The Descendants

Posted on August 2, 2012 by jaycluitt

I’ve had The Descendants, currently the only Blu-Ray I own, sat on my shelf for a few weeks now, ever since I won it from the Empire Podcast, by answering a question about E.R., even though I’ve never seen a single episode. All praise IMDb. I’m something of a fan of Alexander Payne, and both Sideways and Election are just wonderful, so I’d been looking forward to sitting down and watching this, especially with all the Oscar buzz it had garnered earlier this year. The Descendants was nominated for five awards in all, including Best Picture, Director, Editing and Actor, and eventually won for Adapted Screenplay.

George Clooney, the aforementioned acting nominee, is Matt King, a wealthy landowner living in Hawaii, and on the brink of a massive retail deal, in which his family’s historic heritage is to be sold, as requested by many of Matt’s less wealthy cousins. As if life weren’t stressful enough, Matt’s sporty wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) suffers a horrific speedboat accident, leaving her in a coma, and Matt boosted from his former role as ‘back-up parent’ to the sole guardian of their two children, 10-year old Scottie (Amara Miller) and 17-year old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), and soon becomes lumbered with Alexandra’s lunkheaded friend Sid (Nick Krause).

There’s a certain level of expectation for an Alexander Payne movie. The ones I’ve seen (not including Citizen Ruth or Inside Out 1 and 3) have all dealt with a story with dour aspects – be it failure, adultery, fraud, unhappiness or Kathy Bates’ backside – yet the sadness has been all but shrouded in comedy, yet here Payne’s reputable light touch is fighting against a brick wall of melancholy with the probable impending death of a spouse and mother. Such a morbid topic is no match for any level of wit, and the film almost always retains a depressing tone. This isn’t to say its a bad film, far from it in fact, its just that I was expecting a much more enjoyable watching experience that didn’t leave me deeply moved and my girlfriend literally in tears.

Payne made exactly the right casting decision in Clooney as Matt. The character is, let’s be honest, a bit of a dick. Yes, he’s a hard worker with a balanced head on his shoulders (he believes in giving his children enough money to do something, not so much that they’ll do nothing) yet he is practically absent when it comes to being a father and husband. Frequently away on business, he has little-to-no knowledge of his daughter’s lives, and it comes as no surprise to learn that prior to her accident, his wife was having an affair. It’d be a heartbreaking moment in most other actor’s hands, but Clooney breaks the tension with a ridiculously stone-faced flip-flop run. Under his command Matt is almost likable, and definitely relatable, even though he’s obscenely wealthy. Clooney is, in my opinion, a thoroughly under-rated comedic actor, and in one memorable scene (pictured) he has some genuinely hilarious eyebrows. Matt always seems to do the right thing and have the best of intentions at heart, yet his methodology and timing aren’t necessarily sound.

The revelatory performance of the film however is Shailene Woodley as Matt’s eldest daughter Alex, who lives on a different island to her father both literally and figuratively. Woodley is perfect in the role, her first in a film after appearing regularly on television since 1999, aged 8. Here she captures the exact transition from petulant teenager to woman-of-the-house, becoming a surrogate mother to her younger sister and a confidante to her father. Nick Krause is also great as Sid, a cliched dumbass who still gets to set up some of the film’s funniest moments. His first interaction with Matt’s father-in-law is just genius.

Beau Bridges and Judy Greer crop up in small roles, and Matthew Lillard does surprisingly well as a guy you really should hate deeply. The script has subtlety – offhand remarks to Elizabeth’s alcoholism and Alex’s drug taking – and definitely deserved at least the Oscar nomination, and whilst much of the action is fairly predictable, there are still a few unexpected turns along the way. This is still probably the least enjoyable of Payne’s films that I’ve seen – mostly due to the subject matter – but it’s still moving, well acted and performed, and all the locations are stunning.

Choose Film 8/10

The Ides of March

Posted on June 18, 2012 by jaycluitt

Ryan Gosling is Stephen Meyers, assistant campaign manager to Governor Morris (George Clooney, who also directed and co-wrote), who is currently locked in a battle with opposing democratic candidate Senator Pullman to win the Ohio Democratic Primary and eventually win the nomination as the next potential president. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti are their campaign managers, Marisa Tomei the Times reporter out for inside information, Evan Rachel Wood a young intern with her eye on Gosling’s big man on campus, and Jeffrey Wright is the senator both sides are eager to please.

In the past few years there have been a number of talky, ‘important’ films with predominantly male all-star ensemble casts, with generally well written scripts dealing with issues whose effects can have life or death ramifications. From The Company Men, Moneyball, Margin Call and Wall Street 2, they all have something else in common – I haven’t seen them yet. It’s not that I don’t want to see them (Moneyball and Margin Call are in my LoveFilm queue and The Company Men is sat on DVD form on my shelf – Wall Street 2 will take me a while as first I must get past a hatred for Shia LaBeouf) it’s just that I don’t have many opportunities to go to the cinema, so I use them for seeing movies with a certain sense of spectacle, ones that will make the better use of a gigantic screen and that, should I happen to miss a line of dialogue from a fellow patron’s ringing phone, screaming child or popcorn-chomp, I can still follow the plot amidst the explosions and giant robots. The more dialogue-heavy, less action-y films are saved for DVD. This even applied to such masterpieces as The Social Network – I saw Toy Story 3 instead. Please don’t have a go at me about this. Rest assured that if I had the time (and the money) to see the other films at the cinema too, then I would, and there have been difficult decisions made in the past as to what must be sacrificed for a smaller screen some months down the line.

And so it is that it’s taken me a little while to watch The Ides of March, though it was well reviewed, I’m a fan of 5 of the principle players (Gosling, Clooney, Hoffman, Giamatti & Tomei) and The West Wing has made me at least interested in the ins and outs of American politics, more so than I am in the British trivialities. Plus, my girlfriend could be described as being more than a fan of Gosling (I’m still receiving backlash from my rant on The Notebook).

Now this isn’t a bad film, but I got the feeling that every actor involved was retreading ground they’d walked down many a time before. They all performed well – though Gosling goes a bit glary-eyed on a couple of occasions – but no-one really showed anything new. This is kind of a testament to the acting talents on display. Nobody does cynical schlubs like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti, but they’re settled into a well formed groove, and who is Clooney’s smoothly persuasive senator than a slightly more ambitious Ryan Bingham from Up in the Air? Only Gosling gives something of a fresh performance, but only in terms of him being something of an impressionable blank slate of contradictions. His Stephen has supposedly worked on more campaigns by the time he’s 30 than most of his peers ten years his senior, yet it sends him reeling when he discovers that the world of politics is more than occasionally played with cards to the chest and the odd stacked deck.

At times the plot goes a bit overly dramatic. The outcome from who is the presidential candidate already has the potential for phenomenal consequences, yet the scriptwriters felt the need to show the devastating effects this can also have on individual people, with the fate of Evan Rachel Wood’s intern Molly being particularly distressing. It hits the point home, but does so in too severe a manner. I feel that there was greater scope for exploring the characters of Gosling and Clooney being two sides of the same coin twenty years apart. Had equal time been spent on their stories, rather than instead focusing more on Gosling – who I never really believed in as a masterful campaign manager sought after by everyone – then this could have been more interesting. The whole poster campaign was set up to show them, and their freakishly symmetrical faces, as being the same person anyway, yet this seemed completely lacking in the film.

Were this the first film I’d seen with most of these actors in I’d no doubt have been floored by the incredible performances on display. I don’t mean to take anything away from them – they are all consummate professionals who are incredible at what they do and I look forward to seeing them do it again – it’s just I’ve seen them all do it before.

Choose life 7/10

Up in the Air

Posted on May 2, 2012 by jaycluitt

Jason Reitman’s third directorial outing, after the stellar Thank You For Smoking and the good-the-first-time-you-watch-it Juno takes two done-to-death plot conceits – the business-set rom-com and road movie odd-couple – and reinvigorates them to be not only modern, but impressively timely.

Up in the Air is much more in keeping with the structure of Smoking, as we follow a successful, charming but morally dubious and emotionally detached businessman discovering that his perfect life may not be as ideal as it seems once women step a little too far into it. Previously it was Aaron Eckhart’s fast-talking cigarette peddler Nick Naylor, here it’s George Clooney’s professional corporate downsizer Ryan Bingham, jetting around the country to fire people when their own superiors don’t quite have the balls. And with the economic climate and unemployment rates where they are now, no other film could be quite so prescient.

But it isn’t just that this film rings true with modern times. Clooney channels his inner Cary Grant in the role he was seemingly born to play, whilst Vera Farmiga is wonderful as his female equivalent, Alex. The real surprise though is Anna Vendrick. Formerly most famous as Bella’s best friend in Twilight, here she shows real comic ability and acting prowess as Natalie, the bright young whippersnapper brought in to downsize the downsizers, aiming to revolutionise the business by doing it all online.

The cast is rounded out by some Reitman regulars, including Jason Bateman, J. K. Simmons and Sam Elliott, as well as Danny McBride, Melanie Lynskey and Zack Galifianakis, and a gaggle of non-actors portraying essentially themselves when they were fired, with Reitman instructing them to dwell on their own experiences in some moving moments.

The best scenes involve the principals just sitting down and talking. Be it Ryan and Alex comparing the weight of their loyalty cards, or Natalie learning that, as you get older, your expectations of life lessen to more realistic goals, the script is insightful, sparky and above all else funny. I was a little annoyed at seeing Sam Elliott in the opening credits, and seeing his cardboard-cutout as the Chief Pilot in an airport signposting that, at some point, his character was going to crop up somewhere, but that’s another of those things that only really hurts the film nerds. Some of the metaphors are a little heavy-handed (at one point Ryan’s family literally doesn’t fit into his suitcase) and the ending feels like a series of devastating gut-punches that kind of spoils the mood, but each one feels perfectly justified and necessary.

If you don’t settle too deeply into the subject matter this is a fun comedy with a great script, and even if you do it’s still thought-provoking and entertaining stuff. I await tracking down Reitman’s latest offering, the Charlize Theron starring Young Adult, with anticipation.

Choose film 8/10

Ocean’s Eleven

Posted on March 15, 2011 by jaycluitt

Sneaking its way onto the list at number 500 of Empire’s top 500 films is the 2001 remake of Ocean’s Eleven, one of the few remakes on the list to surpass its original. This film relies on the complexity of the genius heist plot and the easy camaraderie and star wattage of its leads to create an enjoyable and cerebral popcorn flick. But as usual it’s the small moments of humour that meant the most to me, especially how the story and characters play with the real-life personas of the actors playing them. For example, at the beginning of the film Brad Pitt’s Rusty Ryan and George Clooney’s Danny Ocean are teaching ‘movie stars’ how to play poker. The so-called stars they are schooling include small screen heartthrobs Topher Grace (That 70s Show,) Joshua Jackson (Dawson’s Creek) and Holly Marie Combs (Charmed), each playing themselves, and here dubbed as major movie stars, being photographed by the paparazzi whilst Pitt and Clooney, at the time two of the most famous faces in the world, are ignored by everyone. Another parallel is Pitt and Clooney’s teaching of Matt Damon’s rookie conman Linus Caldwell, in a sense showing Pitt and Clooney teaching Damon how to become a star as renowned as them, with Damon continuing his meteoric rise to fame with the Ocean’s Eleven, arguably reaching the same level as Pitt and Clooney. Finally, Pitt’s performance as a fake doctor parodies Clooney’s stint on ER, especially his flamboyant overacting.

Choose film 9/10

Out of Sight

Posted on February 19, 2011 by jaycluitt

Last night I watched Out of Sight. I’d seen it before, but never really paid an awful lot of attention to it, but this time I made an effort to follow the plot. I think the film is a little over-rated, with editing style taking precedence over actual substance. In places, it seems to want to be a modernised version of classic cinema, with freezeframes, snappy dialogue and a plot that sees George Clooney’s prison escapee and Jennifer Lopez’s federal marshal thrown together and falling for one another, but it is this plot device that in my opinion lets the film down. I’ve always hated the tacking on of an arbitrary romance subplot almost ruining what would otherwise be an incredible picture (see also the Nightmare Before Christmas, Pulp Fiction, Star Wars), and this is definitely the case with Out of Sight. If the film had focussed on Clooney’s Jack Foley, his escape from prison and the heists before and after, I feel it would have been a far superior picture. By all means keep J-Lo’s character, (but for the love of cinema, recast) but drop the frankly ridiculous romance between the two. The best part of the film was the cast, with Don Cheadle eating up the screen as hoodlum Snoop, whilst Ving Rhames supports well as Buddy, Foley’s redemption-craving partner in crime. And the last minute cameo is one of the greatest I’ve ever seen.

Choose film 7/10