News: Atonal Musings - The Sequel

Just an update for those few cats who've been following my adventures in cineland on this site. I'm currently working a new site, with its own domain, hosting and all that jazz. All the film related content here will be transferred over.

In addition, there will be even more new content - reviews, news and interviews from the world of Film and TV, charting my adventure in the world of film and film journalism.

The site will go live in a few weeks. The short of it is, I will still be updating this blog until then, but posts will be more sporadic while I sort out the teething issues on Atonal Musings 2: Bigger, better, and with more Tina Fey (wait, that's not entirely accurate, but on the upside, there's only four more days 30 Rock returns to the airwaves).

Look forward to seeing everyone on the new site.

Happy filmgoing!

Review: Accidents Happen (2009)

Released April 22, 2010

The struggling family of Accidents Happen

Geena Davis’s career imploded after Cutthroat Island, the 1995 pirate movie that holds the dubious honour of being the biggest ever box-office flop. After an intermission involving Olympic archery and matters presidential (TV’s Commander in Chief), she returns to the big screen in this numbing British-Australian co-production about a family torn apart by unfortunate happenstance.

In tone and theme, it’s a less charming version of Pushing Daisies, the wonderful series that combined wacky Tim Burton-esque whimsy with morbid dark humour. There’s some of that here: “Some people wouldn’t know their ass from an air-conditioner,” our know-it-all narrator informs us as a man goes up in flames on a sunny morning in suburban Connecticut. Beautifully shot in poetic slow-motion, it’s the best scene in the film. This event is observed by the young Billy Conway (Harrison Gilbertson), the son of Davis’s Gloria, a boy struggling to find his place within his fractured family after a car accident kills his sister and places one brother into a coma.

He’s too bland a protagonist for us to really invest in his coping strategies – dabbling in girls, drugs and the odd nude streak through the local supermarket. Davis is however fine as the distraught mother, who spends most of the time on the verge of crying and muttering overly-scripted, inane wisecracks like “I’m so hungry I could eat a crowbar and shit a jungle jim.”

First-time feature director Andrew Lancaster shows a flair for painterly images but is saddled by a mess of a script by Brian Carbee that never settles on a consistent tone. Things turn all serious at the end when the story focuses on the real psychological cost of the family’s loss, and even though the ethereal indie-rock soundtrack encourages us otherwise, it’s hard to care when the catharsis isn’t earned.

Review: The Book of Eli (2010)

Released April 15, 2010

Denzel and Mila Kunis wandering the plains in The Book of Eli

Post apocalyptic movies are all the rage (The Road, Children of Men) and why not – there’s few concepts that are inherently dramatic and provide the platform for existential angst. There’s plenty of the latter in the latest movie from the Hughes Brothers (Menace II Society, From Hell), though the point of its confused religious grandstanding is anyone’s guess.

Eli, the man-with-no-name wandering though the generic but oddly beautiful American wasteland, is played by a stoic Denzel Washington. He’s a wizened old survivor who’s become adept at dispatching cannibalistic thugs with his workhorse blade slung over his shoulder. He needs it, especially, to ward off the aggressive Carnegie (Gary Oldman) who launders over a ramshackle town like Ian McShane’s Al Swearengen in Deadwood. Carnegie may delve into a Mussolini biography and have a paperback copy of the Da Vinci Code on his desk, but what he’s really after is the crucifix-adorned book in Eli’s possession. It doesn’t take a great leap of faith to guess the book’s subject and, as per the historical precedent, The Book of Eli follows the battle over this divine text, complete with wildly excessive, but gloriously stylish action scenes.

For two-thirds of its length Eli maintains this enjoyable B-movie Western vibe, replete with a classic high-noon style standoff. But it then turns to serious philosophizing and final act twists which are simply baffling. These WTF moments, weirdly, do not commit the M. Night sin of invalidating all that happened prior, but just act to make it more fascinating; The Book of Eli is nothing if not ambitious. The ideas are silly, but the oddball sincerity is kind of charming, and there’s a stylized exuberance to the images seemingly inspired by graphic novels.

Aside from Forgetting Sarah Marshall (and, presently, Date Night), the very pretty Mila Kunis often feels miscast. Here, her young Solara, a woman intrigued by Eli’s sturdy conviction, is an odd foil for the Washington’s grizzled survivor. A hoot, though, are Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour as a couple of cannibalistic outlanders.

Review: Beneath Hill 60 (2010)

Released April 15, 2010

Brendan Cowell's Captain Woodward somewhere under Hill 60

Spoilers for history: in 1917 members of the 1st Australian tunnelling Division detonated 19 mines under the German front lines in Belgium, resulting in the biggest ever man-made explosion. The blast, it is said, was heard as far away as Dublin. The lead up to this momentous event is the subject of this awfully old fashioned war movie set in the muddy misery of World War I. Don’t expect cries of “war is hell,” existential crises or sharp political comment, Beneath Hill 60 tells its story with a straight face and minimal reflection.

Our band of heroes, plucked from working in the mines back home, are lead by the soft-spoken Captain Oliver Woodward (Brendan Cowell). Tunnelling and explosive experts, they’re literally “diggers,” not soldiers. Before their reassignment to Hill 60, the movie skirts with tensions within the squad and between them and the more highly trained regular soldiers, but the underdeveloped characters are non-descript and expendable. As perfunctory is a relationship between Woodward and sixteen year-old farmgirl Marjorie Waddell (Bella Heathcote), told in flashback, which is low on romance but high in creepiness.

Despite impressive production values and cinematography (and a budget of only $9 million), director Jeremy Sims’ heavy theatre-trained hand is bludgeoning. Music swells, men fall in a slow motion swath of bullets and heroes make the necessary scarifies for the greater good. It’s undone, too, by some peculiar self-conscious acting from men who feel more like NIDA grads than working class miners. An exception is Steve Le Marquand’s as the gruff Fraser, a man who is not afraid to state his mind.

BH60, while delving into the procedures of war rather than its ideology, is no Hurt Locker. That film used specific details to illuminate Jeremy Renner’s adrenaline junkie protagonist. The characters in BH60, on the other hand, exist only at the service of the insufficiently explained plot. Not every war film needs to be a meditation on violence, but they do have to pass the most basic litmus test of any film: making the audience care, something Sims, despite his smooth and earnest production, struggles to achieve.

Review: Clash of the Titans (2010)

Released April 1, 2010

Sam Worthington as the demi-god Perseus

The original 1981 Clash of the Titans was a plodding fantasy epic made enjoyable by the special effects of stop-motion wizard Ray Harryhausen. The creator of innumerable beasts in the Sinbad movies and, most famously, the skeletons at the climax of Jason and the Argonauts, his designs were masterpieces of creativity and subtlety. These are qualities absent from Louis Leterrier’s frenetic remake, a wash of bland CGI monsters, ADD action and self-important dialogue.

Current bigshot Sam Worthington (still struggling with his pseudo-American accent) plays a non-descript, monosyllabic Perseus. The son of Zeus (Liam Neeson), he is none too pleased with his demi-god status after his adoptive parents are inadvertently killed by the malicious god of the underworld, Hades (Ralph Fiennes, in slithering Voldemort mode). As punishment for their rejection by man, the gods decree the city of Argos to be destroyed by the monstrous Kraken – inflated this time to Bruckheimer-sized proportions – unless the beautiful princess Andromeda (Alexa Davalos) is offered up as a sacrifice. It’s up to Perseus and his disposable band of warriors to avert disaster.

The plot makes little sense, especially since Perseus’ affection lies not with the in-peril Andromeda but towards the helpful demi-god Io (Gemma Arterton). Saving the princess, hence, seems like a plot convenience. Worse are the messy visuals. Already a victim of Leterrier’s poor spatial sense, the post-conversion to 3D is at best perfunctory and at worst, downright atrocious, simply too dim and muddled to be coherent.

Technical ineptitude aside, it’s the creature design and scene construction that reek of laziness and indifference. The suspenseful Medusa confrontation of the 1981 version is here replaced by an improbable battle in a cavern that’s a cross between the gravity-bending maze of Labyrinth and the fires of Mount Doom. It might have worked if, Mads Mikkelsen’s Draco aside, the characters were not already made of stone. I was cheering for Medusa, her demonic cackle one of the few moments of original inspiration.

There’s a joke early on about the absence of Bubo the mechanical owl, the R2D2 cash-in from the original. Bubo’s presence would have helped this movie. And that’s saying something.