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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 19 October 2016

He may have turned 80 years of age last December but Woody Allen keeps making films and he keeps doing things he own way.  He’s also one of his harshest critics.  Allen refuses to watch his own films once complete and believes that there’s only a handful of them that are actually any good.  He doesn’t read reviews, he hates having to do publicity and he seldom goes to the cinema.

Café Society begins in the same manner as other Allen films.  The opening credits are shown in simple white writing against a black background, the actors’ names are listed in alphabetical order, and a crackly 1930s-type tune plays in the background.  These credits culminate with the words “written and directed by Woody Allen” and then it’s time for the movie to begin.  It’s a routine that he’s used so often that it ought to be trademarked.

Allen’s latest outing was inspired by his own as a teenager.  He would be fascinated by the powerful talent agents in Hollywood and their influence within the film industry.  Set in the 1930s, Café Society is structured around three characters.  Phil (Carell) is the fast-talking talent agent who oozes success.  He has a beautiful mansion, a deep wallet, and appears to know everyone in industry.

Arriving at the door of his office one day is Bobby (Eisenberg), his nephew who was moved from New York to California in search of work and other opportunities.  Phil doesn’t have much time for Bobby and so he creates a small, pointless job requiring him to makes deliveries across town.  He proclaims that he doesn’t want to “overemphasize the nepotism.”

This is ultimately a love story and the person who comes between them is Vonnie (Stewart).  She acts as Phil’s secretary and the two have been having an affair for a year.  Vonnie has a few doubts about their future but it’s hard to get inside her head.  Is she worried because Phil has been making empty promises about leaving his wife?  Or is it that she’s not truly love with Phil and has been seduced only by his wealth and power?  These concerns push her into the arms of the naive Bobby and a complicated love triangle ensues.

I’m a long-time fan of Woody Allen (and always will be) but this is well below his best work.  It’s a choppy story in that there are several subplots that detract from the main show.  One involves Bobby’s brother back in New York who has become a gangster/murderer.  The relevance of these detours is revealed in the film’s later stages but they don’t add up to as much as you might hope.

Allen has clearly enjoyed recreating 1930s and throws in numerous references to real life people at the time (largely actors and filmmakers).  This technique worked successfully for him in Midnight in Paris but this time around, feels like more of an unnecessary name-dropping exercise.  Of the cast, Jesse Eisenberg does his best to mimic Woody Allen traditional on-screen persona (evidenced by a scene with a prostitute) but it’s Kristen Stewart who impresses most as the likeable starlet torn between two suitors.

Lacking the sharp, witty dialogue synonymous with other Allen films, Café Society is forgettable.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 05 October 2016

The life of Rachel Watson (Blunt) is a mess.  She’s a thirty-something-year-old woman who went through a nasty divorce, lost her job at a PR firm, and is now a struggling alcoholic.  The only high point of her daily routine is when she goes on a lengthy return train ride from Westchester County to Manhattan.

It is during these train rides where Rachel uses her “overactive imagination” to push her problems aside.  She takes sips from her big water bottle (which is actually filled with vodka) and delves into a world of fantasy.  She looks around the train carriage and conceives fictitious stories about other passengers.  She does the same when passing some of the beautiful houses situated beside the train tracks.  She’s created backstories for the residents and adds a little more to her fantasy each day.

Rachel’s troubled existence takes a further twist when a police detective (Janney) arrives at her doorstep.  A young woman went missing in a nearby park and Rachel was identified by witnesses as being in the area at the time.  She has no answers though.  She caught the train at 6pm, arrived home at 11pm and doesn’t know what happened in between.  The most plausible scenario is that Rachel was passed out drunk somewhere (it certainly makes sense to the detective) but not everything is what it seems in this peculiar mystery.

It’s not often that a movie studio buys the rights to a book before it is first published but that was the case with The Girl on the Train.  A book scout for Dreamworks Pictures came across Paula Hawkins’ manuscript and thought this female-centric murder thriller might appeal to the same crowd that made Gone Girl such a box-office smash.  Their instincts were right.  When the book was actually released in 2015, it sold more than 1 million copies in the first 2 months.

Screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary) and director Tate Taylor (The Help) have struggled in translating the novel into a cinematic form.  To illustrate the turmoil inside Rachel’s head, they’ve given the film a rough, fragmented feel that continually slips between events and timeframes.  Perhaps it was the casting of Justin Theroux that triggered the thought but the movie reminded me of Mulholland Drive in that you won’t know what’s real and what’s not.  This isn’t as big a challenge though.  As Rachel’s mind starts to sharpen, so too does the narrative.

Emily Blunt (The Devil Wears Prada) is the film’s strongest asset.  She uses an array of tears, bloodshot eyes, and quizzical looks to bring her character to life.  It’s as if she’s goes through every human emotion with the exception of laughter.  There are several key scenes where Rachel builds up a little confidence only to have torn away by insecurities and self-doubts.

Without giving too much away, I wasn’t wholly satisfied by the finale.  It’s like a jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing.  The Girl on the Train offers intrigue and a few red herrings but doesn’t provide a knockout punch.   

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 12 October 2016

To its credit, Inferno has a villain with a thought provoking motive.  It refreshingly goes against the mould of standard action films where bad guys concoct bizarre plans to go in search of wealth and power.  That’s not the case here as evidenced by the very opening scene.  Bertrand Zobrist (Foster) jumps off the top of the church and commits suicide.  He certainly wasn’t going to wait around and be killed by the hero (as is tradition).  He was happy to do that himself.

There was a method to his madness.  Zobrist was an eccentric billionaire who was worried about the rapid rate at which the world’s population was increasing.  We see a video of him speaking at a seminar where he mentions that it took the world 100,000 years to reach a population of 1 billion and yet we’ve grown to almost 8 times that size in the space of two centuries.  If that trend continues, it’s only a matter of time before the planet becomes overpopulated and there won’t be enough resources for us all to survive.

He refers to some of history’s great plagues.  While many would see them as a dark chapter in our history, Zobrist takes a contrasting view.  They helped reduce the population and kept it from rising at an unsustainable rate.  It’s why he’s spent two years developing a virus to create a plague that will trump all others.  He believes that we need to kill half of the planet now or run the risk of us all dying in the near future.

Inferno marks the third adaptation of a Dan Brown novel.  The 2006 release of The Da Vinci Code was followed by Angels & Demons three years later.  Tom Hanks reprises his role as Robert Langdon, one of the world’s leading professors of religious iconology and symbology.  He doesn’t have a look of a traditional action hero (he’s actually a bit of a nerd) but there’s seemingly no mystery he can’t put together.  He’s not too bad at bullet dodging either.

He has reluctant found himself caught up in the search for the virus so he can prevent it from being released.  This time around though, he doesn’t have the clearest of heads.  It’s Monday evening and he wakes up in a hospital bed in Florence with a splitting headache and a bleeding scalp.  He doesn’t know how he got there.  The last memory he had was being back home in Boston on the Saturday.  Dr Sienna Brooks (Jones) diagnoses him with acute amnesia and believes his recent memories will soon return.

There’s not a lot of time though.  A policewoman turns up at the hospital and tries to kill Langdon.  She’s not the only person on his tail.  Three separate groups of people are trying to locate him for reasons that won’t become clear until the film’s second act.  Langdon isn’t sure who he can trust and the audience will find themselves in the same position.

It’s never easy translating book to screen but this is a few notches below the earlier two movies.  There’s an unnecessarily long introduction where director Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind) uses a mix of blurred images and dream-like sequences to take us inside Langdon’s head.  It’s all a bit too messy and repetitive and you’ll be anxious for the action to get started.

Langdon isn't doing much this time around.  There are a couple of puzzles to solve but the more prevalent scenes involve him running from the authorities Jason Bourne style.  Drawing from Dan Brown’s novel, screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park) tries to spice things up with a few twists but again, the characters appear to be relying more on good luck as opposed to good planning.

Brown’s books have captivated readers but I’m not convinced this film adaptation will do the same.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 04 October 2016

Given it took place only 6 years ago, many will already be familiar with the events that took place off the coast of Louisiana on 20 April 2010.  An explosion occurred aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig.  Lives were lost, a huge amount of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, and it was described as the “largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.”

The first half of the film is spent getting to know the key characters and the cause of the accident.  It’s evident from the early scenes.  While director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Lone Survivor) has given it a documentary-like feel, it’s a Hollywood-ised version of what actually took place.

This is most evident during two sequences that tap into our superstitious nature.  Electronics technician Mike Williams (Wahlberg) is in his kitchen explaining to his daughter how an oil rig works.  A coke can is used as a prop but it explodes onto the kitchen table.  Yeah, not a good sign.  Later that day, manager Jimmy Harrell (Russell) is preparing to escort a group of BP officials onto his rig.  He asks one of them to remove his magenta tie because such it’s the same colour as the warning light for dangerous gas levels.  It’s not hard to figure out what will happen next.

Before we get to that, the film needs to find someone to blame.  The person who has all the fingers pointed in his direction is Donald Vidrine (Malkovich), a well-paid BP executive who gave the order to commence drilling despite others raising safety concerns and calling it “the well from hell.”

Vidrine wasn’t afraid to articulate his reasons.  The project was overdue, the costs were blowing out, and it was putting the share price of the company at risk.  This is another part of the movie where truth blurs with fiction.  The actual event wasn’t as clear cut.  A government committee investigated the accident and spread the blame more widely amongst staff at BP and Transocean.

My early qualms about the film’s truthfulness were forgotten by the half way mark.  The explosion occurs, the action ramps up, and Berg’s movie transforms itself into an edge-of-your-seat survival tale.  It must have been a dream project for the sound technicians.  There are more explosions than a New Year’s Eve fireworks show.  The visual effects artists and stunt personnel also play a major part.

This is the best performance we’ve seen in a while from Mark Wahlberg (Ted) who is strong as the film’s level-headed hero.  Kurt Russell (The Hateful Eight), Dylan O’Brien (The Maze Runner) and Gina Rodriguez (Jane the Virgin) get less screen time but still make an impression (well, only when you can hear them speaking over the deafening sounds of the rig).

Offering one of the most intense action climaxes of the year, Deepwater Horizon is well worth a look.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 08 October 2016

If you Google the term “Spanish film directors”, the first photo that comes up is of Pedro Almodóvar.  He is not just an icon in his home country.  Over the last 30 years, he has put together a superb resume that has earned him the respect of film lovers across the globe.  He won Oscars for All About My Mother (1999) and Talk To Her (2002).  His other works include Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), Volver (2006) and The Skin I Live In (2011).

Julieta is the latest creation from Almodóvar and fans will recognise his fingerprints throughout. For starters, it’s a film with women at the centre.  The few men that appear in the film pop up in smaller, supporting roles.  It’s also an intriguing mystery.  The film is scant on detail in the opening scenes and then develops into something that you won’t see coming.

The movie opens by introducing us to the title character.  Julieta (Suárez) is a middle-aged woman who has spent a significant chunk of her of life in Madrid.  After a lengthy period living alone, she has finally found love in the arms of the successful Lorenzo (Grandinetti) and the pair are about to immigrate to Portugal so as to start a fresh chapter in their lives.

Julieta’s plans change when she runs into woman on the streets of Madrid.  Her name is Beatriz (Jenner) and she was the close childhood friend of Julieta’s only daughter, Antía.  She mentions that she recently spoke with Antía who is now living in Switzerland with her husband and three children.  It may sound like a simple, innocuous statement but it strikes Julieta like a bolt of lightning.  Her daughter has been missing for more than a decade and Julieta didn’t even know if she was still alive.

This unexpected encounter releases the dam on a flood on memories.  Julieta sits at her desk, opens the first page of a blank journal, and starts writing.  She begins with – “I’m going to tell you everything I wasn’t able to tell you.”  It clearly intended for Antía and implies a fractured history between mother and daughter.  Julieta needs to get something off her chest and the journal is her outlet.

With the stage set, Almodóvar’s screenplay delves into the past by way of flashback.  We see the younger Julieta (Ugarte) at several key events in her life.  It includes the moment where she meets Xoan (Grao), an already married fisherman who would later become Antía’s father.  That’s about all I’m willing to reveal in terms of story.  The less you know going into the film, the better.

This is a powerful piece of cinema.  Emma Suárez is stunning as the older version of Julieta.  You will get a clear sense of the confusion and heartbreak that has tormented her for so long.  It’s as if a hand is pulling her back into the past and preventing her from moving forward to a more promising future.  A brooding film score from composer Alberto Iglesias further adds to the film’s unsettling vibe.

Selected as the Spanish entry for the foreign language film category at next year’s Academy Awards, Julieta is for admirers of Almodóvar and for those who enjoy a mystery fuelled by the darker elements of human nature.