"Run little piggy"
Joe Wright's endlessly stylish cat-and-mouse film is a wonderful move away from the period dramas people may associate him with (how many people actually saw The Soloist after all?). His visually appealing take does justice to Seth Lochhead and David Farr's location-packed script, the emphasis always falling on where Hanna is which greatly influences who she is.
Hanna is an assassin - and a young one at that. Her whole life has been a training camp in which her father instills the rules she must follow to stay alive, "You must always be ready. Even when you're sleeping", but not the skills she needs when she finally comes up against that unknown quantity - other people.
Saoirse Ronan handles the difficult leading role of the youthful assassin with aplomb. It is a very physical role without much scripted opportunity to show the inner workings of the child, yet she brings real heart to the character and her new, confusing, experiences with civilisation are played with just the right amount of awkwardness and curiosity.
The plot is drip-fed to the audience. We're kept in the dark about the reason for the hunt for quite some time and even then new information hijacks us along the way. In fact it appears that we are discovering things at about the same rate as Hanna herself, who remains in the dark about important plot points almost until the bitter end.
Eric Bana is very good as the father who has chosen to raise his daughter very much to his own design; in such a way as to make it impossible for her to make an informed decision about her life's direction. It may seem strange and would make his character difficult to sympathise with were it not for the warmth with which he plays it. Cate Blanchett is rather a weak link with a drifting accent and a slightly-too-driven character to get to grips with when we are told so little about her (what is her obsession with her teeth all about?). However, I do wonder if the accent shifts are a character decision as she appears to get more Southern as she tries to come across as warm and caring.
The real star of the show is Tom Hollander's wearer of short-shorts extraordinaire, Isaacs. Equal parts camp and creepy he edges ever closer to his prey with ever more well-contained joy. It is yet another utterly brilliant performance to add to Hollander's seemingly never-ending list of extraordinary characters. Yep, I love that guy.
Really though, Hanna is a film in which the style, production design and score (a brilliant piece of work by the Chemical Brothers consisting of pounding beats and haunting nursery rhymes) carry much of the weight. Wright uses locations brilliantly, moving from snow to desert, populated urban areas to abandoned, overgrown sites with ease. And this movement allows us to see the characters at their most comfortable and completely out of their depth which only allows us to understand them better. As Hannah graduates from life with her father to the harsh landscapes of the compound and the desert, and then to the (much more dangerous) locales of urban life, we see that Wright is even more adept at pulling together different visual styles than his heroine is at adapting to the new constraints and information in her life.
Stylish with some very interesting performances - all underscored excellently by The Chemical Brothers - 8/10
Sunday 29 May 2011
Saturday 28 May 2011
Meek's Cutoff
"I think this was written long before we got here"
Kelly Reichardt has created a creeping trawl of a film in which we watch three families traipsing across the Omaha Trail in search of riches and a new life. This search is clearly not going well as we join them far enough into the journey for them to be questioning their guide, Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood). In fact, as the film lingers on it becomes less about a search for the gold-filled promised land than a quietly desperate endeavour to find water, trust and humanity in these less than humane conditions.
There are many interesting elements to this film which can be taken as either praise-worthy or criticisms depending on the mood that takes you while watching. For instance, the static camera-work, the lack of dialogue, any real drama, character development. I think a lot of these are praise-worthy but unfortunately the coming together of these elements did not meld to form an engaging enough film for me.
The idea that I really got the most out of was that this wasn't a story put to screen but part of one. That these characters are fully formed and without need of explanation thrilled me. That they continue to travel without needing to 'grow' in front of our eyes excited me greatly. This film is not so much a drama as a dip into the reality of the character's lives; very much warts and all.
This is where the lack of dialogue comes into play. These people are trekking, they aren't chatting. When they do, it is something that needs to be said. Seeing the women walking alongside the wagons, their dresses blowing violently about them in the desert wind, working their fingers to the bone to clean and cook on the road and staying out of the 'men's business' is a slice of reality that seems hard to watch. These people aren't here for our entertainment. They're here to survive and they are going to try to do that the best way they can - by getting on with things.
The look of the film is striking. A great deal of the footage focuses on the movement of the caravan; the camera remaining still as they walk slowly across the horizon. The lengthy silences mean that you have to rely on the visuals for character information and plot details to emerge. There are moments where you almost want to look away because the camera has been still with so little happening for so long. Inevitably this is when the important things happen. There is excellent use of real lighting and indeed utter darkness. I think I saw William Patton's face clearly only once during the film. His whispered, tense conversations with his wife (Michelle Williams) take place in such deep darkness that the dialogue was really brought to the fore.
Unfortunately not all of the characters are completely convincing which the film clearly relies upon due to dropping us into this episode of their lives. Zoe Kazan's hysterical Millie and her husband (an unusually disappointing Paul Dano) seem slightly over the top.
A fine piece of art but not engaging enough as a film. However, if I see a better, more fitting ending this year I will be very, very surprised (and very excited) - 7/10.
Kelly Reichardt has created a creeping trawl of a film in which we watch three families traipsing across the Omaha Trail in search of riches and a new life. This search is clearly not going well as we join them far enough into the journey for them to be questioning their guide, Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood). In fact, as the film lingers on it becomes less about a search for the gold-filled promised land than a quietly desperate endeavour to find water, trust and humanity in these less than humane conditions.
There are many interesting elements to this film which can be taken as either praise-worthy or criticisms depending on the mood that takes you while watching. For instance, the static camera-work, the lack of dialogue, any real drama, character development. I think a lot of these are praise-worthy but unfortunately the coming together of these elements did not meld to form an engaging enough film for me.
The idea that I really got the most out of was that this wasn't a story put to screen but part of one. That these characters are fully formed and without need of explanation thrilled me. That they continue to travel without needing to 'grow' in front of our eyes excited me greatly. This film is not so much a drama as a dip into the reality of the character's lives; very much warts and all.
This is where the lack of dialogue comes into play. These people are trekking, they aren't chatting. When they do, it is something that needs to be said. Seeing the women walking alongside the wagons, their dresses blowing violently about them in the desert wind, working their fingers to the bone to clean and cook on the road and staying out of the 'men's business' is a slice of reality that seems hard to watch. These people aren't here for our entertainment. They're here to survive and they are going to try to do that the best way they can - by getting on with things.
The look of the film is striking. A great deal of the footage focuses on the movement of the caravan; the camera remaining still as they walk slowly across the horizon. The lengthy silences mean that you have to rely on the visuals for character information and plot details to emerge. There are moments where you almost want to look away because the camera has been still with so little happening for so long. Inevitably this is when the important things happen. There is excellent use of real lighting and indeed utter darkness. I think I saw William Patton's face clearly only once during the film. His whispered, tense conversations with his wife (Michelle Williams) take place in such deep darkness that the dialogue was really brought to the fore.
Unfortunately not all of the characters are completely convincing which the film clearly relies upon due to dropping us into this episode of their lives. Zoe Kazan's hysterical Millie and her husband (an unusually disappointing Paul Dano) seem slightly over the top.
A fine piece of art but not engaging enough as a film. However, if I see a better, more fitting ending this year I will be very, very surprised (and very excited) - 7/10.
Thursday 26 May 2011
13 Assassins
"Total massacre"
Before seeing 13 Assassins my only experience of a Takashi Miike film was watching the first half of Audition - you know, the boring half - and turning it off because it was, well, boring. So when it was suggested to me that I watch 13 Assassins I was concerned not only by the 2+ hours (ok, only +6 minutes) running time, but the information coming my way that almost half of that, if not more, was given over to a battle sequence. An hour? Of Samurai fighting? I must admit, I was not under the impression that this was going to be my thing....
How wrong I was. How very wrong.
13 Assassins is an epic of Shakespearean proportions. All stilted, polite conversation - even when debating how to go about taking out the enemy - dark rooms and darker deeds, good vs. evil, all on the most humanistic of levels.
Admittedly the film takes a while to really get going but, as with Audition if I'd stuck with it, the slow build leads to an immense climax. But even before the battle Miike has you on the edge of your seat. He walks the line between the gruesome and the subtle very well; there is evidence of torture in a scene which shifts the film into 'horror' terrain and a brief but brilliant moment later in which it rains blood. But even in the battle scenes are not all about the gore. The sequences are choreographed and shot with great invention (did I mention the raining blood?) with each of the assassins featured in their own fights against seemingly undiminishing numbers of aggressors yet without it feeling episodic.
Miike also focuses on the characters enough for each personality to come through, especially during the trek through the mountain forest, lightening the mood brilliantly through Yûsuke Iseya's joyously wild-eyed performance. Masataka Kubota (Ogura) is also one of the highlights as an inexperienced Samurai.
So it turns out this was indeed my thing. I'll be looking up more of Miike's work in the future and preparing for one hell of a ride.
Epic in the most glorious of ways. So full of detail it's probably worth another 10 watches - 9/10
Before seeing 13 Assassins my only experience of a Takashi Miike film was watching the first half of Audition - you know, the boring half - and turning it off because it was, well, boring. So when it was suggested to me that I watch 13 Assassins I was concerned not only by the 2+ hours (ok, only +6 minutes) running time, but the information coming my way that almost half of that, if not more, was given over to a battle sequence. An hour? Of Samurai fighting? I must admit, I was not under the impression that this was going to be my thing....
How wrong I was. How very wrong.
13 Assassins is an epic of Shakespearean proportions. All stilted, polite conversation - even when debating how to go about taking out the enemy - dark rooms and darker deeds, good vs. evil, all on the most humanistic of levels.
Admittedly the film takes a while to really get going but, as with Audition if I'd stuck with it, the slow build leads to an immense climax. But even before the battle Miike has you on the edge of your seat. He walks the line between the gruesome and the subtle very well; there is evidence of torture in a scene which shifts the film into 'horror' terrain and a brief but brilliant moment later in which it rains blood. But even in the battle scenes are not all about the gore. The sequences are choreographed and shot with great invention (did I mention the raining blood?) with each of the assassins featured in their own fights against seemingly undiminishing numbers of aggressors yet without it feeling episodic.
Miike also focuses on the characters enough for each personality to come through, especially during the trek through the mountain forest, lightening the mood brilliantly through Yûsuke Iseya's joyously wild-eyed performance. Masataka Kubota (Ogura) is also one of the highlights as an inexperienced Samurai.
So it turns out this was indeed my thing. I'll be looking up more of Miike's work in the future and preparing for one hell of a ride.
Epic in the most glorious of ways. So full of detail it's probably worth another 10 watches - 9/10
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