The Town - Quick Review

So to save on time and effort I'm putting up a short review for The Town as I saw it recently and it just got a DVD release.

The Town follows Doug Macray who commits a number of bank robberies with his Charlestown crew and falls in love with a woman who they take hostage and let go in the first heist of the narrative. He wants to break free from Boston and start life a fresh with his new found love, but with a persistent FBI agent hot on his tail and a crew who won't let him go lightly, Doug has the odds stacked up against his fight for freedom.

So its a brilliant follow on from Gone Baby Gone even though its a very different style of film. The Bostonian setting is once again realistic and effective with the script written very much with the city in mind. There are so many little gems of Bostonian language that scatter the various scenes with humour and sharp dialogue. The cast is superb with Affleck leading as well as Directing and managing to hold it all together brilliantly. Kudos to Jeremy Renner (Hurt Locker) who is unnerving and unpredictable as Dougs best friend and gang member James. This is also one of the last times we'll see Pete Postlethwaite perform since his recent passing, he is utterly brilliant and growls viciously as the Irish mob boss Fergus Colm. The drama is superb and really sets the tone of the film but is broken up with style by three superb heist scenes. Each better than the other with the final filling a lot of the third act and seeing tons of gun fire. The slick editing and shooting style, along with the way the gang orchestrate their plans really make the scenes memorable, and very much pivotal to the story. This is well written and entertaining drama coupled with sharp and exciting action. Ben Afflecks 'Heat' if you will.

I really recommend this for a night in, it will suit most tastes and is a film I would gladly revisit.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

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BAFTA Show Down

So the BAFTA's have come and gone and the outcome is ridiculously predictable. The Kings Speech is amazingly acted, Social Network is perfectly scripted and directed and Inception looks and sounds amazing so you can probably tell who won what already. Colin Firth, Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Rush all walked away with their acting nominations with Natalie Portman obviously winning best actress, if it went to anyone else it would be a sham. Sure enough Kings Speech won both the British film and overall film award (a little too much me thinks) but David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin got what they deserved winning best director and adapted screenplay for Social Network, a film I have now begun to laud over since getting a copy, its a supreme piece of work. Inception raked in the technical awards, a shame because I think it deserves more, but at least its been recognised. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo which was the first review I wrote on this blog took best foreign film totally deserved. My only real grievance was with best soundtrack, now its enough for a film to rake at the BAFTA's like Kings Speech, but the soundtrack although great doesn't stick in the memory nor have the impact that many of the others had. How To Train Your Dragon is a firm favourite of mine although no one can deny the impact of the Inception soundtrack, why either of these didn't get it is beyond me, I supposed it's justice enough for a nomination. Only one film was going to win best animation and rightly so Toy Story 3, one year there might actually be a case where the winner of this category might be hard to predict, but one can dream.  


Anyway the full list of winners is below, did they go the way you thought? who did you think was robbed? and is the Kings Speech reeeeally THAT good? Let me know. 


ORIGINAL MUSIC: Alexandre Desplat for The King's Speech

SHORT FILM: Until The River Runs Red

SHORT ANIMATION: The Eagleman Stag

SOUND: Inception

EDITING: The Social Network

MAKE UP & HAIR: Alice in Wonderland

FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

COSTUME DESIGN: Colleen Atwood for Alice in Wonderland

PRODUCTION DESIGN: Inception

SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS: Inception

SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Helena Bonham Carter for The King's Speech

OUTSTANDING DEBUT: Chris Morris for Four Lions

OUTSTANDING BRITISH FILM: The King's Speech

SUPPORTING ACTOR: Geoffrey Rush in The King's Speech

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: David Seidler for The King's Speech

OUTSTANDING BRITISH CONTRIBUTION: The Harry Potter Films

ANIMATED FILM: Toy Story 3

ORANGE WEDNESDAYS RISING STAR: Tom Hardy

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Roger Deakins for True Grit

DIRECTOR: David Fincher for The Social Network

LEADING ACTRESS: Natalie Portman for Black Swan

LEADING ACTOR: Colin Firth

BEST FILM: The King's Speech

FELLOWSHIP: Christopher Lee  

The Fighter - Review

I love this time of year as directors and actors bring out the big guns and create well formed character piece movies, but for the life of me I can't remember a time when a fight has been so close to call as the bout for best film. Having seen nearly all of them now with just True Grit to go, each contender save for Toy Story has a strong and detailed focus on a powerful central protagonist, there's no glossing over the detail, there’s raw realism to each one of them and The Fighter is a shining example of this trend. It is a sports movie and the structure is typical but with a central character that you genuinely route for as his fights are fought not just in the ring but in his life outside it. With the type of gritty realism that reminds you of Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone, the setting paints a pretty grim picture of 1980's Lowell Massachusetts where drugs are rife and hard times are plain to see. The community of Lowell supports and idolises boxing and their local hero Dick Eklund who long ago destroyed his career thanks to drugs. His brother Micky who also fights has the chance to prove himself as a boxer but is held back by his families damaging motives and deluded dreams. He finds a way to break free and achieve his potential thanks to his new girlfriend and the support of his trainers, but not without consequences.

The drama here is electric, especially amongst the family where Micky who should be receiving all the support he can, is side lined by the damaging lives and habits of his brother and the rest of his family. With his mother as a manager Micky is at the behest of his family including his six grown female siblings who would all seek to gain from any success their brothers have. Confrontations and snappy dialogue come thick and fast when Micky’s girlfriend Charlene (played brilliantly by Amy Adams) is thrown into the mix. Mark Wahlberg puts in an understated but brilliant performance as Micky; in fact this is probably his finest work even though his character is overshadowed at first by Christian Bales off the hook performance as his brother Dicky. It comes as no surprise that Bale has received a supporting actor nomination at the Oscars as he behaves like and embodies the character he is playing, but Wahlberg is the same, his character is just more level headed. But it’s like with everything, you always remember the wild ones more and although Bale looks like he might steal it from him, Wahlberg shows that this is his film. And if you doubt that some of Bales performance may be over acting the film makers make a point of showing just thirty seconds of the real brothers in the credits, in that brief time it’s plain to see that both Bale and Wahlberg really knocked this one out of the park.

The way the sport is depicted and filmed is crucial to a movie like this and The Fighter makes the boxing feel very real by presenting it in a TV broadcast manner but with focused close-ups at crucial points. The fights are intoxicating and as more come the more you route for Micky to make it through. The hard work on display here is undeniable, long and medium shots give the actors little room to fake and Wahlberg clearly has put in the training to make the fights look real and intense. The drama of these fights and the clashes that Micky deals with in-between them make this a film that never loses pace; none of the scenes feel unnecessary. This is a brilliantly directed piece of work and David O Russell’s best work since Three Kings and once again it doesn't surprise me that he’s up for best director at the Oscars.

I thoroughly enjoyed this, the story is so wide in its appeal and to know this is based on truth is bitter sweet, I loved the characters and I was on the edge of my seat for the final fight earnestly routing for Micky, I haven’t had an experience like that in a sports movie for some time. As a lot of critics have already penned this is Rocky for a new generation.  Go see it.   

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

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127 Hours - Review

So Danny Boyle tackles yet another genre, a real life fight for survival story with the tagline 'there is no force more powerful than the will to live'. It brings to mind one of my favourite films/documentaries 'Touching the Void', a true story about a man who has a climbing accident and through his own unstoppable determination manages to crawl for miles with a completely broken leg back to base camp. The story is endearing and powerful but it’s told in a documentary style with talking heads and superb dramatisations. Touching The Void is a triumph because it comes straight from the mouths of the people who actually went through it. 127 Hours is brave in taking a true story that is recent, can be well documented by the real Aron Ralston and instead dramatising it. With the story focusing solely on one person doing something daft, it's easy to see why this was given the feature film treatment, the film has one focus with James Franco playing the central role brilliantly, but for me it never reaches the heady heights of Touching the Voids honesty and compassion. A friend of mine watched an interview with Aron Ralston describing his escape before seeing the film and felt his experience at the cinema was enhanced due to this. After seeing the film for myself I couldn't help but feel that this kind of insight would have given the film more connection with the fact that this actually happened.

However this is not to say that 127 Hours is a bad film, far from it. To anyone not privy to the story of Aron Ralston this will be an inspiring and excruciating ride into a man’s psyche and his willingness to live. The performance and the way that it is captured through various experimental camera techniques are astonishing. It’s not a film for the faint of heart, when it was first shown people were given t-shirts shirts saying 'I kept my eyes open for all of 127 Hours' and in all fairness I did flinch a few times myself as Aron went about his escape. Even though the event that see's Aron free himself from his prison weighs heavily in the plot of the film, 127 Hours proves what The Kings Speech proved, that characters mean much more to the film than anything else. James Franco brings Aron Ralston to life and really goes hell for leather. He's totally believable as a free spirited and outgoing . . . tit, and as his characters pluckiness and foolishness is worn down by the struggle he's landed himself in and responds with a performance that doesn't feel forced or fake.

One of the main crux of the story are Arons flash backs and hallucinations that represent his thoughts, fears and dreams as he slowly deteriorates. For much of the film they help the audience to understand what is going through Arons head and why he eventually comes to this disturbing but inevitable conclusion. The images never spell their meaning but they don't have to as they ultimately serve in making Aron realise that his attitude and total lack of responsibility have lead him to this crack in the wilderness. It's a sour note especially one that paints the protagonist as a bit of an idiot, but this never becomes a sticking point in the enjoyment of the film. In fact it gives you better connection to the character, none of us are perfect, we all have our flaws and the best characters in movie history are flawed in their own unique way.  

To conclude 127 Hours is like nothing you've seen before, you've all seen survival movies and they do paint the same picture every time, not here. Like I say it’s not for the faint of heart, but for those who want to see real sacrifice and triumph in the face of impossible circumstances then this is what you’re after.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Click here for trailer