Paddington - review

Let's be honest. At the start of 2014, who would have honestly said that the two best family films of the year would have been one based on a building block toy and one that inspired the meme #creepypaddington?

Well of course The LEGO Movie turned out to be "Awesome" and Harry Potter and Gravity producer David Heyman has worked his magic yet again to produce a film which is as charming, warm and fuzzy as the titular bear.

Not only has it remained faithful to Michael Bond's original character thanks to Ben Whishaw's marmalade-smooth vocal performance but Paul King (director of The Mighty Boosh and Bunny And The Bull) gives it a delightfully quirky and whimsical spin with some great gags and touches like the taxi ride that highlights all the cliched sights in London before having Mr Brown (Bonneville) ask the taxi driver "what kind of route was that?" And the lights on the lost and found sign at the station flickering dependent on how the conversation is going with the Brown family.

It is also surprising that Paddington overtakes The Hunger Games: Mockingjay as the most overtly political movie aimed at young people this year.

It positively promotes the benefits that immigrants can bring to London and the UK and how they should be welcomed with open arms despite what the naysayers might say, as epitomised by Peter Capaldi's Mr. Currie who is clearly a Daily Mail reader and has the conversation with Nicole Kidman's villain about how it starts with one and soon they'll be over here stealing all our marmalade.

Paddington has found a welcome home this festive season and is the bear necessity for a family trip to the cinema.

4 stars

Before I Go To Sleep - review

In Before I Go To Sleep, following a vicious attack Nicole Kidman's character suffers from amnesia that causes her to forget everything she has learned that day, thus starting from scratch again each morning.

Her only real source of help is a digital camera in which she records important information.

I bet that Memento's Leonard Shelby is really annoyed they didn't have them back in 2000 when he was stuck using post it notes and tattoos!

The story has a great hook of someone trying solve a crime like to piecing together a jigsaw puzzle when you don't know how many pieces are involved or what the final picture looks like.

However you yourself could be suffering from short term memory loss and still be able to work out the twists and turns that appear during the third act.

The irony is that while the movie is an enjoyable thriller, it is ultimately rather forgettable and will begin to fade from memory as soon as you leave the cinema.

3 stars

Grace of Monaco - review

Grace Of Monaco lacks exactly that... grace.

It fails to deliver what one of the most beautiful stars that ever graced the silver screen had in abundance: Grace, beauty and elegance.

This film is so heavy-handed in its execution, it feels like it was made with boxing gloves.

Whether it is the overly-dramatic score that ramps up emotion or a sense of danger that simply isn't there, a camera that seems fixated on Kidman's eyes with many scenes consisting solely of Wayne's World-style "extreme close ups" and an unintentionally hilarious training montage where Derek Jacobi holds up cards with feelings written on them that Kidman has to express.

We get cards that read "Anger", "Trust", "Regret" yet the resulting expressions only reminded me of Derek Zoolander's various "range" of looks like Blue Steel, Ferrari and Le Tigre.

The final nail in the coffin has to be Grace Kelly's big moment at the end of the film where she finally delivers on her promise and duties after transferring from High Society to high society by giving a speech about how living in Monaco is like a fairy tale and please don't destroy our fairy tale by making us have to pay tax.

Given the current economic climate and the news stories about Amazon, Starbucks and Gary Barlow, I'm sure this will have the exact opposite effect that the movie had planned.

Somebody had better Dial M for Murder because Olivier Dahan has just killed the Princess of Monaco in a biopic that is as big a car crash as Diana that proves once and for all that Australia actresses shouldn't play royalty.

1 star

The Railway Man - review

Thanks to series of delays and changed trains, railway enthusiast Eric Lomax (Firth) meets Patricia Wallace (Kidman) by chance on the journey from Crewe to Carstairs. He's on his way home to Berwick-Upon-Tweed, she's off for a tour of the Highlands.

Before you can say Brief Encounter, he uses his timetable to meet her at Edinburgh Waverley and a whirlwind romance begins resulting in their marriage.

On their wedding night, Eric suffers a panic attack at the memory of a past trauma. Unable to get through to her increasingly distant and fragile husband, Patsy sets out to find out the root of the tracks of his tears by speaking with former war buddy Finlay (Skarsgard).

Through flashbacks, the truth is revealed that both men were POWs in WWII and forced to work on the railway the Japanese were building in Burma. Young Lomax (here played commendably by Jeremy Irvine) is subjected to further unknown tortures at the hands of a Japanese soldier called Nagese.

"War leaves a mark" Finlay tells Patsy, and Lomax's marks are more than skin deep.

This is not a film where "love" is the thing that offers redemption. This is a film about honour and the knowledge that for some, the war is never over. What they have to decide is whether they live for revenge or forgiveness.

This dilemma is at the heart of the film's third act (and best section), when Lomax returns to Burma to confront his captor after he discovers that he works at a museum dedicated to the railway.

With the story, perhaps unintentionally, falling into three main sections (romantic love story, POW flashback, confrontation), it suffers slightly as certain characters get lost along the way.

Kidman is given little to do for two thirds of the film as the love story is sidelined for the war plot line and Firth doesn't really come into his own until the final showdown with Nagese.

The grown-up Nagese is played by Hiroyuki Sanada, who appears in just about every US/UK film set in Japan or in need of a Japanese character (Sunshine, The Last Samurai, The Wolverine, 47 Ronin). He takes a character who is initially portrayed rather one-dimensionally and develops him into a real person who has also been scarred and changed by the events of the war. The one-on-one confrontations with Firth are the most emotionally charged and moving of the film.

Watching this film in the cinema is rather like a train journey. You initially balk at the ticket price, the refreshments are daylight robbery, the progression is a little stop/start with a feeling like "are we ever going to get there" but ultimately it gets you to your destination and the resulting emotion is enough to forgive any issues you may have had.

3 stars

Glasgow Film Festival Review - Stoker

Stoker is adapted from a script written by Prison Break's Wentworth Miller (the fact he had it tattooed to his body must have made for an interesting cast readthrough) and is the first English language film from director Park Chan-Wook.
The fact that Park directed Oldboy means that he knows a thing or two about, how would one put it, the "unique family dynamics" at the heart of Stoker.
India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) is a rather odd, lonely girl dealing with the death of her father on her 18th birthday. While her mother (Nicole Kidman) is cold and distant, India finds herself developing a curious interest in her mysterious Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) who turns up at the funeral out of the blue.
With a title like Stoker, one might imagine lots of gothic imagery and references to the classic vampire story however in this particular tale, the name Stoker takes on a more literal interpretation. The word "stoke" means "to encourage or incite" and Charlie's arrival and subsequent actions certainly have this effect on India, to "stoke her" awakening in terms of her sexuality and possible family predilection towards violence.
As the film progresses the acts of sex and violence become intrinsically linked. There is one sequence which starts as a cliched scene of someone trying to wash away their sins that is given a devilish twist that brings to mind the French term for an orgasm "le petit mort", or "little death".
One of the most divisive aspects of the film has been Park Chan-Wook's mise-en-scene. Some critics have argued that the film is a case of style over substance but this is certainly no Terrence Malick film. The director's use of cinematography, sound design and Clint Mansell's score help to build an unsettling atmosphere and sensual beauty that prevent the film from tipping into melodrama and heighten the sporadic moments of ultra-violence.
The influence of Bram Stoker may not have been felt in the way many might have been expecting but there is another rather portly shadow cast over the film in the shape of Alfred Hitchcock, in particular his 1943 film Shadow Of A Doubt, with enough references to rival a Brian De Palma back catalogue.
In that film young Charlie (Teresa Wright) worries that her favourite person in the world Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotton) is actually a killer.
Where Wright shies away from Cotton, in Stoker the revelations about Uncle Charlie only cause India to become more intrigued and attracted to her enigmatic relative.
This film might reveal it's hand earlier than Hitch would have but times have changed and he was more restricted with what he could and couldn't show. like its predecessor, this film succeeds on the strength of the chemistry between the leads and both deliver career-best performances.
Initially not that impressed with her in Alice In Wonderland, the talent Wasikowska has shown since has led this reviewer to mark that performance down to working within such a sterile CGI environment. Here she creates a complex character that is part Wednesday Addams and part Kevin a la the kind we need to talk about.
Matthew Goode, in the most difficult role, pitches it just right, never giving too much away behind that perfect poker face but oozing charm that lures India, Evelyn (an excellent Kidman) and the audience into wanting more.
Park, like Charlie, knows exactly how to seduce and manipulate his prey (in this case the audience), using every trick and tool at his disposal to cast a spell over them. It might not have the visceral impact or horrific sucker punch of Oldboy but Stoker is beyond a shadow of a doubt one of the year's most beautiful and haunting films.

4 stars