Oz The Great & Powerful

This is a version of a review that aired on ABC Ballarat Breakfast on March 15, 2013.

(PG) ★★★

Director: Sam Raimi.

Cast: James Franco, Mila Kunis, Michelle Williams, Rachel Weisz, Zach Braff, Joey King.

Hobart sure did look pretty this time of year.

A PREQUEL to The Wizard Of Oz? Who would be fool enough to try to emulate such a landmark piece of movie-making?

After all, such cinematic lightning has never struck twice for the many reimaginings of L Frank Baum's beloved story through the years. The dark 1985 sequel Return To Oz, the 1976 Aussie rock'n'roll version Oz, the 1978 African-American take The Wiz, The Muppets' Wizard Of Oz - the best any of these has achieved is a status as a cult favourite, and none of them have come close to reaching the lofty heights the 1939 classic.

This belated predecessor would like to think it's cut from the same cloth as the film that it's prequeling, but really this is more like Tim Burton's recent adaptation of Alice In Wonderland. It collects familiar tics and tricks from its source, tries to mould a solid story to some sketchy background information, and it does it all with an over-abundance of shiny computer-generated imagery.

In the context of what it's up against, what had come before, and what director Sam Raimi and scriptwriters David Lindsay-Abaire and Mitchell Kapner are trying to do, Oz The Great And Powerful is as good as it could be.

It tells the story of how a carnival magician named Oscar Diggs ended up in the magical land of Oz and ended up becoming its Wonderful Wizard.

In spite of the film's propensity to answer questions no one was asking (Why is the wicked witch wicked? Why does she fly on a broom? What's the deal with that wizard guy?), it's a solid-enough look at one man's journey to overcome his own caddishness and become a good man.

Standing between Oscar and the incalculable riches of the Emerald City are three witches (played by Kunis, Williams and Weisz), and the movie's main conceit is figuring out which one is good, which one is wicked, and which one is a homicidal maniac.

The familiarities are innocuous enough and mostly endearing - the black-and-white real world changing into the colour of Oz is done well, there is a selection of anthropomorphic creatures to join Oscar on his journey, there's a reference to a cowardly lion, and the tricks that the wizard would later hide behind are used as plot points.

Wisely, Oz The Great And Powerful is not a musical, and it makes a slightly predictable but still worthwhile joke about the fact.

It certainly looks a million dollars (or $200 million apparently) and most of the CGI is pretty good, even if it is over-the-top and filled with unnecessary detours as opposed to necessary details.

There are some decent family laughs in there and the characters are fleshed out reasonably well. Franco is good and gets strong support from the trio of witches, particularly Kunis and Weisz.

Overall the film is decent-enough. It was never going to be exceptional and it was going to be impossible for it to match the wonder of its 1939 follow-up. The story is too constrained by what comes next when Judy Garland's Dorothy arrives to be surprising or feel fresh, but Oz The Great And Powerful is adequate for a film that no one was asking for. 

Cloud Atlas

(MA15+) ★★

Director: Tom Tykwer & The Wachowskis.

Cast: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw, Hugh Grant, Susan Sarandon, James D'Arcy.

Rainbow Serpent Festival was really going off this year.

DAVID Mitchell's tour de force novel Cloud Atlas is a sprawling, epoch-spanning marvel that's as entertaining as it is ambitious.

It's also one of those books that was always going to be difficult to turn into a film.

As a movie, Cloud Atlas is as bold as the novel. However, it is predominantly a noble defeat - compressing Mitchell's six segments and endless interwining themes into a streamlined narrative proves beyond the grasp of The Wachowskis (The Matrix trilogy, Speed Racer), Tom Tykwer (Perfume, Run Lola Run) and a willing cast.

The six stories span almost five centuries and in Mitchell's book they run sequentially forward, then back again to the beginning, but in the film they are edited together into a mass of parallel stories that jump back and forth between each other.

In 1849, lawyer Adam Ewing (Sturgess) is battling illness on a trans-Pacific voyage. In England, 87 years later, musician Robert Frobisher (Whishaw) is reading Ewing's journal while helping composer Vyvyan Ayrs (Broadbent) write his symphonies. In San Francisco in 1973, journalist Luisa Rey (Berry) discovers Frobisher's letters to his lover while she investigates corruption at a nuclear power plant.

Luisa's story ends up as a manuscript in the hands of publisher Timothy Cavendish (Broadbent) in present day England, where Cavendish is fleeing unhappy clients only to end up trapped in an old folks' home. His story is eventually made into a movie that transfixes Sonmi-451 (Bae), a clone in Neo Seoul in 2144, who is whisked from her regimented life by a freedom fighter (Sturgess) with the intention of using her as a figurehead and catalyst for social upheaval in the corporatocracy they live in. And finally there is Zachry (Hanks), whose people worship Sonmi in a post-apocalyptic 2321.

As you can likely guess, jumping back and forth between these tales is disconcerting, distracting and disruptive. Despite the best efforts of the directors and their editor, Cloud Atlas struggles to maintain momentum or allow an ongoing connection with the characters.

It does allow the film to play up the links that run through the segments though, which are tied together by ideas about past lives, reincarnation, and an undying spirit of survival and determination that runs through humanity, as well as themes of prejudice, love, regret, redemption, freedom, and oppression.

It's these ideals and concepts that give Cloud Atlas a depth that may come to be appreciated over multiple viewings (if you can handle the 172-minute running time). Moments fly by, narratives are set aside almost randomly, and the individual vernacular and style of each story thread can take some time to adjust to, particularly Zachry's post-apocalyptic tale, which is told in a pidgin English that is a struggle to follow at times. But going back to soak it in again and again could make this film a rich experience that rewards over time - it's likely this is destined for cult status.

Watching it first time through, however, will leave many cold. It's scattershot approach is distancing, despite the best efforts of the cast, who appear in multiple roles though some ingenious make-up work, further highlighting the links between the different time periods, albeit in an occasionally distracting and slightly confusing way.

There's a lot to like about Cloud Atlas and the effort to adapt Mitchell's novel should be applauded. Unfortunately it doesn't quite fit together - it's big ideas and ambitious plotting fly by at the expense of having an engaging story that builds emotion and connects to an audience.

Ultimately, it's a scattershot film that courageously tries to incorporate as much of the novel as possible, only to find it doesn't translate well from the page.

BlogalongaBond

Way back in 2011, my favourite film critic The Incredible Suit figured out there were exactly the same amount of months preceding the release of Skyfall as there were Bond films. And thus BlogalongaBond was born, in which international film critics from around the world (hence the international bit) reviewed one Bond film a month until Skyfall dropped.

Being the top bloke that I am, I convinced my then-girlfriend (now wife) to take part in BlogalongaBond with me, seeing as how she hadn't seen a Bond film before, or couldn't remember having done so.

For the sake of posterity, I have collected our BlogalongaBond blogs here. To be honest, they're probably some of the best bits of film criticism on this site, which isn't saying much. But they were fun to write. And who doesn't love making one's significant other watch movies they don't want to watch? No one, that's who.

Click the poster to choose your Bond.

And the post-BlogalongaBond 007 reviews (ie. my wife doesn't watch Bond with me any more):

Spectre

No Time To Die

Rise Of The Guardians

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Ballarat on December 14, 2012.

(PG) ★★★★

Director: Peter Ramsey.

Cast: (voices of) Chris Pine, Alec Baldwin, Jude Law, Hugh Jackman, Isla Fisher.

Quicksilver vowed to never join a superhero group via Craigslist ever again.

THE Avengers isn't the only super-powered ensemble to impress on the big screen this year.

In fact, Rise Of The Guardians is a lot like a "childrenised" version of Marvel's blockbuster team-up — instead of Thor, Iron Man and The Hulk joining forces, we have Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy combining to battle evil.

As with The Avengers, each of the characters is given their time to shine and is nicely developed, while a tidy sense of humour sparkles on top of the darker undercurrents of the story.

The big bad here is Pitch, aka The Bogeyman, deliciously voiced by Law and hell-bent on infesting children with his nightmares in the hopes of becoming properly "believed in".

Standing in Pitch's way is North (aka Santa, voiced by a Russian-accented Baldwin), a boomerang wielding Easter Bunny (Jackman), the silent yet powerful Sandman, the birdlike Tooth Fairy (Fisher), and reckless newcomer Jack Frost (Pine).

It's Frost who is the central figure, with his search for identity and meaning in his life one of the key themes in this surprisingly deep and thoughtful children's adventure.

Duty, selflessness, teamwork, finding your purpose and overcoming your fears are often standard go-to ideals for a kid's flick, but in Rise Of The Guardians they feel fresh thanks to being dealt with intelligently, with the dumbing down kept to a minimum.

While few of its ideas are original — its characters are tweaked classics and even its "power of belief" plot was handled more cleverly and satirically in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Small Gods — the combination of its elements is exciting for all ages.

Pitch is a particularly intriguing character, artfully shaded to look like he's stepped out of a black-and-white film noir and developed enough to be more than a caricature.

Law's voicework is excellent, and the broad Russian accent Baldwin brings to North is good fun. Jackman is allowed to let his ockerness run free, which borders on being a bit too "Strine" at time, but it's only Pine's too-mature voice that's really out of place.

The spectacle is excellent, from its single-take chases to its hyper-powered battles. It should go without saying in this golden age of CG films, but Rise Of The Guardians looks amazing. Equally, the sound design is impressive, as is the use of light throughout — kids movies don't usually have this amount of visual flair to them.

It's not perfect — it's ending is too convenient and predictable and doesn't really make sense in the global scale of the movie — but it's thoroughly enjoyable, no matter how old or young you are, and that is the makings of a great family film.

Now, all we can do is sit back and wait for the inevitably disappointing sequels.

BlogalongaBond: Skyfall

Way back in 2011, my favourite film critic The Incredible Suit figured out there were exactly the same amount of months preceding the release of Skyfall as there were Bond films. And thus BlogalongaBond was born, in which international film critics from around the world (hence the international bit) reviewed one Bond film a month until Skyfall dropped.

Being the top bloke that I am, I convinced my then-girlfriend (now wife) to take part in BlogalongaBond with me, seeing as how she hadn't seen a Bond film before, or couldn't remember having done so.

Me: Congratulations! You've made it the end of BlogalongaBond!

Her: Whoopee.

Me: Thanks for watching every Bond film with me.

Her: Thanks for nothing.

Me: Oh, come now, grumpy. Surely it hasn't been that bad?

Her: To be honest, they all tend to bleed together a bit. There were stand-outs, obviously, and memorable moments... but don't ask me to name the best ones because I can't remember the names. They're all "Tomorrow Is Never Enough" and "You Only Live Another Day" and "Golden Thunderlove". Having said that, Skyfall is a good one to wrap up this painful project because it's probably the best one.

Me: Really?

Her: Sure. And if it's not the best, it's certainly well up there.

Me: What makes you say that?

Her: Well, it's got a great villain, who's actually really freakin' scary. He's not trying to do something stupid like start wars to sell newspapers or bite people with his metal teeth. He's just a psycho who likes to kill people. And he's got a weird face. And mummy issues. It's a perfect recipe for a bad guy.

Bond had let himself go a bit though.

Me: Silva is certainly memorable and disturbing. And Bardem does an outstanding job in walking that fine line of the over-the-top villain, balancing between chewing the scenery and underplaying things too much. What else did you like about Skyfall?

Her: Nah, that's it really?

Me: What? How can you say it's one of the best....

Her: I'm kidding. Jeez, relax.

Me: Sorry.

Her: I liked the new Q. And Judi Dench's M is always great, but especially in this one.

Me: What else?

Her: I dunno. I guess I just liked the fact it wasn't stupid. And that it wasn't seemingly edited by a blind toddler with epilepsy, like Quantum Of Solace.

Me: Yes, well, the less said about Quantum Of Solace the better. Casino Royale was far from stupid - is Skyfall better?

Her: Maybe. This one had a better villain.

Me: You didn't rate Le Chiffre?

Her: Who?

Me: The villain in Casino Royale. He wept blood. And pummelled Bond's nuts.

Her. Meh. He played cards - ooh, scary.

Me: But the nut-pummelling!

Her: Look, Silva's better. Skyfall wins.

Me: Ok.

Her: Are you agreeing?

Me: Not really, I still think Casino Royale is better than Skyfall. But this one is certainly more Bond-ish, which was one of your criticisms of Casino Royale. And I did enjoy that.

Her: So what are the downsides of Skyfall?

Me: I'm a bit torn over that. I liked that it took it's time, but it also felt a little slow in places. And it was nice to see a Bond movie with an actual narrative theme - old versus new - but it felt a bit overused.

Her: You're just being picky.

Me: Maybe. I have to say Skyfall looked stunning though. We've never seen a Bond fight that looks as good as the one staged in silhouette among neon signs, plus the whole last act in Scotland - probably the most unglamourous Bond locale we've seen - looks great.

"Remind me again as to why we're not filming in the Bahamas."

Her: Speaking of the last act, that pretty much blows up your theory about each Bond being a different guy who just assumes the mantle of "James Bond".

Me: Maybe. It could just be a coincidence that they found an orphan called James Bond to become James Bond.

Her: Oh come on!

Me: Whatever. Look, thanks for watching all those movies with me. I know you didn't enjoy them all, but I've enjoyed our little chats.

Her: Yeah, well, it wasn't a total waste of time.

Me: Agreed. So, now that you've seen all the Bond films... will you marry me?

Her: Are you serious?

Me: Yeah. Will you make me the happiest man alive and agree to marry me?

Her: Because I've seen all the Bond films?

Me: Well, no. But now that that's all out of the way, I just thought I'd propose.

Her: Hmmm. Sure.

Me: Really?

Her: Yeah ok.

Me: Cool.

(PS. Ok, so it didn't quite happen like that - there was a ring, a restaurant, and I got down on one knee - but we really did get engaged after seeing Skyfall and wrapping up our BlogalongaBond conversation. It was a few hours after, but you get the point, which is "how can you ask someone to marry you if they haven't seen every 007 movie?".)

That's the end of BlogalongaBond, but you can read my review of Spectre here.

Seven Psychopaths

(MA15+) ★★★

Director: Martin McDonagh.

Cast: Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson, Tom Waits, Abbie Cornish.

"So I went to this zoo in Tokyo and all it had in it was a dog.
One dog. It was a shit zoo."

IRISH playwright Martin McDonagh created a cult favourite with swear-heavy purgatory parable In Bruges.

For his follow-up, McDonagh again mines an alternative vein, creating another profanity-laden niche black-comedy that also finds Farrell in good form and should appeal to fans of In Bruges, despite being a very different beast.

Farrell plays Marty, an Irish screenwriter struggling to complete his screenplay for a film called Seven Psychopaths.

Offering him assistance is his annoying actor friend Billy (Rockwell), who has a sideline with his pal Hans (Walken) in dognapping and collecting the rewards offered by distraught owners.

But one of those owners (Harrelson) is not content with posting a reward - he wants to kill everyone who gets between him and his shih tzu Bonnie, drawing Marty into a world of real-life psychopaths that are far more terrifying and unexpected than anything he could have come up with for his script.

With its title being about a script of the same name, Seven Psychopaths gets into some very "meta" territory. It revels in its own post-modernity - in discussing the script within the movie, the film gets to embrace and ridicule cinematic conventions at every turn.

From the cliche of the final shootout to the role of women in movies, from the American fetishism of violence to the use of dream sequences in cinema, it cleverly skewers the tropes of Hollywood while gleefully carrying them out. For the most part, it manages to have its cake and eat it too.

It's also funny in an often dark way. One character's possible alcoholism is treated as a serious problem in the face of largely ignored violence, and an extended section involving characters trying to figure out how to end Marty's movie riffs on the insanity of movies such as The Expendables.

The cast is great - Farrell is good but overshadowed, becoming a headlining passenger along for the ride. Rockwell's idiosyncracies are hilarious, Tom Waits just about steals the show, and Walken and Harrelson each do what they do so well.

So why only three stars? As enjoyable as this movie is, there are holes. Some of its attempts at being clever come up as overly convenient. This could be tight scriptwriting, but in hindsight it feels a bit like cheating.

It stretches its post-modern "hey look at us mocking making movies while we make a movie" joke to breaking point, and despite it being satisfying at the time it's troubling afterwards if you start thinking about character motivations and backstories, and realise that it doesn't quite gel.

In my heart I want to give this four stars, but I know it's actually only a three-star movie. As fun and funny as it is, as incredibly cool and sneaky its meta-movie plot is, Seven Psychopaths is disjointed and doesn't make sense in places. Too many characters seem strange for the sake of being strange and there's a feeling that there may be one too many ideas in there as part of a desperate attempt to shoehorn in a couple more themes.

BlogalongaBond: Quantum Of Solace

Way back in 2011, my favourite film critic The Incredible Suit figured out there were exactly the same amount of months preceding the release of Skyfall as there were Bond films. And thus BlogalongaBond was born, in which international film critics from around the world (hence the international bit) reviewed one Bond film a month until Skyfall dropped.

Being the top bloke that I am, I convinced my then-girlfriend (now wife) to take part in BlogalongaBond with me, seeing as how she hadn't seen a Bond film before, or couldn't remember having done so.

Her: Thank god it's all over and I never have to watch a Bond film again.

Me: Well, actually, Skyfall comes out next month....

Her: I said, "Thank god it's all over and I never have to watch a Bond film again!".

Me: Umm... okay. So, you didn't enjoy Quantum Of Solace?

Her: I was actually bored. You couldn't see what was going on in any of the cool bits and frankly I didn't care.

Me: I know what you mean. I don't think I've ever seen a film so destroyed in the editing room. Why bother doing all these amazing stunts and setting up great shots if you're going to edit into an incomprehensible mess where you can't see anything? It's a pretty huge slap in the face to the amazing stuntwork and cinematography that's obviously going on in there.

"Bond's about to do something cool - quick, throw in some random editing!"

Her: Agreed. There were car chases and plane chases and fights and none of them made any sense. I couldn't tell who was shooting at who.

Me: Were you really bored?

Her: Yeah. What the hell was it all about? Water?

Me: Yeah.

Her: Big whoop. Is that what the series has come to? Out with the bonkers supervillains with giant lasers, in with the not-terribly-scary businessmen building large underground dams?

Me: I liked that there was an environmentally aware plot - I think it was another attempt to make Bond timely and relevant.

Her: Meh. Even with the watery plot, I still felt like I'd seen most of this before. The girl covered in oil on the bed - that's copying Goldfinger, right? Why bother doing that? It's been done.

Me: Homage?

Her: And the Bond girl, out for revenge 'cos someone killed her family? We've seen that before, too haven't we?

Me: Yeah, but I thought Olga Kurylenko did a good job. As did Gemma Arterton.

Her: Well, at least Bond got a random shag this time.

Me: And with a nicely obtuse pickup line too: "I can't find the stationery".

Her: That was a pickup line?

 Me: It worked, didn't it?

Her: I guess. Did you like the movie?

Me: Not really. After Casino Royale being so damned good, Quantum Of Solace is a bitter disappointment. There's a good film in there potentially, but the most terrible editing job of all time prevents the audience from settling in to enjoy any of the action sequences. It puts the rhythm of the entire film out of whack, and doesn't give its set pieces time to breathe. It always like it was rushing to get somewhere. The film should have been 10 minutes longer.

"It's okay, it's a rental."

Her: Is that enough to ruin the film?

Me: In this case, yes. It's a shame really. Craig is good again, I think the plot had potential, and I liked the scene set during the performance of Tosca.

Her: Don't you think the people sitting next to the all bad guys would have told them to shut up? Holding a meeting at the opera is not a good idea.

Me: I liked the idea. There were some good ideas in there, but poorly executed, I think.

Her: What about the Bond theme? That was Jack White, yeah?

Me: Yeah, and Alicia Keys. I don't mind it - it's adventurous at least, although it does sound more like The Raconteurs than a Bond theme.

Her: So is that it then? Are we done? Is the hellish nightmare of BlogalongaBond over?

Me: Oh come on, you're being a tad dramatic. I know you liked some of them.

Her: Maybe. I just feel a little beaten into submission by them all now.

Me: Well, there's only one more to go and then I promise I'll never make you watch a Bond film ever again. And the last one you'll get to see on the big screen!

Her: I can hardly wait.

BlogalongaBond will return in Skyfall.