'Zero Dark Thirty', 'Lincoln', 'To The Wonder', 'Cloud Atlas': review round-up, plus Academy Award opinion

First up, before the reviews, a brief Academy Award summary just because it wouldn't be polite to completely ignore award season, as I have so far this year!

'Argo' winning doesn't offend me like it has some people. I know it's pretty lightweight, a sort of Sidney Lumet knock-off, but I really enjoyed it even if it's quite far from the best film of the past year (it made my 2012 top 30 though, coming in at 21). I think it found favour with the Academy because it's built to appease (or at least not offend) both right-wing hyper-patriots and liberals. It lays the blame for the situation in modern day Iran at the feet of the US - and UK - whilst also being a punch-the-air CIA success story, and in a part of the world where American successes are hard to come by. Plus, it's entertaining whilst still being kind of worthy, it pokes gentle fun of and celebrates Hollywood, and - though Ben Affleck was snubbed for a directorial nomination - the Academy traditionally loves actors behind the camera.

Ang Lee winning for the twee and shallow 'Life of Pi' (the night's big winner with 4 awards) is a joke, especially given that Paul Thomas Anderson ('The Master') and Terrence Malick ('To The Wonder') weren't even nominated. 'Life of Pi' was one of the worst films I saw last year. And how did it win a cinematography award? How much of it was actually filmed in-camera? It's a triumph of post-production work if anything at all - as a result (and perhaps justly) it won the visual effects award. I didn't rate 'Skyfall', but how is Roger Deakins still Oscar-less?

Can't argue with any of the acting wins, aside from the fact that Christoph Waltz ('Django Unchained') is clearly in the wrong category: he's a co-lead rather than a supporting player. Glad to see Jennifer Lawrence pick one up, though Bradley Cooper is the star performer in 'Silver Linings Playbook'. Would have taken any of Cooper, Jaoquin Phoenix ('The Master') or Daniel Day-Lewis for Best Actor, so I'm OK with the fact DDL won it - becoming the first triple Best Actor winner in the process. Pretty pleased for Anne Hathaway too: she's not in 'Les Miserables' for long, but she is the best bit. Besides she's due one for missing out back when she was up for 'Rachel Getting Married'. And, though I quite like Waltz and am glad he won another Oscar (just four years ago he was a 52 year-old unknown TV actor and now he has two Academy Awards!), there is no way his performance was on the same level as Philip Seymour Hoffman's career defining turn in 'The Master'. No way at all.

'Brave' shouldn't have beaten 'ParaNorman' in the animation category - or 'Wreck-It Ralph', for that matter. Confirmation that Pixar will win that award every year so long as the film in question isn't related to 'Cars'. I'd have preferred seeing 'A Royal Affair' win over 'Amour' in the foreign film category, but 'Amour' is still a terrific film. Shame Tarantino won a screenplay award for one of his baggiest movies: perpetuating the idea that the screenplay award is about dialogue, when movie writing is about much more than that. For instance, craft, structure and discipline. You shouldn't be able to throw every thought you've had onto a page and beat a pretty perfect film like 'Moonrise Kingdom' to that award. No arguments with 'Searching for Sugar Man' for best doc - loved it. Also, how was 'Cloud Atlas' (see opinion below) not even nominated for Best Make-Up? 'Hitchcock' was, and that's just Anthony Hopkins in a terrible fat-suit. 'Cloud Atlas' is a little more ambitious and interesting than that, even if it's not much else.

For more on the Academy Awards, they were the subject of my latest podcast with Toby King - which you can subscribe to on iTunes.

Anyway... reviews:

'Zero Dark Thirty' - Dir. Kathryn Bigelow (15)

Like 'The Hurt Locker' before it, Kathryn Bigelow's latest foray into post-9/11 US dealings in the Middle East is resolutely A-political. Whether that's in order to avoid splitting the audience (and Academy Award voters) or because she has no clear view on events I can't say, but 'Zero Dark Thirty' - despite strange allegations that it's pro-torture - is clinical, cold and matter of fact, sometimes to the point of being sterile. It's possibly the least testosterone-filled and adrenaline pumping movie of Bigelow's career as, aside from  a tense and deeply disturbing depiction of the Delta Force killing of Osama Bin Laden in the film's final third, it mainly follows the office-bound trials and tribulations of Jessica Chastain's maverick CIA operative. We witness her attempts - apparently based on fact - to persuade bosses to pro-actively pursue fresh intelligence on Bin Laden, then (supposedly) assumed by higher ups to be hiding in remote caves - a decade-long quest that ends in the al Qaeda leaders 2011 death.

The Delta Force sequence is breathtaking in its construction, and totally morally ambiguous - it's basically a group of well-armed men slaughtering the occupants of a family home as they sleep and plays as about as heroic as that sounds - but the rest is fairly forgettable, if reliably performed by the award-nominated lead. Chastain is a commanding presence, though most of her discussions with bosses are cliché dick-swinging contests won by the shoutiest person in the room, rather than Aaron Sorkin-style exhibitions of smartest-guy-in-the-room cleverness. It could have benefited from the latter given how talky it is, and how interesting much of supporting cast are: Mark Strong, Mark Duplass, Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt, James Gandolfini, Kyle Chandler, Jason Clarke and Frank Grillo are all decent in it but have very little to do.

In regards to the much-discussed scenes of torture, I don't think Bigelow, or writer Mark Boal, has an overtly pro or negative stance (though you could certainly make a compelling case for anything other than a negative stance being morally dubious) as far as we can glean from the movie. Torture is certainly depicted, but ultimately generates no intelligence that isn't ultimately already in the CIA's possession. Besides, whilst the military personnel involved, along with Chastain's character, don't seem to have any problem with the practice, the torture itself is suitably uncomfortable to watch - much like the Delta Force raid. Neither are presented as performed by uncomplicated good guys. In fact I'd be very surprised if anybody - even on the extreme "kill them all for what they done" far-right - found much cause to celebrate the military action as depicted here. The film's only real crimes are against reasonable running times, as it out-stays its welcome by a good 40 minutes. But that's a consistent problem with 95% of recent movies. For further reading, see 'Lincoln' and 'Cloud Atlas' below.

'Lincoln' - Dir. Steven Spielberg (12A)

This will be a very short review, as Spielberg's 'Lincoln' is an otherwise forgettable (if robustly constructed) film that will be remembered for an amazing central performance: Daniel Day-Lewis is fantastic, as is much of an impressive supporting cast. His Abraham Lincoln is believable and a character, not a caricature - something that can't be said for every Day-Lewis creation. We have no real way of knowing if this is what the most-celebrated US president sounded like or moved like, but this portrayal is entirely convincing and, perhaps more significantly, wonderful to watch. In fact it's the only thing that kept me gripped in what's really a dry courtroom drama about the horse-trading and back-room politics involved in passing a law. The Civil War setting is interesting and the law in question - the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which outlawed slavery in the United States - is obviously of great historical importance, but Spielberg's telling of these events suffers from an uncharacteristic lack of dynamism and narrative drive.

'To The Wonder' - Terrence Malick (12A)

Full disclosure: I'm not a great lover of Terrence Malick's ouvre, finding that I appreciate his work far more than I enjoy it or even like it. In that respect 'To The Wonder' is true to form: a plot-light, narration-heavy visual poem, replete with awe-inspiring visuals (including the classic: long grass in a suburban American backyard at magic hour) and deeply, earnestly contemplative about the meaning of existence, the director's relationship with God and our place in the universe. This one deals in typically big themes via Javier Bardem's conflicted priest and Olga Kurylenko's lovelorn immigrant - covering existential despair with over the top free-spirited joie de vivre. Yet it's more satisfying for me as a subject for post-film conversation than as a viewing experience itself.

To me its whispering narration, mostly in French and Spanish this time around, coupled with inspirational visuals of people frolicking in nature, give it the feeling of a particularly lavish perfume ad or an especially bombastic mobile phone commercial. Which isn't to say the film itself is at all superficial or pretentious: I think Malick is entirely sincere and honest in what feels like a very personal exploration of - among other things - marriage as an intrinsic part of faith and faith as an essential component of marriage. It's just that, as with the similar (if infinitely more grand and ambitious) 'Tree of Life', the themes that are closest to Malick's heart couldn't be further from my own. Spirituality and faith are often no more than buzzwords in American movies, and Malick is to be applauded for examining these concepts seriously and devoid of superficiality (I'm thinking of you 'Life of Pi'), but they don't particularly interest me as a militant atheist.

On a different tact, Ben Affleck is completely bland (or perhaps his character is just incredibly cold to the point that he isn't required to express any emotion) and his character poorly defined, whilst Rachel McAdams is in it for barely ten minutes - making it odd that in some cases the marketing has billed them as the stars, especially given that Kurylenko narrates the majority of the piece and features more prominently from start to finish. In many respects the film is about her character's journey from flighty and infatuated love-obsessive to wounded and disheartened romance cynic.

'Cloud Atlas' - Dir. Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski & Andy Wachowski (15)

Nothing says the Wachowskis like ambitious and expensive folly, and so in the spirit of the 'Matrix' sequels and the unfairly maligned 'Speed Racer' comes the cluttered and confused 'Cloud Atlas', made in collaboration with German filmmaker Tom Tykwer (of 'Run Lola Run' and 'The International' fame). There's so much to be curious about here: for instance, the principal stars all play a half-dozen different characters, often changing race and gender as the film cuts between time periods - from the 1800s to the far-flung, post-apocalyptic future. It's a sci-fi blockbuster, romantic tragedy, period drama, espionage thriller and a slapstick comedy about bungling pensioners - all in one movie. But this is both the appeal and, it turns out, the problem. Many (if not all) of these disparate elements are interesting, but combined they have the effect of drowning each other out, whilst the constant cutting leaves it feeling messy and unfocussed.

Basically it doesn't quite work as a whole, only really succeeding as a curiosity: but, for many, this curiosity won't extend for the film's near three-hour running time. Furthermore, the stories only really have one point: that we should set aside intolerance of difference and embrace the fact that we are all essentially one single race, united in our struggles. That's why it is actually anti-racist for (as an example) Jim Sturgess to get made up to look Korean, as opposed to deeply troubling: because the fact that we're all the same is the movie's entire point - which it attempts to amplify through the repeated use of the same actors in vastly different role across the span of human existence. But this presents two problems, as I see it.

The first is that this message, if - like most of the audience, I presume - you already believe it, doesn't require a three-hour, $100 million demonstration in which Tom Hanks incongruously plays an Irishman, a Scotsman and a futuristic caveman. The second difficulty is that, by venturing into the bigoted sci-fi future, and the bigoted ultra-distant future, the film suggests that this war against difference is intrinsic to the human experience and never destined to change. In other words: we'll always be racists. And that's a bit pessimistic for my taste.

'Skyfall', 'Argo' and 'Rust and Bone': review round-up

'Skyfall' - Dir. Sam Mendes (12A)
By far the glossiest looking Bond film to date, this 50th anniversary edition of the spy series arguably brings top tier talent behind the camera for the first time - with an Academy Award winning director in Sam Mendes and the legendary Roger Deakins serving as DP. The result is something very pretty indeed and a film in which London - so often centre of attention in this Olympic year - is made to look especially cool. This seems to be the chief aim of 'Skyfall': to celebrate Bond as a British icon, and by extension celebrate Blighty. It's the first of the current Daniel Craig led series to be made in the coalition era and, perhaps not incidentally, it's a very conservative movie - which frequently invites us to look backwards.

In some ways this is harmless, as we're expected to coo at the screen return of a vintage car or an old character (inventor Q returns to the series, played by Ben Whishaw). Yet in other ways this is more insidious as the series to some extent jettisons the sensitive and fully-featured Bond of the past two instalments - the one who lost the love of his life in 'Casino Royale' and then went on a revenge mission in the derided 'Quantum of Solace' - in favour of a return to a Bond who makes glib jokes as a women he's recently bedded is killed. Yes, in the traditional style, once Bond beds the bad guy's woman she no longer has anything to offer the narrative and her only recourse is to serve as an example of how ruthless the big baddie is. Whishaw's Q - who seems to be channelling Moss from 'The I.T Crowd' - makes a self-aware joke at one point that the series has grown-up beyond exploding pens and other extreme gadgets. What a pity the sexual politics of old was not thought equally out of date.

In any case, that's Bond for you I guess. If it seems churlish to complain that a Bond movie falls in-line with long-established Bond conventions, I only do it because the series did seem to be taking a conscious step in another direction before this reversal. In fact, by the end of 'Skyfall' the series traditional status quo - and with it oak panelled patriarchy - is fully restored. One bright spot though is the appearance of Javier Bardem as the villain of the piece. Bardem is magnetic in every scene and brings out the best in the material. His mode of speech and every subtle mannerism is interesting and makes the film worth watching even for self-confessed non-fans like me.

'Argo' - Dir. Ben Affleck (15)
Following on from the enjoyably meat and potatoes, Michael Mann-lite crime movie 'The Town' and his Clint Eastwood-like directorial debut 'Gone Baby Gone', Ben Affleck has now turned in an entirely effective political thriller in the mode of the late Sidney Lumet. The actor-turned-director still hasn't really displayed any particular style of his own behind the camera, but it doesn't really matter in this instance because everything about 'Argo' is at least solid, often going some way beyond that. In fact, for the last hour, it's incredibly tense and terrifically well-paced, leading to the sort of air-punching, applause baiting finale usually reserved for fight movies.

Based on a true and recently declassified story, 'Argo' is about a marverick, young CIA operative (Affleck sporting a nice beard) who creates an elaborate cover in order to sneak into Tehran and rescue six American embassy staffers as they wait in hiding during the hostage crisis of 1979-81. The six had escaped the embassy during the takeover and are hidden in the residence of the Canadian ambassador, however it is only a matter of time before the authorities discover that they are missing and begin to search for them. With the clock ticking, Affleck comes up with "the best bad idea we have" - deciding to try and sneak the six out of the country posing as a Canadian feature film crew scouting for a location for a science fiction epic called Argo.

In order to make the cover realistic however, Affleck has to journey to Hollywood and gather interest in the film - getting a script and storyboards done, as well as attaching a special effects guy (John Goodman) and a big-shot producer (Alan Arkin). This makes for some neat, affectionate satire of the film industry and some pretty decent comic relief which helps to relieve the sometimes unbearable tension of the action taking place in Iran. Roundly superb performances (Bryan Cranston is in it, fagodsakes) and a humanistic attitude to the whole crisis, with attention paid to the complex history of the rift between Iran and the US, 'Argo' is the sort of smart and gripping thriller you didn't think they made anymore.

'Rust and Bone' - Dir. Jacques Audiard (15)
Following on from the over-praised prison drama 'Un Prophete', French director Jacques Audiard takes a change of direction to tell this rather more compelling and left-field story about the redemptive power of love. Here Marion Cotillard's double amputee regains her lust for life after embarking a complex relationship with Matthias Schoenaerts' uncouth, selfish part-time doorman and wannabe prize fighter - an errant father and petty criminal. It's the story of two lost souls finding their way in the world together and complimenting each other perfectly, seemingly against the odds. The most appealing thing about 'Rust and Bone' is that Audiard doesn't judge his characters, in spite of their doing some pretty horrible things from time to time. They are wounded and troubled people, but not caricatures and this makes their finding solace in each other all the more powerful.

In fact there is something bitter-sweet about their relationship as it seems born, to some extent, of compromise and circumstances. They have fallen into this partnership together because neither's life has gone as planned and that's sort of sad, albeit in an extremely mundane way. That is until the ending, which seems to artificially rectify the situation with a change of fate that doesn't feel foreshadowed or particularly warranted. Perhaps the film's final moments are an ultimate tribute to the transformational and life-affirming nature of having love in your heart - and that's a very nice sentiment - but it still rings false as a piece of storytelling.