Reviews

Leonardo wins an Oscar, finally, but for what?

Endurance, probably. And that goes for the audience too, in this long, unremitting tale of implausible survivable in a hugely impressive setting.

This film is an oddity. The Cinematography is peculiar in several respects. Many of the panning shots are notably using a wide angled lens which shows as distortion at the edges. (IMAX?) The camera is seen several times as participating in the action. For example - blood and breath appearing on the lens, the actors actually crashing into the camera during the last fight sequence and Leonardo breaking the fourth wall at the conclusion. There are additional sound-track artefacts that serve no other purpose than to irritate.

Then there is the plot. This, disappointingly, is utterly implausible. The idea that anyone would have survived such a Grizzly Bear attack at all, never mind in the freezing conditions and without medical intervention is pushing its credibility beyond limits. The ability of the lead to survive and recover requires an impossible suspension of disbelief. So, as you are you are watching it, you are constantly saying, "not feasible", "oh come on" and "you must be friggin' joking"...

And why, BTW, did the Director insist on Tom Hardy's character's dialogue be utterly impenetrable? We should have had the foreign language subtitles for his character too.

The whole premise of the film, revenge, was left lacking as we neither cared whether any of the protagonists lived or died (except one death, which occurred fairly early).

You were, while watching, thinking, "Wow, di Caprio suffered for his art while filming this". Of course that was a problem, as you should have been thinking, "Wow, 'lead character' managed to survive all that!" (Whatever the lead character's name was, but who cares?)

So a feat of endurance indeed, both for the actors AND the audience...

Huge talents (Robin Wright, Harvey Keitel, Paul Giamatti) totally let down by irredeemable execution. A promising premise, that actors will be replaced by their own avatars, is utterly wasted here.

It's like the producers ran out of money, and instead of the live action/futuristic version, supplanted some weird, Fritz the Cat version of the second two thirds of the film, in it's place.

"WTF was that all about?" you may, no WILL, ask yourself. Incoherent rubbish is the natural conclusion.

This film must have been like the "Emperor's New Clothes" when being pitched.

Somebody should have prevented Robin Wright making another terrible choice...

Stunning and ground-breaking cinematography. (Restored to brilliance in the 50th Anniversary BluRay edition)

Gorgeous soundtrack, with its familiar, enigmatic theme. Spectacularly bravura and camp performance by eye-lined Peter O'Toole (of whom Noel Coward noted, "If he'd been any more beautiful they'd have had to rename it 'Florence of Arabia.'" (Omar Shariff may have had the same eye-liner clause in his contract, BTW.)

I wanted to watch this with the family a) to see a movie classic and b) to see how the story of Britain's carving up of the middle-east post Ottoman empire was presented and finally c) to revisit the story of a remarkable (and controversial) man.

The first thing to note is the length of the film - 3 hours and 18 minutes. Blimey! You're not gonna take this one in one sitting. The second is that you may struggle with the plot and context if you don't gen up before (or while) you're watching. e.g. Q: The Arab Bureau? A: A department of the Foreign Office responsible for overseeing the political machinations of the regional players; Turks, France, Britain, local Arab emirs, independent tribes and whose representative decides to support the maverick Lawrence. If you don't know he'd been an Academic already in Arabia for two years or more, spoke fluent Arabic, was well respected by the locals and so on, you might wonder why the Arab Bureau was keen on having him work for them.

Indeed, the historical accuracy is very variable, so don't expect a well structured history lesson. There were some hefty arguments at the time about the content, and how it portrayed the film's prime antagonists.

What it does very well is show the brilliant madness of a man obsessed with his own destiny and special nature. This is probably an accurate representation of Lawrence, at least it concurs with what he autobiogrpahically wrote in his 7 Pillars of Wisdom.

But in watching it, you too will probably be puzzled by his motivation - why he takes many of the actions he does.

Questions remain about Lawrence's sexuality and the film makes nods in this direction as well as his potential sadism, for example when we see him apparently revelling in unnecessary killing (instead of taking prisoners).

Lawrence clearly was an extraordinary man and Peter O'Toole's performance was pretty darned amazing. But for me the narrative doesn't hold up. It's fragmented and sporadic and fails to give the personal or historical insight it deserves. The panoramic shots of expansive desert are indulgently long, as is the whole film.

So, a ground breaking, historical film, with some outstanding performances and truly stunning photography. But it is flawed in its accuracy and proportions and is unlikely to get a great deal of attention from future generations other than film aficionados, for whom it will continue to be a classic and formative.

We enjoyed watching this film, although I should say my wife was particularly disconcerted by the paradoxical plot.

And although it is carefully, even lovingly, crafted, the plot twists are all deductible before the reveals.

But that doesn't make it massively less interesting or thought provoking. I didn't know the Heinlein origins of the plot, but it provides a great idea and story arc.

There were several elements of the film that caused us pause for thought; the harsh arbitrary medic decision, the amusing idea of virginal astronaut concubines and of course the plausibility of self-referential time-travel.

A really good watch worthy of wider distribution/availability...

First thing to note is that the producers have made this film available on YouTube, for free: http://youtu.be/vXr-2hwTk58

So, if you are interested about who controls the Internet, about fundamental freedoms, about access to research and similar "scholarly articles", you have no excuse to not watch it.

And you will be rewarded for doing so by a truly moving story of a remarkable young man. Aaron Schwartz was an Internet pioneer and a precocious prodigy who developed Wikis, Reddit, RSS, Creative Commons among others and was a major contributor to the campaign that eventually stopped the SOPA bill.

Part of his campaigning was targeted at open access to research material which is controlled and capitalized on by commercial companies who contribute little to their publication but make huge profits from doing so.

This led him to download huge volumes of one such publisher, JSTOR via a laptop secreted in a switch room in MIT. The government chose to indict him with several felonies despite the fact that JSTOR chose not to pursue any litigation.

This government prosecution, "to deter others" was in poignant contrast to lack of any such prosecutions following the loans and banking crises that led to the worldwide recession.

The questions that Aaron and this film about him raises are important and are well articulated here. That is his powerful legacy and this film is a must-see, in my view.

This film is widely considered to be an all-time classic, and I thought it worth showing my 12 year old as we are approaching the 100th anniversary of the start of World War 1.

We watched the digitally remastered version, so the reproduction of sound and visuals was near on perfect.

This highlighted some of the sophisticated cinematography used, but equally some of the quite crude sound. (It is worth remembering that it was released only some 3 years after The Jazz Singer, so is a relatively early talkie.)

The overall production values are also really quite high: authentic looking European towns and villages and some impressive battle scenes.

Germans speaking with an American accent is rather quirky to an English ear, the dialogue and acting are very much of their time and often something of a disappointment. Again, this was quite early days for talkies and it is easy to forget how rapidly things developed to the more naturalistic style that we are used to today.

As far as the story is concerned, it is a simple but powerful polemic about the futility of war. The scenes of fighting are very telling. (After long waits of frightened boredom) struggling for a strip of land, to gain a few hundred yards only to then lose them again as quickly, with a huge cost in lives, The naiveté of the young volunteers as they join their cynical elders at the front, after being encouraged by their parents' generation at home to go and fight and die gloriously. Their dawning realisation of the reality is well made, even if it seems a bit clumsy by modern standards. This is further highlighted by a visit home on leave to a population largely ignorant of the harsh, painful, life-or-death drudgery of life at the Front.

Authored by and from a German perspective, the telling of the story by an American film company and crew is itself pretty remarkable. It did make me think that we still hadn't got the plain, simple truth that they are all "our boys"...

Yes, UK critic Mark Kermode went overboard about it, but his is one voice. (And he was wrong about the Borat movie, too, as far as I was concerned.)

Firstly, this is a very well made film, of that there's little doubt. Both the reality and fantasy elements are technically faultless. But as my wife and I were left puzzling after watching this film, "Why?"

If you separated the Reality element from the Fantasy you'd be left with two stories, one about a young girl and her troubles with a masochistic stepfather who is struggling with his father relationship (or lack of it) and is fixated on the production of a son. This is told well, if simplistically, and in excessively brutal detail. (Scenes of torture, disfigurement and other graphic violence.) Running concurrently with this is the same girl's introduction to her role as a Princess in the Fantasy world.

What was the connection between them? I couldn't see it. All other aspects of the storytelling were unsophisticated, (the role of the partisans and insiders, the inevitable breaking of the rules in the girl's fantasy "test"), so the likelihood of some deep and subtle meaning seems unlikely.

So you can have half an OK tale about the end of the Spanish Civil War, and half an OK fantasy tale. Intertwined, for no obvious reason. (But very well made, oh yes, I mentioned that already!)

Daniel Craig was a strange choice for many, including me. I was sorry to see Pierce Brosnan relinquish the role, and couldn't see how Craig could do the character justice.

But, as someone else noted elsewhere, and unlike previous Bonds, Daniel Craig can really act. Not only that, Ian Fleming could write. So when you combine a closer adherence to original novel with a raw, visceral and utterly convincing lead performance, it's no surprise that this is probably the most satisfying Bond ever. (And earned Craig a BAFTA nomination to boot.) In fact this is such a refreshing take on Bond, I find myself musing about shooting many of Fleming's novels all over again. The flippancy of the Moore productions with, for example, the utterly implausible "Jaws" character did the franchise no favours at all. This new approach (major kudos to Broccoli for taking such a gamble) restores and revitalizes in a way that the Lazenby and particularly the Dalton films threatened, but never entirely delivered.

The Bond character of the novels, as I remember reading in my youth, was suave, sophisticated but entirely ruthless and discompassionate about his job AND his women. There was real menace about the character. You would NOT mess with James Bond! That danger, risk and sense of threat is more believable here than in any other Bond film. Those films had deteriorated into Pantomime and Special Effect self indulgence.

So this Bond movie has plausibility. Daniel Craig as Bond is truly a maverick; on the edge in more ways than one. We see him struggling with the consequences of his newly assigned assassin's status. He neatly and poignantly finishes his victim's statement that the second time (using the 'double 0' sanction to kill), is easier. But he realises through the movie that this licence comes with a heavy price. Action, plot AND back-story - quite a feat!

Well done, Daniel Craig! You utterly convinced as Bond and in the process showed your critics where to shove it!

It took me two nights (2½ hours total) to watch this - as I couldn't stay awake the first night. The story of Alexander is fascinating, but you wouldn't know it from watching this movie. (Michael Wood's excellent TV series/DVD/book "In the Footsteps of Alexander The Great" is a much better use of your time, and much more engaging.)

The Irish accents are invasive, and in the case of some (e.g. Val Kilmer) truly risible. (And the Russian accents? Come on!) Colin Farrell is utterly implausible - I wouldn't follow him to the bottom of my garden, and that's not very far. My wife thinks he looked like a porn star. (It would have been a very low budget porn film to use such poor wigs...)

The film's historical accuracy is better than Stone's version of the Kennedy story, but it completely misses in its attempt to capture the true sense of scale and ambition in Alexander's quests. It similarly fails to adequately address the source of that ambition.

In summary, this film utilises the talents of a dozen or so stars (and Colin Farrell), millions of dollars of very obvious production costs and is based on one of the most epic stories of individual ambition in the history of the world. And the result? An overlong, indulgent, "who cares?" movie.

What a waste! Brian