My Week of Film – Week 6

So far this year I’ve spent a lot of my weekends sitting in the cinema, but it’s burned me out a bit – I need to keep the cinema as something I look forward to rather than something that I need to do. I’ve been ticking the boxes in terms of seeing all the high profile Oscar baiters, but it’s left me resenting those evenings and weekend’s I’ve spent in the darkened screening rooms. Plus, it’s pretty windy and rainy out there right now, so cycling 20 minutes and then sitting in wet jeans for the following two hours is a much less attractive prospect to sitting on the sofa with a DVD. So no new releases this week, but rather two very good video discs:

Margin Call

J C Chandor has been on film-journalists’ radars recently because of his film All Is Lost, or “the almost silent one with Redford in a boat” as it’s widely known. Chandor’s won plaudits for his innovative and dramatic writing and direction on the project, plaudits which have a remarkably familiar tone to those given for his work on his first film, Margin Call.

While All Is Lost focusses on the silent actions of a lone central character, Margin Call is a dialogue-heavy recreation of the birthing of the 2008 financial crisis from the perspective of a range of characters sitting on the various rungs of a stockbroking company ladder. A young Wall Street worker discovers the fragility of his company’s practise of selling the now infamous toxic assets and passes the news up the hierarchy. The writing offers an accessible window into the complex world of such financial dealings whilst refusing to baby the audience with heavy exposition. The characters are extremely well rounded, the interaction adroitly observed, the pacing expertly judged and the moral arguments of the financial crisis astutely delivered. Some of the monologues, especially one delivered by Paul Bettany in a sports car, really stuck a chord with me in an intellectual rather than emotional sense – something rare for a piece of fiction.

But my praise shouldn’t be limited to the writing and direction, the cast ply their trade with the skill that you would expect from actors with such pedigree. Led by a predictably strong performance from Spacey they all inhabit their well-written characters with real humanity, from the relatively inexperienced Quinto to seasoned Irons and Tucci.

I hadn’t expected to enjoy a dialogue-heavy film that charts the beginning of a stock-market crash, but this really surprised me. And makes me regret missing All Is Lost when it was in cinemas. If you have any interest in this area, or just a love of films with more to them than exploding helicopters, then you should check it out.

The also-watched:

The Iron Giant –

I love this film. I was bored last Saturday night and didn’t really want to schlep my way to the local world of cine, so I dug out my DVD of The Iron Giant. Based on the Ted Hughes book but transferred – as so many films are – to a US setting, this mixes the 50’s B-movies doomsday musings with an Amblin-esque boys-own adventure, all beautifully rendered in traditional style animation with a sterling voice cast. In terms of contemporary kid’s films, this belongs alongside Pixar’s finest – exhibiting as it does a timeless charm, not reliant on popular references but focussing on strong characters with easy charm. If you haven’t seen it yet, I will lend you my copy.

Iron Man 3

Okay, I haven’t bothered with any reviews recently – this is becoming a very running/eating dominated blog. So now that I’ve been to the cinema to watch a blockbustery type film I thought I’d opine about it.

Well, Iron Man 3 was about as inevitable as the sunrise. Marvel’s on going movie schedule is as unstoppable as the tide –  to use another meteorological metaphor. The primary-coloured, one-liner filled superhero movies have enough inventiveness and charm behind them to make them eminently watchable without ever really challenging any cinematic conventions or preconceptions (as perhaps the Nolan Batman films have). They don’t worry people, they don’t scare people, they just serve as shiny, mindless entertainment and as such are perfect box-office fodder. Iron Man 3 adroitly continues this tradition and ensures that Downey Jr will be back for more Tony Stark-ery despite his contract being up for renewal. It’s a cash cow and I doubt they’ll stop any time soon.

Now this cynicism should not suggest that I didn’t like the film. As I said, it is perfect mindless entertainment. You sit back and relax, comfortable in the knowledge of roughly where we are in terms of yellow-and-red action heroism and enjoy the wizz-bang action. And I did, I really did. And I enjoyed the one liners, especially the interplay between Stark and the almost-but-not-quite-cliché bullied-kid. And I liked the shiny suits, the big explosions, the gun fighting and the punching. I liked that Shane Black once again set his movie at Christmas time (I love that little idiosyncrasy in his films). I enjoyed all that. But ultimately it did still feel a little hollow. The characters came and went, Rebecca Hall had woefully little to do and I just couldn’t care about what might happen to her character. Guy Pearce does a great job of injecting menace to his mad scientist but even he felt slightly limp as a character. Ben Kingsley provided a surprising amount of charm to his mini-character, so he maybe wins the most points on that basis. Oh, and the final action sequence. It looked impressive (though the logic of it made me wonder *SPOILER ALERT* why, if he had an army of suits just sitting there, did he not use them earlier when he was being tortured or Pepper was being injected with bad stuff? It just doesn’t make sense – and when you question stuff like that in the midst of a giant action sequence something’s wrong) but as with the rest of the film, it felt weirdly… lacking. There was little peril, little tension, and as a consequence the conclusion felt a bit anti-climactic.

But this all sounds very negative. I enjoyed it, and I’ll watch it again. And I’d recommend it to anyone who’s enjoyed any of the marvel films before. It’s miles better than Iron Man 2, and probably Thor and Capt America, but not Iron Man 1 or Avengers. So it’s good, just don’t expect a masterpiece.