Words: James Soo

Studios are now chasing the grey dollar. Hence ‘The Expendables’. And hence ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’. Basically proving that while pensioners may have money, they have no taste. Based on the book ‘These Foolish Things’ by Deborah Moggach, this cliche-ridden train-wreck of a film follows a disparate group of British pensioners finding themselves implausibly in a retirement home in Jaipur, India.

Soon, they discover that the magic of the East charms their stony Western hearts, as each of the characters undergoes a massive life-change in the twilight of their lives. Vomit. It’s targeted at the older generation, who the producers assume have the sensibilities of an earlier more racist age. Hence, loads of hilarious jokes about curries giving you a bad belly, funny Indians who shake their heads when they speak and lots of WISDOM from gnomic sadhus who point out the error of their uptight ways.

That the cast is a roster of England’s finest (Dame Judi Dench, Dame Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson etc etc) is all the more shocking. How could they have thought making this film was a good idea? For a start there are too many stories, so there is no room for more than a superficial sketch of each character. Plot is shat out through Dame Judi’s voiceover exposition-blog (interspersed with Dame Judi looking pensive and uttering more WISDOM). And the hotelier at the centre of it all is Dev Patel (from Slumdog Millionaire) whose embarrassingly parodic Indian accent rarely makes it out of the Welsh borders.

If the film had been made in the 70s when chanting racist slogans was a perfectly acceptable way to spend a Saturday night, then it would probably pass muster. But thinking it funny in 2012 to see a woman refusing to be operated on by a non-white doctor because ‘he can’t wash the colour out of his hands’ is just insane.

Words: James Soo

A newlywed couple gets into a car accident and the bride wakes up with no recollection of her husband or even of how they met. I wish someone had struck me over the head outside the cinema so I would have no recollection of having seen this excruciating film. Over the course of 104 long minutes, Channing Tatum’s bovine neck tries a variety of strategies to reawaken Rachel McAdams’ memory of him. You can’t help feeling she’s faking it just to get away from his jaw-numbingly wooden performance.

The Vow is based on a true story, and I won’t deny it’s a sweet story. Initially, you find yourself rooting for this cool, urban couple. He owns a recording studio, she’s a promising young sculptor; they live in a funky warehouse space, her workshop at the end of the alley is hipstertastic. As the film meanders through flashbacks, you understand that McAdams’ character has run away from her privileged upper middle-class suburban country club lifestyle. So while her character tries to understand how she ended up being a boho-chick, Tatum begins to realize that his wife is more than she claimed to be.

But the trouble is the film goes nowhere and takes far too long to get there. There is no chemistry between the leads, making you wonder why they don’t just cut their losses and move on. Partly it’s the amnesia creating distance, of course, but instead of presenting a film where you feel these two should somehow be together no matter what (that was The Vow, by the way), you can’t help wondering if the accident wasn’t destiny intervening to save this awful couple from each other. Best bit: seeing Channing Tatum’s naked ass. Worst bit: the other 103 minutes 59 seconds.

Word: James Soo
There are few films that are willing to plumb the dark secret at the heart of life: that good people do bad things all the time. And because it is brave enough to show that, ‘A Separation’ is brutal. The set-up is simple enough: Simin wants to divorce her husband, Nader, and after she moves out he hires a woman to look after his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father. But complications start to arise almost immediately, putting these fundamentally decent people in desperate situations that compel them to act, and to suffer the consequences of their actions. The genius of the film is that there is no overarching morality – the audience sees each character’s dilemma, sees their actions and at the same time sympathizes with their decisions. And watching these fateful decisions unfold is utterly, and painfully, gripping.

One of the major themes is honesty. The backdrop is a court-case. Characters testify against one another and small lies creep in. No-one is innocent, and yet the film asks the audience what they would do in the same situation. And the answer sits very uncomfortably. To some extent, there is an element of ‘foreignness’ about the situation. We are asked to view these characters in unfamiliar contexts: the Iranian legal system, Persian patriarchal society, working-class Islamic religiosity. But no element is too strange to understand, and we don’t have to look far to see parallels with our own societies.

Of course, none of this would matter if the film wasn’t also just wonderful to watch. Leila Hatami (Simin) and Peyman Moadi (Nader) give fine nuanced performances that shift imperceptibly over the course of the film as the audience’s sympathies meander between the two. And Sarina Farhadi is heartbreaking as their daughter Termeh, caught in the crossfire. Asghar Farhadi, who both wrote and directed the film, was deservedly nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and won for Best Foreign Language Film. ‘A Separation’ almost exults in its bleakness and it refuses to give any easy answers. But the questions it asks are too important to ignore.

Words: James Soo
What The Iron Lady gets right is casting Meryl Streep, who mesmerizes as Margaret Thatcher from her middle years into her frail dotage. Everything else is a bit of a washout. This biopic controversially depicts a doddering old Maggie in the present day, stumbling about her townhouse and lapsing into hallucinations of the past as she slips deeper into senile dementia. As a result, it’s really three films: a showcase for Meryl Streep’s eerie impersonation, a historical film about one of the last century’s most important political figures, and a sentimental romance about a lonely old woman whose only company is the phantasm of her long-deceased husband. Of these, only the first works.

Streep’s performance earned her a third Oscar, and it’s not hard to see why. She captures Maggie perfectly – accent, gestures, stoop and gait. She ‘battles daily’ with Parliament in her prime, and Streep plays her like a general, decimating opponents with that trumpet of a voice. In contrast, her frail, elderly Maggie who clings pitifully to her memories is a sad and convincing portrayal of age and decline. But the trouble is this is, no ordinary pensioner – this is Baroness Thatcher, once one of the most powerful people in the world. And any film that deals with her must deal with her history.

If you know nothing about Thatcher’s Britain, you won’t know any more after watching this film. History is presented in flashback as a series of contextless soundbites that are mostly used to contrast her patriotic determination (or stubbornness) against her weak-spined careerist Cabinet. News reports punctuate the narrative and lazily demarcate various epochs in her career, but clarify nothing.

Abi Morgan (writer) and Phyllida Law (director) have made a biopic that simply isn’t biographical. But with a person as divisive as Thatcher, you expect at least some assessment of her twelve years in office and her legacy. The conceit of turning a film about Thatcher into a film about senility must have sounded like a perfect sort of revenge – kick the tyrant down and laugh at her dribbling on the floor. But instead, by sentimentalizing her, they have banalized her (mis?)deeds and unwittingly served as the best spin doctors (a term popularized during her ‘reign’) she could have hoped for.

Words: James Soo

It must be terrifying being asked to play a myth. But there are moments in this film when you forget you’re watching Michelle Williams and believe it’s Marilyn Monroe up there in front of you. While she may not be an exact lookalike, Williams captures that almost indefinable quality that Monroe was rumored to have, this thoroughly unpracticed, totally innate understanding of how to seduce the screen. The foundation of the film is this very quality.

‘My Week with Marilyn’ is based on the memoirs of Colin Clark (played winningly by Eddie Redmayne), a young boy enchanted by the movie world who gets his big break being 3rd Assistant Director (aka the gopher) on the set of ‘The Prince & The Showgirl’ starring Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and Marilyn Monroe. Kenneth Branagh hams it up as Olivier with an enunciation that verges on the ridiculous, but it’s Clark and Monroe’s budding romance that is the heart of the film. As you watch it, there is undoubtedly the feeling that Clark’s memoirs may have had more than a touch of exaggeration in them – the idea of the most famous woman in the world falling (a little) in love with an unknown director’s assistant has the flavour of the rose-tinted nostalgia of an aging man. But whether the romance was built up for the film, or whether Clark himself magnified it, or whether indeed it is absolutely true, the joy of the film is the exhilaration of feeling you’re watching a lost Marilyn film. It’s impossible to think about Marilyn Monroe as just an actress – any attempt to discuss her verges inevitably into some form of idolatry. ‘My Week with Marilyn’ is no different, but for once you begin to understand the hype.

Words: Lee Harlem Robinson

Much ado about Michel Hazanavicius’ French silent film ‘The Artist’ these days. It keeps scooping up film festival awards all over the world, and rightfully so. ‘The Artist’ is a wonderful, almost frivolous, idiosyncrasy in today’s cinema, with its boundless love for sequels and superheroes. In crisp black-and-white cinematography, it takes us back to late twenties Hollywood, when movies with sound (talkies) started taking over from silent films.

Jean Dujardin plays George Valentin, a silent actor who is cast aside by the studio that made him a superstar. He refuses to believe that the glory days of his type of cinema are over and stubbornly soldiers on, until his demise is inevitable. As George Valentin’s star fades, Peppy Miller’s, played by the gorgeous Bérénice Bejo, rises to unseen heights with the advent of the talkies. George Valentin has no choice but to look on how his former protégé, whom he personally picked to dance alongside him in one of his last films, takes Hollywood by storm — not an easy feat when years of success have left him with a certain sense of entitlement.

The two main actors, Dujardin and Bejo, are perfect for their part. It’s astonishing to witness how Jean Dujardin captures the spirit of the era, while balancing, all without words, the near-arrogance but irresistible like-ability of his character. Bérénice Bejo’s dazzling smile and effortless grace are more than enough to make anyone believe she was the first real star of movies with sound. Together they display such chemistry on screen, and, alongside John Goodman and James Cromwell, who respectively star as the studio boss and Valentin’s driver, they make watching ‘The Artist’ an extremely enjoyable experience. Add to that director Michel Hazanavicius’s eagle eye for detail, his clever use of cinematic tricks and — we saved the best for last — the most adorable Jack Russel to grace the silver screen ever, and it’s safe to presume that ‘The Artist’ will rank high on most critic’s Best of 2012 lists.

Words: James Soo

or all its flaws, the Descendants is a nuanced portrayal of a family that is coming apart. George Clooney plays Matt King, the staid attorney and trustee of a large piece of land in Hawaii that is due to be sold for a great deal of money to developers. At the start of the film, his wife suffers a horrific accident while waterskiing and you next see her in hospital, in a coma, with a grieving Clooney by her side. Their two daughters are next introduced: the younger daughter is at an age where reality and fantasy merge easily, the older is in her late teens, and is already jaded and bitter. King thinks his job is to manage his two daughters and the sale of the land. But it all changes when he discovers that the origin of his elder daughter’s anger is that his comatose wife was in fact having an affair and was planning to leave him.

Director Alexander Payne does a good job of inculcating a Wes Andersen quirkiness, with King’s bizarre family and the cruel drama of grieving for someone who doesn’t love you. But the film suffers from a bit too much cool. King and his daughters don’t ever strike you as people whose wife and mother is dying – while King has to maintain an aura of decorum, the resulting lack of emotion is too stylized to allow the audience to sympathise.

That is not to say the film doesn’t have some fine performances: Clooney does well as the much put-upon King, and Shailene Woodley in particular shines as the fractious elder daughter. The screenplay is wry and witty and the entire film feels modishly low-key. But it is perhaps this desire to be modish that stops the film from really tackling its subject matter and making the leap from an exercise in style to something more emotionally affecting.

Words: James Soo

It’s probably quite hard to watch this film with fresh eyes, and even harder not to compare it to the book or the original Swedish film adaptation. If you’ve seen the Swedish adaptation, don’t bother with this one, unless you’re a huge Daniel Craig fan – it’s almost a direct copy. If you’ve only read the book, or have never come across the biggest publishing sensation of the past couple of years, then you might be in for a reasonably enjoyable evening.

What director David Fincher and writer Steven Zaillian have come up with is Hollywood’s acknowledgement that the original Swedish adaptors got it spot on. What was a rather rambling, and rather confusing, book has become a taut locked room mystery that answers one basic question: what happened to Harriet Vanger 40 years ago? The rest of the detail has been thankfully expurgated to reveal the thriller within. There is a pleasant amount of polish that’s been added – the cast is internationally recognisable (dare I say, attractive?) and effort has been made to hype up Daniel Craig, even to the extent of adding stupid James Bond style titles.

But, unlike the Swedish adaptation, you get the impression that it’s all been rather hurried. The characters feel sketchy and their relationships even more so. There’s no clear reason for Salander’s involvement at all. Blomkvist in the books is a Casanova, but Craig plays him so conservatively that his sexual libertinage feels out of character. And even though Larssen’s main theme is that the abuse of women is societally institutionalized, the audience here is left with the impression that the crimes committed were the work of individual madmen – the complete opposite of what Larssen was trying to say. The original title in Swedish is “Men who Hate Women” – something the almost meaningless “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” totally fails to get across.

Words: James Soo
There’s a lot to like in Almodóvar’s latest film, ‘The Skin I Live In’. The sets, the design, the dialogue are all gorgeous in their hyper-realism. But there is definitely a sense of anticlimax as well. The characters are deliriously exotic as usual, but I found myself not falling in love with any of them. It’s a shame, because one of Almodóvar’s fortes is his ability to turn the grotesque into the everyday, and show us the humanity inside even the most outlandish person. Agrada, the transexual whore whom we first see being beaten to a pulp in ‘All About My Mother’ is the perfect example. But the characters in ‘The Skin I Live In’ are cold and inhuman, although in fairness this is partly because of the plot.

No-one wants to give away the plot of this bejewelled puzzle-box of a film. The bare essentials involve a mad scientist (Antonio Banderas) and the creature he is ‘creating’ (the striking Elena Anaya). His housekeeper (Marisa Paredes) shuttles between the two, like a matronly Hispanic Igor, spending her time variously whipping up gourmet comfort food or bringing in buckets of blood ‘taken from the animals while still alive, as requested’. Without letting on too much, it’s the story of Pygmalion, Frankenstein, and Twelfth Night rolled into one. But to get to the pay-off, the audience is led up various false dead ends through twisted flashbacks and jumps between seemingly unrelated stories.

Despite the convoluted plot, it’s the most spare Almodóvar has been since ‘Live Flesh’. Most of the film is set in one house, and much of it in one room. The three main characters inhabiting the house jealously guard their secrets till the end. The trouble is the ‘hero’ of this ménage à trois keeps flipping between the characters until the audience doesn’t know who to root for. I think that was the director’s intention – to come to an indeterminate conclusion – but the fuzziness of the ending left me a little unsatisfied.

Words: Arthur Tam

Male masturbation or “hitting the gun” (shotgun?pistol?) seems to be a common occurrence in this movie; portraying men as horny little monsters(which we are).
With that said, “You are the Apple of My Eye” is quite an adorable movie filled with humor, youthful shenanigans, and a few life lessons to boot.
This film is based on the author Jiu badao’s (九把刀) own adolescent romance and reflects an honest perspective on love.

The story begins in a Taiwanese high school during the late 80’s early 90’s. The young Ko-Teng, played by Chen-tung Ko (柯震東), is interested in nothing more than masturbating, working out, and causing mischief with his high school chums. On the other end of the classroom is the studious and mature Shen Chia-Yi, played by Michelle Chen (陳妍希). The two are polar opposite and could care less about the other; however, fate takes its course and Chia-Yi is forced to monitor Ko-teng after he was caught masturbating in class. From then on, their relationship of mutual detest transformed into a story of love in its purist form. Chia-Yi starts to care for Ko-Teng and helps him with his studies, while Ko-Teng shows Chia-yi how to let loose and have fun.

The film captures the untrammeled lives of the youngsters with a sense of nostalgia and longing. The movie is split up into two parts. The beginning portion is the initial stages of love, while the second portion juxtaposes the conflicts that begin when adulthood comes into fruition. As Chia-Yi put it, “ Sometimes we do things in life that we do not expect returns for”, which seems something that we learn later on in life with our relationships. Give this film a watch, because its not your typical sappy Taiwanese young idol love story.