The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty ** (125 minutes)

Based loosely on James Thurber’s 1939 short story about a prosaic individual attempting to escape the mundanity of life through his fantastical daydreams - Ben Stiller’s new film is executed with a degree of style and precision, but suffers from a lack of essential humour.

With Stiller both directing and starring in the titular role, the character of Walter Mitty in this version is a photographic research manager at Life magazine who has a tendency to zone out of real life and imagine himself in more heroic dream scenarios, whilst looking longingly at his co-worker (Kristin Wiig). The way the film portrays Mitty’s daydream fantasies is through a string of action set pieces were the central character, for example, has an infuriating conversation with his boss which leads Mitty to imagine an explosive superhero style punch-up with him – a scene reminiscent of something from mind of Timur Bekmambetov(Wanted 2008) with its over-the-top, weightless CGI brawling. Although these dreamy visual asides sound entertaining, there is a strange tonal clash within the first half of the film. On the one hand, Mitty’s flights of fancy are there to provoke a humourous reaction, but the rest of Stiller’s movie is far too formal and po-faced for the comedy to translate effectively - leaving you feeling oddly detached from the proceedings. It also has an ultra-clean, stylish visual aesthetic with a lot of the camerawork directed to linger incessantly on Ben Stiller’s face. These languorous moments indicate that Walter Mitty is a bit of a vanity project for Stiller and although the central Freudian idea of men indulging in egoistical fantasies may allow the film to itself procure a certain level of narcissism, it doesn’t alleviate this misplaced sense of self-importance.

Although the first hour lacks a certain wit, the plot does get into gear in the second hour as Mitty has to go searching for a crucial photographic negative that has been misplaced from the archive, leading him to Greenland to find photographer, Sean O’Connell(Sean Penn). The character of Walter Mitty is immediately more engaging in the latter hour and the way his dreams overlap into reality is achieved with a level of efficient fluidity and interest. I could have done without the aggressive use of product placement from Papa John’s Pizza and eHarmony – both used in such a cringingly unabashed manner that entire plot points were dedicated to promoting the brands.  Despite the fact that Walter Mitty does become much more emotionally involving towards its resolution - it is still a very flawed endeavour.

V/H/S ** Another found-footage film? – this portmanteau piece attempts to do something new with the verisimilitude of horror but suffers ultimately from a lack of surprises.

V/H/S opens with that oh-so familiar shaky camera style that has featured so heavily within the found-footage horror compendium. Although the notorious video nasty Cannibal Holocaust(1980) was probably the first incarnation of this full-on, documentary style of filmmaking - since the success of The Blair Witch Project(1999), the found-footage genre has generated some interesting output; such is the case with Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield(2008) which shared similarly enigmatic qualities to Blair Witch. Nevertheless, the sheer volume of found-footage horrors in the last ten years has dispelled most of the genre’s initial fear and mystery. V/H/S has an over-arching narrative that involves a violent gang who commit crimes, cause damage and do reprehensible things to women. Very early on the gang are given the job of burglarising a house to find a VHS tape and we subsequently become witness to the contents of a scratchy video comprised of a series of short spliced together horror vignettes.

In its defence, V/H/S does try to reimagine the found-footage format. The individual stories are told though several different camera mediums and often the damaged or disintegrated aesthetic of the individual recordings are used effectively to obscure the appearances of the horrors within. This is relatively innovative if you can get over the issue that V/H/S seems to paradoxically break the rules of its own genre- why is there a webcam chat, a home video recording and digital camera footage all on a single VHS tape?

Although some of the individual stories are quite creepy, they rely an awful lot on salacious voyeurism. The film also has a particularly prurient sensibility in the portrayal of its female characters which only has the effect of making you squirm instead of inciting actual fear. V/H/S is far too long and although the chilling unexplained strangeness of some of the stories is passingly compelling, many of them were just trite, boring rehashes of other, better, horror ideas. 

Pain and Gain *** Pain and Gain sees director Michael Bay working on a stripped back budget with this bodybuilding crime caper.

Based (apparently)on a true story - Mark Wahlberg plays Daniel Lugo, a bodybuilding personal trainer who believes achieving physical perfection, unlocking his full potential and making use of his “gifts” will help him strive towards the American dream. However, these desires are undone by the fact that Lugo is a total plank. With the help of  the equally dense Adrian Doorbal(Anthony Mackie) and Paul Doyle(Dwayne Johnson) the trio hatch an ill-conceived plan to extort a fitness client, which all goes horribly wrong.

Pain and Gain struggles initially with figuring out its comedic tone and there are a few missteps where it doesn’t really know whether it is a dumb gross out comedy, a black comedy or indeed, trying to satirise the bodybuilding community. The result is that it ends up doing a bit of all three. For better or for worse, all of the Michael Bay directorial traits we have come to expect are present – although there are less explosions than his typical blockbuster staples - the film is still incredibly loud, brash, pumped up fare with deliberately meretricious, oversaturated visuals. Dwayne Johnson plays a real knuckleheaded character and is the funniest thing in the movie and Mark Wahlberg is also very amusing, demonstrating once again, a real flare for comedy. It is hindered by its overlong run-time and often the humour and indeed the purpose of the film get lost amidst its own ramped up, erratic stupidity and violence. Pain and Gain is nonetheless, entertaining.  

The Place beyond the Pines **** Derek Cianfrance teams up for a second time with Ryan Gosling in this spectacularly raw and well acted three act drama.

Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine(2010)depicted Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as a couple in marital collapse. Blue Valentine was undeniably a film that was driven by the extremely genuine and overwrought performances of the actors over the manoeuvrings of the plot. The Place beyond the Pines is, however, much more of an elaborate and masterful return for Cianfrance.

Ryan Gosling plays Luke Glanton, a stunt-biker who discovers, after a brief former relationship with Romina, (Eva Mendes) that he is the father to an infant son. Gosling’s character subsequently wants to fulfil his paternal requirements; however, he fails to earn enough money on the right side of the law to provide for his child and instead, turns to robbing banks. Meanwhile Avery Cross played by Bradley Cooper, (who is also the father to an infant) is an esteemed police officer whose endeavour to track Luke down ends up providing him with ethical problems within the police profession that even infiltrate into the bloodlines of these intrinsic central characters. The film is in the vein of mythical tragedies and has to be understood as a drama of archetypal consequences. At the centre of The Place beyond the Pines is a biblical and well-worn literary idea of the sins of the father being visited upon the son. Within these father-son threads, concepts such as fate and retribution play out in a drama controlled by a powerful imperium of divine intervention and poetic justice with powerful effect.

Gosling gives a particularly sincere, charismatic and conflicted performance, however, it is Bradley Cooper that is the real revelation. He portrays Avery’s tortured guilt with a raw understated conviction intensified by Cianfrance’s intimate shot style used with such claustrophobic effect in Blue Valentine. Cooper essentially plays a character that is haunted by his actions and spirals into a web of duplicity incited effectively by Ray Liotta’s character.( Liotta incidentally, in paradigmatic slime-ball mode.) Both Cooper and Gosling’s characters are reflections of good and bad, however, these binary oppositions are clearly not determined by lawful ideologies and end up becoming deliberately distorted to portray a greater moral point. In the second act of the film, the word hero is emphasised, but the context in which the word is used does not ring true and is consciously intended not to. Cianfrance is allowing the audience to question both Avery’s heroism that is placed upon him in conjunction to Glanton’s crimes. The latter may perversely resemble the acts of a more genuinely heroic figure.

The final act of the film occurs 15 years later and deals with the lives of the children. In a strange and archetypally contrived twist of fate, both Luke and Avery’s sons become friends at high school and the repercussive effect of their father’s wrongdoings end up revisiting them in the drama. Although this act is the weaker and baggier of the films three act tragic structure, it does actually deal with some of the moral problems created by the parents that percolate into teenagers lives such as excessive hedonism, drink/drugs quite effectively. Drink, drugs and debauchery would seem the more natural vices that would percolate from the threads of hereditary sin and manifest within the boys as a sort of moral decay.

The Place beyond the Pines is an intensely riveting and darkly dramatic experience that must be understood as a modern mythical tale, fable or allegory about the looming effects and reprecussions of moral and lawful transgressions. The 'beyond' of the film's title possibly alludes to a greater, more prophetic arbiter of judgement.

Oblivion ** – Oblivion is an incoherent, desolate regurgitation of previous sci-fi films we know and love.

It’s 2077, aliens have invaded Earth and blown up the moon which has resulted in cataclysmic disasters, leaving the planet a wasteland. Tom Cruise is Jack Harper, a scout and repairman, who is one of the last remaining humans on the planet along with Victoria(Andrea Riseborough).We are lead to believe that the remaining humans are repopulating on a nearby moon called Titan.  Cruise’s character is completing his final missions to despatch the last remain hostiles on the planet. Andrea Riseborough is meanwhile back at HQ, a sky tower, assisting Cruise on logistical matters - all the while, Cruise is having dreams and reveries concerning a women(Olga Kurylenko) he has yet to meet.

The best you could say about the film is that it has an interesting colour palette – it is cold and grey and visually quite arresting to look at. Also, Andrea Riseborough does the very best she can with little to go on, delivering insubstantial lines with a certain degree of weight and her performance is a hell of a lot less self-conscious than Cruise’s. Every moment Riseborough is on screen the film is just about held together by her performance and actually the potentially sparse character drama between Cruise and Riseborough’s character works initially. However the film starts to crumble under its utterly incomprehensible plot. Much has been made of the fact that the film riffs on other sci-fi’s of the genre and I could fire off a list; it’s a bit Star Wars, a bit I Am Legend, a bit like The Road, The Fifth Element,The Man Who Fell to Earth, Wall-E etc. The character drama between Kurylenko and Cruise owes a debt to Stephen Soderbergh’s Solaris, but it has none of the depth of Solaris, and indeed it is as though they wanted somebody as charismatic as Natascha McElhone in Risborough’s character – but that doesn't really pay off either. Oblivion is also very long and slow and at 124 minutes, you do feel the time drawing out because of the nonsensical plot simply leaving you unengaged.

However, I think that Oblivion does want to be a film of ideas and it does have ambitions to be an intelligent sci-fi film – it just fails. When Morgan Freeman turns up, he is given nothing to do and the film loses its way even further. What could have been initially an arresting and engaging drama descends into an emotionless, frustrating mess of ideas and bad script writing.

The Great Gatsby ***

F.Scott Fitzgerald’s evocative and tragic novel, The Great Gatsby(1925), dealt with the titular character's endeavour to recapture a lost moment of love within the backdrop of the decadent roaring twenties. Baz Luhrmann, director of Moulin Rouge!  and Australia, now helms this radically modernised and ostentatious adaptation. The plot involves Nick Carraway,(Tobey Maguire) the story’s narrator, who moves to Long Island to learn about business bonds. However he becomes interested in his elusive neighbour, Jay Gatsby,(Leonardo DiCaprio) who holds extravagant parties from across his lawn. As our narrator begins to untangle the nuances of Jay Gatsby’s cryptic past, Nick also learns about Gatsby's troubling lost love, Daisy Buchanan(Carey Mulligan).

Luhrmann’s previous films have had a sparkling and decidedly glib quality to the production and this new adaptation is decorated with similarly bright, sparkling surfaces - but Gatsby is not an entirely shallow film. The enchanting quality of the novel always resided within Fitzgerald’s striking aptitude for constructing incredibly evocative illusions and imagery. Whereas one can go looking at symbolism speciously within literature, Fitzgerald gave his figurative ideas a looming and prophetic purpose; such as the judgemental eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg and the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, that Gatsby reaches out for so desirably. This delicate imagery that is so carefully woven into the novel is boldly and brashly thrust into Lurhmann’s film with very little subtlety, however, these symbols are conjured with a certain level of magical impact. Film is a literal medium and making metaphors bold and real and symbols lucid and physical has both substance and validity within Lurhmann’s filmic vision as well Gatsby’s own struggle in trying to make his dreams and idealised imaginings transform from the intangible to the tangible.

The modern sense of excess and hedonism is what Luhrmann has evidently found within the novel - the symbolic elements are audacious and explicit, the drama is overplayed and the performances are loud, exaggerated and full of melodrama. There is a newly integrated narrative device whereby Nick Carraway, jaded by alcoholism, recounts the events of the Gatsby affair to his therapist. This therefore constructs the story as a flashback or dream sequence making the events of The Great Gatsby seem just like the dizzying, hyperbolic and over-the-top drunken fragments of someone trying to piece together the follies of the night before – except Carraway has woken from this dream into the sobriety of reality as the opulent surroundings head for an inevitable crash. Gatsby’s parties are therefore both a visual headache and really spectacular - to quote the source, these lavish revelries really do have ‘enough coloured lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s garden’ – and then some. The film has noisy, hyper real adrenaline fuelled car chase set-pieces with totally disorientating sweeping zoom shots to the backdrop of a thumping soundtrack(provided by the likes of Jay-Z and Will.i.am). However, all of this outrageousness seems to hang together within the films garish, staggering drunkenness and when we are finally introduced to Gatsby, it literally looks as though the frame is about to explode.

Luhrmann has made an overdriven version of The Great Gatsby that still retains a latent metaphorical and magical augury underneath the film’s excessive and superficial exterior.

Paramore(album review) ***

Paramore’s self-titled fourth studio album follows up Brand New Eyes(2009) with a new, glistening, electronic pop sound.

After the acrimonious departure of key musicians Josh and Zac Farro, Paramore have carried on in a different musical direction. Although their new sound is not desperately confounding or earth-shatteringly radical, it does possess a certain amount of proficiency and charisma.

Paramore have always been an interesting band as they have a remarkable ability to just churn out intoxicatingly catchy singles whilst still remaining curiously strange, awkward and subversive. This offbeat quality that they possess in their career must be praised and equally the reinvention of the sound onParamore must also be acknowledged.

Although this album has a shiny, windex-sterility to the production - there are great moments such as Proof, Grow Up and Fast In My Car which are still enamoured with Paramore’s refreshingly youthful, yet undeniably pugilistic punk attitude. On the other hand Daydreaming and Last Hope interrogate the band’s more stirring, wistful and introspective style.  Ain’t It Fun is awesomely elating with its 80s pop sensibilities and Style Council-esque use of gospel choirs that have been panned in almost every review I’ve read. But conversely, as someone who has a strange affection for slightly dubious 80s keyboard sounds and nonsensical choir outros –Ain’t It Fun is probably the best track on the album.

However, Paramore is not an album graced with great depth or creativity, and with this arrives the duller, more complacent moments on the record. Ankelbiters is grating and annoying but it is over quickly, whereas Part II (a bizarre reprise of Let the Flames Begin from RIOT!) is a pretty worthless reimagining of a great song and utterly out of kilter with the rest of the album. The sporadic interlude tracks also bag-down an already overladen album that needs to be cut down to a disciplined ten or twelve song tracklist. Yet, Paramore is by no means a hateful or entirely pointless effort; often the more straightforward euphoric pop moments are underpinned with melancholic lyrical content and subsequently - the album is the most engaging in its quieter moments. One of these low-key moments include Hate to See Your Heart Break which is almost on the cusp of being saccharine, but never overplays its delicate sentiments.

Although the album is a very mixed bag and may trouble the fans of Paramore’s earlier alt-rock sound, the band have demonstrated an ability to reimagine their identity as an efficacious, if rather flawed, pop act.