Watching Paycheck made me want to give up reviewing films altogether. This inept, silly and annoying movie should have never left the pre-production stage.
It features career-low performances from blandly handsome Ben Affleck, toothsome and vapid Uma Thurman and John Woo, who should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.
Paycheck sees his soul, brought, signed, sealed and delivered to Hollywood and his sellout mentality is now well and truly complete.
If you thought Gigli was bad, Paycheck is just as awful, if not worse.
It's a rip-off of Minority Report and Total Recall, even though Phillp K. Dick loosely bases it on an original short story.
Affleck plays Michael Jennings, a "reverse-engineer" who steals other people's technology, sells it to the highest bidder and then, conveniently, has his memory erased.
He's approached by an old friend, Jimmy Rethrick (Aaron Eckhart) to committ himself to a three-year project , which, if completed, will secure the biggest payout of his career.
But Jenning's colleague Shorty (Paul Giamatti) has reservations about this job, citing the old adage that, if it's too good to be true, it probably is- as Jennings discovers to his cost.
Jennings wakes up to fins that it's three years into the future and his only help in piecing together what has happened is in an envelope filled with a wristwatch, a diamond ring and a matchbox.
In all this confusion, time is running out for him to find out what happened. Making matters worse, people are trying to find and kill him.
With a script that either states the obvious at every turn or repeats things such as character motivation long after the audience has established it for themselves. Paycheck is an essay in stupidity.
With more holes than Swiss cheese, its artless and graceless action sequences are poor payoff for a plot that is either very silly or needlessly complicated.
Affleck has never been more wooden or more smug. Thurman, as a biologist must be the most airheaded and vacuous doctor that I have seen on film.
Woo manages to make the action set-pieces incredibly conventional and very unexciting. His reputation, gained from Hong Kong action flicks, has been lifelessly drained away and he's been forced to cover up a feeble plot, rubbish acting and script that does nothing but slither along.
Paycheck is a desperate effort by all concerned and should be avoided by audiences like the plague.
Sunday, 24 July 2011
Friday, 22 July 2011
TOKYO STORY, DIRECTOR: YASUJRIO OZU
It says a lot that the best film of the week is 51 years old, but then Tokyo Story is a special film, a life-changing experience that has stood the test of time for over haf a century.
In the renowned film magazine Sight and Sound, Tokyo Story ranked as number five on the 2002 critics' poll, adding testament to a well-deserved legacy.
Tokyo Story is a universal tale of estrangement between parents and their adult children, a story that never seems to date and has emotional resonance for any mother, father and offspring.
It's a very simple film, in the sense that it builds its emotional power from nuances, in terms of camera placement and characters' expressions and from a story that reflects reality, showing how people deal with a range of situations.
The story is of an aging married couple who travel from a provincial town to visit their various grown-up children.
But the children have moved on, leading busy lives as professionals, seemingly only taking them out to see the city because they feel obliged to.
But the don't seem to have time to show them around properly, eat a meal or just chat, hamstrug as they are by their jobs and their seperate, hectic lives.
The parents come to terms with this turn of events and turn their attention to their widowed daughter-in-law, someone who seems to have time for the couple and shows human kindness.
However, on their trip, the mother dies and the scene is set for a funeral at the ancestral home, where the siblings face up to their priorities and try to absolve some of their guilt.
Recriminations are kept to a minimum, as is the apportioning of blame. The widowed daughter-in-law comes off as showing the most compassion, which the father remembers even if she is nothing less than modest about what she has done.
The greatest sorrow is reserved for the widowed husband. His resignation to loneliness is heartbreaking and there is little he can do but face his fate without the woman that he loved.
This simplicity is also the brilliance of a director like Yasujrio Ozu. He is able to make big emotional strides by expression real human emotion and this is why the film exudes a power that is rarely seen in cinema.
Ozu's sublime trademark style of little camera movement, setting up the scene and playing lt long after the narrative necessitates is cinematic poetry.
Ozu knows more than most directors about exploring off-screen space and enhancing it for emotional heft. However, this is the least conventional or emotionally manipulative film that you are ever likely to see.
Characters are framed with utmost relevance to their surroundings, making a relationship between person and environment. The idea of loneliness being conveyed in terms of film space is something that Ozu understands.
He also expresses beautifully the images of a character in the middle of a frame surrounded by huge gulfs of space as a metaphor for helplessness and isolation in scene after scene.
It's the unobtrusive camera placement, usually only a foot or so higher than the floor, which puts you at the heart of the drama and the heart of the characters. It's as if you are an invisible member of the family, absorbing the humanity surrounding you.
Ozu was one of the greatest directors of the 20th century and most of his film are inbued with the kind of humanism that makes him a great film-maker.
The film manages, simply and in an unfussy manner, to explain more about the complexities of life than many so-called epics.
Tokyo Story is epic, not in terms of its canvas, but in terms of its ambition, its depth and its perception of human values and feelings.
If there were only seven wonders of the cinematic world, Tokyo Story would surely be one of them.
This is absolutely unmissable cinema that will stand the test of time for the next 50 years and way beyond that.
In the renowned film magazine Sight and Sound, Tokyo Story ranked as number five on the 2002 critics' poll, adding testament to a well-deserved legacy.
Tokyo Story is a universal tale of estrangement between parents and their adult children, a story that never seems to date and has emotional resonance for any mother, father and offspring.
It's a very simple film, in the sense that it builds its emotional power from nuances, in terms of camera placement and characters' expressions and from a story that reflects reality, showing how people deal with a range of situations.
The story is of an aging married couple who travel from a provincial town to visit their various grown-up children.
But the children have moved on, leading busy lives as professionals, seemingly only taking them out to see the city because they feel obliged to.
But the don't seem to have time to show them around properly, eat a meal or just chat, hamstrug as they are by their jobs and their seperate, hectic lives.
The parents come to terms with this turn of events and turn their attention to their widowed daughter-in-law, someone who seems to have time for the couple and shows human kindness.
However, on their trip, the mother dies and the scene is set for a funeral at the ancestral home, where the siblings face up to their priorities and try to absolve some of their guilt.
Recriminations are kept to a minimum, as is the apportioning of blame. The widowed daughter-in-law comes off as showing the most compassion, which the father remembers even if she is nothing less than modest about what she has done.
The greatest sorrow is reserved for the widowed husband. His resignation to loneliness is heartbreaking and there is little he can do but face his fate without the woman that he loved.
This simplicity is also the brilliance of a director like Yasujrio Ozu. He is able to make big emotional strides by expression real human emotion and this is why the film exudes a power that is rarely seen in cinema.
Ozu's sublime trademark style of little camera movement, setting up the scene and playing lt long after the narrative necessitates is cinematic poetry.
Ozu knows more than most directors about exploring off-screen space and enhancing it for emotional heft. However, this is the least conventional or emotionally manipulative film that you are ever likely to see.
Characters are framed with utmost relevance to their surroundings, making a relationship between person and environment. The idea of loneliness being conveyed in terms of film space is something that Ozu understands.
He also expresses beautifully the images of a character in the middle of a frame surrounded by huge gulfs of space as a metaphor for helplessness and isolation in scene after scene.
It's the unobtrusive camera placement, usually only a foot or so higher than the floor, which puts you at the heart of the drama and the heart of the characters. It's as if you are an invisible member of the family, absorbing the humanity surrounding you.
Ozu was one of the greatest directors of the 20th century and most of his film are inbued with the kind of humanism that makes him a great film-maker.
The film manages, simply and in an unfussy manner, to explain more about the complexities of life than many so-called epics.
Tokyo Story is epic, not in terms of its canvas, but in terms of its ambition, its depth and its perception of human values and feelings.
If there were only seven wonders of the cinematic world, Tokyo Story would surely be one of them.
This is absolutely unmissable cinema that will stand the test of time for the next 50 years and way beyond that.
Monday, 11 July 2011
BIG APPLE LIMEY
It was just after I got my visa to start a film course at Point Park College (now university) and the embassy official told me that Point Park wasn’t a very good university and I should think about going somewhere else or abandon my plans altogether. I took her comments under advisement and still hoped that a film course in Pittsburgh would prove interesting, enlightening and lead me to some sort of long-term stay in the U.S or some film-related job back in London, where I’m from. I came back to my apartment in Central London to find a huge package with the logo of New York University (NYU) emblazoned on the top right hand corner. I opened the package, which revealed a red folder, and opened that, which showed a letter of acceptance to the most prestigious film-related university in the world. I was shocked; numbed. I couldn’t believe my luck. It was a long shot that NYU would accept me. After all, University of Miami, University of Iowa and University of California at Los Angeles had all turned me down I had predictedA’ Level passes in English, Sociology & Psychology and the offer at NYU was conditional on securing those grades. NYU’s acceptance came with some conditions, which gave me trepidation: namely, being on academic probation my first year and having to maintain a Grade Point Average of 2.5 on a 4.0 scale.
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