Film Review - Ex Machina

Spoiler alert! And a fairly big one this time because I am pretty much going to tell the whole story.

This has the potential to be a decent film.

Oscar Isaac has a dodgy beard and a shaved head, and that distracts from the storyline a bit. Actually that comes back a few times, as he always looks slightly out of place. A basic explanation that Gleeson is here to test if a robot is sentient and then the robot is introduced almost immediately and the special effects are very good. 

So we wait for the twist.

Some highly technical discussion of the what makes an AI sentient, but filled with primary school inaccuracies about the Turing test. Some scars on his back, is he a robot? Is Oscar Isaac a robot? Another random woman appears and obviously the is a robot? So maybe the vagaries of the test rules mean something clever about which robot is being tested?

And so we wait for the twist.

Some random female nudity and some crude discussion of her physical abilities to try and distract half the viewers from the fact that really nothing is actually happening. Gleeson cutting himself to check that he isn't a robot. Letting out the secret that the robot has more control than expected (even though that was obvious half an hour ago). 

And we are still waiting for the twist.

Here comes the twist. Wait is that it? None of the expected twists, a half baked, plot-hole filled twist instead. And suddenly we are done.

Really disappointing.


Rating 6 or 7 / 10. Probably only deserves a 6 for not quite delivering on the promise. 

Film Review - American Sniper

So this is supposedly the film that will finally get Bradley Cooper an Oscar. Really? 

The only way that happens is if there is a major attack of biased voting from 'Merican Academy voters who all watch this with their brains switched off whilst waving flags.

In hindsight that makes it seems like Cooper doesn't deserve credit for this film. That is slightly harsh, he was perfectly adequate with what he is given. Sometimes he seems like he should be an arrogant dick, sometimes he should be suffering from PTSD or at least showing some sign of a conscience, sometimes he should be really happy. Yet through everything he is completely flat. Maybe this is intentional as they try to show a man so completely in control of everything that it allows him to pull the trigger on any target without the emotional consequences. 

Also it is hard to totally blame Eastwood's direction. He does labour the storytelling to the point that this is basically the slowest action film ever made. And he obviously puts pressure on Cooper to be as emotionally flat as he can be. However it is more realistic than the alternatives of crazy American heroes running around, seemingly bulletproof, whilst every shot they fire is instantly fatal. Eastwood also shies away from almost all of the special effects in order to keep his film rated for a wider audience. 

There is something of a hole in the story and the characterisation but they possibly come from trying to stay true to reality. The real problem comes from the styling. It jumps too much from year to year, scene to scene, without really developing the characters at all. Even when his character is meat to be changing and being affected by what the war is doing to him, we only get that because his wife points it out to us. 

The ending is rushed and doesn't really make sense, even less than the reality. The overall tone of the film is the usual bias towards America and the American military. Some of this is well covered but if you watch with even an ounce of skepticism you have to start wondering how much is true and where the lines are between the tweaks made for film-making (like cutting what sex and violence is seen on screen) to the almost blatant lies (e.g. I killed 8 but you can only confirm 6 and I say one of those had a rifle but there is no actual evidence of it at the scene). 

Some work needed to really turn this into the film it should have been. 

Rating 7 /10.

Film Review - Whiplash

Whiplash is not weird. Or maybe it still is but I have moved the goalposts for weird after Birdman. 

I haven't seen Mark Ruffalo's Foxcatcher performance yet so I may be slightly premature but at the minute J.K.Simmons can be fairly confidently writing his Oscar acceptance speech. The only way he isn't getting Best Supporting Actor is if Academy voters consider him to be the main character and dismiss Miles Teller as supporting and providing a narration role.

Simmons has been a bit part in everything before this. The closest he has been to a memorable role was playing the overbearing editor JJ Jameson in the Toby Maguire Spiderman series. 

Film Review - Birdman

Birdman is weird. Maybe even too weird. A lot of people are not going to find it too strange to handle, or a little boring. There is a section about half-way to three-quarters though which doesn't really seem to go anywhere. Another 10 minutes at the end must have been hard not to cut, as it gives a much cleaner and more audience-expected finish. In hindsight I think that last section is valuable enough to stay in, but I can see where other people are going to disagree.

The directors approach in trying to film it to look and feel like one single tracking shot is genius. It does make you feel much more a part of the film. In a lot of scenes and locations that you know you shouldn't have access to, you are made to feel much more like you are a part of the action. The transitions are sometimes visible, but often so well disguised that only freaks like me are going to spot a lot of them, and I still think I missed more than a few. He also puts in a hatful of other really great tricks, many of which I spotted but a couple I still haven't figured out. There are a lot of mirrors but I can't figure out where the crew and camera were hiding from many of them. If it was post-production, it was amazingly clean, and much cleaner than some of the other special effects, maybe intentionally so.

The mentions of the other movie stars and all the plugs for the superhero franchises could have been a bit overbearing but again they are played into the story well. The self deprication of Keaton referencing his own history as Batman is also so smoothly rolled into the character that it gives extra validation to his performance.  

Thompson's delusions are also tied into the movie so fabulously that it is easy enough to buy into them completely and even when the others around him who are free of his delusionary view and are showing you what is really happening it is easy to tie together their version with his and to understand how easily he can make his delusions fit his circumstances. 

I was all ready to hand Eddie Redmayne the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in The Theory of Everything and I still suspect that it might go his way. Now I am less confident about the outcome though. I can see a lot of Academy voters giving Keaton credit for this as an insightful piece of art and a great performance as well as rewarding the breadth of his back catalogue.

Rating 8 out of 10. 

Film Review - Taken 3

I am not even going to put a spoiler warning on here because if you can't predict everything this film has to offer by watching the trailer then you shouldn't bother going to the cinema, ever. 

The film is so predictable I actually wonder if I have seen it already. Very much in a Thunderball / Never Say Never Again sort of way.

The set-up is entirely obvious, the cop insists on chasing him even though he knows he isn't guilty, because that is procedure, but once he catches him he just lets him go despite the huge number of other offences he has committed through the film. 

The archetypal bad guys are so bad that even in an enclosed room their leader, a supposed Spetsnatz super soldier, armed with an automatic machine gun which he cycles through several magazines can't get anywhere near hitting our hero. Meanwhile he takes out people with wine bottles, knives, fists and so on. So we are past the ridiculous and into the stupid long before he uses a Porsche to tackle a private jet.

Unfortunately, the sound quality in the showing I went to was terrible. From about half way through the voice track went overly heavy on the bass and the treble dropped out and it sounded like the cast were underwater. Weirdly enough though, the music and sound effects tracks were unaffected so I doubt it was something as simple as a hardware fault with the cinema. While this didn't help with my enjoyment of the film, I was already paying little enough attention that it probably didn't make it any worse either. 

Worst film so far this year. Not terrible. Just completely and perfectly average. 

Rating 5/10

Film Review - Into the Woods

I am a big fan of Anna Kendrick. If she had filmed 10 hours of herself walking around New York I might have been interested enough to watch it. So I was going to see this movie as soon as her name was on it. If the cast then includes the likes of Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt and Captain Kirk, my attendance is guaranteed regardless of story or director. James Corden and Johnny Depp being in it did worry me but I got over that by about 5 minutes in.

I didn't realise how musical it was going to be. I expected something more like Mamma Mia or Pitch Perfect or Frozen with big chunks of story running between songs. It took me a while to get into the idea that almost every line would be sung but by the time Lilla Crawford completely upstages Johnny Depp I was already wondering when I would be able to get tickets for the sing-along version. 

Squeezing the fairy tales of Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel and Cinderella in around a new story was clever. Keeping in the creepier parts of the fairy tales caught me by surprise though. I expected Disney to stick with their sanitised versions, especially around the fates of Cinderella's sisters. 

Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen in their 'prince-off' duet is beyond hilarious. Rarely, if ever, have I known a cinema audience break into such spontaneous, prolonged and genuine laughter, but when Chris Pine tears his shirt open the audience went crazy.

For me, there was a better and more Disney-fied stopping point just after the royal wedding. From that point on there wasn't anything I felt added to the movie and not even a song that was worth stretching it out for. Kendrick and Corden's duet of Not Alone is good, but it wasn't worth the extra 30 minutes stretching the film out to get it.

Considering the strengths of the films that have been out so far in 2015 it is pretty impressive for a full-on fairy tale musical to come out ahead of them. But in hindsight with it being Meryl Streep doing Disney doing Sondheim, that was actually predictable enough. It needed to be pretty special to overtake Eddie Redmayne's Stephen Hawking biopic and I am not going to be in the majority here but for me this was better.

Best film of the year so far. 

Rating 8/10.

Film Review - Unbroken

Caution, Spoilers!

I had to go to this one on my own. I have been putting it off as there have been several better looking films on for the last few weeks. However, there are 2 much better looking films coming next week (Big Hero 6 and Birdman) so I took the opportunity to go and see this one before it leaves and before I go back to a full work and training schedule. 

So earlier in the week I went to see The Theory of Everything, a biography of a theoretical physicist in a wheelchair, today I went to see Unbroken, a biography about an Olympic finalist, war hero and prisoner of war. You won't need 3 guesses to figure out which was the more exciting film, but you might need 2. 

As with almost all films about running (Prefontaine being the possible exception that proves the rule), the actual running bits are rubbish. Maybe as a runner myself I am overly sensitive to this sort of thing but they really just bug me. Also they feel a bit rushed. There is almost a movie here just doing the pre-war section but it is over with a couple of flashbacks in the first half an hour. 

Then there are a couple of exaggerated flying and crashing scenes before the film just seems to switch off. We must get the best part of 40 minutes of Zamperini and two crew mates in a life raft, seemingly failing miserably at basic survival skills until one of them dies but somehow still lasting 45 days.

It just gets so slow that by the time you get to some of the prisoner of war torture scenes the speed of the film is becoming torture itself. Maybe this was intentional as a directorial decision to try and make the audience uncomfortable. If so then it was entirely successful. The problem with that approach though is that not many viewers are going to the cinema to be made uncomfortable. 

By this point I was also getting a bit frustrated with the cinematography. It ranged from close-ups on the actors to top-down shots which seemed designed to avoid showing modern architecture then back to close-ups, and more close-ups and sometimes more close-ups. This over-reliance puts too much pressure on Jack O'Connells talent and the problem with that approach is that he isn't all that exciting to look at in such repetitive close-up. 

Overall it isn't a bad directorial outing for Angelina Jolie, but given the source material this could have been so much more. 

Rating - 6/10, nothing special, should have been better. 

Film Review - The Theory of Everything

First serious post for my new blog.

Caution Spoilers!

Today we went to see 'The Theory of Everything'. 

The first thing that I have to note before I even get to the film was the demographic of the audience. It was surprising to se an audience which was so old. I wonder if this was due to Hawking's peak of popularity being 30 years ago or down to the nature of the film. It also meant a lot of people turning up late. I am going to write a separate blog about that. 


The documentary nature of the film meant that I was already familiar with the story. As such I know there were some liberties taken with the story but I can understand most of them in terms of directorial and scripting choices. I could argue with a few of them but that assumes the previous versions and details that I have read elsewhere are more accurate than this version which may not be the case. The film being based on Jane Hawking's book means that the story is certainly more sympathetic to her than most other accounts.

There are some interesting directorial choices when sections are turned into a home-video effect. I assume that these are based on someone having actually made a home video of those events and the director having chosen to copy those home movies. Apart from that the styling seems consistent with the era and I can forgive the standard Hollywood failure that everyone looks like their clothes came straight out of the shop. As the clearest example, despite much focus on Hawking dragging his shoes during the early stages of his disease they never seem to get scuffed. Less forgivable is that the furniture, wheelchairs, computers, tents an so on seem to be mostly 70s originals which show 40 years of age despite supposedly being new. One or the other I could have lived with but next to each other they do occasionally grate.

On the acting side there are two major characters in the movie Stephen and Jane Hawking. As the book is written from her perspective it is no surprise that Felicity Jones is able to elicit sympathy from the audience. A lot of other film-goers and reviewers are giving her very good reviews, but in my opinion the material is very favourable to her character and she is given plenty to work with. So while it is a good turn, there is nothing really special about it. 

Eddie Redmayne's performance as a gradually deteriorating Hawking is something special though. Early on he exhibits some of the key mannerisms of Hawking, and as he deteriorates through the film he becomes ever more impressive in delivering an almost perfect portrayal of the man. By the point his portrait is used to replace the original photograph on the book cover he is so close to the real thing that I almost missed the change. 

There is a slightly annoying dream scene right at the end where he rises from his chair and reverses the whole process of his deterioration in about 5 seconds. That threw me out of the film a little bit, and I personally could have done without it. It did give Redmayne a chance to show his entire transition in reverse in one smooth move but it didn't really work for me. 

Overall I quite liked it.
Rating - 7/10 and most of those points go to Eddie Redmayne. 

No Training Here

So I have found my original plan to have a general blog that covers my battle with depression then started to turn into a blog with a little bit of training, then gradually became a blog of mostly training and then eventually became a blog of only training. So I have decided to start this one to allow me to take everything else out and treat it separately. 

So this will be a more general blog about everything else from film and restaurant reviews to politics to general philosophical musings.