Dream Theatre

Knowing

Nicholas cage movies in recent years have either fallen into two camps; unwatchable or dire. Anyone who's had the misfortune to watch Ghost Rider or Bangkok Dangerous will understand what I'm talking about. So why did I force myself to sit through another potential Cage crapfest? Well the trailer and premise held an awful lot of promise. Furthermore it was exploring an idea that I've been toiling away over for the last year or so - what if you had been given the gift or curse of clairvoyance?

The premise is simple, fifty years earlier a school in the Boston area decide to bury a time capsule filled with the drawings by the children of the day. One girl however submits a page of seemingly random numbers. Fifty years later and Cage's son is the lucky recipient of this curious work of modern art.
Cage being a professor of astrophysics at MIT enables him to quickly works out that the numbers are in fact dates, times, death tolls, and GPS co-ordinates for major disasters over the last fifty years.

 Well, armed with such incredible knowledge you'd have thought Cage would have stayed well away from the unlucky locations, well he doesn't, he wants to find out if they are real. It's no spoiler to say that they are, the thing is something else is coming which is much worse than any airplane disaster or subway accident.

 The film is over long and slow in it's first two acts, and could have been easily dismissed as another turkey if it wasn't for a surprisingly well executed third act that actually doesn't drop the ball, delivering a remarkably well realized climax that is both cinematic and thought provoking.

Incidentally I wrote this on my Iphone Typepad application, then edited later on the IMac.

Angels and Demons

I never bothered to watch the Da Vinci Code thanks to the negative reviews and overlong running time. Fortunately Howard and his Vatican baiting posse have ensured no previous experience necessary for his second attempt at adapting one of Dan Brown mega successful airplane religious plot boilers.

This time the plot is even more far fetched than the original, which at least had some basis in reality, no matter how thinly stretched it might have been. This time around a progressive Pope has just died suddenly and  the Illuminati (secret organization, don't you know) have kidnapped four Cardinals who are the front runners to become the new Vicar of Rome (The Pope to you and me).

They plan to kill each one of them in suitably imaginative serial killer fashions, before detonating an Anti Matter bomb somewhere in the Vatican. Like I said pure fantasy land this time around, I'm sure the Vatican boys just curled up in laughter at this one.

Tom Hanks plays Robert Langdon once again, a less charasmatic Indiana Jones character who has obviously borrowed an avatar from James Cameron's new movie in order to phone in his entirely forgettable performance. No doubt he was laughing all the way to the Vatican bank.

Believe it or not Ewan Mcgregor is in this one, you'd have thought he'd have had enough of playing priests belonging to ancient relgions to last a life time. I guess he really must be hurting on those mortgage repayments, eh? He plays Cameriango Patrick Mckenna, mercifully for once, nearly using his own accent. He is the adopted son of the recently deceased Pope, and assists Langdon in his investigation to uncover the whereabouts of the kidnapped Cardinals and the bomb. Surprisingly he gives a reasonably textured performance that certainly sheds light on a more complex character than what he played in his other warrior priest role. He has the majority of the best scenes in this film, and plays the audience pitch perfect through to the final act.

The non love interest is Ayelet Zurier played by the sultry Vittoria Vitra, a particle physicist who is sent by CERN to assist the Vatican in finding the Anti Matter bomb. It's a thankless role, with her standing around or running around a lot in order to make Tom look good and give something for the guys to drool over in a very top heavy masculine movie.

Other notable performances are Stellan Skarsgard, who plays the Vatican Security chief and Armin Mueller-Stahl playing the mercurial Cardinal Strauss. Both play their characters well, amping up the smugness and political double play that you'd expect in a Vatican based movie.

The movie has some serious pacing issues, the first half is labouriously slow at times, with sluggish, top heavy exposition sequences of pseudo art history and consipracy stories. My concentration wavered several times in coming to understand the loopy logic of the puzzles. You can see Howard struggled here, as there are dozens of tacked on, over dramatic car journeys through the Roman streets.

Somehow he manages to avoid grinding to a complete halt, and actually manages a half decent, if rather obvious final act, where some reasonably adept scripting allows the movie to sprint to its climax, albeit with the help of a some decidedly dodgy CGI.

Not the complete snoozefest I was fearing, but defiinitely keep some caffine tablets handy for the first half.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

 If you're expecting Oscar winning performances and subtle observations about the human condition you should probably look elsewhere. If, however you're into heavy metal robots performing WWF moves on each other for two and a half hours with action sequences bordering on the abstract, then this may be just the movie for you.

I never saw the first one at the cinema, although I had an affection for the transforming robots from Cybertron as a kid, news of a live action movie didn't excite me very much. It just seemed like a cynical cash-in on the wallets of nostalgic thirty somethings who now had ankle biters of their own. Bay movies are pretty  much the same one note slam-bam-thank-you-mam affairs of testosterone filled actors and actresses. Telling a story on a canvas as rich as the Transformers mythology seemed somewhat too much to hope for. I was wrong, when I saw the film on DVD I found myself regretting not seeing it in the theater where it deserved to be seen. Somehow Bay had managed to capture the heart of the series for me, no doubt due to the influence of Spielberg who had helped develop the storyline. Wisely he focused on the hero's journey of Shia La Beouf's character, Sam Witwicky. The effects were incredible and the action although extremely Bayesque kind of worked for me. The real success though was how they'd managed to successfully translate Bumblebee and Optimus Prime so well for the big screen. So on hearing of the inevitable sequel I was expecting bigger, faster more intense.

Believe it or not this movie does pack in a hell of a lot of Transformers mythology, for long time fans from Generation 1 you'll appreciate how they reinterpret old story lines, in particular from the original animated movie. For the casual viewer it'll all sound like a right load of nonsense but then they've got Megan Fox's ass to drool over - she's most definitely one of the movie's main effects shots, seriously does she look like that in real life too?

What works in this film is the exploration of Optimus Prime and how his fate is entwined with Sam Witwicky, together they share a classic hero's journey filled with revelations and action beats to keep any hardcore fan at bay. In fact the second set piece between Prime and Megatron is delivered brilliantly - you're just going to love the anime esque sword action that Prime delivers to the Decepticons.

What doesn't work is the movie's pacing - at 2 and a half hours its way too long for a film with so many mash ups. The third act just goes on forever bordering on abstraction with the action sequences. By the time the final show down actually takes place, you've really just given up caring, which is a shame because it'll have toy otakus all over Tokyo screaming in ecstasy.

The other issue is the abstraction of the combat in places.  A movie with CG characters so complex and busy needs to slow it down a notch and deliver wider shots to give the audience some spatial orientation, at times it was just flashes of machinery and nothing much else, coherency thrown completely out of the window. Had Bay decided to overuse slo-mo, he'd have had no argument from me whatsoever. Certainly this movie will benefit from the Blu-Ray format where you can slow those beats down and enjoy the robot ballet.

This movie won't deliver the franchise to a new audience, it's an arrogant overconfident beast of a movie that gives a two fingers up to opera and theater audiences - oh and women, seriously don't take your girlfriend to see this - you'll be single very quickly.

Terminator Salvation

Oh man, am I angry about this movie.

 Hollywood writers have an expression when talking about a project that they’re working on:

   this piece of shit.

Boy is this a steaming pile of turd that’s straight out of the nightmare factory of box office turkeys. Why do I care so much? Because Terminator is a modern day Hollywood classic. Cameron shaped two of the best sci-fi movies of the last thirty years with the first two in the series. His movies contained action, violence and then some, but they also contained real character, hard sci-fi concepts for the era, and more importantly they were the few films of the genre that actually had a strong feminist icon in the shape of Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Conner. Where did it all go wrong?

I really had high expectations for this one, even though Charlie’s “McG” Angels was directing. Those movies weren’t exactly high on the brain matter scale, nevertheless they had a certain visual verve that looked exciting and eye popping. In addition to this Jonathan Nolan worked on the screenplay, and they even had Christian Bale on board as John Conner. Bale has had an excellent record in recent years when choosing his projects – good omens or what? Furthermore they had Michael Ironside on their side too, a genre mainstay, dependable for playing gruff outsiders and military generals – remember Starship Troopers? Finally they had Stan Winston Studios working on the robots. What could possibly go wrong with a team like that?

Well, in short – every fucking thing - excuse my language.

First off, the focus of the story is just all wrong. A future war Terminator movie isn’t tough to work out. It’s about one very important storyline. John Conner making sure that he gets Kyle Reese into the time machine to go back in time and protect and impregnate his mother. That’s the movie that needs to be shown, this isn’t the movie they made. Why? Because the studios and powers at be have been infected with sequelitis again. They’ve forgotten a really important axiom of film making – you tell the strongest story possible, don’t penny pinch with high stakes story points. However that’s exactly what they do with this movie and it condemns it the seventh circle of hell itself along with the Highlander sequels and Jar Jar Binks.

Future War Terminator should have been easy – just think this – Its Private Ryan with Terminators. How difficult is that? This should be a future with swarms of skeletal robots swarming across the nuked wasteland. I counted five. Seriously where were all the robots? Where were the land battles that had been hinted and shown in the previous movies? Where was our war movie? Not here. This film looks like a bad Mad Max movie with reject transformers from Michael Bay’s franchise juggernaut.

Storywise it's totally leftfield. The opening scene focuses on Marcus Wright played by the dead eyed Sam Worthington who will be in Cameron’s Avatar flick later this year. He plays a man who’s condemned to death but not before signing off his body to Helen Bonham Carter’s Cancer woman. She works for Cyberdyne by the way.

Fast forward to post Judgement Day earth where we meet an all grown up version of Mr Conner who likes to land helicopters on top of the T600s and then shoot them when they’re helpless in the head – very heroic. Bale plays Conner like he’s sitting in a VR machine somewhere far away. I’m beginning to understand his rant last year, he was suffering from that sinking feeling actors get when they realize they’re making a real stinker that’s going to mar their record for a few years.

After some pyrotechnics that kill everyone apart from our erstwhile hero Marcus is awakened and pulls himself out of a muddy hole, which is basically where the story is, but is unable to pull off the same feat itself.

Marcus wanders around for a bit, bumps into a big Frankenstein T600, saved by a teenaged Kyle Reese, and wonders what is going on – well so is the audience who have long since stopped caring.

Running concurrent to this Conner takes a dip in the sea to visit Ironside in his submarine. As you do, you know, jump from a helicopter into the CG sea from A Perfect Storm, and just, you know, happen upon a sub hiding the Resistance command HQ. Jesus – do they really think the audience is this stupid? Well apparently they do. Those guys argue for a bit, Conner gets an important bit of info about how to stop Skynet and then leaves.

I think at some point her learns that Skynet is looking for Kyle Reese, so Conner realizes he has to find his dad before they do. Here’s the beef, why does Skynet know this? Why is Conner telling everyone and his mum who he is? It makes no fucking sense. Skynet would have no idea who even John is at this point. He makes speeches across the radio, but as far as Skynet is concerned he’s just a nut at this point. Or am I missing something important? Obviously the screenwriters were.

Think about it logically. Cyberdyne systems lost its entire future tech after Terminator 2, delaying the rise of an A.I capable of taking over the world. Fast-forward to three, and the military have created it from a completely different source. If this movie is following on from those events, then this version of Skynet wouldn’t yet consider the Conners a threat, right?

Next point, the knowledge of John’s father would only be known by John and perhaps his inner circle, certainly, if he’s the wonderful leader we’re lead to believe then there’s no way he’d be stupid enough to tell people, right? So that begs the question why does Skynet have Reese as a target? Quite simply put - its lazy writing to create jeopardy quickly.

If that wasn’t bad enough the lack of strong female archetypes in this is unforgivable. Traditionally the Terminator films have always been built around female hero. That was what made the franchise stand out from all the others. Even in the lesser, Terminator 3, Kate Brewster, played by Claire Danes came across as a strong willed, determined and active heroine.

No such luck here. We’ve Moon Bloodgood who plays a pilot who’s name I can’t remember and can’t be bothered to check up on. She plays Marcus’s love interest for about five minutes, and aptly enough, needs rescuing every five minutes as well, I can’t even remember what happens to her by the end – that just shows how utterly forgettable her role was.

Yet even that doesn’t compare to the utterly redundant role of Bryce Dallas Howard. She plays Kate Conner, replacing the aforementioned Claire Danes as the luckless wife of the permanently scowling John Conner. She’s practically a housewife in this movie, who does absolutely nothing of consequence other than stare wide eyed and give tedious exposition about what isn’t happening.

At some point after plot revelations concerning Marcus’s true nature, it all mercilessly arrives at the final act where after a Skynet trap that decimates the Resistance leadership, John leads a daring rescue of Kyle and other rag tag types from the Skynet HQ in San Francisco. What should be an exciting finale that should have been an extended and expanded sequence in the tradition of the original future war clips turns into a tired rehash of the climaxes to the original. Except this time I just don’t fucking care. We get two frames of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’s a CG creation, before he’s conveniently burn with molten metal, and then oh well, you can probably work out the rest yourself.

This movie was supposed to have been a big budget blockbuster- quite frankly you really have to wonder where all the money went on this one. It certainly isn’t on the screen. There’s talk of this being the first in a new trilogy. Please God no! Just let it die for a decade and then do a proper reboot – please, pretty please with jam on it.

Wolverine

I had pretty low expectations for this film based on a lot of the negative pre release press, a troubled shoot, reshoots, work print leaks and so on. Was Wolverine going to turn into another Elektra or worse another Ghost Rider?

Thankfully Wolverine is way above both those films but not because of the script, structure or costume designs, more on that later. The movie scrapes through a three star rating based on some really amazing performances amongst the principles. Hugh Jackman owns Wolverine and is showing no franchise fatigue, even though it’s his forth outing as the title character. As someone who grew reading about this guy’s adventures, Jackman manages to add that essential star quality to the funny book anti-hero, making you really believe in all the daftness that happens here. And boy is it daft even for a comic book movie.

The writers felt that we needed to know where Logan (Wolverine) came from, even though we’d already heard enough in X-Men 2 to appreciate the Canadian has issues.  I read about him for ten years without really knowing the true story, nor caring – so why the need to do so here? Did we need to know the origins of The Man with no Name? No. Nevertheless the writers thought we did and so we fast-forward through a hundred years of wars, with our eternal warrior and his older badder brother – Victor Creed, killing and killing and killing. They’re the best at what they do only remember this. Wolverine kills but Sabretooth (Creed) is a killer.

 The story sets up the rivalry, and through misdirection sets up a revenge story, only it isn’t, if you know what I mean. And here lies the film’s problem – it doesn’t know what it wants to be. For all the thrills and spills it jumps around genre and archetype worse than Spiderman in his Alien suit.  One minute it's a war movie, the next a death/ rebirth story, then a Cain and Abel retread, then a superhero movie, then one man against the government and then – hell I’m exhausted from all the pick and mix. You get my point though – the thread is like the last American playboy who just can’t settle down.

Grips aside though, it is fun and again its all about the performances.

Liev Schrieber who just knows how to play lean and mean is fabulous as Creed. Although a killer, he still manages not to savage the cat completely keeping it on just the right side of anti-hero where he belongs. When Schrieber and Jackman are sparring the movie really takes off and you can’t help but think that the opening credit montage was the movie they should’ve told.

Danny Houston plays a younger Stryker who’s still as diabolically amoral as he was as an older man in X-Men 2. Indeed he fits the part of a slime ball government Dr Mengeles perfectly, of course if you haven’t seen X-Men 2 you’ll have no idea why he’s doing what he does, and why he’s as twisted as he is, but there you go welcome to the world of Comic Book movies – do your homework.

My real bag with this film though was costume design. There really was some appalling dress sense in this film. In particular with the big bad at the end. Ryan Reynolds who gets some great scenes early on the film is savaged of all of his charm and looks for the grande finale. He looks like a cross between Jason and Freddy with samurai swords stuck in his arms. He was a character who had an uber-cool costume in the comics, why fix something that ain’t broke, you know?

Not the complete disaster that I feared. Its fast paced and there’s plenty of eye candy sequences for the fans and the casual viewers. Don’t pay too much attention to the plot, certainly the writers didn’t. If you need a rest after a long hard week or you’ve got a thing for veiny, pumped up men this could be your bag.

Star Trek

God it feels weird going to watch a Star Trek movie again in a Theater. The last time I saw one in the cinema I think was in college. That time was when the powers that be thought it’d be a good idea to kill Captain Kirk by having a bridge fall on him.  Well it wasn’t and as far I’m concerned in damaged the franchise irrevocably.

Now that they have some real filmmakers in charge of the franchise once again so we can mercifully forget some of the awful wrong turns the films went through after that piece of nonsense.
This isn’t like any Star Trek movie you’ve ever seen before. This Trek has had money thrown at it, and all of it has stuck to the screen in wonderful ways. The visual invention in this film takes the old warhorse into a new world and reality. where I actually really was gawking and smiling at the screen. This is Star Trek done right – it's the perfect Sci-fi popcorn blockbuster, bursting with deliciously daft ideas and time travel contrivances to fill up a whole series of LOST. This is like no prequel movie as you’ve seen in the past – this one is actually decent.

You see the guy who made this movie is a genius; J. J. Abrams is the natural successor to George Lucas and Spielberg. He’s hungry to innovate and invent, he’s ravenous to create excitement mystery and thrills, he’s dying to fill you up with plot and character, and he’s peacocking it all the way to the bank.
 Currently this movie is the top performer of the year, no one has ever said that about a Trek movie before. That means he’s done the impossible, a successful reinvention that has honored what has come before, yet managed to crossover into the mainstream. What a guy, eh?

How does he do it? First off, this is a film about heroes. This is the story of Kirk and Spock and how they became the galaxy saving dynamic duo we all grew up on. J.J. Abrams smartly goes down the Joseph Campbell route and deftly shapes both of them into archetypes for the twenty first century. Kirk is wildly undisciplined and thinks with his heart. Spock, an outsider, and victim to his world’s racism is caught between logic and emotion. Through the movie they have to face their greatest fears and confront their weaknesses in order to prevail against the Rommulan bad guys.

Zachery Quinto plays Spock pitch perfect, channeling what we know and love about Nimoy’s portrayal and yet adding something new, an undercurrent of danger and unpredictability, thanks to the positive baggage he has carried over from his Sylar role in Heroes.

Chris Pine is completely new to me and fills the role of Kirk admirably. Wisely he makes no attempt to emulate the Shatner school of acting, yet brings enough verve and brashness to the role to successfully win us over. Just watch the Kobayashi Maru scene to see what I mean.

Karl Urban plays Dr McCoy superbly. Not only does he have an uncanny resemblance to Deforest Kelley, but also he manages to channel his mannerisms and cadences wonderfully. He’s the real stand out here in providing the soul of this archetypal trinity.

It’s fantastic that Abrams managed to work Nimoy into the story in a way that is integral and necessary rather than just being a silly cameo like Shatner’s in Generations. Here he takes on the role of Mentor and Wise Man. As Kirk is expelled from the higher world and descends in the lesser kingdom, where he fights some decidedly un-Trek like aliens. He then stumbles across a hermit like aged Spock. Nimoy fills the scene with the emotion and pathos in ways I hadn’t seen since the glory days of Trek II and III. In terms of mythology the elder Spock hadn’t seen his old friend for a hundred years or more. For long time fans this reunion between the characters is a real Easter egg of a moment.

Many of the other supporting roles are equally well executed; in particular I loved Anton Yelchin as Chekov, his humor and accent added the kind of color to the Enterprise that had been sorely missing in recent Trek movies. Simon Pegg provides some expert comic relief in his portrayal of Scotty, and Zoe Salanda sexes up Uhura well enough for the drawling hordes of sexually deprived teenaged trekkers out there. The one off note for me was John Cho, who plays Sulu – I was irked that once again Japanese actors were ignored in what is a Japanese role. I know that there were discussions with regard to ethnicity, but surely there must have been some Japanese actors suitable for the role.

Villain wise Eric Bana did an adequate job of snarling and snarking his way through the film, not quite up there with Riccardo Montalban’s Khan, but no where near as bad as some recent Trek movie villains, most notably the Picard clone in Star Trek X.

Really I could go on and on saluting the efforts of Abrams team in their endeavor to make Trek relevant again. The franchise is reborn once again. Bring on the sequels. Next time some bad ass Klingons please.

The Watchmen

This film is more than a film, it is an adaptation of the comic world Shakespeare’s (Alan Moore, if you’re really that ignorant) Magnum opus, The Watchmen. According to the man himself its unfilmable, which is just the way he likes it, judging by the fact he’s given up all financial residues that he’d stand to profit from. Zack Snyder (director), David Hayter and Alex Tse (screen writers), on the other hand, thinks differently as does the comic artist himself, David Gibbons, who worked with the film maker to refine the movie aesthetics and insure a faithful translation of the comic panels to the screen.

The running time is well over two and half hours – still not enough to give the work the justice it deserves, but just enough to convey what comic book geeks have been raving about for two decades, that is The Watchmen isn’t a comic book in the true sense, but an epic treatise on the human condition and the socio-political world it has spawned. Its the ultimate in super hero deconstructionism as each character fulfils a reversal of the genre’s archetypes. Its also an intriguing case study into alternative histories, with itself now having its own historical perspective. The story is still set in an alternative 1985, when the Cold War was still running hot and fear of nuclear annihilation felt more real than Islamic terrorists.

I’m personally amazed this movie got made with such an uncompromising dedication to the original material. This isn’t a commercial movie in the true sense, any exec thinking that this will break records is in for a huge financial disappointment – why? Because its just too damned high brow and opaque for the average movie audience. Think of it like this, would you go and watch a four hour production of Hamlet without studying the play first? Seriously, unless you were born in the sixteenth century you’ll have no idea what the characters are referring to half the time, let alone appreciate the complexity of the story. With the Watchmen it is the same thing, audiences need to be prepared, they need to understand the context, that means reading a hefty tome of a novel albeit with pictures, but nonetheless its not a light read. These days no one expects audiences to do this, and that means once word of mouth hits the streets that they just didn’t get it, then the masses will turn away, leaving the film with a huge drop off in the following weeks. Fortunately it looks like the studios were having an artistic revelation when the film was green lit and felt that regardless of whether it makes money or not, it something that should be made. Thank God it was before the credit crunch, eh?

I’m going to start by saying that I loved this movie because I loved the book and this interpretation is slavish in its reverence for its look and feel. Thanks to advances in film technology; panels and sequences are lovingly recreated and enhanced with a dollop of movie magic. Furthermore the violence and nudity of the novel is pretty much all left intact. Its a pretty gruesome movie in parts, with plenty of movie ketchup and sickening sounds splashed around the screen. Nevertheless for me personally this story is all about the characters and its central conceit, how can you save mankind from itself without killing millions of people?

The premise of the movie is that in this reality Superheroes are real and have been among us for decades. However just as celebrities rise and fall, so have the heroes who are currently banned from partaking in any cape action and have become condemned to a life of impotence and vigilantism.

To make matters worse America is now under a fifth term of Nixon who won the Vietnam war thanks to the help of the world’s only true super powered hero, Dr Manhattan.

On a dark and stormy night, a semi retired hero, named the Comedian, is brutally murdered by a unseen assailant. This act incites a tragic sequence of events that will lead to the unravelling of a terrible global conspiracy, that could possess a greater threat to the world than the growing confrontation between the Russia and America.

It’s a brilliant set up, and after reading the copy you can’t help but wonder how does a movie do such a story justice? Believe it or not it tries to keep the actual plot simple – almost too simple considering the sophistication of the premise, which is the film’s main weak point. However this is forgivable as this story is about character first and foremost, and here it delivered one hundred percent.

This world presupposes a reality where Superman is an even bigger prick than in the original and where Batman is not one character, but two; one half an impotent well meaning geek, the other a raving sociopath with hygiene and mother con issues. Its a world where Captain America is painted as a misogynist who appears to be in it only for the thrill of the kill. Wonder Woman is another gal with mummy and daddy issues and is caught up in a love triangle between Superman and Batman.

The equivalent of this world’s Lex Luthor, Reed Richards or Tony Stark is Adrian Veidt who is the world’s richest and smartest man, spending his time trying to find a solution to unlimited energy, but has a God complex worse than Tom Cruise.

You have to hand it to Moore for delivering such a delicious premise, god only knows how that psyche developed into a mind that could create such a set up. Now that would be an interesting story in itself.

So how does the movie do in delivering these characters?

I’ve got to say but I loved the interpretations, certainly some are stronger than others.

Let’s start with Dr Manhattan as played by Billy Crudup. For me he’s the movie’s most recognisable actor, he pretty much delivers a detached and serene Manhattan, yet with the understanding he could destroy everything if he so chose to do so. His voice is measured and Byronic – his key sequence when he is on Mars remembering his past and present is wonderful, and hits all the right beats. It is possibly one of my favourite parts of the movie, as we find the emotional core of this God like being. What’s even more remarkable is how the effects and Crudup’s performance made you believe in his reality, up there with Gollum in humble view. Loved the fact they kept the man’s schlong intact.

Niteowl (Dan Dreiberg) is played by Patrick Wilson, who’s new to me in film, he manages to effectively deliver the nerdiness and lack of confidence that has come to possess the character. He’s Batman, devoid of a crusade. Empty inside, his virility has turned to impotence and without his costume he’s drifting through life. Wilson really projects what a warm, yet ineffectual human Dan has become since hanging up his costume. I kind of miss the pot belly, but that could’ve looked really ridiculous on the screen.

Rorschach (Walter Kovacs) is played by Jackie Earle Haley. He effectively steals Bale’s gruff Batman persona and delivers wholesale the damaged sociopath’s character to the screen as if the drawing had just ripped its way across from panel to celluloid. He hits all his beats beautifully - my favorite is in the prison when he tells everyone to remember that he’s not trapped in here with them, they’re trapped in here with him. Perfect.

The Comedian (Edward Blake) is played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan. He’s a dead ringer for Robert Downey Jr who’d also have been perfect for this crucial role. It was vital that the Comedian came across with all the menace and cynicism of the graphic novel, furthermore his apparent amorality and bursts of sadistic and misogynistic violence needed to be all there. You can’t compromise on an uncompromising character, and indeed they don’t, during the critical Funeral sequence, his back story is fleshed out, as we witness the contradiction between his purpose and his actions in his relationship with the heroes and women. The Vietnam scene is there in its entirety – when you see it you’ll know what I mean.

Malin Akerman (Laurie Jupiter / Silk Spectre II)possibly comes off the weakest in this. It’s not that her performance is bad or anything, but other than getting Superman and Batman’s horn on, there isn’t much to remember. She functional rather than outstanding, certainly not the most memorable of performances, especially when compared to Carla Gugino who plays her mother in the flashback sequences with the kind of zestful and sexy energy you’d imagine. Part of the reason is its just the nature of the character. She doesn’t start in a positive place, and comes across as whiner at just about everything. It’s not helped by the fact he story arc is very much out of a cheap day time soap which with all the post modernist revisionism in all the world can’t hide.

Ozymandias (AKA Adrian Veidt) is played by Matthew Goode . Some reviewers haven’t been particularly kind about how he played this crucial character. In all fairness he’s a tough cookie to interpret, with a thinner back story, and less integrated in the main character arcs until the end of the film. His main scenes espouse exposition and philosophy without any foil for him to allow his character to shine – even for a moment. Somehow for me he just about about pulled it off, albeit with a bit more breathlessness and sweat than Cudrup, Earle and Wilson.

Much has been made about Snyder's decision to change the ending of the movie. Sorry - no giant squid in New York this time around. For me personally, I felt the central reason for the change made more sense and brought the various threads of the story’s themes to a satisfying ending. Simply put the big bad makes it look like the disaster had been caused by Dr Manhattan. America and the world in fear of what he might do next decide to make peace and work together to find a way to defeat Dr Manhattan. I loved this, why? Well in a Godless world – man creates God. God then tries to destroy man. It’s archetypal and dare I say it a more sophisticated ending than the one in the novel. Aside from that everyone who lives – lives and everyone who dies – dies. The alteration is theme enhancing and more than a little aware that gratuitous shots of bloodied New Yorkers isn’t what the American movie going public want right now.

There’s so much going on in this film that one viewing doesn’t do it justice. There are little scenes and touches that hint and in fact show a deeper more textured world here. If you’ve read the book you’ll see so much more happening here. There are rifts, nods and reproductions of visual elements, sounds and character moments that should bring a wry smile and the odd tear to the fan, who will no doubt be breathless for the extended DVD cut. I know I will.

The Reader

I touched on briefly in  a previous movie review about the current trend of World War Two movies to reevaluate the traditional  archetypes of the genre. First of all in Defiance, Jews didn't go to slaughterhouse without a fight, then in Valkyrie, not all German officers carried out the orders of Hitler unquestioningly, and now finally with The Reader, not all German SS prison guards were evil. Erm come again? Did I just write that last sentence? Yeah I did. Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian's film critic trashed this film with a one star for its shallow attempt to  humanize and trivialize the actions of a female SS guard under the guise of literary fiction. Where this movie diverges from the first two is the fact that this is an entirely fictional work rather than an adaptation of a true story. So is the movie as morally bankrupt as Bradshaw digresses? Well, I'm still digesting the impact the movie has had on me. Certainly  I don't feel that the movie trivializes the Holocaust, its victims or the guards involved. However it is guilty of ill placed sentimentality, that dares you to sympathize with the protagonist - or is that antagonist in this case? For that I take  issue with this, furthermore I agree with Bradshaw about the sickening final coda of the film, which defies belief and believability. Performance wise, aside from Fiennes yet again wallowing in another phoned in rejected, dislocated lover role, everyone gives good emotional bang for buck.

The film is based on the popular novel written by Bernhard Schlink and published in 1995. The adaptation is written by David Hare and directed by Stephen Daldry who did The Hours with Nicole Kidman. As a choice of subject the material is incendiary to say the least and touches wittingly or unwittingly on several taboos.

The story is told in flashback mode with Fiennes book ending the story with his detached / damaged and divorced lawyer.

David Kross plays Micheal, a fifteen year old boy living in an atypical German town in the mid nineteen fifties. Post War construction is happening all around as Germany begins its self rehabilitation after the long nightmare of World War Two and National Socialism. The film begins with Micheal inexplicably throwing up on the street in the pouring rain. Winslow's Hanna appears as an austere Nightingale and helps Micheal home after clinically  attending to his panicked nausea. Micheal is diagnosed with Scarlett Fever and has to spend the next several months in lonely recuperation. Once recovered he goes back to where he met Hanna to say thank you with a bunch of flowers. This results in a sexually charged affair (is there any other kind) with vaguely pedophile undertones - He's only fifteen and Hanna must be in her forties at this point. Their affair is marked by an idiosyncratic ritual whereby before they make love Micheal is ordered by Hanna to read classic novels by Homer and Chekhov.

The intensity of the affair causes a profound shift in Micheal's social behavior, he becomes distant from friends and family, rejecting the advances of a girl his own age for the thrill and Oedipus driven lust for Hanna's ticket inspector  - must have been the uniform. The relationship is over as mercurially as it began. Hanna is offered promotion to the station office which prompts her to pack her bags and leave. Micheal turns up to her flat to find it empty and hollow of the distant yet passionate tryst the two had created together.

Years pass by. Micheal grows up and begins studying to become a lawyer as part of his studies his seminar group attends the trial of six SS female prison guards for the war crime of murdering three hundred Jews during one of the notorious death marches at the tail end of the war. He is shocked to discover that Hanna is one of the accused and her testimony and admission becomes the center piece of the trial. Through the testimony of the mother and daughter survivors of the death march, Michael and we, the audience, learn the chilling facts of Hanna's evil deeds. How she'd pick and choose favorites to read books aloud to her, and then coldly send them to Auschwitz to be murdered. More horrific even, are the facts surrounding the murder of 300 Jewish women who were locked in a burning church to die during an allied bombing run. Through the course of the trial it becomes clear to Micheal that Hanna is illiterate and takes responsibility for the evil act in order to hide her shame.

Hanna is sentenced to a lifetime in prison, and Micheal is condemned to a lifetime of trauma and dysfunctional relationships as he attempts to come to terms with the stark reality that his first love had been a Nazi monster of the worst kind.

To be honest, up until this part of the film, which occupies the first two acts, I didn't really have much of a problem. Hanna played earnestly by Winslet is a pretty cold and unlikable character, even before the grand reveal of her Nazi past. Furthermore the court scenes where she has to face the survivors and attempt to justify the unjustifiable are logically constructed and act as crucible for much of German War Guilt. Considering the circumstances of the time - what would you have done? A question she poses to the judges in a critical scene. The immediate impact of the trial is admirably  discussed by the students themselves in their seminar where the issue of Hitler's Willing Executioners is addressed unequivocally - why is it only these women were on trial? There were thousands of camps across Europe, Auschwitz alone had over six thousand workers, who only these six are being tried? Their teacher proselytizes the legal viewpoint about the issues of what is wrong and what is legal - although here it become muddied and the point in my view lost. The main issue here is the fact that even if you accept the defense that the guards were doing their jobs - there is still the issue of what is human and moral. None of what the defendants say remotely touches on the issue of being humane. They all operate from a falsehood, a point of bad faith, and its for that which they're guilty. Hiding behind orders and professional duty is sickeningly laughable in the face of the real horror that they perpetrated and perpetuated.

Where the film really falls apart is in it's post trial sequences. Hanna is now living a life behind bars and Micheal is stilling trying to figure out how to live his life with the knowledge of who she is. This is where I just lost the sense of authenticity and reality. He starts to record tapes of himself reading the books from their affair and sending them to her so that she can listen. When she receives these tapes it reawakens something inside her, and she becomes determined to learn to read for herself at last. Now I've two questions here for the writers. First of all, if I had been seduced by a mass murdering female nonce, would I really go to all this effort? Wouldn't I have rather taken a course of therapy and called the police to report a further charge to add to her crimes - that of seducing and sexually abusing a minor? He's supposed to be an intelligent lawyer after all. Secondly - why oh why do the writer think we'd give a flying turd with worms about this convicted murderer learning to read? I wouldn't mind if she'd started reading books about the Holocaust, and started to write a thousand lines - I mustn't trap three hundred women in a burning church and let them die. But oh no, instead the writers think it would make far more sense for her to read the classics instead. What exactly are they trying to say or what do they want to say here? This is the film's real crime - trying to create sentiment for this person. We never see her attempt to make sense and atone for what she participated and incited, that in itself is an inexcusable flaw.

Finally the ending of the movie is just beyond ridiculous and in complete bad taste. Micheal by the end of the film isn't much of a character to write home about anyway, he's a weak man that allowed a three month affair thirty years earlier to totally dominate his life. We've all had our fair share of emotional disasters that can impact our personal development - but this is beyond the pale with what we're expected to buy into. Quite simply the brevity and mundanity of their relationship just doesn't amount to the emotional damage he appears to keep running over and over in his head for his entire life. He attempts to fulfill her final wishes by giving the daughter, Ilana, from the trial, a tin with money inside it. First of all what is  this supposed to mean? She's sorry? Here's a bit of cash to help with your life long therapy sessions? Buy some sweets with it to make up for all that starvation and torture? Okay if it was a tacit admission of penitence, fine, but Micheal, a professional lawyer - an adult, actually decides to go to New York and find Ilana to partake in this sick transaction. She's now living as a rich Jewish woman with fine artistic tastes in Manhattan - could you be anymore stereotypical? I mean every survivor had this - really? What are trying to comment here? That Jews like her were trying to profit from the Holocaust? Considering how coldly the scene is played I felt a hint of nausea that this was attempting a subtle dig here concerning that. She refuses the money, but the tin reminds her of one that she lost, so she takes that in another dose of unbelievable sentiment. Micheal feels the whole thing has allowed him to go through a  catharsis. For me it I felt I'd been put through a particularly sick farce, but that's just my humble point of view.

For the life of me I don't understand why this story became so popular. A third of the movie attempts an erotic love story that failed on both counts of eroticism and emotional connection. The second part of the movie had its merits with its attempt at exploring how the next generation of Germans dealt with the knowledge of The Holocaust, but I think here that there had been a missed opportunity to show flash backs to Hanna's actual time as an SS guard. Structurally speaking it was vital for us to truly come to despise the woman, as any right thinking human would - I couldn't care less that she was unable to read and had been ashamed of the fact. The third act of the movie compounds this mistake further. As we, the audience, are in danger of actually daring to sympathize with her plight. Utterly unforgivable, she's no fictional serial killer, she's a character based on a repugnant act of evil. Why should we sympathize with someone like that? I may as well start praying for Myra Hindley's damned and burning soul at the same time. This film is guilty of irresponsible film making and exploiting one of Europe's darkest chapters for cheap sexual thrills and a criminally shallow exploration of German war guilt. 

Valkyrie

There's little in the way of ambiguity in this movie and plays the whole story as an extraordinarily black and white tale of good versus evil. It's Nazi versus Nazi in a good old fashioned conspiracy story based on the true events to kill Hitler.

Wait did I say Nazi versus Nazi?

 How can that be a story of good versus evil? Weren't they all bad? I mean isn't Tarantino releasing a movie this year that glorifies the hunting and murder of same said jackboot stomping archetypes?

 I'm confused.

 Well you shouldn't be because Tom Cruise is playing Claus Van Stauffenberg who was the lead consiprator in the 1944 plot to blow Hitler up in his Wolf's Lair. With Tom fighting on the side of the angels, how could anyone be confused?

 Except we no longer really like Tom anymore, do we? He's gone down the path of believing his own hype and is a trailblazer for Scientology who have made incendiary claims about the dangers of psychiatry  citing examples from Nazi Germany's Holocaust experiments (check out the Panorama Documentary on from the BBC). The man is tarnished like unpolished silver candles. And can no longer be trusted on chat shows to do his job - sell movies, not make audiences feel nauseated.  How can he hold up a light for all that is free and good in the world?

Apparently Bryan Singer believes he can. In his follow up to the dour Superman Returns, the director has done his best to deliver a tight thriller about this German Superman who will free the Fatherland from the evil of the Nazis and be a messenger of peace to the allies.

Singer builds quickly a picture of an honorable man who values the lives of his men and the tradition of his country, and abhors what he sees as the sickness of National Socialism that is engulfing Germany and the world in suffering.

To younger viewers these days I wonder how much they know about this man, but from the cursory research and my own knowledge from studying Nazism at Uni he was somebody who had been genuinely appalled by the atrocities carried out by the SS in Russia during the invasion. He had been from Prussian aristocratic stock who believed in Military honor and respect, something he felt the Nazis knew nothing about. 

 Singer widens the canvas to show that this wasn't an isolated view point in Wehrmacht and that other high ranking  Military men and politicians shared a similar sensibility about Hitler and his cronies.

In order to paint this epic of the most famous of plots against Hitler, Singer has enlisted the great men from the English acting fraternity to play the officers involved - as you know only Brits can play Nazis, as Americans can only play good guys. An exception is made of Cruise because, well, he's the hero of the piece. It's actually quite an ensemble as it goes, you've got Terence Stamp, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Kenneth Branagh and even bloody Eddie Izzard, who last I remember used to like wearing women's clothes. Obviously no one feels the acting community in Germany is ready to play Germans yet, and I guess they still need more language lessons to work on their Genglish. Why is it the Americans always have to insist on Brits still being the bad guys? The Red Coats were like two hundred years ago now. Enough already. Have a spade play a spade for once, you know?

All Griping aside I did actually rather enjoy this movie. Its a tightly plotted bit of World War 2 drama with some excellent productions values. What's more you find yourself rooting for the "good guys" right up to the point when you know that they're doomed.

Smartly, the Second Act of the movie draws out the period of uncertainty surround the issue of Hitler's demise as long as it can to make you feel that at the time the conspirators might just have been able to have pulled it off. There's a wonderful bit with Goebbels slipping a cyanide capsule in his mouth just in case he was arrested. Singer makes it look like a really close thing, accentuating the tragedy of it all in the fact that it was doomed to fail as soon as the bomb went off.

For me, Cruise was still Cruise, albeit with a funny haircut and an eye patch. The fact he couldn't be arsed changing his accent gave the performance a wiff of Costner's Hood admittedly without that awful Bryan Adams song.

Mercifully Singer focuses on the action rather than going to psychological or personal. He keeps family scenes to a taut minimum, and ensures that once the inciting act occurs that there is no let up in tension. I'd go as far as to say that this film shows the director back on his game, and I look forward to seeing where he goes for his next project.

The Verdict

This a movie starring Paul Newman and James Mason, directed by Sydney Lumet.

With that kind of pedigree you know you’re in for something special, right? Well this was the movie that was supposed to have been Newman’s Oscar. Its a textbook example of a brilliant screenplay that should be studied on any screen writing program worth its salt, and is a major case study in Paul Lucey’s Screenwriting book. David Mamet’s script is superb in every way. It avoids showy and aims for naturalism and character. It keeps the plot simple and uncluttered focusing on the human drama of the situation as opposed to the details of legal procedure.

Newman plays Frank Galvin, a down on his luck lawyer, who’s progressing past functional alcoholic into the oblivion of chronic dependency. He’s regressed into a child like life, of playing pinball, entertaining the patrons of his local with bad jokes, and trying to find work by ambulance chasing. He’s the anti-hero after the fact. The guy who once had it all as lawyer in a respected firm with beauty queen wife and future as bright as the city lights.

His long time friend and one time mentor Mickey Morrissey played by Jack Warden has been trying to save Galvin from falling off rock bottom and deeper into hell by throwing him easy cases that a blind mouse could win to keep his friend afloat. This time the case is a sure thing out of court settlement that could net Galvin a considerable amount of cash that would buy him some more time to sort himself out. The details of the case involve a patient who’s effectively brain dead after she had a heart attack during the delivery of her baby. The hospital involved is owned by the Roman Catholic church, and the arch bishop of the Boston diocese wants the case to disappear quickly with no publicity. Quite literally all Galvin has to do is pick up a check and enjoy the money.

Things don’t go as planned after talking to one of the hospital’s doctors and actually seeing the patient for himself. He realizes that he could actually win this thing, that this could be his shot at regaining his former self and finding a kind of redemption. Of course it meant taking on the Archdiocese’s law firm, Edward Concannon, played classically by James Mason who is quite literally Galvin’s dark rival / alter ego, a hugely successful lawyer who lives by the axiom, you don’t do your best you just have to win.

The movie is a well paced character piece, the sort of movie that is tailor-made for actors gunning for Oscar glory and such like. However its more than just the sum of its parts, thanks to Lumet’s unshowy directional style and cinematography the film emphasizes the torture that Galvin goes through in fighting the case. Often he is in medium long shots with one fixed camera, Lumet unflinchingly shows the procrastinations and desperate attempts by Galvin to survive not only on a case where the odds become increasingly stacked against him, as he discovers the cronyism going on between the Judge and Arch diocese but also the fact that he needs alcohol to survive through the day. In the opening sequence we see just how bad his dependency is when he trashes his office in a fit of alcoholic rage, the scenes become less frequent as the film builds towards its third act, but we know its all still there bubbling under the surface.

Newman is incredible to watch considering the length of the scenes that he has to act in. Lumet holds a shot for something like three and half minutes at times, giving the scenes a play like quality in the fact that there are no quick cuts of montages used. In contrast with modern films it might appear old fashioned in style, however his careful blocking and use of lighting, gives the film a naturalistic aesthetic enhanced further with a painterly sense of composition, especially when dealing with Newman. I for one badly want to use some of those frames in my art, thanks to their subdued colours and stark contrasts of light and dark.

If you want to watch a movie anad watch a couple of Hollywood legends duke it out in true style I really recommend this film, despite its age there is something extraordinarily classical about it. I haven’t watched many Newman films recently, but I now find myself wanting to rediscover his older works and appreciate his star quality. Furthermore if you’re a student of screenplays, the nuanced dialogue and structure of th Mamet’s script is the perfect master class and I recommend Paul Lucey’s Story Sense : A Screenwriter’s Guide to Film and Television for a detailed case study of the story.