'12 Years A Slave' review by Captain Raptor

'12 Years A Slave' review by Captain Raptor

2013 is firmly behind us now and it's time to embark upon the hopefully rewarding cinematic journey of 2014. It's good to start the year in the cheery mood we mean to go on in with some harrowing, heart-wrenching drama about persecution and racism. 12 Years A Slave is the most talked about film of the moment, one of the few films made on one of the most important topics imaginable and has the most impressive cast this side of a Woody Allen movie, so naturally my interest was piqued.

The most obvious film to make a comparison to would be Django Unchained, but 12 Years A Slave is much closer to something like Schindler's List - total and unabashed tragedy whilst still showing restraint, a bleak tone played out with bucketfuls of pathos and drama, taking one of the worst events of history and examining it through the lens of one troubled protagonist. If that's an apt comparison, then Michael Fassbender is certainly the Amon Goethe character. He plays his utterly repugnant plantation owner with aplomb, showing great range and depth in his performance, and he threatens to steal the show. I say 'threatens' because it's hard to conceive of anybody who could outshine Chiwetel Ejiofor in this film, giving an intensely moving performance where he can mix in some subtlety whilst still breaking out into moments of extreme emotion. His delivery of dialogue and facial expressions alone are enough to not only convince but to completely captivate the viewer, and it's fantastic to finally see him in the leading role he deserves. There's solid performances from the supporting cast too, particularly from Adepero Oduye and Lupita Nyong'o, both giving incredibly emotionally charged performances that hold nothing back. There's also highly nuanced work from Benedict Cumberbatch and Paul Dano gives his most memorable performance to date.

As brilliant as the performances are, the absolute best thing about 12 Years A Slave is the directing. Steve McQueen has been handed a fantastic story full of drama and horror, and he sets about presenting it in the best way he could - unflinchingly. 12 Years A Slave is brutal in parts, and goes to great length to portray the genuine suffering of slaves in America, utilising both subtle elements like the dirt-filled, claustrophobic accommodation and more explicit, violent scenes where bones crack and pained, agonized faces are pointed right at the camera. Tension builds over the course of the film and is released in one horrendous, haunting and superlative whipping scene, and it's hard to know whether to concentrate on the pain of the victim, the anger of the perpetrator, the fear and shame of the onlookers or the gore and brutality of the punishment. Also brilliant is McQueen's use of audio overlap - Cumberbatch's idyllic preaching sequences have the sounds of racist taunts and cries of anguish played underneath to keep the shocking and melancholic atmosphere at its peak.

12 Years A Slave is truly phenomenal. It's not an easy watch and parts of it will make you want to crawl out your own skin, but it's insuppressible, enthralling and sublime. There's so many amazing components that it's hard to fit everything into one review whilst doing it justice. Steve McQueen displays some of the smartest, most dramatic and affecting directing that I've ever witnessed, Fassbender and Ejiofor give knock-put performances, and the film's harsh tone and total conviction make it an intense and hugely engrossing movie.

Top Ten Films of 2013

Nearly a year after I've started this blog and we're back to where we began (by which I mean January). The selection of films here is based on British release dates, so while these films might have been in cinemas in 2012 in other locations, from my perspective these were all released in 2013. Without any further ado:

10. Pacific Rim - Loud, dumb but inventive fun, and some of the coolest CGI set-pieces ever filmed, anchored by a mostly on-form cast and the masterful hand of Guillermo Del Toro doing what he does best. It might not be thought-provoking but it's riotously good entertainment all the same.

9. Don Jon - Joseph Gordon-Levitt's debut as a writer and a director was sharper than a pin prick and balanced masturbation jokes with life crises in its own weird, beautiful way. Promising and intelligent, it's an admirably audacious piece of social commentary.

8. Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa - Steve Coogan's hero of British screens gets a well-deserved and well-executed foray into new territory with an adaption that takes everything good about the original and makes it just that little bit more daring. Funny throughout and frequently hilarious, it proves that you can teach an old Partridge new tricks.

7. Iron Man 3 - The funniest and most entertaining installment of Marvel's money maker, it stuck with the sarcasm and explosiveness and elevated it to a higher level. Knowing exactly when to go for laughs and when to go for thrills, Iron Man 3 is crowd-pleasing without being simple or lazy, and an excellent blockbuster.

6. American Hustle - Just creeping in before the year was out, David O Russell's stylized yet serious crime flick wrings fantastic performances out of a prestigious cast to a backdrop of ridiculous design, thoroughly engrossing drama with sprinklings of mirth and enjoyable 'who's conning who' shenanigans. 

5. The World's End - Maybe the Cornetto Trilogy deserved a better send-off, but as a stand alone film it's simply side-splitting, jaw-dropping brilliance, combining anarchy and banality to extraordinary effect from the masters of the art form. Comedy and sci-fi have never made better bedfellows.

4. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire  -Things got moodier and even more intense for the second chapter of the dystopian action series. Jennifer Lawrence's spellbinding performance is the highlight in a more confident, more emotional and subtler re-run of what came before. 

3. We're The Millers - I'm as surprised as you are. What looks like a mediocre stoner comedy is actually a snarky and most importantly hysterical comedy that takes things back to basics to show that low-concept and intelligent immaturity can still be funny, distinct and fresh if you have a good cast and you're prepared to go far enough. 

2. Filth - A no-holds barred turbulent wrecking ball of a film providing enough shocks to run a power plant. James McAvoy gives the best performance of his career, and the bleak, pitch-black sense of humour will have you wheezing for breath though a mixture of laughs and gasps. Not recommend for the faint-hearted, recommended for anybody wanting a dark, subversive and intense delight. 

1. Django Unchained - Powerful, powerful film making - subtlety be damned. Combining genuinely harrowing drama, over-the-top spectacle, intelligent story/dialogue and sheer guts, Tarantino's latest is as brilliant as it is controversial, showing brains behind the brutality and insensitivity. It's not just a film that will blow your mind with it's droll witticisms, blood-stained madness and spine-tinglingly good performances, but actually makes a statement about racism and exploitation. 

'American Hustle' review by Captain Raptor

'American Hustle' review by Captain Raptor

It probably doesn't seem like it, but I think that the worldwide obsession with Jennifer Lawrence (which I completely endorse) has peaked, maybe around the time of last year's Oscar ceremony. Her endlessly GIF'd stumble aside, Silver Linings Playbook obtained a sweep of nominations, serves as a landmark point in the career of almost everybody involved, and it's current cultural significance is pretty much indisputable. So, obviously, I still haven't seen it. As a sort of karmic apology to David O Russell, I watched his latest effort, featuring many of the same cast members.

The most immediately striking thing about American Hustle is the more superficial elements - the outlandishly stereotypical 70's outfits and hairstyles, the fluid camerawork and the fantastic soundtrack. It's a brilliantly stylish film, but the near fetishistic approach to showcasing its wardrobe can be grating at times. As wonderful as Christian Bale's comb-over is, the film's best parts lie elsewhere, in the performances. An absolutely phenomenal cast share equal levels of brilliance in their roles, even the smaller players like Louis CK and a menacing Robert De Niro on cameo duties. It's hard to pick any one cast member as particularly stand-out, but Lawrence and Bale are probably the most attention grabbing; although in fairness to their fellow cast members, those two have the most outlandish characters to play around with. They're backed up by a script that's got fair measures of intelligence and a low-key sense of drama. The film's a drier, more serious affair than I expected, but by no means was this a disappointment; besides, there are a few incredibly funny moments, in particular a scene revolving around a microwave and a recurring joke about an ice fishing anecdote. 

Some underlying weak points do impair the film a little. The plot doesn't really conjure up anything new, it could do with a little more editing, the ending's a little too abrupt and convenient for my taste, and the camera seems to be on a life-or-death mission to objectify Amy Adams. Those are more than minor flaws, but they're vastly overpowered by the sheer excellence of the film's style and performances. The flashiness can be gratuitous but it does make for a sleek, charismatic, highly polished final product, and all the main cast get an opportunity to display a full skill set - there are equally engrossing moments of heightened emotion and of near total restraint. It's a well balanced set of characters, all greatly flawed but understandable and likable, all distinct personalities but realistic and never caricatured.  

American Hustle is a wonderful piece of cinema, but a few tweaks and alterations and it could have been even better. That aside, it's got brains, drama, style and outstanding performances, which far more than makes up for anything that it does wrong. It's a strange blend of straight-faced realism and farce, but ultimately it's an excellent movie that had me entertained nearly throughout, and at times even captivated.

'The Usual Suspects' review by Captain Raptor

'The Usual Suspects' review by Captain Raptor

Given that he's been a key Hollywood player for almost twenty years, I've seen surprisingly little of Kevin Spacey's body of work. The Usual Suspects, for anybody whose cultural awareness is the size of the Greek federal reserve, is a 1995 crime film in which Spacey (in arguably his most famous and most important role) recounts the convoluted tale of his small criminal outfit during an interrogation.

The Usual Suspects really is Spacey's film. His character is incredibly quiet and perpetually in the background, so he never dominates the screen in the way of most great performances, but still his turn as the crippled, nervous conman Verbal is absolutely fantastic, from the mannerisms and movements to the delivery of dialogue and emotion, and it was certainly a well deserved Oscar. The other performances, while by no means below average, aren't particularly noteworthy, due to a combination of weakly defined, unextraordinary characters and the film's realistic and restrained style. This style serves the film well, allowing for the building of tension and it brings out the best in its intricate plot, but when all this tension boils over in the final act into mayhem and violence, it is a little tonally jarring. I do think that Gabriel Byrne was given too much screen time, partly because his character is by far the least interesting out of the gang members and his performance doesn't really elevate it any further than this, and partly because any time spent dwelling on him isn't spent with more interesting characters portrayed by fantastic character actors such as Benicio Del Toro and Kevin Pollack, who is given a great introduction and the film's funniest line and is then practically irrelevant for the remainder of the film.

The drama and complex plot are both fantastic, but not fantastic enough to prevent small segments in the middle of the film feeling somewhat dry. I'm not calling for more action or more comedy - that would be completely inconsistent with the tone and take away from some of the film's greatest attributes - but maybe some added flair to the dialogue, a tiny bit less restraint and realism in the performances, and the film might draw me in a little more with the added intensity. Really though, all these are minor complaints - I liked all the film's components and I especially liked the way they're put together, I just have personal preferences to the degrees to which each component is used.

The Usual Suspects is a brilliant film, and while I feel it might be just a little undeserving of the adoration placed on it and its seeming 'modern classic' status, a truly magnificent performance from Kevin Spacey and an intelligent and intriguing story certainly elevate it above the majority of the competition. It's definitely something I recommend, mostly on the aforementioned successes in screenwriting and performance, and just all round a very good movie.

'Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues' review by Captain Raptor

'Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues' review by Captain Raptor

Almost ten years ago, a simple, lighthearted and idiosyncratic film about a dumb newsreader ascended the steps leading to cult comedy status. It launched several careers and its seemingly inexhaustible supply of quotable lines must have kept about a thousand t-shirt companies in business. I'm in a conglomerate of many when I say that Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy is one of 21st century Hollywood's greatest comedies, but was a belated comeback such a good idea?

Well, despite how long the gang have been away, they are for the most part still on-form. Steve Carell is absolutely fantastic once again as the impossibly stupid weatherman Brick; he's the opposite of deadpan, mugging and screaming at regular intervals as well as blurting out with the hilariously nonsensical quips for which his characters is known. He stands head and shoulders above the rest of the cast, although David Koechner has managed to improve his delivery. Unfortunately, Will Ferrell's performance has turned a little overbearing and weaker over the years, but he's still got the spark that originally ignited Anchorman's flame. The old elements work just about as well as they used to - the group dynamic is as strong as ever and the exclamations and one-liners are still gleefully daft and unpredictable - but most of the sequel's new ingredients simply don't work. There's no comedy to be garnered from James Marsden's slick antagonist or from a brief, almost entirely needless Harrison Ford cameo, and there is one truly awful scene which essentially just consists of Ron being inadvertently racist for a grueling five minutes. There is one brand new addition that works, and that is Kristen Wiig as a female equivalent and love interest of Brick, because it is very hard for anything pertaining to Brick to be anything less than side-splitting.

There are some fantastic new lines ("chickens of the cave" is a phrase destined to be parroted on forums and t-shirts for a good few years) but there are no scenes of laugh-out-loud hilarity, and a couple of jokes have been transplanted from the original into the sequel. It's a hit-and-miss affair, more a sequence of loosely related scenes than a fully-fledged film, and a lot of the components (a blindingly unsubtle satirisation of Rupert Murdoch and sensationalization in the media, an abundance of jokes about hair, the aforementioned race relations debacle) just fall flat on their face. Maybe it was deliberate or maybe Ferrell and Adam McKay just ran out of ideas, but by the end things have descended into total chaos, and the final twenty minutes feature numerous explosions, cameos by a veritable pantheon of celebrities from Liam Neeson to Kanye West, and Ron going blind in a lighthouse whilst trying to raise a shark as his own. Some of these parts are funny, but the incoherence of it all does not escape unnoticed, and the lines between enjoyably daft flight of fancy and plain stupidity through overkill become incredibly blurred.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues could have been absolutely terrible, and maybe it's an impressive enough feat that it wasn't. It's a fully watchable and genuinely very funny movie, but it can't match up to its predecessor and a lot of the material is quite simply just bad. It's still good enough to not be disappointing and if you liked the first film then I suspect that you'll like this one too. Maybe it couldn't equal the brilliance of what came before it, but it's entertaining and worth a watch. Looks like Ron Burgundy stayed classy after all.

'The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug' review by Captain Raptor

'The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug' review by Captain Raptor

An Unexpected Journey was good enough to make my top ten of the year by the skin of its teeth (although by this point, having seen more films released in 2012 on DVD, it's probably somewhere around 14th) but still left a lot to be desired. However, this film was to contain most of my favourite moments from the book, had extra Benedict Cumberbatch and my favourite films from franchises tend to be second one (Lord of the Rings, X-Men, Christopher Nolan's Batman, Pirates of the Caribbean... the list goes on), so expectations were still high.

For the first forty minutes or so, the film totally delivered. Bilbo and his dwarfish entourage are still entertaining, and two equally great but contrasting setpieces - a mostly silent and thoroughly atmospheric interlude with giant spiders, and a brilliantly fun and fast-paced piece of what can only be described as barrel warfare - marked a strong step in the right direction. These scenes weren't done perfectly; it's still hard to care about all of the dwarves when about 5 of them have don't any resemblance of character, and the spider scene, my personal favourite segment from the original book, is done far too briefly, but they're the still the strongest parts of the prequels thus far. Also good is Tolkien newcomer Evangeline Lilly as elven warrior Tauriel, who kicks ass like she's being paid in direct proportion to how much orc blood she can spill. However, whether the film ran out of steam or I just ran out of patience, eventually everything just became dull. The main cause of this is Luke Evans, who fails to display much more than a drop of either charisma or pathos in his role as Bard, which while he may be an important character, is not worth spending an hour with when said hour could feature more dwarves, wizards, goddamn giant spiders or, y'know, fantasy. Lee Pace is adequate but still uninspiring in a role that could have been cut almost entirely and is similarly dull to Evans'.

I don't even want to talk about Smaug. Someone has clearly put in a lot of effort in the wrong direction, because I cannot fathom how one could make a dragon with the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch feel boring. There are numerous other disappointments too, but really they all stem from one problem: trying to recreate Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit is fundamentally a lighter, sillier and (arguably most importantly) shorter story, but this goes by the wayside. Legolas is needlessly brought back, and it's not even that much fun because the canon necessitates him being an asshole. Smaug is stripped of any and all distinctive traits and the talents of Benedict Cumberbatch buried beneath voice modification in order that he might a far more simplistic villain, like Sauron. Rather than concentrating on the fun, light-hearted idiosyncratic tale and set of characters it has at hand, The Desolation of Smaug instead focuses on attempts at moodiness and epicness, and despite the outstanding visuals and thrilling action that it possesses by the bucketful, the end result is somewhat half-baked.

It's such an abundant criticism that it hardly feels worth mentioning, but The Hobbit films are just too long for their own good. There's a 90 minute film that's highly above average somewhere within The Desolation of Smaug, buried under stuff that could have or arguably should have been more heavily edited.  The most interesting parts of the film (yes, I'm still annoyed about the giant spider thing) are whizzed past whereas the duller parts (namely almost everything that happens in Laketown) seem to stretch on for countless minutes, yet despite all that there's enough charm and fun to keep you entertained for the majority of the film's duration. The review doesn't really sound like I enjoyed the film (I did) but that's because it was so easy to see where it could have been better, if only Peter Jackson (who I instantly feel awful for criticising) could maybe, just maybe, learn when enough is enough.

'Scrooged' review by Captain Raptor

'Scrooged' review by Captain Raptor

I expect a few of you are already sick and tired of the ubiquity of Christmas on the internet at the moment, so in that respect I'm sorry for the subsequent festive review. Counter-productive as it might be, this next review is dedicated to you - those called Scrooge and Grinch on a daily basis, who roll their eyes at the inundation of Christmas jumpers and who will most definitely be receiving a stocking full of coal. Not only shall I assess Scrooge's quality, but I'll assess its appeal to your misanthropic sensibilities.

What better antidote could there be for over-earnestness than Bill Murray, man of a thousand smirks?  Updating the classic Charles Dickens parable to the modern day doesn't really sound like the most amusing of concepts (because it isn't), but I'm willing to give anything with Bill Murray a try. He does his usual schtick with the customary charm, but that's pretty much all the film's got going for it. The script is mostly just dull attempts at wit, only improved by Murray's delivery, and the gaps are filled in either by pop culture references - which normally I'm in favour of but given that they're from 1988 it went more than a little bit over my head - or lazy slapstick. Scrooged is funny in parts, but it feels dragged down by an overly sentimental concept and a desire to balance snark and sweetness that wasn't effectively carried out. On the plus side, this keeps the film from being overly saccharine and the cornier parts are closer to pleasant than irritating. On the negative side, the lack of conviction leads to a boring film that's neither charmingly cheesy nor subversively dark.

It's not a simple case of writing bad, Murray good. The lead actor does almost totally carry the film, but it's not a particularly energetic performance and he's made more of lesser roles before. The film has a few engaging, if not particularly entertaining, side characters, and the final scene in which our modern day Scrooge learns his lesson and speaks on the true meaning of Christmas is actually quite well done. The supporting cast isn't spectacular, and although there's nobody that actually gives a poor performance, maybe the film wouldn't drag on so much if Murray had some above-adequate back-up.

So, Scrooged isn't particularly good, but nor is it overwhelmingly poor. It's entertaining enough to be passable but you shouldn't expect too much from it. Now, for our less than enthusiastic about Christmas viewers, this film is far from being as nauseatingly sweet or as unabashedly stupid as some Christmas films can be, but it's still pretty focused on tidings of comfort and joy. It's inoffensive and enjoyable to a degree, but it's not a film worthy of much praise.