A New York Winter's Tale - review

There was me thinking that there wouldn't be a worse film in 2014 than I, Frankenstein, and just a few weeks later along comes A New York Winter's Tale.

The writing was on the wall following the trailer which starts as a rather soppy tale between loveable rogue and petty thief Colin Farrell and a young red-haired girl with TB from Downton Abbey in turn of the century America. THEN he is pushed off a bridge by the incredibly Oirishly-accented Russell Crowe and we find Farrell in modern day New York and it has become a supernatural tale involving angels, demons and Jennifer Connelly.

It was difficult to know the exact moment that you have to put your hands up, admit defeat and just embrace the awfulness of a film which has been played completely straight yet comes across as utterly ridiculous and unintentionally hilarious.

It could have been when the Irish-accented Farrell's German-sounding parents are refused entry to the US as they have Consumption and think that the best chance their son has for survival as they are being shipped back to where they came from is to blindly put him off in a little wooden model boat and dump him in the water near the Statue of Liberty.

Perhaps it is when the audience is meant to believe that a 110 year old would still be allowed to be the acting editor-in-chief of a major New York newspaper in 2014.

Maybe it is when Russell Crowe's demonic thug boss talks to Lucifer (played Will Smith) who wears a Jimi Hendrix t shirt in 1914.

Is it when it is discovered that sex with Colin Farrell is fatal as the girl with TB passes away instantly afterwards?

The point when we suddenly jump forward 100 years and to show this passage of time, Colin Farrell has grown long hair and a beard and spends his time doing chalk drawings in Central Park?

No, the moment of sheer lunacy is around 20 minutes into the film when Farrell's thief escapes from a gang of thugs when he is saved by a passing white horse that then grows wings and flys them off into the distance.

It is difficult to know what could have attracted the cast to the project considering that the novel it is based on was deemed unfilmable by Martin Scorsese before first-time director Akiva Goldsman got his hands on it. The same hands that typed the screenplay for Batman and Robin.

One can only presume that Goldsman had got some serious dirt on Crowe and Smith during the filming of A Beautiful Mind and I Am Legend and blackmailed them at gunpoint onto the set. It might explain why their performances are so bad.

In William Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale there is the stage direction "Exit pursued by a bear" which becomes a running joke in The World's End. If anyone asks you if you want to watch A New York Winter's Tale, unless you are a glutton for so-bad-it's-hilarious movie punishment, simply reply "Drink up, let's Boo Boo!" *exit pursued by a flying horse*

1 star

Much Ado About Nothing - GFF review

Back in February, the Glasgow Film Festival was lucky enough to host the first UK screening of Much Ado About Nothing or "Joss Whedon, I Know What You Did Last Midsummer Night's Dream".
Many people, including Joss himself, must have been asking the question "What does a man who has just directed The Avengers, the third highest grossing film of all time, do next?". Ay, therein lies the rub...
Yet rather surprisingly the answer was not "I'm going to Disneyland" but instead he took the opportunity to brush up his Shakespeare and film a black and white adaptation of one of his plays in his own house with all the parts being played by his actor friends, all in the space of a Twelfth night.
Two weeks in the Magic Kingdom it was not, or perhaps it was depending on your point of view.
Now modern takes on Shakespeare are nothing new and have taken many forms over the years from musical (West Side Story) to teenage rom-com (Ten Things I Hate About You) but what has always been tricky is combining a contemporary setting with the original text.
The most successful of these has been Baz Luhrmann's "William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet", which managesd to stay faithful to the Bard but opened up his work to a brand new generation.
It is certainly possible that Whedon's work could have a similar crossover appeal, especially with it being marketed as "From the director of The Avengers", and he's avoided the tragedy of "For never was a story of more woe, than this of Juliet and her Romeo", instead opting for a comedy of errors and one of Shakespeare's funniest that you could describe as "For never was a story of more wit, than this of Beatrice and her Benedick".
With the rapid-fire dialogue, battle of the sexes and striking black and white cinematography, this adaptation has the feel of a screwball comedy from the Thirties or Forties.
The Cary Grant/Katherine Hepburn of this particular production are Alexis Denisof as and Amy Acker.
Both are completely at ease with the fast-paced, whip-smart dialogue and also adept at comedy as evidenced by Acker's pratfall down the stairs and the sequence where Denisof combat rolls outside a window whilst spying on a conversation about him.
Whedon's version certainly does play up the comedy but never at the expense of the romance which has a real spark, helped by the fact that the two have played lovers in the past on Angel.
By adding a scene at the beginning of the film which reveals a past tryst between Beatrice and Benedick, it puts a fresh spin on their relationship.
There is always a danger with this play that it could become the B&B show but of course this is a Joss Whedon movie, and therefore a perfect ensemble piece with not a weak link in the cast from Sean Maher's dastardly Don John, Agent Coulson Clark Gregg's loving father Leonato to Nathan Fillion's security chief Dogberry who secures the film's biggest laughs with his constant iterations that "forget not that I am an ass".
Casting his friends in the roles not only helped the production as Whedon had confidence in their abilities to deliver in such a short time scale but the sense of family that he has built up over the years with his actors transfers to the screen in this play where family plays an important role to the story.
The adaptation, set in the world of war heroes and politics, contemporises the text and while the words still hold their power (even if it does take a little time to acclimatise to the rhythms of the speech) some of the behaviour and romantic notions will still be considered odd and old-fashioned by some audiences but love is eternal and hey, remember this is Shakespeare, the man who had two teenagers kill themselves after knowing each other for only a week, so what are you going to do?!
So all's well that ends well for Joss Whedon because this labour of love is anything but lost because, measure for measure, Much Ado About Nothing is one of the best Shakespearean adaptations to ever grace the silver screen.

5 stars

Desperately trying not to geek out... Joss managed to keep his cool ;-)

Following the screening, Joss Whedon was on hand to take part in a Q&A and was met with a rapturous reception from the GFT audience.
Below is a video of the Q&A in which Joss was on excellent form and as eloquent, witty and self-deprecating as anyone who has listened to any of his DVD commentaries can attest to.
Highlights include talking about how he first developed a love for Shakespeare, the decision to film in black and white, winding up Nathan Fillion and that if he was to do another film like this following Avengers 2 it would be Hamlet.

P.S. The silly and off-topic Cabin In The Woods question was mine!