Frost/Nixon - Review

In 1977 Richard M. Nixon granted British playboy presenter turned journalist David Frost a series of twelve television interviews. This was the first time Nixon had spoken since his resignation in the midst of the Watergate scandal and Americans waited with baited breath, longing for the trial they’d been denied by newly president Gerald Ford’s blanket pardon. For eleven of twelve interviews nothing happened. Nixon, a master politician squared off against a foppish interviewer, dominated the conversation and twisted every question to earn sympathy. It was only in the final interview, the twelfth, that Frost struck by back pinning Nixon to the wall and forcing a moment of honesty in which Tricky Dick gave America the admission and apology it hungered for.

So perhaps it’s appropriate that Ron Howard’s movie, based on a play written about the event, reels out much the same way. For most of its running time Frost/Nixon languishes. Nothing happens. It’s only in the film’s final moments, as Frost at last decides to take the interview seriously, that Howard ratchets up the intensity, slamming home his movie’s place in this year’s Oscar race and justifying the existence of an otherwise low-key, forgettable movie.

It is Frank Langella’s performance as Nixon which carries the film. His Nixon is a brilliant and broken husk, desperate to return to power and unwilling to admit that it’s no longer possible. When he’s contacted by David Frost (Michael Sheen) for an interview, he jumps at it in the perhaps unrealistic hope that speaking out will somehow rehabilitate him in the eyes of the American people. This movie is, more than anything else, about his journey in coming to grips with the fact that his political career is over, and that the best he can hope for from here on out are endless days wearing loafers and playing his most hated sport: golf.

Golf is a horrifying game, but being forced to spend his life putting hardly seems an appropriate penance for Nixon’s national villainy. To prepare for the interview, Frost assembles a team of American researchers, who urge him to make this interview count for something. Give America the trial is never got, they urge, while Frost traipses off to star-studded LA parties with his leggy British girlfriend (Rebecca Hall). Michael Sheen and the rest of the actors in Frost’s interview team are criminally underutilized. Sheen, who looks almost uncannily like Frost, does an admirable job but he’s far too rarely on screen. When he is on screen, he’s dominated by others, in particular Nixon, and more often than not reduced to half-hearted platitudes. Nixon calls their interviews a duel, and it’s a duel he’s winning.

It’s Langella’s Nixon that you’ll remember, growling at his subordinates or ranting uncontrollably over the phone as Frost sits in stunned silence. It’s as if Frost can’t come to life until Nixon finally starts to fade away, and until he does David Frost is a man in the shadow of a giant. Kevin Bacon plays Nixon’s chief of staff Jack Brennan, delivering an almost creepy performance as a man so totally devoted to the ex-president that his loyalty at times borders on sexual attraction. Whether that’s an intentional choice by Bacon or only a side effect of the script is anyone’s guess, but it’s eerily effective in adding to the overbearing presence of Tricky Dick.

In setting up the interviews, Frost/Nixon struggles to find focus. David Frost isn’t taking things seriously, is barely involved in the process outside of fund raising, and so it’s hard to make him the center of the film. Nixon’s journey ends up being the heart of the story, but he’s the villain. David Frost is still our protagonist and the guy we’re rooting for. It’s a strange dynamic and one which the movie never quite sorts out until those final moments when director Ron Howard cuts to the chase, Frost drops his devil-may-care persona, and in one of the most intense conversations you’ll see on screen this year crushes Nixon between an interview vice grip. This is an ending which justifies the means taken to achieve it. Everything which came before it becomes worthwhile in those final moments, and makes Frost/Nixon a must see.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa - Review

Madagascar was a cartoon and a good one. The difference between an animated movie and a cartoon is plot, which in the case of Madagascar was always paper thin. In the first film, story was minimized in favor of wacky, Looney Tunes style humor and it worked the way any good big-screen Bugs Bunny style novelty act should. In the sequel, solid story has been pushed even further aside, and while the animals retain their wit the cracks are showing.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa finds Alex the Lion, Marty the Zebra, Gloria the Hippo, Melman the Giraffe, and the rest boarding a cobbled together, penguin piloted airplane for the long ride home to New York. Unfortunately penguins aren’t known for their flying skills and they crash in Africa, their ancestral home. Alex is reunited with his parents, Marty joins a herd, Gloria meats a chunky-sexy hippo named Moto Moto, and Melman is… well… sick.

There’s not much here for even the youngest kids to sink their teeth into; it’s typical homecoming, save the herd stuff and it breezes by so fast that it’ll feel like the movie belongs squeezed into a Saturday morning, half-hour block of cereal-selling kiddie entertainment. Missing is the original’s carefully constructed, almost lyrical waves of cartoony gags and wacky asides set to pulse pounding, hip-hop beats. Madagascar 2 is so slapdash and rushed that it makes Madagascar 1 look complex.

The first film at least made some effort to deliver an appropriately cinematic adventure. It had scope, it had scale. Madagascar 2 does not. It happens mostly in one location, it’s focused squarely on the four main protagonists, and the brilliant side characters which made the original movie so funny are relegated to caulk squeezed into the gaps left when the script starts to run out of gas.

Madagascar 2 may not be particularly daring or innovative, but it doesn’t get stale. It never holds still long enough to fall flat, and new additions to the cast like Alec Baldwin and Bernie Mac help keep old gags fresh. This is an inferior sequel, but one which still contains plenty of laughs. Madagascar 2 runs off the cliff, looks down, and plummets towards the ground. We’re there to chuckle at the little puff of dust that follows its flattening impact. Though it arrives without a decent tale to tell, Madagascar 2 is good fun. You will laugh, your kids will laugh and you’ll be in the parking lot, full of smiles and on your way home long before realize how hollow this sequel is.

Zack And Miri Make A Porno - Review

With the casting of Seth Rogen as his lead, I’ve heard people dismiss Zack and Miri Make a Porno as writer/director Kevin Smith’s attempt to be Judd Apatow. I can’t think of anything more spectacularly unfair. Kevin Smith was pulling off raunchy humor with a heart of gold long before we’d even heard the name Apatow, he’s just never gotten the same kind credit for it. If anything, that’s probably because Kevin is often less interested in the heavy dramatic elements Apatow uses to win critics and audiences over. Smith is, self-admittedly, into dick jokes. Usually there’s a touch of dramatic sweetness mixed in, especially in some of his more poignant, focused movies like Clerks II and Chasing Amy, but more often than not he’s there for a laugh, the dirtier the better.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is the ultimate embodiment of Kevin Smith's cock = comedy philosophy. It's pure comedy. In the age of internet voyeurism, the story of two average nobodies making pornography happens all across America on a daily basis, but unless they’re shooting a sequel to two girls one cup, it’s almost certainly never this dirty and definitely never this funny.

Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) have been best friends since high school. They share a crummy apartment, work lousy jobs, and instinctively avoid becoming romantically entangled with one another (though it’s obvious to us that they’re soul mates) while living lives that are clearly going nowhere. Financially speaking, they’re utterly destitute and after an encounter at their high school reunion Zack and Miri decide that the only way they’ll ever make it big (or pay their rent) is to do their own porno movie. After all, everybody wants to see everybody else naked, even if it’s two nobodies from the mid-west. Couple of problems though. They don’t have any money for food let alone movie making, they know nothing about shooting porno, and despite their bravado, neither of them is very comfortable with the idea of getting naked on film, much less having sex with each other.

To make the movie happen they recruit a group of misfits including Smith regulars like Jeff Anderson and Jason Mewes, a couple of porn stars to provide nudity in Traci Lords and Katie Morgan, and Office alum Craig Robinson to bring the funny. Actually, if there’s a problem with Zack and Miri it’s that the supporting cast is so good you may find yourself more interested in watching them than the movie’s two leads. Anderson delivers some of the funniest lines of the film, Mewes finally whips his cock out, and Craig Robinson literally steals every single scene he’s in. Extended cameos from people like Superman Brandon Routh and Mac guy Justin Long really kill too, and they’re so good you’ll likely leave the theater wondering if there’s some way to convince Smith to make Routh and Long’s characters the subject of his next film.

For better or worse though, Zack and Miri’s relationship remains the center of Zack and Miri. For me, the film lags a little when it spends time exploring their softer sides and it soars when we stop worrying about how Zack and Miri are feeling, instead getting down to the business of letting their friends attempt to shoot porno. Whenever they’re working on putting their sex flick together, the movie is filled with big, big, raunchy laughs. The story needs their relationship of course, lest it turn into pornography itself. The sweetness of their awkward, mutually unrequited love is what keeps the audience, even you puritanical types, on their side. When Smith does get around to the business of making his two leads have sex they’ve been avoiding, that moment between them is touching, a sharp bit of directing, and one of the most memorable sequences in the film. It’s just that Zack and Miri Make a Porno is at its most consistent when it’s more “Make a Porno” and less “Zack and Miri”.

Kevin Smith is known for his smart, edgy dialogue and there’s plenty of his brilliant, wordy style on display in Zack and Miri. He’s combined that with a great cast, maybe the most talented he’s ever worked with, and the result is one of Smith’s funniest, dirtiest, most gleefully offensive movies to date.

The Boy In The Striped Pajamas - Review

It’s a rare occasion that any movie has such impact that when the film ends, the entire audience exits the theater in total silence. It was a good several seconds after the credits finished rolling and the lights came up before I even realized what I was experiencing. It happens so rarely that it took that a moment for me to recognize it: I was speechless.

Films about the holocaust are nothing new and while they’re almost always moving stories it’s rare to find one that offers a perspective not explored before. The Boy In The Striped Pajamas generally sets aside the powerful stereotypes of evil German and besieged Jew and instead offers up two innocent eight-year-old boys, one Jewish and one German, neither of whom subscribes to the idea that they’re supposed to hate each other. In the wrong hands this sort of film could easily have been tediously trite, full of stock moral commentary and tagged with a touching but unoriginal feel good ending. Instead the movie presents something much more tragic and evocative, ultimately sending the audience away with more to consider than just the historical atrocities of the Nazi regime.

OK, so by this point I’ve probably already lost the interest of two-thirds of our readers. Let’s face it, most moviegoers don’t want to spend their money on a dark historical drama, no matter how moving or thought-provoking it is. Odds are that unless this movie wins a major Academy Award very few people will see it. That’s the real tragedy here. Not catching The Boy In The Striped Pajamas would mean missing one of the best films of the year.

Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is the young son of a Nazi commander (David Thewlis) whose new promotion means his entire family must leave their comfortable Berlin home and relocate to a spartan country compound. This new home is situated just within sight distance of the commandant’s new post, a Jewish work camp. The naive Bruno decides the camp must be a strange farm where odd people in pajamas work, an illusion his hesitant parents are willing to indulge to protect him from the reality. But the nature of the place means little to the boy. His only concern is that he has no one to play with in his new home, where the only company he and his older sister enjoy is that of their propagandizing tutor.

One day, after breaking the rules and sneaking out of the compound, Bruno wanders in the direction of the farm. There he encounters Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a boy his own age who lives on the farm which, Bruno discovers, is surrounded by an electric fence. The boys strike up the kind of camaraderie you would expect from two lonesome young children, but both struggle to comprehend the complications that arise from their association. Both Butterfield and Scanlon are relative newcomers to the world of screen acting and haven’t been tainted by the demands of the business. Their performances are simple and genuine, so much so that they’ll be overlooked for any award even though no trained or experienced child actor could have been more perfect.

Bruno and Shmuel’s innocence in the face of the lies and violence going on around them is at the same time humorous and heartbreaking, but it is Bruno’s efforts to resolve the father-soldier that he loves and the one that runs Shmuel’s camp that will prick at your soul. The relationship between the father and son explores another risky and rarely touched on subject: the humanity of the Nazi officer. It figures prominently in the movie’s poignant ending, and although you might not find the conclusion satisfying, there’s no denying that director Mark Herman navigates the topic brilliantly and leaves the audience with a lot to consider.

The father’s militaristic duty is balanced out by Bruno’s mother (Vera Farmiga) who always seems uncomfortable with the treatment of the Jews but becomes outwardly enraged when she discovers the true nature of the black smoke roiling from the camp every few days. Farmiga gives a wrenching performance that provides an outlet for all the indignation and hostility that you feel watching Thewlis’ character parade the party line with callous cruelty. At the outset of the film there’s no way to tell where it will lead or how it will end, but as the story draws to a close it’s easy to see where things are headed. That sort of predictability usually ruins a movie for me, but Herman’s carefully laid final act is so breathtaking and James Horner’s score woven in so masterfully that nothing could have spoiled it. As close to perfect as a film can hope to be, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas is nothing short of a masterpiece.

Quantum of Solace - Review

He's back. Daniel Craig allays any fear that he was just a one-Martini Bond, with this, his second 007 adventure, the perplexingly named Quantum Of Solace.

I've got to admit that this didn't excite me as much as Casino Royale and the villain is especially underpowered. But Craig personally has the chops, as they say in Hollywood. He's made the part his own, every inch the coolly ruthless agent-cum-killer, nursing a broken heart and coldly suppressed rage. If the Savile Row suit with the Beretta shoulder holster fits, wear it. And he's wearing it.

This is a crash-bang Bond, high on action, low on quips, long on location glamour, short on product placement.

Under the direction of Marc Forster, the movie ladles out the adrenalin in a string of deafening episodes: car chases, plane wrecks, motor boat collisions. If it's got an engine, and runs on fuel, and can crash into another similarly powered vehicle, with Bond at the wheel, and preferably with a delicious female companion in the passenger seat - well, it goes in the movie.

There are plenty of references to other Bond moments. A horribly dangerous skydive recalls The Spy Who Loved Me. A pile-up in Haiti which spills a macabre lorryload of coffins recalls the voodoo creepiness of Live And Let Die. And, most outrageously of all, the grotesque daubing of a female corpse brings back Goldfinger - though Sean Connery got an awful lot more mileage out of that sort of thing.

As in Casino Royale, the famous John Barry theme tune is saved up until the end; a baffling, decision, I always think, not to use this thrilling music at the beginning of the film.

Bond has hardly got his 007 spurs, when he's infuriating M, Judi Dench, with his insolence and insubordination. Out in the field, he's whacking enemy agents in short, sharp, bone-cracking bursts of violence when he should be bringing them in for questioning.

In theory, he is out to nail a sinister international business type: Dominic Greene, played by French star Mathieu Amalric, who under a spurious ecological cover plans to buy up swaths of South American desert and a portfolio of Latin American governments to control the water supply of an entire continent. As Greene, Amalric has the maddest eyes, creepiest leer, and dodgiest teeth imaginable.

Clearly, Bond has to take this fellow down. But he also wants to track down the man who took his beloved Vesper away from him in the previous movie: he is pathologically seeking payback, and to the fury of his superiors, this is getting personal. But it hasn't stopped him cultivating female company in the traditional, fantastically supercilious manner. His companions are as demurely submissive as ever. Olga Kurylenko plays Camille, a mysterious, smouldering figure, out to wreak vengeance on the corrupt Bolivian dictators who killed her family.

Britain's Gemma Arterton plays Agent Fields; she greets 007 wearing a trenchcoat with apparently little underneath, like some sort of MI6 strippogram. And she is the recipient of his ardour in the luxury hotel suite - that quintessential Bond habitat. This movie is, in fact, a reminder of how vital hotels are in Bond films, providing the essential narrative grammar: the checking in, the fight with the stranger in the room, the messages left at reception, the luxury cars lovingly photographed outside.

I was disappointed there was so little dialogue, flirtation and characterisation in this Bond: Forster and his writers Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade clearly thought this sort of sissy nonsense has to be cut out in favour of explosions. Well, perhaps that is what Bond fans want (not this Bond fan, though). But I was also baffled that relatively little was made of the deliciously villainous Amalric: especially the final encounter.

But set against this is the cool, cruel presence of Craig - his lips perpetually semi-pursed, as if savouring some new nastiness his opponents intend to dish out to him, and the nastiness he intends to dish out in return. This film, unlike the last, doesn't show him in his powder-blue swimming trunks (the least heterosexual image in 007 history), but it's a very physical performance. Quantum of Solace isn't as good as Casino Royale: the smart elegance of Craig's Bond debut has been toned down in favour of conventional action. But the man himself powers this movie; he carries the film: it's an indefinably difficult task for an actor. Craig measures up.