FilmQuest 2012 (1/30): 'Do The Right Thing':

The first entry in my (generically named) "Film Quest 2012" column is Spike Lee's 'Do the Right Thing' - one of those big, famous movies I've wanted to see for ages but just never caught up with. I came to it with sky-high expectations (having heard it classified a seminal movie) and it comfortably beat them. It's hilariously funny and, at once, genuinely thought-provoking.

With 'Do the Right Thing', Spike Lee made one of the most intelligent and rounded films about simmering racial tensions in the United States. Looking beyond the problem as black versus white, Lee highlights a complex myriad of tensions that also involve Italians, Latinos, Jews and Koreans. It's a fractured, racially segregated community but, interestingly, it is a community. This isn't African American life as commonly depicted - with gangs, drugs and guns - but an affable collection of oddball characters (in the best sense) without malice.

As if carefully weighted social critique weren't enough, it's also full of inspired dialogue, full of memorable one-liners ("I want some brothers on the wall"), and shot in a distinctive, eye-catching way (lots of bright, primary colours). It's artful and very composed, without seeming too contrived or stilted. A contemporary tale about life on a predominantly black street in the late-80s, mercifully free of "urban" clichés and depicting a wide range of black characters far more subtle than the caricatures and paper-thin archetypes that remain prevalent to this day.

What's really interesting about 'Do the Right Thing' is that Lee seems himself torn between the militancy of Malcolm X (Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" is prevalent on the soundtrack) and the tolerance of Dr. King - even ending the film with two powerful, contradictory quotes from the two civil rights leaders. Likewise it's a film comprised mostly of patient discussion (notably involving John Turturro's bigoted and self-contradictory Pino) and high-spirited discussions about ethics - but which culminates in violence, death and destruction.

But you've got to feel for Spike Lee. In their infinite wisdom, Academy Awards voters saw fit to award Best Picture to 'Driving Miss Daisy' in 1990. That less confrontational/critical film, about a kindly old white lady teaching her kindly black chauffeur how to read, garnered four awards from nine nominations. Lee's masterpiece drew no awards from two nominations. None of the terrific black ensemble cast was nominated either, despite brilliant performances from Ossie Davis, Giancarlo Esposito and Lee himself.

One down, twenty-nine to go.

'Haywire' review:

With the most perfunctory of plots and a pleasingly slender running time, Steven Soderbergh's action-thriller 'Haywire' feels like little more than a slight, if effective, vehicle for its authentic female action star. Gina Carano - a former champion mixed martial artist in her first major film role - gets to beat up a lot of people and looks great doing so, wiping the floor with the likes of Michael Fassbender and Channing Tatum in a series of brutal, brilliantly choreographed punch-ups.

She plays Mallory, a contract killer working for a private firm (headed up by Ewen McGregor) who handles contracts for a secretive US government agency (headed up by Michael Douglas). Bill Paxton plays her father - a writer of trashy thriller novels, Antonio Banderas is a shady, Spanish antagonist and Michael Angarano is some average guy she steals a car from/speaks exposition at during a terrific driving sequence which ends unexpectedly.

After a routine assignment, Mallory finds herself framed by the agency without much of an idea why. Like Jason Bourne before her, she spends the film travelling around world cities (Barcelona, Dublin, San Diego) in an attempt to uncover the conspiracy and get revenge on those who betrayed her. Unlike the Bourne films there isn't a lot of character work going on here, with a half-dozen stars given very little screentime, but the action scenes are so far ahead of the curve (and the film so brief) that it would seem a little churlish to complain.

In what seems like a direct challenge to the modern action movie, Soderbergh shoots his hyper-realistic fight scenes with an unfashionably immobile camera - give or take a few lengthy tracking shots. He allows action to unfold within the frame for long spells, giving us an unobstructed view. This decision is no doubt influenced by the fact that he's not having to play tricks in the edit to convince us that Carano can kick ass: she really can and we're allowed to see that.

The choice of a non-actor in the lead is reminiscent of the decision to cast top porn star Sasha Grey as the lead in 'The Girlfriend Experience' - Soderbergh's film about a highly paid sex industry worker. Both represent a bold gambit, especially seeing as how the rest of the cast (along with that of last year's ensemble hit 'Contagion', not to mention the 'Ocean's Eleven' series) confirm Soderbergh's ability to draw from Hollywood's A-list - but in this instance it's vindicated without a doubt.

As well as the fighting, the use of various inner-city locations is also eye-catching. They are all shot in a recognisable and spatially consistent way which feels bracingly ordinary. For instance Mallory escapes pursuers by running through the back of a Burger King, emerging in front of an HMV, during her jaunt through Dublin town centre, ultimately escaping by taxi. Soderbergh creates a very realistic world - one in which Mallory picks up bruises in fights and is winded after falling on her back. This only heightens the excitement and (illusion of) authenticity throughout.

'Haywire' is rated '15' and out now in the UK.

FilmQuest 2012

I'm not generally one for New Year's resolutions: those (often diet-based) promises people typically make to themselves on January 1st and have given up by Mid-February. But it just occurred to me that it could be fun and worthwhile to set myself a target in terms of film viewing this year.

As someone who aspires to write about film full-time, I'm regularly embarrassed when somebody name checks a "classic" movie and I have to confess that I've never seen it. In the past I've even nodded and smiled when such a reference is made, pretending to get it. Sometimes I get away with it: "It's like that bit in 'Top Gun!" say they. "Ha ha ha! Yeah!" say I (I haven't seen 'Top Gun').

In order to address this social problem/cinema blind spot I've compiled a list (in no particular order) of 30 films I feel - for whatever reason - I should have seen by now. It'll be my solemn goal over 2012 to watch all these films (again, in no particular order). Many of these have come up in conversation with friends as described above.

In the interests of interest, I'm going to keep it relatively mainstream. Lord knows there's a lot of great "world cinema" I'm yet to see - and I'm working on that too.

Behold some awesome gaps in my knowledge. My completely arbitrary list is as follows:

Top Gun
The Full Monty
Blow Up
Chinatown
Do the Right Thing
The Exorcist
Blue Velvet
Vertigo
Rebel Without a Cause
The Sound of Music
West Side Story
When Harry Met Sally...
The Rock
Con Air
Lethal Weapon
Beverly Hills Cop
Mary Poppins
Kes
Dirty Dancing
The Passion of the Christ
Goodfellas
Dirty Harry
Dances With Wolves
An Officer and a Gentleman
Rain Man
Unforgiven
Braveheart
Saturday Night Fever
Platoon
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

My aim is to watch all of these over the year and, when I do, I'll cross them off the list and write a short review. I'm terrible at naming things so I've gone with the generic sounding moniker "FilmQuest 2012".

There are, of course, many more famous and iconic films I've never seen. If this goes to plan I might do 30 more in 2013.

'Dreams of a Life' review:

In 2003 a 38 year old woman named Joyce Vincent died watching television in her small London flat, situated above a shopping centre in Wood Green. She wasn't discovered for nearly three years - and then only by people seeking her eviction from the premises for failing to make rent payments. When they found her the TV was still on, playing to Vincent's skeletal remains, which were surrounded by unopened Christmas presents. Immediately questions were raised.

Why hadn't anybody noticed her missing? Didn't her family wonder where she was? Why didn't any of her neighbours report the smell? Or question the why the television had been on constantly for so long? Why hadn't the electricity been disconnected? If she were so isolated, who had she planned to spend Christmas with? What did her story say about British society? Questions abound, prompting documentary filmmaker Carol Morley to run a newspaper ad asking for anybody who knew Vincent - in any capacity - to get in contact.

The result is 'Dreams of a Life': a haunting and moving look at Vincent's life as seen through the eyes of ex-boyfriends, colleagues and acquaintances told almost as a stream of consciousness. Early on Morley establishes that we might never know the facts surrounding her death in any detail: Vincent's body was so badly decomposed by the time of its discovery that a cause was not ascertainable (though a possible asthma attack is one theory), whilst insight into her past is limited by the fact that surviving relatives preferred to remain anonymous. With this in mind the film is a patchwork of often contradictory accounts which reveal far more about the nature of friendships - and how little we know about the people around us - than they do about Joyce Vincent, who remains something of a tragic enigma.

Depending on who is speaking she was either too trusting or had problems trusting others. People similarly can't agree on whether or not she was a decent singer, where she worked or who was in her circle of friends at any given time. Several speculate that she lived several parallel lives, having multiple 21st birthday parties with different sets of mates all oblivious to each other's existence. One man considers her the great love of his life, whilst another bestows that honour upon himself. She was a bubbly, happy, confident person - or perhaps a deeply damaged, reclusive individual. Did she quit a high paying office job in order to go travelling abroad with 20 mates or did she simply start working as a cleaner? Maybe all of these things are true. Possibly few of them are.

What is clear is that Joyce was an attractive and capable woman with aspirations of being a professional singer. At one time in her life she apparently rubbed shoulders with Nelson Mandela, conversed freely with Isaac Hayes and dined with Gil Scott-Heron. She was well liked, had a wide circle of friends and, by all accounts, the manner of her death came a huge surprise to those she knew who couldn't believe the lady from the newspaper reports was their Joyce.

This raises an eerie question which, once contemplated, is difficult to erase from your mind: could this happen to you? It also causes you to ponder how much your friends really know about you and, even, the transitory nature of friendship itself. In many ways her story, whilst extraordinary, is understandable. After all, she was young and fit - if one of your friends of a similar age stopped responding to text messages or hadn't been down to the local pub in a while, would you ever wonder whether they had died? I suspect you'd assume they'd moved away, gotten a new job or - for one reason or another - changed their phone number. You'd probably imagine they just didn't like you any more long before you ever considered anything as drastic as Vincent's chilling story.

Morely's film works well as a loose, dreamlike musing on isolation and the fallibility of memory. I think it deliberately seeks to raise more questions than it answers and it succeeds if accepted on these terms. I expect it's rather less satisfying if you're seeking a straight examination of "the facts". In which case the speculative dramatised reconstructions of Vincent's life up to her death, in which she's played by actress Zawe Ashton, are certain to grate.

These sequences are hit and miss in any case, with the worst far too obvious and maudlin - such as when Vincent is imagined singing "My Smile is Just a Frown" into a hairbrush for several minutes before breaking down in tears in her depressing flat. But they can't spoil this thought-provoking glimpse at the cold anonymity of 21st century city life taken to a horrifying extreme.

'Dreams of a Life' has recieved a limited release in the UK, rated '12A' by the BBFC.

'Shame' review:

From Steve McQueen, Turner Prize winning video artist and director of the universally acclaimed 'Hunger', 'Shame' is a stylishly shot, cold and uncomfortable look at an empty existence defined by the nebulous disorder commonly known as "sex addiction". New York executive Brandon (Michael Fassbender) spends his every waking moment watching porn, soliciting prostitutes and masturbating in the work toilets. He can't so much as look at a woman on the subway without straying into a world of crass sexual fantasy from which the film offers no escape.

He is handsome, lives in a clean modern apartment and the women he beds are uniformly gorgeous yet his sexual encounters are framed as dirty and sinister. Brandon takes seemingly no pleasure in what he's doing, with sex reduced to a shameful compulsion and a barrier preventing the development of lasting relationships with people - who include his equally fucked up sister Sissy, played by Carey Mulligan. The problem is most of the people in his life - from his irritating sibling to his arrogant jock prick of a boss (James Badge Dale) - prevent this from seeming like too much of a loss.

Co-written with 'The Iron Lady' screenwriter Abi Morgan, the film's view on sexuality seems the product of deep, unhealthy repression - the sort of judgemental, prudish take on sex that we've spent the last decade or so trying desperately to move away from as public discussion of all-things bodily becomes increasingly frank. The way the film attempts to paint Brandon's acts as depraved is absurd at best. We're first encouraged to view his sexual appetites with suspicion after he asks a woman to undress "slowly". "What a sicko!" seems to be the message, backed up by Harry Escott's suitably ominous and rueful score. Later Brandon is shown to reach his spiritual, emotional and ethical nadir as he enters a gay sauna and is felated by a male stranger - a plot point which feels as homophobic as it does judgemental. Who cares where he sticks his nob so long as it's consensual?

Accepting for a moment that hyper-sexuality is a modern social ill and meeting the film on its own terms for a moment, I still think it's ill-conceived: a ponderous bore. McQueen favours long close-ups which, I suppose, might be said to provoke discomfort or even (and I think this is supremely condescending) give the audience time to think about what they're seeing. The effect is that we are often shown over a couple of minutes what we might have just as easily discerned over a couple of seconds - inflating the running time at the expense of engagement.

'Shame' is out now in the UK, rated '18' by the BBFC.

'War Horse' review:

I fundamentally don't care whether a wide-eyed village simpleton (Jeremy Irvine) finds his 'orse. Especially not amongst the horror of the First World War. And yet here is 'War Horse': a film that time and time again asks the audience to put the fate of the titular steed, Joey, above that of the on-screen humans. Upon hearing of a man's death in battle via letter, Irvine's farm boy hero is only moved to say "he was riding Joey when he died" - fearing for the horse and instantly disregarding the man. At the height of the idiocy, a doctor is asked to leave a makeshift hospital full of dying soldiers to tend to Joey. Who bloody cares about this horse?!

Apparently everyone, for in this story Joey touches the lives of several different people, on different sides of the conflict, heralding chaos, death and misery wherever he goes. As based on the acclaimed Michael Morpurgo novel-turned-stage play, it's supposed to be the story of man's inhumanity to man seen through the eyes of an innocent animal. Yet Steven Spielberg's overwrought and overlong melodrama (as penned by the apocalypse signifying double-act of Richard Curtis and Lee Hall) makes it feel as though he's somehow the cause of all these problems rather than an observer - with more than one owner facing death or ruin before 146 laboured minutes are done.

Unless you automatically gawp and coo at the merest sight of an animal, you won't give the slightest toss what happens here. The human characters, with little screen-time to speak of, are painted as the thinnest caricatures: Benedict Cumberbatch as the shouty, plummy officer, Tom Hiddleston as a softly-spoken, well-meaning aristo, Emily Mortimer as the put upon farmer's wife, Peter Mullan as the drunken old farmer and so on. Though they all make a decent show of it - particularly the increasingly ubiquitous Cumberbatch.

Tonally it's all over the map too, shifting between the most wholesome Hovis advert never made and gritty, 'Saving Private Ryan' style battle sequences in which people crawl through mud crying and riddled with bullets. To give you some idea of what a mess it is, here are four isolated scenes listed in chronological order: some comedy business with a wacky goose; an artful shot of two children being executed; a short sequence in which a cute French girl tries to teach Joey how to jump; the battle of the Somme.

The increasingly self-parodic John Williams relentlessly underpins all this with his most cloying score to date, leading to an extraordinary disconnect between what's being depicted (usually a handsome horse running) and what we are obviously supposed to feel. The worst thing though is that Spielberg is just not built to tell a story about moral equivalence, the futility of war and the commonality of all men. He needs to create baddies and sell us goodies we can cheer for. The result is that the worst war time atrocities are shown committed by the German army whilst Joey is in their care - with a commander who smokes a cigar and might as well laugh maniacally at the end of every sentence.

A decent early action scene manages to convey both the historic potency of the cavalry charge and its obsolescence in 20th Century warfare within an expertly staged five minutes. But the film's best sequence sees a German and British soldier meet in no man's land in a mutual effort to free Joey from some barbed wire: they joke together and end the encounter wishing each other well. This is what the heart of the material is supposed to be about but it's not what Spielberg has been gearing us up for. Under his direction this is reduced to the story of a "magnificent kind of horse" and makes for the purest kind of hogwash.

'War Horse' is out now in the UK, rated '12A' by the BBFC.

'Moonrise Kingdom' trailer:

For me a new Wes Anderson movie is cause for celebration, so the release of a first trailer (below) for the upcoming 'Moonrise Kingdom' is really exciting. It's his first movie since 2009's 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' and first live action film since 2007's 'The Darjeeling Limited' - also co-written with Roman Coppola. Cast regulars Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray are joined by Bruce Willis, Ed Norton and Tilda Swinton, in this 60s-set tale about a couple of kids who run away together, prompting a massive search.

Anderson fans will immediately notice that the titles are written in a different font from that used extensively in his first six features. It's also interesting that the film looks so different visually, with washed out colours giving it an almost instagram look, as regular cinematographer Robert Yeoman is still behind the camera. Otherwise it looks and feels like a Wes Anderson film to the smallest detail.

I love that the scouts in the film seem to continue Anderson's childish love of clubs and gangs, notably explored in 'Bottle Rocket', 'Rushmore' and 'The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou'. I can't wait for this.