actor to carry the role of Theseus. There’s a cringe-worthy sequence where he ‘pumps up’ his army before battle that, if I watch the film again, will have to be skipped in future. But it’s followed directly by an amazing action sequence where he spears an enemy then snaps the spear to use again and repeats until the spear is a splinter. The Gods giveth and taketh away.

There’s a love scene between Theseus and Pheadra that probably only exists to offset the homo-erotic tension of having a cast of gym bunnies run around with barely anything on. There’s some fantastic slow-mo fighting action, an ability that thankfully is reserved for the Gods for once. And then there’s a marvellously ambiguous ending with a battle with hundreds of thousands of combatants floating in the sky. It looks and sounds like Tarsem for sure but I would have liked a bit more focus.

6 out of 10 – Beautiful, but just a demigod after all.

Immortals is available from March 5 on Blu-ray/DVD.

Trishna is a modern take on Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Ubervilles from Director Michael Winterbottom set in modern day India. Luckily (or not) I have read (the majority) of the novel and I have to say I found it a bit tiresome – it couldn’t hold my attention, primarily I think because I found I had almost no sympathy with the character of Tess (renamed Trishna and played by Freida Pinto in this movie) despite the myriad of adversity set against her.

Moving the film’s setting from 19th century rural England to modern day Rajasthan (and for a brief period Mumbai) has merit; there still exists a fairly obvious class system, changing industrial landscape, and growing education system so the story fits. I almost want to simplify this review by saying what we watch is a perfectly lovely, innocent girl’s descent into becoming the live in prostitute for the son of a wealthy Hotel businessman. For the most part that’s a fairly accurate statement, this is a tragedy, but it’s a mixed deal.

I felt like I was watching two movies, the first half is an almost sweet story of a young girl, Trishna, and a young man, Jay, meeting each other and falling in love. She’s naive and innocent and he whisks her away, gives her a job, and ultimately moves her into the modern world of Mumbai where he’s trying to become a movie producer. It’s not all hearts and candy, it’s a little gritty and real – helped in part by the style – which I’ll go into shortly – and perhaps there’s a sense of foreboding, but this first part is relatively enjoyable. But then things get decidedly more ‘rapey’, culminating in what is probably the most disturbing lap dance sequence set to a Portishead song that’s ever been committed to film. Swiftly followed by murder and finally suicide.

The style of the movie probably doesn’t help; it’s shot in a very flat documentary style. It’s un-romanticised and simple – it doesn’t show any stereotypical dazzling lights and colours of a ‘celluloid’ version of modern India instead it is (I imagine) an accurate picture of modern living. This realism isn’t a bad thing on it’s own, but combined with a slow pace and even slower story progression the viewer isn’t exactly glued to the screen.

At several points large sections of time move forward quite fast in quick cut montages and when this is happening in the first act it serves to portray a story of young love. In the second half of the movie it shows the rapidity with which the character of Jay changes into a pattern of abuse against Trishna. There are moments where Frieda Pinto’s acting nails the subservient naive young woman, but largely she’s just a little too stiff and Riz Ahmed’s Jay delivers more than a few lines with a kind of stilted awkwardness as if he’s reading them from behind the camera.

When I try to work out if I enjoyed Trishna I can’t come up with a clear answer – which probably means I didn’t really. There are moments where it dragged me in and held my attention, after a slow start the burgeoning love story of the two leads is compelling, but then there are moments where I just wanted to pick up the characters and shake them. We sit and watch as they spiral and refuse to help themselves out of a mess of their own creation. Perhaps it’s just the slow pace of the movie or the flat documentary style but I just don’t feel for either of them – but this is the problem I had with the novel. Even though this is a very freely adapted take on that novel (and I do mean VERY), I just didn’t really care for Trishna by the time she was sitting on the verge of suicide.

As a separate mark against the film, it ends with a fade to white at that point of suicide and I’m really not a fan of slow fade out’s.

If you’re the kind of person who goes to the cinema for a light comedy or perhaps an action adventure sex-plosion avoid this. If you like a slow paced, considered movie, exploring aspects of human tension then this is probably your thing, but even then it disappoints.

5 out of 10 – It gets some points for the first part of the movie where the characters hadn’t become deplorable shells of human beings.

Trishna opens March 9 in select theatres.