The Quake [12]

Dir: John Andreas Andersen

Three years after the events of The Wave, Kristian Eikjord (Kristoffer Joner) is still affected by the disaster. Separated from his wife Idun (Ane Dahl Torp) and distant from his kids, he feels guilty about his warnings not being heeded sooner and thus saving more people, and he’s haunted by fears of fresh disasters. These fears become more present when an old friend dies while examining a tunnel in Oslo and Kristian finds an old letter from him, warning of the potential of a massive earthquake. When the quake comes, will Kristian be able to protect his family?

The Wave did pretty big things for the career of director Roar Uthaug, who followed it up by making his Hollywood debut with the Alicia Vikander starring Tomb Raider reboot. Perhaps disappointingly, it didn’t seem to do the same for the film’s star Kristoffer Joner (a small role, confined to a hospital bed, in Mission: Impossible - Fallout aside). On the other hand, maybe that’s not such a bad thing, because it’s unlikely that a film like The Quake, if made in Hollywood, would have offered him much opportunity to stretch his acting muscles. At 103 minutes, this is a relatively short film, but for over an hour the titular event lurks in the background. For this time, the film does the requisite build up, but what it concentrates on isn’t the charts and graphs but the already shaken man at the centre of the film. 

Kristoffer Joner is a great actor, and he brings his customary dedication and detail to this part, just as he did in the first film. This performance is about trauma; a man haunted by his previous efforts, even though they were genuinely heroic. It’s left him looking bedraggled, almost hollow at times, and even the slightest engagement has become a struggle (in one particularly well acted moment there’s a tiny register of appreciation for the breakfast his daughter Julia (Edith Haagenrud-Sande) has made him, just in his eyes, a second before he says that she should go home). This background is important because it makes the growing threat of the earthquake feel different. By spending real time and effort on the emotional fallout of the previous events, there is always a very credible feeling that Kristian may genuinely just be paranoid. Of course, we know that’s very unlikely to be true, but it’s a testament to Joner that a film that used the title The Quake in a purely psychological sense would be at least as compelling as this one proves.

There are sacrifices made in order to spend this kind of time on Kristian’s character, and sadly they impact mainly on the other characters. There is an emotional short hand with the established characters of Idun, Julia and Kristian and Idun’s son Sondre (Jonas Hoff Oftebro, sidelined here to the point that you’d be forgiven for thinking the first draft forgot he ever existed) but Kathrine Thorborg Johansen’s Marit, the bereaved daughter of Kristian’s friend who first warned him of the quake, is fatally underdeveloped; little more than a plot device with a face. This is where the film’s running time bites. We understand Marit’s actions in the third act as standard disaster response, the way we’d all hope to behave in those circumstances. Kathrine Thorborg Johansen does what she can with what’s on the page, giving a decent performance, but some more scenes between her and Kristian, just to bond the characters a bit, would give us more investment in her in the last half hour. Ane Dahl Torp is also a little limited by what’s on the page, but there’s enough in her performance and the dynamic between her and Joner that we can read what’s happened between Kristian and Idun over the past couple of years without having it baldly laid out in dialogue, and we are very much invested in her fate and that of Julia, thanks to another solid performance from Edith Haagenrud-Sande.

The carnage does, of course, finally arrive and when it does it’s extremely well executed, with effects that rival any $200 million film for roughly $6 million. The scale is smaller of course, but the CG is strong and because it’s linked to physical effects, more credible than in many higher budget films. The major setpiece, in a collapsing tower block, is tense, well paced, and not easy viewing if you have vertigo. Director John Andreas Andersen steals a few things (notably a sequence from The Lost World: Jurassic Park), but he adds his own wrinkles to everything he co-opts. The only issue in this passage is that, once again, the film largely forgets about Sondre, which makes things feel a bit unbalanced.

If you’re going in wanting something like a San Andreas (which, for the record, would be no bad thing, that’s a fun movie), The Quake is going to disappoint. I appreciated the slow and thoughtful start and the way it allows a great actor like Joner room to dig into his character. It has its problems, even at its best it is riddled with cliche, short changes some of its characters and has an ending so abrupt that it’s barely an ending at all, rather than a hard stop. For all those issues though, this is a smarter and more entertaining film than most Hollywood efforts in the genre.

★★★½

Passion [15]

Dir: Brian DePalma

Once a filmmaker has established a sizeable body of work you can usually see an ebb and flow within it; moments or periods of great inspiration, alternating with films, or even stretches of films, that don't work.  This is perhaps especially true of those filmmakers who really stamp their identity on their work, filmmakers like Brian DePalma.  Before 1993 DePalma had made good films and bad ones, along with several (Blow Out, Carlito's Way, Carrie and arguably Dressed to Kill and Scarface) great ones, but after Carlito's Way, based on what I've seen - which is most of his subsequent work, bar the reportedly interesting Femme Fatale - his talent completely deserted him.

Passion, a very close remake of Alain Corneau's French language Love Crime, which was made in 2010 but released here only at the end of 2012, certainly finds DePalma on firmer ground than, say, the outright unwatchable Redacted, but it certainly doesn't find him on inspired or even middling form.  The plot, just as it was in the original film, is erotic thriller by numbers.  Christine (Rachel McAdams) and her junior executive Isabelle (Noomi Rapace) are working on an advertising campaign for a new smartphone, initially they seem close, perhaps even attracted to one another, but when Christine claims one of Isabelle's ideas as her own it begins a rivalry which also entangles Christine's on-off lover Dirk (Paul Anderson) and Isabelle's young assistant Dani (Karoline Herfurth).

To be fair to Brian DePalma, and to the critics who have enjoyed this film more than I did, Passion is not entirely without merit.  DePalma does stamp more authorial identity on this film than we've seen for a while, and there are some striking images (they don't all entirely work for the film, but we'll come back to that point).  On the level of pure aesthetics, Passion does often look good, even in the more mundane looking scenes the production design and photography are strong, giving the film a sleek and stylish veneer.   Plot wise, DePalma does add a sub-plot about Isabelle's assistant that seems initially tacked on for titillating purposes, but does lead to the film's only good sustained scene.  That scene takes up about ten minutes towards the end where, preposterous though it is (and was in a slightly different way Love Crime), the plot wraps up in a way that is reasonably clever.  To DePalma's credit, this change to the narrative could offer up a haunting final note.  Sadly the film then botches this decent ending with ten tacked on minutes of nonsense that are DePalma's other major contribution to the narrative, the rest of which is almost word for word the same as the original film. Outside of those ten minutes and the sometimes striking design, however, Passion is a dead loss on pretty much every level.  Part of the problem lies with Love Crime which, bluntly, just wasn't much good to begin with, and which DePalma has stuck to closely enough to give original screenwriter Natalie Carter an additional dialogue credit.  

Perhaps the biggest problem comes in DePalma's most fundamental choice: the casting.  Rachel McAdams is an appealing screen presence, but I'm yet to see any real evidence that she's a great actress and while she can certainly play a comedy bitch (who doesn't love Mean Girls?) she seems unlikely casting as an icy and ruthless executive.  Passion demonstrates that there's a reason you don't think of McAdams for that part: she is dreadful in it.  Honestly I can't blame her, in fact I feel rather sorry for her, she's totally out of her depth in a part she's utterly unsuited to, fifteen years too young for and must battle some truly abysmal dialogue into the bargain ('How about you call me never?').

If you were going to go younger (Kristin Scott-Thomas played it in the original film) with the part of Christine, you could have done a lot worse than Noomi Rapace, who brought the emotionally isolated Lisbeth Salander to life in the original Swedish film of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.  Unfortunately she's playing the much more passive and meek Isabelle and while this casting, given the way the part evolves, is less catastrophic than McAdams' it's also terribly misconceived and plays to the weaknesses of a fine actress.  Rapace isn't as extravagantly bad as McAdams, but I've never seen her so flat, so devoid of energy.  In her best roles (Daisy Diamond, Babycall, Dragon Tattoo) Rapace pulls off the illusion of not appearing to act.  Here it doesn't feel like an illusion.  Maybe it's the language issue or maybe this really was just a paycheque job, but either way her performance leaps off the screen in waves of sheer apathy.

The supporting cast is small but, impressively, manages to contain a performance that is worse than McAdams' turn.  I was counting, and I'm not sure Paul Anderson, as Dirk, says one sentence in a way that doesn't feel like he's in a terrible audition.  With every scene he seems to manage to lurch to a less impressive place with his performance.  On the other hand, Karoline Herfurth, who I've liked since seeing her in German coming of age film Big Girls Don't Cry, manages to pull out the only impressive performance in the film, she has little to do for much of the running time, but impresses in those ten good minutes at the end of the film, and she, at least, is appropriately cast as the assistant looking to move up in the company and in love with her boss, Isabelle.

Aside from the casting and performances, there is one other film hobbling problem at work, especially in the first hour of the film.  DePalma always, both as writer and director, seems uncertain of the tone he is attempting to strike.  Sometimes it feels as though he's attempting an icy, sexy, neo-noir, but in the very next scene the tone will wildly slingshot us into outrageous camp, to the point that the film begins to feel as though it is attempting a parody of erotic thrillers.

Those who like the film seem more convinced by the latter tone, but because it is so inconsistent I was never convinced that the hint of parody was intentional.  Even if it is, it still doesn't work, first because DePalma doesn't seem to be committed to it and secondly because as parody goes it hews so close to what it is ostensibly commenting on that it seems not to joke about low rent erotic thrillers as unintentionally become one.  DePalma also falls into this trap, for me, with his most notably auteurist moment; a split screen sequence that shows a ballet on one side of the screen and a shower scene on the other, yes, I get the point he's making, and it does pay off, but it's so much a DePalma trademark that it no longer feels clever or inventive, and like much of the rest of the film it's so overblown it teeters on parody, without ever being funny.

If you attempt to take the film seriously then it really falls flat on its face, first with the overblown stylistic tics, such as a ten-minute sequence which is shot completely through a blue filter at canted angles (shades of Battlefield: Earth in the persistence of those angle choices) in a hamfisted attempt to make you question whether you're watching a dream sequence and then also because of all the other problems; the script, the acting, the off balance tone.

Passion is a misfire on every level.  It takes a film that was less than great to begin with and makes it worse by completely miscasting it and by seeming to have no idea of which of several films it wants to be.  Ultimately this failure to choose a clear tonal direction means that Passion hits a dead end down every road it attempts to travel.  It's a dreadful film, and one that says to me that Brian DePalma's powers really have finally deserted him, because if there was ever a project that should have brought him back to form then it was this one.
★★

Buyers Guide UK: June 2012: Weeks 1 and 2

We're nearly into the sixth month of 2012 already, and there are plenty of exciting DVD and Blu Ray releases to come during June. Here are my personal, week by week, picks of the best and most exciting discs from the UK release schedule for the first two weeks of the month. Some I've seen, some I haven't, but I'm interested in every single one of them. You'll find purchase links at the bottom of this post. If you want to buy one or more of these releases please do so through my links, it won't cost you extra, but you'll be supporting 24FPS.

4th
BLU-RAY

Goon [Also on DVD]

Goon was one of the nicer surprises of the first half of 2012 at the cinema. While it looked from the outside like a(nother) moronic sports comedy, with Seann William Scott playing a(nother) variation on Stifler, the truth turned out to be rather different.

While it ticks many of the expected sports comedy boxes, Goon largely gets by on two things; first off it's plainly, simply, funny. The jokes come thick and fast and the humour both verbal and visual hits a great deal more than it misses, and Eugene Levy is as entertaining as ever as Scott's Father (odd casting, given their mutual presence in the American Pie films. More unexpected is the second standout quality of Goon; its charm. Scott excels as an incredibly nice guy whose only real skill is fighting, and Alison Pill is irresistible as his love interest (giving that story more weight than you'd think). It's not a classic, but Goon is great entertainment, and it's nice to see a comedy that is warm and charming, given the way the genre has gone of late


David Lynch Boxset [Also on DVD]

I'm hardly the world's biggest David Lynch fan (though I believe I know her, Hi Marcey), but I love many of his films, and for all that he can be absolutely infuriating at times, he's never dull. This Blu Ray boxset includes six films covering the whole gamut of his career from the widely acclaimed Blue Velvet to the much derided Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (the other titles in the set are Lost Highway, Eraserhead, Wild at Heart and Dune).

With the exception of Fire Walk With Me, each disc appears to be rammed with extras, mostly in the form of Lynch's short films. For me this represents a chance to rediscover films that I've long loved (Wild at Heart and Lost Highway), get in to some I may have missed the appeal of first time round (Blue Velvet and Fire Walk With Me) and try our two that I've never seen. It should be a strange journey, which is why I'll look forward to it.


Return of the Living Dead: Ltd Ed Steelbook [Also on DVD]

If, by some horrible accident of fate, you're a horror fan and haven't seen Dan O'Bannon's ridiculously fun directorial debut, this is pretty much what you've been waiting for. Return of the Living Dead still combines gore, scares, nudity and laughs with as much verve and as much entertainment value as it ever did. The smart and speedy zombies - the first to explicitly wish to feed on braaaains - are brilliantly realised at a technical level, and actually become recognisable characters in the film too.

The Blu Ray release is backed up by a large selection of extras (five hours of them) including a two hour documentary on the making of the film, including interviews with, seemingly, just about everyone who worked on it. This will be a treat if you already love the film, and a great way to see it for the first time.


Spider-Man Trilogy [Also on DVD]

The Spider-Man series is one that I have a lot of fondness for. I've been a Spidey fan since I was a kid. The first film was my birthday movie when I was 21, and, oddly, the reboot will be my birthday movie at 31. Despite that I also know that it's deeply flawed both in terms of the individual films and how it works as a trilogy.

For every great action scene there's a few minutes of a poorly written, less than faithful, rendition of Mary Jane. For every moment that Tobey Maguire nails as Spidey or Peter there's one that he misses, and for every bravura creative decision made by director Sam Raimi there's a botch job like the Emo-Parker sequence. That said, the highs are strong enough that all the films entertain for the most part (the much maligned Spider-Man 3 may be the best of the series if you delete the symbiote stuff). This boxset retains the spectacular transfers that the Spider-Man trilogy has already had, along with the option to watch the (better, if only by dint of having an extra action scene) 2.1 version of the first sequel, but it also looks as though the extras for the first two films, which went missing from the initial BR releases, will now be included.

This is a mixed bag of a trilogy, but I'm a big enough Spider-Fan to forgive the flaws, if you are too it's an essential purchase.


DVD
Babycall

Why should you see Babycall? Noomi Rapace. Right, that's that conversation over.

In all seriousness, while the presence of Noomi Rapace, unless you've only seen her in the Sherlock Holmes sequel, really ought to be enough to make you want to see just about anything, and she's extraordinary as a paranoid single Mother, on the run from an abusive relationship, there is much more to recommend Babycall. Kristoffer Joner also contributes a strong performance as the introverted, and rather sad, shop assistant who tries to befriend Rapace, and director Pal Setalune introduces a note of creeping paranoia early on, which builds and builds throughout the film, making the narrative and your understanding of the story and characters constantly malleable.

The last fifteen minutes lurch off the rails somewhat, but Rapace is worth watching throughout, and the film will likely repay repeat viewings thanks to the shifting tone.



11th
BLU RAY

The Muppets [Also on DVD]

So, it turns out you CAN bottle happiness. The Muppets remains my film of the year to date, and that's largely because it's the one film that really reminded me why I love films. It's hilariously funny (Beaker as part of a barbershop quartet singing Smells Like Teen Spirit), tells a solid, character based story, and is even genuinely moving at times (if you got through Pictures in my Head without wiping away a tear, I would check for a heartbeat).

The story, involving Jason Segel's Gary and his Muppet brother Walter helping Kermit put the gang back together for their first show in years may be slight, but it conjures a magical mix of nostalgia and a film that is accessible and fun for new fans, be they young or old. The whole human cast nails the tone brilliantly (especially Amy Adams as Segel's love interest and Chris Cooper as oil baron villain Tex Richman), but it's the muppet performers who steal the show; the nuance that Steve Whitmire gets from Kermit is especially astonishing.

The Muppets is a perfect comeback movie and I can't wait to revisit it over and over on Blu Ray.


Sling Blade

Billy Bob Thornton's directorial debut, expanded from his short film Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade (which, inexplicably, STILL doesn't appear to be among the extras, though the others from the special edition DVD do make the trip to Hi Def), was a blind buy for me, and one that really paid off.

Thornton himself plays Karl; a man with learning disabilities who has recently left the facilty he was sent to as a young man after committing a grisly crime, and the film revolves around his friendship with a local boy and his Mother. It would be very easy to overplay Karl, and Thornton's performance can be broad, but it's the sheer detail, and the empathy with which, both as a writer and as an actor, Thornton approaches the role that makes it not just more than a 'full retard' performance but one that feels true and allows you to really understand Karl.

For me, Thornton hasn't come close to matching this film as a director, and has seldom given a performance as good. Sling Blade is highly recommended.

DVD
Grace is Gone

There are plenty of reasons to complain about release patterns for movies around the world, but few delays have infuriated me more of late than the fact that for four years this film has sat on the shelf, unreleased in the UK. It's great that this drama about John Cusack as a Father of two young girls whose wife is killed while she's on duty in Iraq taking his daughters on a road trip to prepare himself to break the news to them is finally emerging, but it's a crying shame that it is only doing so as a barely publicised DVD release.

Cusack has perhaps never been better - or further from his established persona - than he is here, and he's aided by a sensitive screenplay and by remarkable performances from the young actresses playing his daughters. It's a sad film, but never mawkish, and though you never meet Cusack's wife, through him you feel the loss. Grace is Gone is a great movie and you should not let the long delay in its release put you off seeing it.

Buyers Guide: 23/4/12

Each week in the buyer's guide I'll be suggesting a few new Blu Ray and DVD releases that movie fans should give serious consideration to purchasing. At the bottom of the post you find links where you can buy the films from Amazon, so if you DO wish to buy a film I've recommended, please do it through that link, it won't cost you anything, but you'll get the film AND get to help out 24FPS at the same time. Cheers.

These are UK releases, out next Monday, April 23rd

BLU RAY

 Arrow Video Horror, Sex and Violence Collection
[10 Disc Set, Amazon Exclusive]
If you are a horror fan you probably already know and love Arrow Video's lovingly curated line of DVDs and Blu Rays.  This Amazon exclusive package is absolutely perfect if you're just getting into the Blu Ray format.  For £9 each you'll get 10 of Arrow's Blu Ray releases, with all the usual goodies: fantastic artwork, plentiful and in depth extras and transfers that reveal loads of detail while preserving the original look of each film.

The film selection is perhaps not definitive (no Dawn of the Dead?) but with five Argento films including the awesome Tenebrae and two of Lucio Fulci's classic zombie trilogy, including his hallucinatory masterpiece The Beyond included it is a great instant HD library for the strong stomached horror lover.  There is also an 18 title DVD package available, but the titles in that are not the total essentials that these are.

Lifeboat

One of Alfred Hitchcock's more underrated films, Lifeboat gets its first Blu Ray release courtesy of Eureka's always interesting Masters of Cinema imprint. We spoke about one location films on The Picture Show a couple of weeks back, and for me this is a stronger example than Hitchcock's Rope.

In typical Hitchcock fashion the story is a tense one, as survivors from a torpedoed ship end up in the same lifeboat as one the men who sunk them. The performances are the focus, and all of them are excellent, while Hitchcock manages to make what could be an inert film visually interesting. There are also a lot of great stories from beehind the scenes on this film, as star Tallulah Bankhead was just as colourful a character as Hitchcock himself. Typically for Masters of Cinema the transfer looks to be stunning, and there is a strong selection of extras including two Hitchcock directed wartime shorts. Lifeboat is a dual format release, and is also available in a steelbook edition.


DVD
Re-Cycle

Danny and Oxide Pang's film has had a long trip to a UK release, it was made in 2006, prior to their US outings Messengers and Bangkok Dangerous, and I struggle to see why it has been delayed for so long because this is an often dazzling inventive film filled with surreal imagery with which the Pang brothers draw from both traditional Asian horror films and from western filmmakers like Guillermo Del Toro.

Oxxide Pang's wife Angelica Lee Sin-jie (also the star of The Eye) stars as a writer working on a horror novel who believes that she sees one of her characters in her apartment as she is writing. She follows him, and is thrown into his nightmarish world. Re-Cycle doesn't always make sense, but there are moments that are intensely creepy and others that are truly stunning to look at, and even if it doen't always articulate them perfectly it is a film with, a film of, ideas. It's well worth seeking out.

The Story of Film: An Odyssey

Thanks to his fantastic contributions to the Moviedrome series, and Scene By Scene interviews with directors and actors, Mark Cousins was one of the first people who ever made me consider film on a level deeper than 'that was cool' or 'that was rubbish', so it's a real treat to find that he's now made a 15 hour series on the history of cinema.

It's typically esoteric, as Cousins free-associates his way through countries, styles, movements and ideas in cinema, all the while throwing up beautiful images of his own, fascinating interviews with filmmakers and beautifully chosen clips which make this a series to watch with a notepad on your knee, writing down all the films you're going to want to track down and watch. It's a fascinating series which manages to be both intensely personal and accessible.

Purchase Links