Rev Stan's film blog

Review: The Young and Prodigeous TS Spivet

Synopsis: Ten-year-old inventor and brother of dead twin, TS Spivet,  runs away from home travelling across America to pick up a Smithsonian award the institute thinks it is giving to an adult.

Stan's thoughts: This has all the ingredients of a lovely quirky, warm and emotional childhood adventure but it doesn't quite bake a rosette winning cake.

The adventure isn't quite exciting enough (he spends a lot of time on a train) and the emotional story feels a little too weighed down by the quirkiness and the adventure to properly tug on the heart strings. There is a serious family drama here about a family grieving for a dead child/sibling but it feels a little lost rather than enhanced by the packaging it is wrapped up in.

Basically it doesn't quite add up to the sum of its parts and, despite a great performance from the lead, Kyle Catlett, and supporting cast (always a joy to see Helena Bonham Carter) I wasn't quite entertained or moved enough.

Ratings

• Stan’s 56%
• IMDB 71%
• Metascore 48%
• Rotten Tomatoes 65%
• RT Audience Rating* 71%

Recently seen

Belle

Edge of Tomorrow

Two Face of January

Maleficent

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Frank

Blue Ruin

Godzilla

Ilo Ilo

Calvary

* Based on number of people who rated the film 3.5/5 and higher

 

Review: The surprisingly good Her

Synopsis: Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is a lonely divorcee who develops a relationship with an intelligent operating system, Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), which is designed to organise his life.

Stan's thoughts: Written and directed by Spike Jonze, Her certainly has his idiosyncrasies. On paper its an odd and not wholly promising premise: A man falls in love with a computer.

However, what you get is something that is an intelligent and, ironically, very human look at relationships. The expectations, disappointments, joy and pain is all played out. The fact that one half of the relationship is an operating system throws up its own set of ironies.

Samantha is not some electronic sounding automaton but sounds and thinks like a human and is therefore subject to similar feelings of love and hurt albeit with a heightened ability to rationalise them. How the relationship pans out raises questions about artificial intelligence and the drive for something that is close to human.

The futuristic world that Jonze has created is not that far removed from our own; telecommunications and virtual technology has advanced a bit but in some ways humans have become lazy about their relationships. Theodore works for a company that writes personal letters for people. While he is very good at his job, has an amazing way with words, he is essentially manipulating other people's relationships when they are too lazy to do so themselves.  

There is also irony in the fact that he knows what to say when he is writing as someone else but in his own life never has quite the same eloquence and struggles with the same emotional engagement.

I confess that the trailer for this didn't really pique my interest too much but I'm so glad I gave it a go. It's an odd idea but well executed, interesting and entertaining so go with it.

Ratings

• Stan's: 75%
• IMDB: 83%
• Metascore: 90%
• Rotten Tomatoes: 94% 
• RT audience rating: 85%

Recently seen

The Invisible Woman

Dallas Buyers Club

Jack Ryan - Shadow Recruit

Inside Llewyn Davis

August Osage County

Nebraska

The Wolf of Wall Street

 

 

 

 

Reviews round up: This Must Be the Place & Avengers Assemble

This Must Be The Place

Sean Penn doesn't half like to mix up his roles and admire him greatly for that because so few that have reach his level of success do. Here channelling Robert Smith he plays a bored, retired rock star who, on the death of his estranged father, decides to go in search of a man who was a guard at his concentration camp during the second world war.

On the one hand it's deliciously quirky but on the other hand there is there the holocaust/revenge plot and I'm not sure the two sat comfortably together. 

Penn is superb as you can imagine and so is Frances McDormand who plays his wife, although I'd have liked a bit more of her. But Penn's odd and quirky character and how bored he's become with his life just felt trivial against the concentration camp storyline although I was curious as to whether he had got it in him to mete out his revenge.

I'm giving it 65%. On IMDB it has 67% and no Metacritic score while on Rotten Tomatoes it has 69% from critics and 60% of visitors gave it three and a half stars or higher.

Avengers Assemble

In my mind this film is called Avengers Ensemble for reason known only to my small brain but anyway, I loved it. And what made me love it was the humour, it didn't take itself too seriously - it is about comic book heroes after all. I laughed out loud several times. There is one particularly funny moment between The Hulk and baddy Loki which had me giggling for quite a while, but I won't spoilt it.

And I think the fact that the characters had a bit of depth helped tremendously. Much of the humour is derived from a clash of personalities of our assembled super heroes working together for the first time. 

Robert Downey Jr does steal it a little as Iron Man but then I love the Iron Man films and wasn't overly fond of Captain America. (And I haven't seen the rest).

There is going to be a sequel which is predictable and I wonder if they can recreate the humour when there isn't that element of 'meeting fellow super hero for the first time'. I'll still go and see though.

Funny and good fun and I managed to see it in 2D - hurrah. I'm giving it 82%.

On IMDB it's got 88% with a Metacritic score of 69% while on Rotten Tomatoes it 93% from critics and 96% of site visitors have given it three and a half stars or higher.

Kaboom: the missing link?

Kaboom didn't make me angry as bad films normally do but neither did it make me smile like a bizarre but good film should and Donnie Darko leads the way in that.

I think I'm just stunned by the ineffectual absurdity of it all. It starts out promisingly enough - albeit with a lot of gratuitous sex and nudity. Student Smith (Thomas Dekker) is bi-sexual, fancies his surf-dude room mate and has the same weird dream over and over. His best friend Stella (Haley Bennett) is a lesbian who starts going out with a woman Smith has seen before but in his dream.

On the way home from a drug and sex-fuelled night out Smith stumbles upon another woman from his dream who is being chased by men in animal masks. He tries to help her but ends up witnessing her brutal murdered.

Up to this point it's a nice level of weirdness - is Smith delusional, still under the influence of the hallucinogenic drug-laced cookie he ate or is it real?

Going for a critics recommendation and supporting low budget films: Skeletons

Mark Kermode has been saying good things about this low-budget, indie Brit-flick. It sounds amusingly surreal and is about two men that travel around the country exorcising skeletons from people's closets. I've got to say I love the premise so I've booked to see it tomorrow.

It's not on at many screens because of the budget and marketing is being done by interviews with the likes of Mark Kermode and through simple word of mouth.

(Hello) Jason Isaacs, who plays The Colonel, told Kermode that one read of the script was enough to get him involved. The limited budget meant all the actors living together in one house during filming and eating mainly cheesecake - doesn't sound too bad to me.

Have seen some interesting low-budget Brit-flicks in the last few years; Fish Tank and Scouting Book for Boys spring to mind. And where could be more appropriate to see it, than at the Curzon Soho where the cafe bar is a popular meeting point, indeed a make-shift office for some new film makers trying to get projects off the ground?

Anyone else seen it or planning to?

Two films coming out next weekend I want to see

Firstly Heartbreaker because it looks silly and charming and a good glass of wine film:

And secondly, as a complete contrast Leaving starring Kristen Scott Thomas because it looks really moving and I haven't seen a good tear-jerker for a while. Oh and Kristen Scott Thomas is a fantastic actress. It looks a bit like a French version of I Am Love, only better (sorry Tilda).

Please Give (me a film that is better than Greenberg)

Please Give was like a breath of fresh air after Greenberg last weekend. There are some superb characters each flawed in there own way but it has heart,  humour and a tenderness which in some small dose might have made the Noah Baumbach film more bearable.

But back to Please Give. First there is Kate played by Catherine Keener who, with her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) buys furniture from the relatives of dead people and sells it at vastly marked up prices from her chic and trendy vintage shop. Her charitable acts, namely giving large sums to beggars, much to her teenage daughters embarrassment, are partially motivated by the guilt she feels in how she earns a living.

Then there is the elderly neighbour Andra (Ann Morgan Guilbert). Kate and Alex, have bought her apartment and are waiting for her to die so they can knock through. Andra is a rude, cantankerous, ungrateful and straight-talking old lady. Her granddaughter Rebecca (Rebecca Hall)  is quiet and thoughtful while her sister Mary (Amanda Peet) is self-centred, flirty and doesn't hide how she feels about her burdensome grandmother, rarely visiting and letting her sister do the lion-share of the caring.

A snippet from Alan Cumming about filming The Tempest

Thanks to YetAnotherBenWhishaw blog for highlighting this little piece that Alan Cumming posted on his website. It's accompanied by the picture below but to read what he had to say about filming in Hawaii and working with actors like Chris Cooper hop over to the site. He plays Sebastian in Julie Taymor's silver screen take on the Shakespeare fantasy play. You might have to scroll down a little to find it....

The Brothers Bloom - the film and director's Q&A

At the start of this Rian Johnson film Stephen, the eldest of the Bloom brothers and played by Mark Ruffalo, says that the perfect con is one in which all parties get what they want.

As a child his first con is to contrive to get his brother Bloom (Adrien Brody) the girl of his dreams while making some cash. It involves telling a children's story which sets a fairy tale-esque tone aided by the old Eastern European shooting locations and larger than life characters such as sinister Diamond Dog (Maximillian Schell) and the silent and calculating con assistant Bang Bang (Rinko Kakuchi).

It is not your average con movie. Yes the cons are complex and clever giving the plot a roller-coaster feel but underlying it is a heart. Stephen the calculating, mastermind ultimately wants his sensitive-soul younger brother to have the 'and they lived happily ever after' ending with the woman of his dreams.