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Reviews
Yip Man 2 (2010)
Bitterly disappointing
I saw this last night and can't hide my disappointment. Ip Man 1 blew me away with the fighting scenes which I felt it really raised the bar with its choreography and brutal realism (well, as real as you can get with a martial arts flick), but I think 2 just aimed for too much to try and outdo the original. The good old 'make it bigger, better and more badass' approach to sequels.
There's that classic fight against 10 Japanese karate students/soldiers in Ip Man 1. Ip Man 2 never comes close to matching that. I really disliked the Sammo Hung fight on the table with obvious string work – wasn't the first film about realism? The table snapping in half and the two characters still managing to balance themselves in the air? It isn't 'cool' when it's so utterly unbelievable.
And as for the final third, well. I can't believe it. Anyone who hasn't seen a Rocky movie in their life might find it touching or original, otherwise it's almost a frame-by-frame reenactment of the ending of Rocky IV, complete with the whole it's-better-to-unite-than-fight 'If you can change, I can change
WE CAN ALL CHANGE' speech at the end along with absolutely horrendous, cringe-worthy caricature villains. And I thought the Japanese lieutenant character in Ip Man 1 was bad (as in Disney villain bad); nothing compares to the corrupt police officer and the boxer 'Twister' in this film, who may as well be twirling their mustaches and shouting 'I'll get you, if it's the last thing I do!'
All that talk about there being a focus on the relationship between Ip Man and his wife? See the character Adrian in the Rocky series, only with considerably less dialogue being the two of them. Returning characters from the first film? Wasted. Actually, when you strip away the plot errors and the mistakes, alarmingly, the fighting isn't even that good. There are NO memorable fight scenes in the entire film. Maybe its to do with Sammo being the fight choreographer? We've all SEEN this stuff before, and it isn't up to the standard of Ip Man.
Disappointed, but at least there's always the first one. And the Rocky series.
Up in the Air (2009)
George Clooney in a role we can relate
George Clooney regularly plays that guy many of us secretly wish we were: suave, well-groomed, handsome, charismatic, confident - in other words, the Oceans Eleven Clooney - or for that matter, simply that general image we have of George Clooney with those aforementioned qualities, devoid of any discernible weaknesses or personality flaws. Certainly he has also played roles where he is paranoid, troubled, even 'kooky', but regardless of the odd exception which has seen him gaining weight or growing a beard for certain parts, there's that marked disconnection between the audience and him and his characters - where its particularly difficult to even picture him wearing anything other than a suit or even just with a different hairstyle. In fact I've often wondered whether he's been 'doing a Hugh Grant' this whole time by simply playing himself in most of his parts - where the on-screen Clooney is almost inseparable from his celebrity persona.
In Up in the Air it comes as no surprise when he initially appears to fit the bill again - a sharply dressed, handsome, confident, silver- tongued devil. But as we delve deeper into this character of Ryan Bingham - a 'corporate downsizing expert' who has prioritised professionalism and self preservation above all else and has micromanaged to a clockwork efficiency every little last detail of his working life spent mainly at airports and within planes and hotel rooms and who is, as a result, completely detached from remorse and emotional reality - we see something we haven't seen before; the polar opposite of what George Clooney stands for and what that overall image of George Clooney is. A vulnerable human being.
Bingham comes across as very similar to the character of Nick Naylor in Thank You For Smoking, also directed by Jason Reitman, the former a professional firer of people with zero empathy and the latter a pro- tobacco spokesperson, the both of them unscrupulous champions of capitalism who we ought to really hate but somehow, through those innate snake-like charms of theirs, manage to win us over with a surprising likability. The main difference between them is that in Up in the Air we catch a glimpse of the life Bingham has left behind and the pain caused by the ramifications of his choices, concealed behind that all- too-familiar smiling Clooney exterior.
This is a film many of us can relate to. It deals with the pursuit of a career and the security of a salary versus the dreams that may not pay off and which we may well never achieve. It explores the trade-off between excelling in what you need to do and not doing the best you can in what you want to do, and vice-versa. We are confronted with that awful fear in the back our minds that there is an extremely high probability that our lives will probably not turn out the way we wished, and how powerless we are to truly prevent ourselves from harm. We see human fragility in the face of love and pride, where a compromise needs to be made and where something usually needs to be sacrificed.
All of these worries are present in the characters in Up in the Air: dreamers and cynics, sometimes a bit of both. Bingham's love interest in the film, Alex, shares the almost exact same lifestyle but ends up affecting him profoundly. The young hotshot Natalie Keener believes in true love and the importance of seeking it, refusing to even imagine life without it and disagreeing with Bingham's outlook and the emotionless prerequisites of the horrible nature of their work. These characters impart their beliefs on one another, but the one who 'learns' the most from it is Ryan Bingham who, as a downsizer whose life philosophy all along has been to reduce the load of his own emotional baggage while reaching his life target of 50 million frequent flyer miles, eventually comes to terms with the harsh reality that he has, consequently, made redundant his own opportunities of truly living. The scene where he is required to give a potential future brother-in-law advice on the importance of marriage - a decision he has up until then personally staunchly opposed - exposes a hypocrisy he can't help but self-deprecatingly acknowledge and yet, through this, we feel a strange empathy for him, a character who is seemingly heartless, and see how even the most rock-hard stubbornness can still be swayed. Bingham is heartbroken in the end, but the fact that his heart was able to be broken at all really solidifies his character.
And that's what really got me in this movie. Far from being depressing, there is a hope that's revealed through Ryan Bingham: the moment he accepts the flaws of his own beliefs and comes to terms with the pure fact that life cannot be lived alone coincides with the audience's discovery that, instead of constantly being that guy we wanted to be, this time round George Clooney is playing the guy who kind of reminds us of ourselves. We might not have that exact same external charm or the trademark grey hair or display such confidence in public speaking but inside, we all feel the same things, and that's what makes Up in the Air hit home so convincingly and accessibly on a human level.
Invictus (2009)
A film that aims for an ambitious goal but skews the kick wide of the mark
Whilst being a decent film, the main problem with Invictus is that, unlike many sports films that have come before it, it doesn't focus just on the sport or the sporting-related drama. It tries to bring together Mandela's election victory, the man himself and the inspiration he found in prison through the poem the film is named after, the state of apartheid and class in South Africa at the time, as well as the events of the rugby tournament without really concentrating enough on any of the individual elements. It is, in other words, the film equivalent of gathering too many eggs into the one basket or, if you will, a film which tries to tackle much more than it can really handle.
Invictus does have its moments. Morgan Freeman is excellent and the character of Mandela is portrayed affectionately and sensibly with hints of his humanity, humour, and his own family problems amidst the enormity of the task he faced. There is a nice scene where the Springboks spend a day with soccer-loving children in a poor community and the only black player on the team is mobbed. But sadly the story suffers mainly through the lack of any strong leading characters apart from Mandela: Matt Damon's Francois Pienaar who, as the team captain and the main focus on the sporting aspect of the film, is at the end of the day just a rugby player after all, and whilst there are supporting characters in the form of Mandela's bodyguards and personal assistants while New Zealand's Jonah Lomu is represented as the closest "bad guy" character to be found in the movie, none of them are explored enough to make the event feel as significant as it ought to have been. The rest of the cast act only as a means of connecting the few major characters together – the Springboks team in particular have very little to offer apart from uttering filler- speak and nodding their heads in agreement or shaking them in disapproval - and Pienaar's and Mandela's families contribute only in speaking minor lines of exposition and shouting in excitement at the final whistle.
The fairytale simply works better as a moment in history documented through word and memory than as a film, which is surprising given that, even without any liberties taken with the actual facts of the tournament as demonstrated in many of the other movies in the genre where last minute goals or touchdowns or home runs or three pointers are scored, the Springbok's did really win the World Cup as underdogs and they did actually score a last minute drop goal in extra time in the Final and yet none of this hits home as anything remotely exciting. Unfortunately Eastwood has a deliberately slow style which is simply not suited to a story of Mandela as well as a story about a sporting miracle at the same time, when clearly he does not know how to capture the excitement of sport never mind a code of football alien and peculiar to many Americans and the mainstream audience granted how scrum shots are over-elaborated on and drop goals are excruciatingly slow-mo'd. As to the bigger question of whether South Africa's problems improved as a result of the team's victory, the film teases you by alluding to it through a close-up of black and white hands on the trophy and spliced-together footage of a celebrating nation but does not expand on what happened next, and what we are left with is an attempt at capturing the state of a country during a single sporting moment when the moment is better felt and experienced and almost impossible to truly capture on screen.
It is by no means a terrible film. Certainly nowhere near as awful or as ridiculous as my favourite bad sports movie Victory/Escape to Victory – starring Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone, members of the England 1966 World Cup (soccer) winning squad, where English and American prisoners of war in WWII (plus Pele) play the Nazis and win not only the final match but also their freedom. There is however a perplexing and inappropriate scene in Invictus near the end where a South African Airlines plane flies over the stadium to insinuate an act of terror which has no place whatsoever in this movie. Ultimately though we are merely left with a Mandela film which would have been better had it just focused on Nelson Mandela and where the rugby didn't get in the way, or otherwise a rugby story better left as perhaps a feature article or a story told in a pub or in a school PE class. Fans of the sport and those interested in the former South African president will likely be left disappointed with a final product akin to that of Ang Lee directing Hulk; a talented director better suited to emotional pieces taking on a project that aims for an ambitious goal but skews the kick wide of the mark.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig
How do you take a very ordinary, very formulaic film idea and turn it into something so over the top that it becomes an over-spectacularised mess of explosions and colour? Well if you're Michael Bay, you:
(a) Shoot every scene with a moving, sweeping camera so that you end up focusing on the bottom of people's chins. Or the bottoms of "hot girls".
(b) Base the action around America's world-superiority and military might and exaggerate it to the point that it makes the pro-Americanism sentiments of the likes of Rambo First Blood Part II and Rocky IV seem like dissident communist propaganda.
(c) Get as many helicopters as the film's budget can pay for, which in the case of Transformers 2 is a lot, and have them fly around next to each other for a third of the film's duration.
(d) Have multiple "funny" characters of various stereotypically ethnic backgrounds, particularly the African-American 'homie G gangsta', to balance out the hardcore caucasian American patriotism in order to, presumably, deepen the experience of the movie.
(e) Have your CGI artists do the directing for you while blowing up as many things as possible.
And there you have it, the five step formula for a Hollywood blockbuster. However unlike Pearl Harbour, Armageddon, The Rock, and Bad Boys I & II, Transformers started out as an excuse to sell toys to kids with the flimsiest and most nonsensical excuse of a plot holding all the figurines/characters together. Flimsy as in mechanical shape-shifting good guy aliens coming to Earth to fight their mechanical shape-shifting bad guy equivalents, all of them masquerading as vehicles while befriending humans and learning to speak English; nonsensical to the point that if a major character like Optimus Prime dies (in order to pave the way for another series of all-new toys) then no worries, just resurrect him with a convenient plot device like The Matrix of Leadership. In other words, with a film license so full of "anything goes", Michael Bay hit the jackpot.
This sequel is practically the same as the first film, the both of them essentially a series of convenient dead character resurrections, an overload of CGI, done up cars, girls with too much makeup, and hit-or- miss jokes (but mainly miss: the two "wise-cracking" Homie G transformers are especially cringe-worthy). It's quite clear that the script was written well after the action set-pieces were decided upon - how else could you explain it when characters can travel from America to the Egyptian pyramids in an instant via a teleporting Transformer. Insert teen-relationship staple movie clichés with a Transformer posing as a nubile girl and you've pretty much got your film.
In some ways the movie feels like a revival of the one-man-army popcorn action flick from the 80s and early 90s, and given how Transformers 2 turns out it's rather easy to see why that genre died. For a movie as far-fetched as this with what is practically a prerequisite to turn your brain off as you enter the theatre, it is amazing and even slightly insulting how 9/11 can warrant a mention; Barack Obama is also referred to by name just for realism's sake. I find it extraordinary that such intentionally over-the-top movies, more often than not from Bay himself, can attempt to try their hand at political commentary. Perhaps it was even Obama himself who said it best with the quote, "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig", which sums up Transformers 2 to a tee.
Takeshis' (2005)
So when does a film like Being John Malkovich get out-Malkoviched? When Takeshi Kitano makes one, that's when.
A few words about Kitano San to begin with for the uninitiated. Many of you will remember that crazy old 80's TV show called Takeshi's Castle, where contestants participated in a myriad of next-to-impossible obstacle courses with predictably hilarious, injurious, I've-got-a-bad- feeling-about-this, results. Well this is that very same Takeshi. The very same Takeshi who then went on to make a name for himself in the 90's with hauntingly beautiful (and often very violent) Yakuza films, before finding relative international success in the 2000's with the fascinating Zatoichi, a movie about a blind samurai, a pair of revenge- seeking geishas, and tap-dancing. Obviously. And in between? Well, that very same Takeshi made a lot of weird ones too. And when I say weird, I mean crazy, messed up, only-in-Japan weird.
If you haven't realised by now I'm a big fan of "Beat" Kitano, a nickname he often likes to call himself. I love his charisma, his takes-no-lip attitude. His facial twitches and odd mannerisms. His involvement in the incredibly psychotic cult classic Battle Royale. I even put up with a lot of the ridiculousness that happens in his films, acknowledging it instead as a unique artistic vision with the defiance of an over-fervent stalker fan. But this time, with Takeshis', you've gone too far, Takeshi. You have gone too far.
Only someone like Takeshi Kitano can make this reviewer, in an attempt to explain the plot of this film with the utmost of his ability, sound like a complete and utter fool. Allow me to demonstrate:
Takeshis' is a movie about the real life Takeshi, as a director, making a movie, and there are auditions for this movie. Fair enough, so far so good; if Kitano is making a mockumentary-type satire about himself, fine. I won't even mention how this movie (the movie being watched, not the movie within the movie being watched) actually started with a scene in a WWII setting. Not relevant, not one bit. But it sure doesn't help when one of the people auditioning for Takeshi's movie is also played by Takeshi, and that this Takeshi, a character working in a convenience store, is practicing for the role of, seemingly, the real Takeshi in the movie within the movie. Umm. And then it turns out that every new scene is totally unrelated from the last, but still contains the same imagery and characters we've seen moments earlier in a different context. And some of these scenes are dreams. And that this dreaming Takeshi is now an altogether separate character who drives a pink taxi around, and who is not auditioning for a part but still meeting all the same people these other two Takeshis have already met. And in the end, the convenience store Takeshi kills the real life director Takeshi. And that last bit really isn't a spoiler because (a) I have no idea as to what the significance of that scene even was, and (b) spoilers tend to ruin plot points and this movie, really, has no point.
See what I mean? I was really trying there, too.
Kitano has said that he wanted audiences to come out of this film not knowing what to say or what to think, so in that respect he has definitely succeeded, albeit in some deranged and sick Yoko Ono unit of measurement (Y/Onos per minute?). Takeshis' makes Being John Malkovich look like a predictable American sports film where the underdog team with the player who was always teased or came from a broken home scores the winning touchdown or basket or goal in the last second. Actually, I'd go as far as saying that Takeshis' makes even the most surrealist nonsense you could conjure up in your mind seem as certain as the knowledge that a hammer against a window equals smashed glass. And it is for this very fact; the fact that I understood precisely none of it and am certain that I will never see anything like it ever again in my lifetime, that I give it 4 stars out of 5. And as for you, Takeshi, I still reckon you're awesome, but I think it's also time we had a break as I go off to watch something I can comfortably understand. Predator it is, then.