REVIEW: Straight Outta Compton (2015)

Straight Outta Compton is a biopic of the influential NWA and follows the typical beats of the music biopic. You can guess how the film plays out – from the early meetings as slumming musicians to the energy and excitement of the first inspiration to the wild success, debauchery and lawsuits. However, there is something different about Straight Outta Compton that makes it initially stand out – it’s angry, political outsider status.

Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr, Ice Cube’s real-life son) and Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell) are the focus of the film. Key moments includes the controversy of the NWA song ‘Fuck Tha Police’, the band’s arrest in Detroit for playing the same song, the aftermath of the Rodney King beatings and the various disputes between the members of the band and their manager Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti) and individual labels following the dissolution of the band.

The film is executive produced by Ice Cube and Dr Dre, so it is easy to think of the film as a clean, officially sanctioned view of the two of them. Though it is true that a healthy degree of scepticism is required towards any music biopic, Straight Outta Compton does display a certain even-handedness, given that Ice Cube and Dre themselves were on opposing sides of several disputes. Much of the blame is placed on Jerry Heller (who is now suing) and on Eazy-E (who died of AIDS in 1995), but Ice Cube and Dre are not free from some blame.

Having said that, this somewhat messy film is not particularly interested in the ins-and-outs of any of these legal disputes. In fact, it is difficult to work out what exactly the film’s main focus is. It hits the typical beats but in such a desultory way that it can be difficult to work out what is going on. The film ends suddenly with Dre announcing that he is leaving Death Row Records to start his own label, a non-ending that would suggest erroneously that the focus of the film has been Dre’s growing independence. It is an oddly restrained ending to a film that so frequently verges on craziness. Indeed, the messiness of the film is part of its appeal, the film acting more as a collection of big moments rather than a sustained piece. The sequence of the genesis of ‘Fuck Tha Police’ is great – moving from a tense and humiliating confrontation with some racist police straight into the recording of the song and, later, the performance in Detroit – capturing the anger that helped create the song but also the social situation that made the song matter.

Less successful is the film’s attempts to deal further with the socio-political situation, particularly the Rodney King beating, the subsequent trial and the LA riots. The film shifts with great difficulty between these scenes and further scenes of band members squabbling and trying to get out of contracts. The film never regains the balance between the politics of resistance and the music, and these two strands of the film end up belittling each other. Equally, the film does represent a good deal of misogyny and one mention of anti-Semitism, but only to acknowledge that it existed, never to question it. The film might transcend the formula of the music biopic thanks to the politics of the band, but the film itself has nothing to do with it. Given the current situation in America – where the music of NWA feels positively contemporary – there was the possibility of making a film about NWA that would have been as shocking, angry, defiant and unapologetic as the band’s music. But nowhere in this film is there a moment to equal even Spike Lee’s opening to his otherwise fairly safe biopic Malcolm X in which footage of the Rodney King beating, a contemporary issue at the time that the film came out, is intercut with a burning American flag. Straight Outta Compton could have made a convincing argument for the band’s continuing relevance or adapted the criticism to 2015 in much the same way that last year’s documentary Nas: Time Is Illmatic, which fared much better in making the argument for both the music’s socio-political significance both then and now. Instead, we get weird moments such as Ice Cube laughing his head off at the script to Friday (directed by F. Gary Gray himself) and a closing montage celebrating, amongst other things, Ice Cube’s performance in XXX: State of the Union and Dr Dre’s Beats headphones (flogged often enough in several music videos). Here, the film feels like a cash-in, and watching it, one could forget that this is a film about a band that frightened the FBI. The film could and should have been just as radical as the music. Sadly, we are left with the safe story of unsafe music, with a politics of resistance diluted for the mainstream and a contemporary phenomenon relegated to the past.

Straight Outta Compton then is a watchable film with some great moments, but it is tame when it should have been challenging. Unlike with ‘Straight Outta Compton’ the album, one is left wondering ultimately if the film’s main aim is box office and awards, rather than a valuable contribution and a voice. Perhaps there is a case to be made that putting these ideas into the mainstream is the best way to effect change, but it does feel that no one here is expressing with their full capabilities.

REVIEW: 12 Years A Slave (2014)

12 Years A Slave is the third feature film from artist turned director Steve McQueen, who is developing into a surprisingly mainstream filmmaker, following the somewhat esoteric Hunger and the challenging yet disappointingly conventional Shame. 12 Years A Slave is initially off-putting, being too much of an Oscar-friendly drama to fit easily alongside McQueen’s other work. In fact, it is when one forgets McQueen’s involvement that the film begins to work in its own right, an odd example of an auteur’s disappearance.

Based on a true story, the film follows Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free man in 1841 New York, who is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Over the next twelve years, he is passed between a variety of masters, learning along the way to keep his head down and tell no one about his previous situation. Northup thus leads a dangerous and precarious existence at the hands of white masters in the Deep South.

Steve McQueen’s films have always stridden a thin line between the art house and the multiplex. Hunger and Shame were both bleak and muted in a rather minimalist way and yet both remain fairly conventional in terms of story arcs. Shame fit neatly into a three-act structure and even offered rather simplistic explanations for its protagonist’s urges. It is difficult to see 12 Years A Slave as anything other than a Hollywood drama – something that is not helped by one traditional crane shot’s dodgy CGI landscape or by a few rather manipulative scenes. McQueen’s trademark long takes are still present, though they are much shorter and more embedded within the film’s storyline. Aside from some extreme violence, which is justified for the purposes of realism but which nonetheless represent a breaking from the tradition of the Hollywood drama, 12 Years A Slave is almost entirely conventional. The star cameos (Paul Giamatti, Paul Dano, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassbender and Brad Pitt) are often off-putting, their sudden appearance taking you out of the film just when you were beginning not to notice the mechanics of the screenplay and direction.

That said, the film's moral complexity confronts the audience, forcing them to question their own feelings about the action onscreen, suggesting that American slavery was not a battle between innocent slaves and the evil white slave owners. Benedict Cumberbatch's Ford is a less obviously loathsome character than Fassbender's Epps - but then he is all the worse for his moralising does not extend as far as the question of slavery. As compassionate as he is, he is happy to turn a blind eye to what cruelty and suffering when he needs to. Steve McQueen is too good a filmmaker to let Ford off the hook, but neither does he openly berate him, instead showing the more corrosive side to the evil of slavery. Meanwhile, other slaves hold the whips and openly collude with their evil bosses. As well as this, the film offers a much more violent and bleak representation of American slavery yet seen, McQueen refusing to look away in order to represent what slavery is like without any respite for the audience. As a result, the film can be depressing and suffocating but then what true representation of slavery wouldn't be?

The film’s primary focus is on how Solomon Northup survives his ordeal and the alterations in his personality that are required to do this. Initially, Northup is outraged and indignant. Soon realizing that his past could be dangerous to him, he must act like a normal slave and not allow his masters to see him as anything different. He is thrown into a series of morally compromising situations and is constantly in danger of losing any sense of who he was. The film also focuses on his despair and his decision not to give up in the face of his apparently hopeless future. The film requires a strong performance to bring across this character’s duality and it has one in Ejiofor’s work, which avoids big Oscar-friendly histrionics (where other actors in the film itself may not) in favour of a quiet pain and anguish that is all the more believable. These themes coupled with a great central performance ensures that 12 Years A Slave succeeds both as a drama designed for mass entertainment and as something more interesting.

It is interesting to note that, in Django Unchained, Tarantino tries to develop a similar idea of the adapting that Django must overcome in order to survive – though he fails since he is much more interested in film references, long bouts of monologue and exploding bodies. Conversely, it is difficult to watch 12 Years A Slave and not wish for the kind of bloody satisfaction so gleefully though tediously doled out by Tarantino, although McQueen makes short shrift of the idea of violent revolution all too quickly and, it has to be said, convincingly. It is difficult to watch 12 Years A Slave so soon after Django Unchained – especially since one early scene in the former looks identical in terms of lighting and framing to the latter. 12 Years A Slave works in some ways as a riposte of Django Unchained, particularly in its much more honest focus on the victims of slavery, in their much more three-dimensional characterization and in the fact that Solomon Northup survives thanks to his own skills and not through the advice and assistance of a nice white man.

As a drama, 12 Years A Slave is most effective in its quiet moments, McQueen showing a flair for the more subtle drama of single scenes as well as in the more uncompromising scenes of institutional racism and brutality. As a whole, 12 Years A Slave moves through a variety of registers usually under the influence of its performers. Fassbender, Dano and Sarah Paulson overplay their scenes and the film seems over the top when they are centre stage, while it plays best when Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o and Adepero Oduye are given the space to act. Since it is tied so closely to its performances, 12 Years A Slave ultimately succeeds or fails on the quality of the work of its actors in individual scenes, making it a flawed and overblown yet effective and moving drama.

REVIEW: Cosmopolis (2012)

     

  As we have seen with David Cronenberg’s last great film, Crash, a world saturated with modernity and objectification (read shiny, metallic surfaces) is a world devoid of warmth and emotion. Where Crash works as a moody, almost-futuristic fantasy, Cosmopolis tries to be broader and, oddly, more recognisably down to earth.

  Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson, doing rather well despite being cast presumably only for marquee value) is a young billionaire who has everything he wants. He jumps into his cork-lined and impenetrable limousine and travels through the city in search of a haircut. On the way, he has one-on-one meeting with a variety of advisors, their talks becoming increasingly philosophical. He also meets his new wife Elise Shiffrin (Sarah Gadon) for a variety of meals, their relationship unconsummated and stalled. He also meets Benno Levin (Paul Giamatti), a disgruntled ex-employee who is dedicated to killing Packer in order to give his life meaning.

  Like Cronenberg’s previous, A Dangerous Method, the film is primarily a talking piece. Cronenberg has lately become committed to the idea that film need not especially be a visual medium and that images of people talking are of equal import. The conversations in Cosmopolis are stilted and deeply intellectual, taken largely from Don DeLillo’s original 2003 novel – which now seems remarkably prescient in view of the subsequent economic collapse. The film contains a philosophical and economic critique of the modern world in which young billionaires have two elevators, which they choose between depending on their mood and everyone keeps an eye on the rises and falls in the stock market like more spiritually-minded people would keep an eye on tea leaves. The intellectual conversations range from the fascinating to the almost incomprehensible, delivered with a palpable coldness and near total insincerity. His theory coach, Vija Kinski (Samantha Morton) trains him on philosophical matters, pointing out that money has become so abstract that “it talks to itself”, and, hence, people are almost obsolete. She criticizes a society fascinated by wealth, but she does not seem to be bothered by it all that much, her intellectual talk becoming exactly that. That Packer might slowly be returning back to humanity is reflected in how he becomes increasingly dissatisfied with other peoples’ inane conversations.

  The film is about a world in crisis, on the brink of economic ruin but with no alternative and no place to go. Even the protesters are ineffectual with one particularly destructive and anarchic riot quickly cleaned up and forgotten. Even the famous André Petrescu (Mathieu Amalric, delivering one of the film’s few funny performances), an anarchist prankster, acts for his own camera crew, but does not have any valid point to make. The view of the world from inside Packer’s sound-proofed limousine seems faraway and unreachable, the life outside moving in a graceless silence as if it is all playing from a television on mute. If Packer is getting tired of his lot, the film makes clear that there is little else for him to do. Though unreachable, however, the world outside feels remarkably and horridly familiar as it clearly refers to the economic collapse and the Occupy movement, even to the notorious incidence of the self-immolation of the Vietnamese monks. Unlike Crash, it becomes increasingly clear that Cosmopolis is about our world and not necessarily some post-human future.

  The film is a hard film to like, ultimately because there are none of the typical pleasures associated with escapist cinema nor are there any clear-cut messages or arthouse gimmicks. Cosmopolis is a very esoteric and somewhat unique film, which is difficult to categorize and even harder to qualitatively appraise.

  However, the film does reach a fascinating and rather moving climax, with an extended conversation between Packer and the Mark Chapman-like Levin, introduced with Levin actually saying, “Let’s sit and philosophise together.” Silly as that may sound, the film develops into a conversation about finding meaning in one’s life and gaining the ability to feel again. Giamatti gives the film its sole believable and human performance, capturing with great honesty and subtlety a man who has nothing and who no longer knows himself. It all sounds very arch, but in the context of the rest of the film, coming as it does at the end, it works very well. The arthouse prerequisite ambiguous ending notwithstanding, Cosmopolis does develop into something much more thought-provoking and, surprisingly, moving, something more than the rest of this very strange and very cold film. It feels almost triumphant in a weird and incalculable way.

  Cosmopolis is practically impossible to like and it is far from entertaining, but it is a work that reminds us that film is a versatile medium, one that is expressive in more ways than we would probably want. Cosmopolis does not really tell us anything encouraging about our world, or ourselves but it is a film with courage behind its convictions and a near fearless rebuttal in a mainstream film culture that is becomes increasingly safe and unsurprising. Cosmopolis is ultimately a film that is hard to get out of your head after you have seen it, whether or not you are willing to engage with its ideas.

REVIEW: The Ides of March (2011)

  The Ides of March displays a sense of recent post-Obama disillusionment and largely deals with the loss of a young political advisor’s ideals and the impossibility of making worthwhile change in the current political system. It also pleasingly harks back to the brilliant The Best Man and Advise and Consent.

  Ryan Gosling plays Stephen Meyers, press secretary to Governor Mike Morris (played by George Clooney, who also directs), an apparently sincere Democratic and Obama surrogate.  Meyers believes that Morris is the best man to run the country, precisely because he is honest and committed to doing the right thing. However, as the race for a presidential nomination heats up, Meyers’ beliefs and ideals blow up in his face as he comes across dirty secrets and corrupt backroom deals.

  To the wary eye, trained on Armando Iannucci’s scathing and hilarious The Thick of It and its spin-off In The Loop, Meyers’ idealism seems entirely naïve and Gosling’s performance slightly unbelievable. The Ides of March initially seems like it might be a silly though sincere attempt to persuade a jaded audience that politics is good and that it works. Which is why it is really rather effective when it becomes a bleak movie about the impossibility of good coming from within the current system. Though it doesn’t go to the extremes of Iannucci, who can get a bit depressing at his most powerful, The Ides of March is surprisingly glum, especially for a Hollywood movie, and even has moments of wry satire. Unlike The Rum Diary, there is no third-act redemption to undercut the power of its critique.

  That said, it remains a Hollywood movie. The film is saddled with a few creaky plot manoeuvres and constantly threatens to wrong-foot itself, most awkwardly in the figure of Evan Rachel Wood. Her character becomes little more than a plot point after a rather good start, something the film’s odd conclusion seems to apologize for. At the film’s end, an intern is introduced with the aim of exposing their casual exploitation during a political campaign. This is an odd criticism in a film that deals with much more serious forms of corruption and much more so in a film that also exploits the intern to develop its convoluted plot.

  Another problem lies in the film’s rather disappointing move from sober political drama into a somewhat overblown political thriller. After a confident though befuddled beginning, Gosling reverts to The Driver and is given to brooding and walking down corridors with a stone face. The thriller elements are what threaten a descent into silliness, which, admittedly, the film does manage to largely avoid. However, it is hard to believe that politics can be this exciting and devious in the real world. Iannucci gets away with it because he uses exaggeration for the purposes of comedy. A seemingly realistic film like The Ides of March can’t help but look over the top if it exaggerates.

  It is a mark of a film having worked when, if it stumbles, you are genuinely worried for it. The Ides of March, despite its flaws, manages to create enough good will to see it through to the end. Though it may be unsure about what tone to take, it remains a surprisingly biting, if not angry, film with mostly great performances, especially Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman. As well as that, it has a point to make and, for once, it makes it well.

REVIEW: The Last Station (2009)

  When the Oscars are looming, audiences must exercise caution when choosing a film to go and see. Oscar Dramas are a tricky class of film. Taking as an example 2008 Oscar race, for every Gran Torino and Frost/ Nixon there was a The Curious Case of Benjamin Button or The Reader. If you’re lucky, you could get something moving and riveting. If unlucky, however, you might end up with a dull movie with terrible Oscar Clips (the scenes in which venerable actors give loud and annoying bravura performances), which merely serve to startle you back into lucidity. The Last Station, oddly enough, falls between these two stools.

  The story closely resembles your typical Oscar Drama. Set over the last days of Leo Tolstoy’s (Christopher Plummer) life, it centres on Valentin (James McAvoy) a young disciple of Tolstoy’s writings, who becomes embroiled in a feud between Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren), Tolstoy’s devoted wife of 48 years and the oily Chertkov (Paul Giamatti). Chertkov seems to have convinced Tolstoy to write a new will, which Sofya fears might disinherit her. Valentin is swayed one way then another, whilst struggling with the celibacy aspect of Tolstoy’s doctrine.

  Whilst it does sound like the perfect framework for some high-pitched melodramatic acting and Oscar-friendly period settings, the film is surprisingly entertaining for the most part. What helps it get by is its sense of humour which allows for several funny scenes. The sense of humour does remain strong for the first half of the film, with even a sting on the tail of one particular Oscar Clip. During this period, the film even retains a light comedy score.

  The problem with The Last Station is that it loses its way during the second half. Here, the comedy is replaced by wallowing with everyone giving everyone else significant and serious looks. The comedy score gives way to the more typical Oscar Score, all over-bearing instruments and droning chords. Before you know it, The Last Station has become just another dull Oscar Drama. What is particularly frustrating about the film is that the first half shows you what it could have been had the film-makers tried harder while the second half shows you what its going to be because they can’t be bothered.

  The performances are the same. In the first half, the four leads are all fun and likable (even Giamatti whose excellent performance as someone you really don’t know whether to like or dislike is the best in the film). However, by the end, their company isn’t all that enjoyable. Even plot and character motivations, initially so clear, become muddied and confusing.

  Initially a good film with great potential, it’s a pity that the film opts for by-the-numbers melodrama midway through.