FilmQuest 2012 (7/30): 'The Rock':

"What is wrong with these people, huh? Mason? Don't you think there's a lot of, uh, a lot of anger flowing around this island? Kind of a pubescent volatility? Don't you think? A lotta angst, a lot of "I'm sixteen, I'm angry at my father" syndrome? I mean grow up! We're stuck on an island with a bunch of violence-for-pleasure-seeking psychopathic marines, SHAME-ON-THEM!"

I was surprised to hear the above rant voiced by the hero of a 1996 Michael Bay action movie. Welcome to 'The Rock' - the latest entry for "FilmQuest 2012" - where it is spoken (or shouted) by Nicolas Cage's FBI chemical weapons specialist Stanley Goodspeed. It seems to be criticising the violent machismo of every Bay movie (even the ones that hadn't been made yet). And it's not an isolated case: elsewhere Sean Connery's ace escape artist and former SAS operative Captain Mason cites Oscar Wilde in declaring patriotism "the virtue of the vicious".

Both quotes seemingly run in direct opposition to much of what we see throughout Bay's movie, which fetishises American military men, might is right pragmatism and the star spangled banner as much as ever. There are sombre speeches about the importance of respecting the armed forces and about the honour involved in "serving", just like all of Bay's other glossy feature length army recruitment videos (and with the same frenetic cutting). 'The Rock' is in many ways the definitive "get the President on the phone" movie: full of ultra-macho one-liners, strangely charming vulgarities and fist-pumping moments of explosive violence. It's a film in which, without irony, people say things like:

• "Your best? Losers always go on about doing their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen."
• "This is the toughest call I've ever had to make... airstike approved!"
• "This man knows our most intimate secrets from the last half-century: the alien landing at Roswell, the truth about the JFK assassination. Mason's angry, he's lethal, he's a trained killer... and HE is the only hope that we have got!"
• "General, we've shed the same blood in the same mud - you know god damn well I can't give that order!"
• "Make no mistake, gentlemen. We are in the fight of our lives against maybe the greatest battalion commander of the Vietnam war, I shit you not!"
• "The whole world is being Fed-exed to hell in a handcart!"
• "You're between the rock and a hard case."

Anyone who's seen it will know there are a million more zingers like those, most punctuated by the cocking of a gun or the twang of an electric guitar. 'The Rock' invented hi-octane... then shot it into space on the back of a radioactive unicorn on crack where it exploded with the heat of a billion suns. You get the point: it's a film that waves its big dick in your face to the sound of the American national anthem. It's a film so over the top that it sometimes feels less like Bay's 'Armageddon' and more like Wes Anderson's MTV Awards parody of 'Armageddon'. Yet remember those two quotes from before? They feel like they're from a different movie universe.

Perhaps it's not surprising that 'The Rock' should exhibit signs of multiple personality disorder: it is the fruit of at least eight different writers - most of whom are uncredited for reasons only those within the nebulous and highly litigious world of Hollywood writing credits could explain. Among the uncredited are voices as disparate and distinctive as Aaron Sorkin and Quentin Tarantino (highly speculative, but perhaps some of that liberal-minded critique came from Sorkin).

But wherever the lines came from and however much they contradict each other (undermining whatever the point of 'The Rock' is in the process) there is little sense in denying that it's in the same bracket as 'Casablanca', 'Withnail & I' or 'The Big Lebowski' in terms of how endlessly quotable it is. Personally I love all the lines which lay out the stakes in really direct fashion, such as this doozy: "Look, I'm just a biochemist. Most of the time, I work in a little glass jar and lead a very uneventful life. I drive a Volvo, a beige one. But what I'm dealing with here is one of the most deadly substances the earth has ever known, so what say you cut me some FRIGGIN' SLACK?" What more do we need to know about the disparity between the life of Cage's character and the gravity of the situation he finds himself in? 'The Rock' is the sworn enemy of subtlety and I wouldn't have it any other way.

After foiling Ed Harris' apparently noble terrorist plot (it's easy to forget that pre-9/11 a lot of movie terrorism was domestic), Cage ends up in possession of the MacGuffin microfilm, holding information that got Connery's character locked up in Alcatraz for life without trial. Goodspeed's never previously expressed any interest in possessing this information, so why does his attainment of it count as a win? The answer: it just does. Especially because it facilitates one of the best (and most irreverent) final lines ever: "Honey, you wanna know who really killed JFK?"

'Moneyball' review:

"How can you not be romantic about baseball?" asks Brad Pitt's jaded team manager Billy Beane of himself, somewhere near the end of 'Capote' director Bennett Miller's engaging sporting biopic 'Moneyball'. Billy's relationship with the game is bitter-sweet, having given up a college scholarship on the advice of talent scouts only to come up short as a professional athlete, before moving upstairs into the frustrating and thankless world of sports administration. His love affair with the game may be in jeopardy but, as co-written by 'The West Wing' and 'The Social Network' scribe Aaron Sorkin, you suspect he'll come to bask in that romance again - and that we'll bask right along with him whether we care about the sport of not.

'Moneyball' is the intelligent, talky film you'd expect from Sorkin, who balances rapid-fire sporting jargon between top-end professionals with pithy, memorable one-liners. It's a drama with deft comic touches and populated by earnest, well-meaning characters for whom the proper running of a baseball team is a sacred vocation.

It begins with Beane's (relatively) modestly budgeted Oakland Athletics suffering a heartbreaking, but expected, end of season loss against the titanic force of the New York Yankees - a much better funded team, who compound the Athletics' misery by poaching their star player. Fed up with trying to compete against much wealthier teams using the same player recruitment strategy, Beane enlists the help of a Yale economics graduate played by Jonah Hill, who has come up with a whole new way of putting together a winning team based on a new set of principles founded in dry statistical analysis.

This philosophy sees the duo - who enjoy a surprising on-screen chemistry - recruit a roster of misfit, imperfect players long since overlooked by Major League scouts, our inherit love of the underdog being skilfully exploited to offset any reticence we might have at seeing the rules of this traditional game rewritten (with seasoned scouts being overruled by a young maths-whizz with no history in the game). All of baseball, including the team's taciturn head coach played by the always brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman, think Billy has gone insane. The stakes therefore go beyond simple sport: if this bold new strategy doesn't succeed Billy will find himself out of a job - an unemployable laughing stock.

Pitt, who looks increasing like Robert Redford, is a force of understated charisma even as this serial loser (at baseball if not in life) who obsessively wants to compete but, at the end of one terrific sequence (that sees the Athletics break a hundred year old record), finds mere winning hollow. Billy doesn't just want his team to win: he wants his team to change the world. Anything less will plunge him into a depressive coma lessened only by the love of his precocious daughter (Kerris Dorsey).

If 'The Social Network' made computer coding and the founding of a social media website play as cinematic, then 'Moneyball' does the same for contract disputes, statistical analysis and the economics of sports management. We spend more time in the offices of the Athletics then we do on the field of play - though the film still has its share of lovably cliché fist-pumping sports movie moments.

'Moneyball' is rated '12A' by the BBFC and on limited release in the UK now.

Blu-ray reviews: Charlie Wilson's War + Tamara Drewe

I'm back writing about film now from my internship at video games industry news site GamesIndustry.Biz, where I wrote a number of news items and a couple of features last week. It didn't end up snaring me a job, but it was great experience.

Anyhow, here are a couple of Blu-ray reviews I did in the last week for the guys at Obsessed with Film:

Charlie Wilson's War
Tamara Drewe

My attention is now back on all things film, so I'm sure to have a plethora of reviews up here in April after an uncharacteristically quiet March - two theatrical film reviews being an all-time-low since the blog started at the start of 2010.

'The Social Network' review:

This year few films have intrigued me more than David Fincher's 'The Social Network': a film about the founding fathers of the hugely successful Facebook website based on the book 'The Accidental Billionaires' by Ben Mezrich. The film focuses on the lawsuits filed against Mark Zuckerberg and ever since I read that 'West Wing' creator Aaron Sorkin had penned the screenplay, and that 'Squid and the Whale' star Jesse Eisenberg had been cast as Zuckerberg, I have been excited to see the finished film. Then, at the end of last month, the positive reviews began to come in and are yet to stop. It seemed as though everyone was calling it a masterpiece and awarding it "film of the year" status.

I worried that all this praise, coupled with my own longstanding interest in the film, might raise my level of expectation unrealistically high. After all, earlier this year my headlong descent into a world of hype left me a little underwhelmed by Christopher Nolan's 'Inception' and earlier this month a great weight of expectation probably played its part in my less than enthusiastic response to Palm d'Or winning 'Uncle Boonmee'. I needn't have worried, however, as it turned out that 'The Social Network' was actually better than I had ever anticipated. In fact I saw it for a second time within twenty-four hours.



Aaron Sorkin's reputation as a screenwriter has taken a few knocks in recent years as his TV follow up to 'The West Wing', 'Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip', was cancelled after one season and is generally disliked (though I was in the minority who enjoyed it), whilst he also scripted Mike Nichols' horrible 2007 film 'Charlie Wilson's War'. However his status as one of the best contemporary writers of dialogue has been completely restored as 'The Social Network' is, to my mind, his best work to date by some distance. I have always enjoyed the self-consciously clever and fast-paced style of his character's speech, but if I had one problem with his other work (even the best of it) it was that often it was all too clear who the "good guys" were.

'The West Wing' casts his White House staffers as shining white knights battling the forces of evil - Republicans (until the post-Sorkin addition of Alan Alda) always portrayed as though they are the snarling agents of Satan. Politically I was never upset by this representation, but however much it preached to this particular choir I tend to prefer more nuanced and humanistic depictions of people. In 'The Social Network' all of Sorkin's best qualities as a writer are evident whilst all the principle characters are fully formed and multi-dimensional. Much has been made of Zuckerberg having been portrayed unfavourably by the film - that it is a smear campaign against him - but I disagree with this.



As someone who has never met Zuckerberg (in fact I've never heard him speak) I can't vouch for how accurate the film is. I expect, like the film itself says, 85% of testimony is exaggerated (with the remaining 15% being fabricated altogether). Sorkin has said that his main duty is to storytelling and not to "truth". But regardless of what the truth of this story might be, within the world of the film all of the characters are pleasingly well rounded out. Zuckerberg is not portrayed altogether negatively, in fact I sympathised with him and even at times respected him (for his intelligence, self-belief and single mindedness). In fact the film questions its own validity at several points: set during two lawsuits the film positions all the actual founding of Facebook stuff as coming to us via each plaintiff's skewed testimony and referred to by Zuckerberg, more than once, as "lies".

Even Zuckerberg's best friend Eduardo (played by the new 'Spiderman' actor Andrew Garfield), who is perhaps the most obviously likable and sympathetic character, is not perfect: he is a rubbish businessman when it comes to understanding what Facebook can become and seeks to gain instant, easy profit from it in a way which may have damaged the site. As a counterpoint, Justin Timberlake's character, Napster co-founder Sean Parker, is probably the most obvious "villain" of the piece - threatening to throw Zuckerberg's empire into hedonistic chaos and freezing out Eduardo - yet he is also the one who sees the site's potential and helps to catapult it into the big time.



Then we have Armie Hammer skillfully portraying both of the rich, athletic and popular Winklevoss twins: Cameron and Tyler . Depending on your viewpoint they can stand as the instantly hateful examples of social inequality and of arrogant fraternity boys raised in privilege, but they are also shown to be fairly reasonable and decent people who have a real case against Zuckerberg - who they claim stole the Facebook idea from them. And we can also see why Zuckerberg might honestly believe he owes them nothing: "someone who makes a nice chair doesn't owe money to everyone who ever made a chair". Every character has an angle and nobody is cast as a hero or a villain. This well balanced script is also full of truly brilliant one-liners and more than one self-righteous and indignant tirade from Zuckerberg, delivered with intensity, and with a delicious air of spite and malice, by the ever-excellent Eisenberg.

Another great strength of Sorkin's screenplay is that it never makes any obvious comment about Facebook as a social phenomenon and its impact on our lives - save for one girl's throwaway remark that it's addictive - but plenty of allusions to its perceived evils are made in subtle ways. For example, Zuckerberg's ex-girlfriend played by the up-and-coming Rooney Mara (now confirmed as the star of Fincher's 'Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' remake) lambasts the Facebook founder for writing trash about her on his blog commenting on his need to write everything he feels: "as if every thought that tumbles through your head was so clever it would be a crime for it not to be shared."



As well as the great cast and the gripping, intelligent script, which doesn't shy away from technical detail and fizzes by at a rate of knots (evaporating the films 125 minute running time), there is also the direction of Fincher to admire. He is able to shoot this film, essentially about nerds arguing, in such a way that it plays as an effective thriller. This is aided in no small part by the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score which lends an air of foreboding to everything that takes place. The film's colour palette is reminiscent of Fincher's 'Fight Club' (also shot by Jeff Cronenweth) and helps to make every aspect of Harvard campus life seem seedy and undesirable thus enabling the film establish a tone which differentiates it from anything else about American college campus life.

'The Social Network' is a staggering film and an instant classic. It is often very funny and always very clever, with a script that doesn't infantilize its audience. It is also thrilling and exciting... and dark too. As with Darren Aronofsky's 'Black Swan' I am moved to say that this film is quite simply perfect. Historians and technology experts may disagree with the film's take on real events and I have some sympathy with business writer Andrew Clark at The Guardian when he asks: "does a 26-year-old businessman really deserve to have his name dragged through the mud in a murky mixture of fact and imagination for the general entertainment of the movie-viewing public?" Probably not. But whatever the "truth", and whatever the moral implications of this type of dramatised treatment of very recent history, 'The Social Network' is a quite brilliant piece of entertainment and a wonderful example of American cinema at its very best.

'The Social Network' is out now in the UK and is rated '12A' by the BBFC.