The Two Faces of January (2014)

Director: Hossein Amini
Writers:  Hossein Amini, Patricia Highsmith
Cast:       Viggo Mortensen, Oscar Issac, Kirsten Dunst

A thriller centered on a con artist, his wife and a stranger (a minor con) who flee Athens after one of them is caught up in the death of a private detective.

Film marks the directorial debut of Hossein Amini, who was involved with the writing of Nicolas Winding Refn's 'Drive'. It is an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel with the same name that was published in 1964. It has got a great cast and is magnificently shot on locations in Greece and Turkey. Being a very old school film with unspoken tension between the characters, it is no surprise that it didn't too well at the box office. The story takes unexpected turns throughout without having a big reveal at the end. The character Rydal (Oscar Issac) comes into contact with the couple basically because of him being curious about Chester (Viggo Mortensen) who looks like his now dead father, with whom he had an uneasy relationship. Rydal is an American tour guide, who is looking to fleece his customers, like all your guides do I guess. Chester reads that in him and it is kind of made clear that he sees a younger version of him in Rydal. Both of them don't trust each other and Chester is insecure about his wife, who has taken a liking to Rydal. The circumstances forces all of them together and dependent on each other. What is great about the film is that the nature of feelings between Rydal and Colette (Kirsten Dunst) is not made very clear to the audience and we are very well looking into it with similar suspicions that Chester has. I really didn't buy the father-son vibe (teenage angst kind) that is supposed to be going on though. 

Overall it is great watch with some great performances. Oscar Issac was also excellent in 'Inside Llewyn Davis'. Am glad that Viggo Mortensen told Peter Jackson to fuck off when asked to be in 'Hobbit Trilogy'. I saw the film after it being included in Empire's top 50 films of 2014.

Rating: 3.5/5

The Babadook (2014)

Director: Jennifer Kent
Writer:    Jennifer Kent
Cast:       Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Daniel Henshall

A single mother, plagued by the violent death of her husband, battle with the son's fear of a monster lurking in the house, but soon discovers a sinister presence all around her.

The husband died in a car accident while he was taking his pregnant wife to give birth to their son. Now the son is seven years old and she has not coped with her loss yet. The child is a difficult one and the reason for his behavior could be his mother's troubles. When the film starts off, the problems with the child is more apparent and as it goes on we realize that the more serious patient is the mother. The whole Babadook thing is something that is happening in both of their minds and represents the darkness that they are dealing with. The question in the film is will they come out okay at the end of it, successfully dealing with the cloud that is hanging over their lives feeding off each other. What is remarkable is that we start off hating both the characters, which could be a recipe for disaster in a horror film, but as the film goes on we start caring for them sympathizing with what they have gone through in their lives. Film also highlights the helplessness that surrounds Western family system where you don't have the support structure that is common in the Indian Joint Family system. What you in stead get is the community services/social workers who might deal with such delicate situations with tremendous suspicion and limited understanding. I am not advocating one system over the other since both presents itself with unique set of problems.

I am not really a fan of Horror these days because I don't have much time for ones that deal with overt super-naturalism like most of them do. In what has been a good year for Australian film industry, I have been hearing about 'The Babadook' in the usual places but was not arsed about it because of it being described as a Horror film. I finally took the plunge after reading William Feiedkin and Edgar Wright waxing lyrical about it on twitter. After watching it, I would class the film more as a Psychological thriller than horror and unsurprisingly enough, it was thoroughly a enjoyable / disturbing watch. Unlike most horror films, there is no casualties at the end and the ending is very hopeful even though it is a precarious one. Film reminded me of 'Sixth Sense', 'Stoker', 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' and of course 'The Shining', all of which I enjoyed thoroughly. I saw 'The Exorcist' when I was very young (11 years old dude) and am not sure whether there was any subtext to it apart from being a genre film. I guess I have to watch it again since everyone rates it so highly, and I suspect like this film it also has a motherhood/parenting subtext to it.

It is Jennifer Kent's feature length film debut after having made this story into a short film called 'Monster'. Funding for the film was primarily provided by 'Screen Australia' and SAFC and part of it was raised on Kickstarter. It is getting very good reviews from the critics but if you go by the IMDB score, general audience is not embracing it that much. Since am not a fan of the genre I don't know whether they will enjoy it as much as I did. Guess some people will be also put off by the Australian accent which is sad. 

Rating: 4.5/5   

Predestination (2014)

Directors: Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig
Writers:    Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig, Robert A, Heinlein
Cast:         Ethan Hawke, Sarah Snook, Noah Taylor

The life of a time-travelling Temporal agent. On his final assignment, he must pursue one criminal that has eluded him throughout time.

It is another one of those thrillers with time travel as theme with a twist of Inception thrown in. To pick holes in its plot is a futile exercise since time travel films are anyway rife with 'Bootstrap Paradox'. So best way to judge the film will be whether you were immersed in it throughout and whether you want to watch it again. It did both of those for me and therefore I reckon it is a great film. The cast is great and the directors who are known as 'The Spierig Brothers' look promising. It is another good Australian film in an year which looks like a great one for Aussie Cinema. 

Let me see if I have got a hang of the plot. If you are planning to watch it, I would recommend so, don't read ahead. We learn over the course of the film that time travel was invented by an organization in 1981 and you can travel 53 years on either side of the year zero, 1981. It is used to send Temporal agents to the past in order prevent crimes and Ethan Hawke is one of those. There is a a terrorist called Fizzle Bomber on the loose in late 60s and early 70s with his biggest operation happening in 1975. Ethan Hawke is assigned to do prevent the fizzle bomber. First scene of the film has someone getting burned while handling the bomb and someone else is also intervening on the proceeding and the bomb goes off. My initial impression was that the man who got burned was the agent and he is given facial reconstructive surgery. Then it cuts to Ethan Hawke who is given another go and he goes back to 1970 as a bartender and meets a writer who tells him his/her life story. After the story is over Hawke prompts him to join the organization and before that he takes him back to 1963 where he meets his past, which is a she, and proceed to have sex with her conceiving a baby. The baby is stolen by Ethan Hawke who goes back to 1945 and put it in the orphanage and it grows up to be the girl from 1963. So far- the writer, the girl and the baby are same people. So the writer fucks with himself/herself giving birth to herself/himself who is taken back to continue the cycle. Then Ethan Hawke makes one more attempt at stopping the bomber and it turns out that the burned man was indeed the bomber (first scene). He again goes back in time and reaches 1975 where his time travel machine was supposed to decommission, and it does not, and he pieces together clues to find out that the bomber is another older version of him and he kills him. It turns out that the writer, girl, baby, Ethan Hawke and bomber are all one and the same. I don't know whether it made any sense to you but the million dollar question is what is the purpose of all this and whether there was any real fuck ups they are trying to fix. At the end of it, what exactly he is trying to fix is not clear. Maybe the girl is fucked by different versions of herself and the point of the story is whether she ends up bitter after it. Since the bomber had long hair, Ethan Hawke must have thought it was she who was the bomber but in fact it was another version of him. But that doesn't make any sense since she is anyway gonna have sex change operation. It is a clusterfuck. I know what happened in the sense that all of them are the same person but the motivations are not clear. I guess I will watch it again but I don't think all of it will become clear. Maybe it was just a cerebral experience in terms of figuring out the plot and nothing much more to it.

Film is based on Robert A. Heinlein's short story "—All You Zombies—".To sum up it is great watch, rehashing the Looper theme but it goes several iterations further. Cast is great but I don't know whether it will remain great on further viewings. Whether you enjoy it or not will very much depend on how arsed you are about plot making any sense. 

Rating: 4.5/5

The Gambler (1974)

Director: Karel Reisz
Writer:    James Toback
Cast:       James Caan, Paul Sorvino, Lauren Hutton

Alex Freed is a literature professor. He has the gambling addiction. When he has lost all his money, he borrows from his girlfriend, then his mother and finally some bad guy that starts chasing him. Despite all this he cannot stop gambling.

Film is semi-autobiographical based on James Toback who also was a professor with gambling problem. It is also seen as a loose adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's short story 'The Gambler'. One would expect a thrilling humorous film if you go by the title in similar lines to 'The Sting'. It is anything but. It reminded me of 'The Hustler', which was also a very serious film that I also went in thinking it would be a light one. It is a serious look at Gambling addiction  and posits that the addicts are people who look for prospects of losing to give them the fix of uncertainty associated with it. Freed himself says that he let go off bets that he knows has a high chance of winning in favor of longer odds one that would give him the necessary fix of uncertainty and pain. If that is not clear enough for the audience, you have got the end sequence of him behaving in a destructive manner at a non-gambling scenario when his gambling debts are on the clear. The film plays with the audience expectations giving them a protagonist who doesn't give them anything to root for and when the debts are cleared, we are also as uncomfortable as him since it ended up corrupting him. 

I don't know how credible this portrayal is for gambling addicts as a whole but at least it was like that for James Toback, who wrote the screenplay. It is getting remade by Rupert Wyatt (Mark Wahlberg as lead) after a Scorsese-DiCaprio remake project fell through. James Caan starring 'The Gambler' is a great watch with it being an adult look at gambling addiction without any glorification.

Rating: 4/5

St. Vincent (2014)

Director: Theodore Melfi
Writer:    Theodore Melfi
Cast:       Bill Murray, Jaeden Lierberher, Melissa McCarthy, Naomi Watts

A young boy whose parents have just divorced finds an unlikely friends and mentor in the misanthropic, bawdy, hedonistic war veteran who lives next door. Bill Murray plays more or less himself in the film, like George Clooney in Gravity, and Naomi Watts is his Russian hooker friend.

It is a formulaic feel good film with a great cast. Bill Murray, the kid and his mother are great in their roles and Naomi Watts is alright. It is filled with some great one-liners and the performance of the kid is particularly great as you get what you expect from Murray. It loses  its steam towards the end but is nevertheless a very good watch. 

Bill Murray is someone who is famous for being very inaccessible for the filmmakers to get him act in a film unless you are Wes Anderson. So you can pretty much guarantee that the film he picks will be interesting on some level. Naomi Watts must have picked this one to get a chance to share some screen time with Bill Murray.

Rating: 3/5

Thief (1981)

Director: Michael Mann
Writers:  Frank Hohimer, Michael Mann
Cast:       James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Robert Prosky, James Belushi

Becoming closer to his dream of leading a normal life, a professional safe-cracker agrees to do a job for the mafia, who have other plans for him.

A thief doing one last job before retirement scenario has been done to death in cinema and if you trace the lineage, maybe you will conclude that Michael Mann's feature film debut 'Thief' to be the big daddy. Mann worked five years in television drama before making this film and you can see many of his trademarks already in there-meticulous attention to detail, groundbreaking soundtracks, exquisite night cinematography. All the tools that are shown being used to commit the robbery are real ones and the actors were trained to do it. I think the only other film I have seen James Caan in is Godfather, and he himself rates Thief along with the former as his best performances. His mannerisms are quite similar in both and maybe it is characteristic to him. Soundtrack for the film was done by Tangerine Dreams, who also did Risky Business which I saw quite recently.

While watching Thief, you will realize how much it influenced Ryan Gosling starrer 'Drive'. Both Caan and Gosling portrays characters who are basically very similar even though they both give it very different identities due to their mannerisms. The famous dinner scene monologue lays bare the character in Thief and it very well explains his motivation behind the actions he take at the end. Apart from James Caan's great central performance, you also get some great performances in very small roles-his fatherly prison friend, his bar man, an Asian waiter who is there in only one scene etc. One part in Michael Mann's collateral that I thought was very corny was Jamie Foxx's stupid post card. Well, it turns out that it was a homage to Thief which also had a central character motivating himself with something like that. Now I cannot wait to re-watch 'Heat' to pick up other references he might have placed in it. 

It is a difficult film to describe as it is very experiential and is a must watch Neo-Noir genre classic. Up there with Micheal Mann's best who occupies a unique place i Hollywood being a genre onto himself. If you go by decades I have always considered 80s to be the weakest for English language films. I might have to reconsider that position as I catch up with some 80s classics and Thief certainly classifies as one.

Rating: 5/5  

JFK (1991)

Director: Oliver Stone
Writers:  Oliver Stone, Zachary Sklar
Cast:       Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman, Tommy Lee Jones

A New Orleans DA discovers there's is more to the Kennedy assassination than the official story.  He disputes the Warren Commission's lone assassin theory and contends that multiple shooters were involved which by default makes it an act of conspiracy. 

Am not a big fan of Oliver Stone. Platoon was great while I found the rest of the films that I have seen of his to be average (Scarface, Natural Born Killers & Any Given Sunday). I am also not a big fan of 'Conspiracy Theories' because I don't think it is quite possible to keep a lid on what they accused to be conspiratorial involving a large number of people. So I was really not that inclined to watch JFK but I think the situation in US is such that it is not a stretch to believe that such an assassination to be carried out involving people occupying the highest of its intelligence community. I have been listening to Dan Carlin's 'Hardcore History' podcast lately and there was this one episode in which he discussed the cases of World leaders being under the influence of things they were taking which might have affected their decision making. He cites Napoleon, Hitler and Kennedy as some examples of people who were administered a lot of drugs by their doctors that won't be acceptable  these days. Kennedy's case is unique because his medical records, that were declassified recently, offers us access to see whether he could have been under the influence while we cannot say anything for sure about the older leaders. Kennedy was taking a lot of steroids and other stuff from a doctor whose license was revoked years later for doing the same for different pop stars. That reminded me of a theory which said that CIA assassinated him basically because his decision making was very impulsive and that he almost started a nuclear war. So it is suffice to say that I was kind of primed to watch this film.

The film won praise for its editing and it was very important for it to make sense to the audience with the use of flashbacks, reenactments and what not especially with its running time of close to three and half hours (Director's cut). Still I found the first half of the film, which basically is an investigation into who Lee Oswald was, to be quite boring with  an average script. Still it is essential for it to be there for you to buy the conspiracy theory that the film is advocating in its second half. Kennedy, in his time as US President with decisions on Cuba, Soviet Union, CIA oversight (through McNamara) etc, could have been assassinated for various different reasons and the film points the fingers at US intelligence community and Defense Department with their motive being Kennedy's decision to withdraw from Vietnam. Post war US being a War machine which looks for it in all places so that the various businesses could line their pockets from it is a  position that has been strengthened due to Dubya and his neo-cons' excursions in Iraq. I found the second half of the film, which went into answering 'Whydunnit', to be more interesting but I don't know whether it was because I watched the film over two days. 

Many can argue about the veracity of what Oliver Stone is claiming but all have to admit that it is great film-making. His attitude was that against what he claims to be a fictional myth like Warren Commission's version of the event should be a counter-myth from his side. At the end of the film it states that all the documents connecting to the event will be declassified by late 2020s only but after the release of the film JFK act was passed which led to the formation of Assassination Records Review made (ARRB) because of which  declassification will occur as early as 2017. Films don't matter, eh?

Obvious parallels could be made with Costa Gavras' 'Z' and Kurosawa's 'Rashomon'. Stone himslef said that Z was more of an influence with it also featuring a political assassination in a fascist state. Oliver Stone, himself a Vietnam war veteran, has made plenty of Vietnam war films and JFK can also be considered to be one of them. As for the question of believing the conspiracy theory surrounding JFK assassination- am inclined to buy it. JFK is certainly Oliver Stone's best film.

Rating: 4.5/5