Tag Archives: American cinema

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Ace in the Hole


Ace in the Hole 1
Ace in the Hole

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)

Release date: 28 April 2014

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Billy Wilder

Writers: Billy Wilder, Lesser Samuels, Walter Newman

Cast: Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Robert Arthur

USA 1951

111 mins

Kirk Douglas is Chuck Tatum, a born ‘newspaperman’, who used to have desks in New York and Washington, but is now reduced to filing copy for the Albuquerque Sun Bulletin, biding his time, waiting for the story that will get him back in the big leagues. His chance arrives in the form of luckless shmoe Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), trapped by a cave-in while trying to excavate Indian artefacts to sell at his struggling tourist trap cafe in Esquedero (nowhere, New Mexico). Tatum inveigles himself into the centre of the action by force of will and personality, and creates a media sensation with this victim of the ‘curse of the mountain of seven vultures’. The crowds begin to swarm to Esquedero, the rest of the media descend, (there is a literal ‘media circus’ when the carnival rides move in) and Tatum has to do all he can to keep his story exclusive and ongoing, and should that include getting a corrupt sheriff (Ray Teal) re-elected, and interfering with the rescue plans to draw out the ‘human interest’ drama… Well, so be it.

Co-writer/director/producer Billy Wilder’s scabrous broadside against the mentality of the yellow press should really have dated horribly in the age of blogging, twitter and tumbling print sales. Made in 1951, it’s set in a world of manual typewriters and smoky workplaces, where newspapers and radios rule and TV is the new kid on the block. That it still enthrals is largely down to the fact that it’s as lean and mean as a rattlesnake, a bitter parable of hubris and horror with no room for romance or sentiment. It knows what it wants to say and moves relentlessly towards that conclusion. Appropriately enough it has the virtues of a good tabloid hack, quickly establishing the who/what/where of the characters with minimal fuss and an eye for the telling detail. So we quickly get the measure of Lorraine (Jan Sterling), Leo’s wife, sharp of tongue and blonde of bottle, and she quickly gets the measure of Tatum: ‘I’ve met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my time but you…you’re 20 minutes’. Lorraine is allowed a complexity denied your regulation dumb blonde or femme fatale: she’s disloyal, and mercenary, but it’s hard not to feel something for a smart woman trapped in this ‘sun-baked Siberia’. Wilder was once a journalist himself, and this is a writer’s film, carried by crackling dialogue and in thrall to the logic of story rather than box office. The media landscape may have changed but the tale still rings true.

It’s a film of well-used (mainly dusty) locations and well-cast (mainly sweaty) faces, filled with character actors rather than stars. The exception, of course, being Kirk Douglas, who’s another large part of why the film still plays. Chuck Tatum is an extraordinary creation; from the moment he appears on screen reading the Sun Bulletin in a convertible being towed by a truck, he exudes a dynamic energy, a kind of poisonous charisma that sucks the rest of the cast down with him. He looks fantastic in black shirt, braces and Steve Ditko trousers, striking matches from typewriter carriages or one-handed against a thumbnail, monologuing endlessly, pacing rooms that barely contain him. We feel his frustration at his reduced status and watch his eyes light up at the scent of the tragedy that will set him free. Tatum does awful things, but he’s never a monster, and Douglas gives us moments of insecurity underneath the bluster. This is the bilious flipside to the standard American myth, where a man with the right ‘moxie’ and determination can achieve his dreams. The film ends in nightmare, but the dynamic remains the same.

Mark Stafford

The Eureka release comes with a booklet, original trailer, an informative featurette on the film with Wilder biographer Neil Sinyard, and a great little hour-long 1982 documentary Portrait of a 60&#37 Perfect Man made by Michel Ciment and Annie Tresgott, with Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, and a mischievous Wilder, on the cusp of nothing much, chatting about his life and work.

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White Dog

White Dog
White Dog

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)

Release date: 31 March 2014

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Samuel Fuller

Writers: Samuel Fuller, Curtis Hanson

Based on the novel by: Romain Gary

Cast: Paul Winfield, Kristy McNichol, Burl Ives

USA 1982

90 mins

1982 was a pretty good year for American cinema, with Blade Runner, The Thing, E.T. , The King of Comedy and First Blood being just a handful of the movies to be released theatrically. One film that home-grown audiences didn’t get to see though was Sam Fuller’s White Dog. Although it screened around Europe, receiving much praise in the process, Fuller’s tale of the attempts to recondition a dog trained to attack black people was shelved by the studio that financed it. This spineless, economically driven, act was precipitated by a well-meaning but utterly wrong-headed protest from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a representative of which raised concerns about the film – specifically that it could inspire racists to train their dogs in such a way and may even be racist itself – without having seen a single frame of it. Fearing that the entirely unjust ‘controversy’ would adversely affect the film’s box office potential, Paramount decided it wasn’t financially viable to release it.

This sorry story, recounted in the enlightening 50-page booklet that accompanies the new dual format Masters of Cinema release, highlights a number of contextual issues that add extra layers of interest to a film that has lost none of its power or relevance in the 30-odd years since it was made. Chief among these is the fact that artistic representations of issues pertaining to race/racism/racial equality have always, unsurprisingly, been a highly emotive area. Hollywood has often been uncomfortable, misguided or plain backward in its dealings with race, reflecting American society’s own turbulent relationship to both its slavery-stained history and its culturally diverse population drawn from all corners of the world.

At the time, Fuller’s film fell foul of either unfortunate or wilful ignorance. Considering White Dog’s subject matter – the attempts to counter the sometimes fatal effects of ignorance – it’s impossible to miss the irony of the treatment of what is, in actuality, an intelligent, passionate and pointed rejection of racism. The bone-headed disservice done to White Dog also says a lot about the, then, standing of its director, at least in terms of mainstream attention and the Hollywood elite. This was a filmmaker, remember, who was a decorated veteran of World War II, and one who, as a matter of course, included strong minority characters and tackled issues of equality and racism in his films throughout his career. Equal parts philosopher, hustler, humanist and maverick, Fuller was, and to a degree still is, regarded as something of an outsider within Hollywood, despite influencing the likes of Bogdanovich, Scorsese, Spielberg and Tarantino. This is more of a damning testament to Tinsel Town not quite knowing how to handle either the man and his no BS attitude, or the head-on, provocative nature of his films rather than pointing to any detrimental aspect of Fuller or his movies. This welcome Masters of Cinema entry does point to the fact that in some circles Fuller is rightly regarded as worthy of serious critical attention and respect, as well as foregrounding just how important it is to have companies such as Eureka, Criterion, Second Run and Arrow Videos, to name but a handful, releasing special editions of films that enrich our understanding of their directors and the eras and genres in which they worked.

White Dog itself is a simple story, dealing with a literal black and white issue. Inspired by a Life Magazine article and subsequent book written by Romain Gary, and co-written by Fuller and Curtis Hanson, the film works on many levels: it is a psychological thriller, an action flick, a human drama and a crime movie. If the premise of the film sounds sensational (in the wrong way), its realisation is resolutely not so. Ennio Morricone’s plaintive score complements a narrative that, while containing several violent set-pieces, is more concerned with philosophical inquiry than it is with explosive entertainment. The film’s two main locations – the Noah’s Ark centre where animals are trained to appear in TV shows and movies, and the Hollywood Hills where it is situated – sees the Dream Factory become an ideological battleground. The locations are also pointed reminders of the dangers of blindly consuming entertainment, and of mass conditioning to accept the status quo, both subjects which Fuller was always keenly aware of.

With the dog a canvas upon which the worst of humanity has been forced, the post-attack shots of its blood-stained white coat providing stark visual symbolism, a hearts-and-minds battle is played out between man and beast. Having taken on the seemingly impossible task of un-training the dog, animal wrangler Keys, played by African-American actor Paul Winfield, becomes locked in an emotionally and physically draining stand-off with the ‘four-legged time bomb‘. Kristy McNichol’s bit part actress Julie, who, after running over the dog, takes it in as her own, and Burl Ives’s Carruthers, the owner of Noah’s Ark, are also put through the wringer as Keys and the dog play out their very private but universally relevant duel. Fear, hate, aggression and violence – their existence within the individual and society – are confrontationally challenged, as are the notions of how to combat these destructive forces. The later revelation as to the identity of the owner of the white dog, the person responsible for its racial conditioning, is provocatively chilling, raising an unsettling mirror to certain sections of American society.

Featuring numerous, expertly shot suspense and action set-pieces, including an attack on a black actress by the dog that De Palma would have been proud of, White Dog also suggests the idea that reconditioning, even from ‘bad’ to ‘good’, is itself a form of psychological violence, as the film’s downbeat conclusion attests to. Comparisons to the aftermath of the use of the Ludovico technique in A Clockwork Orange are readily apparent, as the Pavlov-like conditioning implemented in both films has dire consequences.

On a wider plane than the specific story White Dog tells, the role the state, church and family plays in the upbringing of each new generation is of clear concern to Fuller, his method of addressing these issues being characteristically forthright and presented with knife-sharp clarity. The frequent use of low camera angles and POV shots, giving the audience a ‘dog’s eye’ view of proceedings, cannily places the viewer as both victim and perpetrator, making us intimate with subject matter from which some may still wish to turn their eyes and ears away.

Neil Mitchell

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Heaven’s Gate

Heavens Gate
Heaven's Gate

Format: Blu-ray + DVD

Release date: 25 November 2013

Distributor: Second Sight

Director: Michael Cimino

Writer: Michael Cimino

Cast: Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, Jeff Bridges, Isabelle Huppert, John Hurt

USA 1980

216 mins

‘Exhilarating and Moral’ are the words written at the entrance of the new skating rink that dominates the centre of a small town in Wyoming, and these same words can equally be understood as an ironic comment on the film itself. The exhilaration in Heaven’s Gate comes with director Michael Cimino’s obvious love of scale and movement. There is a spendthrift giddiness to the proceedings, an excess which chimes perfectly with the legends associated with the film’s production.

The opening scene is as high-spirited as the Harvard students who are shown celebrating their graduation. Cimino’s camera whirls around the lawns, first waltzing with the gals and then fighting with a rival fraternity. It is this dizzying movement, more than character or plot, that dominates the film. The exhilarating dancing will be continued, 20 years later when the action moves to Heaven’s Gate, in the roller-skating rink as a violinist plays a reel, and the townsfolk join the dance. But this commotion will give over to a dance of death, as the headlong rush becomes the confused, tragic and circular charge of violence and blood in the final showdown. Cimino creates a portrait of a marginalised community caught in the onrush of history. Individuals will battle to understand and react to changes that are too brutal and uncompromising. Many will be crushed (and several characters are literally crushed) in the headlong calamity of life.

So for the story: a wealthy ex-Harvard man, Marshal Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson) returns to Johnson County on learning that new immigrants are being targeted by the cattle barons’ association, led by Frank Canton (Sam Waterson). The association has drawn up a ‘death list’ of more than a hundred names. Averill doesn’t fully belong to either camp: he has been blackballed from the club where the association holds its meetings, and his university chum Billy (John Hurt) is now a gin-sodden baron, who acquiesces in murder even as he fails manically to maintain a cultured pose of insouciance. But Jim’s affections lie with Ella (Isabelle Hupert), a young prostitute who takes stolen cattle and cash from customers, and thus finds herself included on the list. One of Jim’s friends is Nick Champion (Christopher Walken), a murderer for the association, who himself nevertheless comes from the same immigrant stock as his victims.

This is where the ‘moral’ part comes in. The cynicism and anger are heartfelt – but the speed of events and switching loyalties overtake the film and its protagonists. The town meetings held in the skating rink are drowned out in lamentations and shouting, and finally gunfire; no one is clear what they want to do – including Jim – and when a decision is finally made to fight back against the association’s hired killers, many rush off in the wrong direction or are killed in the initial enthusiasm, before the association forces fire a shot.

Michael Cimino’s grand folly has accrued legends about massive waste, with entire towns built and then torn down and built again; the ruination of a major studio; and the definitive death – after a moment of brief supremacy – of the auteur in Hollywood. But now that we have the re-mastered director’s cut, we can judge for ourselves the worth of this bizarre end to the American Western. It certainly has its flaws (principally the wooden post that is Kris Kristofferson, sitting like a lump in the middle of the film) but this cut finally allows us to see the beauty – especially in the glory of the landscape, captured by Vilmos Zsigmond – and the terror of the brutal labor pains that were played out in this birth of a nation.

John Bleasdale

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The Tarnished Angels

The Tarnished Angels
The Tarnished Angels

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 26 August 2013

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Douglas Sirk

Writers: Douglas Sirk, George Zuckerman

Based on the novel: Pylon by William Faulker

Cast: Rock Hudson, Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, Jack Carson, Alan Reed

USA 1957

91 mins

The beautiful thing about The Tarnished Angels, director Douglas Sirk’s adaptation of William Faulker’s novel Pylon, set during the Great Depression, is that the film remarkably encapsulates the human condition in a mere 90 minutes, using only a handful of characters and locations. Desire, love, greed, avarice, sorrow and tragedy are all present, though the film itself is a departure in style from the more overblown melodramas that Sirk is famed for. It’s a remarkable feat – that it also looks gorgeous, with its perfect silvery hues (it was shot in black and white Cinemascope, rather than in colour) and features terrific performances from Rock Hudson, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone, adds to the film’s appeal.

Roger Shumann (Stack) is a former First World War pilot, now daredevil, who travels from air show to air show to compete for the top prize. His blonde bombshell wife, LaVerne (Malone), fell in love with a poster of Shumann she saw during the war; and in a desperate bid to gain his affection, became a parachute jumper, gliding down to earth in a white floating dress. But to her driven, obsessed and foolish husband, she’s little more than an accessory, even if she is the mother to their small child, Jack, who is already itching for his own seat in a plane. It’s left to Jiggs (Jack Carson), their loyal mechanic, to worship the ground that LaVerne walks on. That is, until Burke Devlin (Hudson) arrives on the scene. The film is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and Devlin, a wise-cracking journalist with a drinking problem, and a thorn in his editor’s side, wants to write a human interest story about the Shumanns – about how a flying ace and all-American hero ends up scraping the barrel, living hand-to-mouth, while risking his life to compete against much younger hot-shots.

It’s a tight, claustrophobic picture, with much of the action taking place at a carnival, with the pilots racing in the air above the fair ground, flying a circuit that sees them swoop around pylons, inching ever closer to fly the tightest line. The crowd, cheering them on, will play their own role in the tragedy that unravels at the end of the film. But until then, the Mardi Gras parties and carnival atmosphere are the perfect foils for the characters’ inner torments. LaVerne has never had the chance to live her life to the full; instead she’s spent it chasing after a man’s withheld love; beautiful, charismatic, she’s endured a luckless life full of lonely nights.

Devlin, of course, falls for LaVerne, who’s charmed by his attention – although at first, he seems more interested in probing her for personal details about her marriage and life with Shumann for his newspaper story. But by insinuating himself into their lives, Devlin also has the perverse effect of eventually bringing the married couple closer together – but only after a shocking trade that the pilot tries to make with a greedy businessman: a new plane in return for his wife. Despite being portrayed as impossibly heartless, Shumann is eventually given one last shot at redemption – yet it comes at a terrible price.

Brought to life by Irving Glassberg’s expressionistic cinematography, and with an exceptional performance from Rock Hudson, who delivers a terrific epilogue to the sad story of the Shumann, The Tarnished Angels is an intriguing, unmissable slice of Americana.

Sarah Cronin

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All Is Lost

All is Lost
All Is Lost

Format: Cinema

Release date: 26 December 2013

Distributor: Universal

Director: J.C. Chandor

Writer: J.C. Chandor

Cast: Robert Redford

USA 2013

106 mins

A man – alone in the middle of the Indian Ocean – wakes to find the hull of his yacht has been breached by a shipping container adrift. The seawater has leaked in and destroyed the electronic equipment the man (Robert Redford) uses to navigate and, more vitally, to pump the water from the boat. Without panic, or fuss, the man disengages his yacht, stops to retrieve his sea anchor and tackle, and then sets about patiently repairing the damage, even as tropical storms brew on the horizon. He will face a struggle for survival in which he will be stripped bare of everything but his stoicism, cunning and ingenuity.

J.C. Chandor’s film at first seems like a complete departure from Margin Call (2011), his financial crisis-dissecting 24-hour drama. In that film, tension is built on talk, as a piece of crucial information is passed steadily upstairs via one explanation after another. However, for all the yada-yada, talk is relatively cheap. Words are used to evade, seduce, cheat and betray. As deadly as silk dipped in arsenic, Jeremy Irons – playing the CEO John Tuld – gives such a persuasive explanation for the crisis to Kevin Spacey that he manages to persuade even the audience, who are still living with the consequences of the greed and irresponsibility of CEOs like him. So in a way, the decision to dispense with dialogue in All is Lost is perhaps more consistent than it at first seems. The unnamed man is obviously wealthy, but he is detached from the world and has some obvious regrets, which grow as his world becomes significantly more elusive. Although this might be a push, his attempt at some kind of ideal of individual freedom is endangered by the invasion of the wild and the free spaces by the corporate. The container spills high-priced, cheaply-made trainers into the indifferent seas. It is this banality that might, in the end, kill him.

The man – unlike Tuld and his ilk – is in a predicament not of his making. His boat is well supplied for every contingency, and what skills the man does not already possess – and he seems to be more than an able seaman – he is willing to learn, pulling down a book on celestial navigation and getting down to some serious study as soon as he has the time. This could well be the performance of Robert Redford’s career. The vanilla-flavoured actor has become increasingly bland and gauzy with age, playing off the memory of better films and, unlike Clint Eastwood or the late Paul Newman, unwilling to accept and play to his age. Even in the forgettable The Company You Keep (2012), he has a crazily young daughter. Here, finally, age becomes part of the character, as the well-kept man slowly falls to pieces under the unrelenting physical struggle, the beating sun, the deprivation and salt water. Redford’s performance is unshowy. His character is lost (and found) in the pains, excitements and pleasures of just doing things. His emotional inner life is expressed by a small gesture, the retrieving of a personal item, a small sign of pique, the sight of him shaving carefully as he awaits a storm that he knows is approaching and might well take his life.

This is an action film in which the actions are all vitally important, unlike most action films in which a law of diminishing returns sees the explosion of the world itself as a ho-hum eventuality. All is Lost is the kind of action film a young Hemingway might have directed, should he have turned his hand to it. It is a small film that is underwritten by the epic nature of life and death and the ocean. Without words, it avoids saying anything: there are no audience surrogates (think Wilson in Cast Away, 2000), no monologues (aside from an opening prologue) and no prayers. And yet despite this, or perhaps because of it, All is Lost is a film that very eloquently provides an argument for the survival of heroes, or at least one hero.

John Bleasdale

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Zero Dark Thirty

A gripping, tense follow-up to The Hurt Locker (2009), Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012) dramatises the decade-long hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Based on the taut but strikingly detailed script by her long-term research collaborator and former war reporter Mark Boal, the film generated significant buzz on all fronts around it’s theatrical release earlier this year – and some controversy along with it. Joe Decie revisits the unsettling thriller, released in the UK on DVD/Blu-ray + UV Copy on 10 June 2013.

zero-dark-review
Comic Strip Review by Joe Decie
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The Long Riders

The Long Riders
The Long Riders

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 3 June 2013

Distributor: Second Sight Films

Director: Walter Hill

Writers: Bill Bryden, Steven Phillip Smith, Stacy Keach, James Keach n

Cast: James Keach, Stacy Keach, David Carradine, Robert Carradine, Keith Carradine, Dennis Quaid, Randy Quaid, Christopher Guest, Nicholas Guest

USA 1980

100 mins

The Long Riders, Walter Hill’s take on the exploits of the Jesse James and Cole Younger gang, is an entertaining, highly watchable Western with some charismatic performances, if not quite a classic of the genre. The film’s ace in the hole, casting real-life brothers to play the ones in the gang, may sound like a bit of a gimmick, but it’s actually a strategy that pays off beautifully (despite the fact I can’t help but think that the roles of the Quaid brothers should have been reversed). Although James Keach produced the film, he and his brother Stacey, as Jesse and Frank James, respectively, take something of a back seat to the Younger brothers, terrifically played by David and Keith Carradine. It’s Keith in particular, whose character, Jim, seems to spend half the film romancing a whore, in some of the film’s lighter moments, who delivers one of the film’s strongest and most appealing performances.

Hill and his screenwriters are generous with their sympathy for the notorious bandits: the film opens with a bank robbery that goes wrong when one of them shoots a civilian, causing the trigger-happy criminal to be exiled from the gang. The James-Younger gang don’t kill the innocent; but rather it’s the undiscriminating Pinkertons, hot on their tails, who are the true criminals, unleashing their fire on anything or anyone that stands in their way.

Episodic in nature, the film isn’t built around any one narrative arc, but rather follows the already-notorious gang through their – at times – even mundane existence, as they go from bank robbery to hiding out, chasing women, attending funerals and dances, and, of course, attempting to dodge the law. And it all ends with the notorious betrayal of Jesse James – the subject of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, one of the best Westerns in recent years. The feel is almost languorous throughout, demanding a little patience from the audience, before rewarding them with a terrific climactic shoot-out, with plenty of slow-motion shots of spurting blood and reeling, writhing men.

Carefully composed and beautifully shot, with a soundtrack by the legendary Ry Cooder, there are more than enough elements packed in this Western to recommend it. But what makes it a special treat is the chance to rediscover some fine acting from a bunch of Hollywood legends who seem to have lost their way in recent years.

Sarah Cronin

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Behind the Candelabra

Behind the Candelabra_2
Behind the Candelabra

Format: Cinema

Release date: 7 June 2013

Distributor: E1 Entertainment

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Writer: Richard LaGravenese (screenplay)

Based on the book Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace by: Scott Thorson and Alex Thorleifson

Cast: Michael Douglas, Matt Damon, Dan Aykroyd, Rob Lowe, Scott Bakula

USA 2013

118 mins

From the moment Behind the Candelabra opens with a blow-out of disco-genius and camp, one can’t help but embrace two thoughts: first, that Matt Damon and Michael Douglas don’t actually make a bad pair of lovers; and second, that Side Effects, thankfully, doesn’t go down in cinema history as the last Steven Soderbergh film ever made. Instead, at the age of 50, the bustling director has once again crafted a fine-tuned drama that manages the balancing act of being exuberant and lavish without being patronising, and that is outrageously witty, feisty, slick looking and well-acted, without feeling conceited or narcissistic. What’s more, although doomed as ‘too gay’ by Hollywood’s studio bosses, and hence produced by HBO with no theatrical distribution deal in sight in the US, Behind the Candelabra shrewdly dissembles the various obstacles Soderbergh ran into when trying make what is now said to be his directorial swansong.

Part of the magic in Soderbergh’s thoroughly entertaining biopic on the life of flamboyant piano virtuoso Liberace comes from the way it strives to be as free-spirited, wily and simply irresistible as its subject. Based on Scott Thorson’s memoir about his troubled five-year relationship with the alluring entertainer, the film begins as the young, bisexual Thorson (Matt Damon) is introduced to the aging, publicly heterosexual megastar (Michael Douglas). As you would expect, Thorson soon can’t resist the palatial kitsch and subtle arts of seduction thrown at him by Liberace (who comes across as a lascivious, eccentric and oddly jealous father-figure). Soderbergh spends a reasonable amount of time plotting a credible romance between the two men in an unashamedly hilarious setting of late 1970s extravaganza, before delving into melodrama and tragedy as Liberace averts his gaze from his younger love interest and, ultimately, succumbs to AIDS at a time when many people still believed it was a pestilence sent by God to extinguish the bad seeds in his creation. At the same time, the film showcases some of the best acting seen to date by both Douglas and Damon. While Douglas banks on cocky charm and sympathy, the younger Damon delivers a more understated yet weighty performance, which comes across in unassuming looks and gestures compared to the obvious seduction, delusion and ultimate rejection engineered upon his character by Liberace.

In other words: Behind the Candelabra is more than just an epilogue to a career that embraces a wealth of inspired, original, if occasionally flawed, pieces of filmmaking, ever since Soderbergh first emerged on the big screen with Sex, Lies and Videotape in 1989. And suddenly it all makes sense, at least to the craftsman himself, as he reflected on his departure from the director’s chair after the world premiere of his film at Cannes: ‘I am absolutely taking a break, I don’t know how extended it is going to be. But I can’t say that – if this was the last movie I made – I would be unhappy. And there is a connection to my first film, because by the end of the day, it’s really about two people in a room. At the same time, stylistically, it’s a progression. If you’d flashed me forward and showed me this film, I would have been able to recognise that there was a lot of experience that resulted in kind of a simplicity and directness in the filmmaking, that I think would have made me very happy. It’s been a nice run.’

Pamela Jahn

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The Iceman

The Iceman
The Iceman

Format: Cinema

Release date: 7 June 2013

Distributor: Lionsgate

Director: Ariel Vromen

Writers: Morgan Land, Ariel Vromen (screenplay)

Based on the book The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer by: Anthony Brun

Cast: Michael Shannon, Winona Ryder, Chris Evans, Ray Liotta

USA 2012

105 mins

A hulk of a man with a soft spot for sadistic murder, Polish-born American Richard Kuklinski gained fame in the mid-1980s as the The Iceman, a highly professional Mafia hit man who is alleged to have ruthlessly killed more than 100 men (sparing women and children by rule), while living a sham life as a banker and devoted Catholic family man, with a wife and two loving daughters, in suburban New Jersey. History suggests he received his nickname for hiding a body in an ice-cream-truck freezer, but watching Arial Vromen’s chilly thriller about the notorious contract killer, that only vaguely hints at the subtle ingenuity with which Kuklinski (Michael Shannon) dispatched his numerous victims for the mob over the course of more than a decade.

Plotted and paced as a character study rather than a full-blown action movie, the film starts with Richie as a well-mannered, if somewhat unwieldy, young man out on a date with the girl (Winona Ryder) destined to become the love of his life. He clearly has the physical strength to kill, but a romantic at heart, he manages to pull off his stone-faced charm in his favour. However, soon after a short period of conjugal bliss, Richie’s focus begins to shift dramatically as he becomes involved with troubled local mob boss Roy (Ray Liotta), who gives him the opportunity to make full use of his vicious, barbaric potential.

On paper, this may sound like a solid enough premise to make for an enjoyable ride. The performances are strong throughout, in particular Ray Liotta, but also Ryder as Kuklinski’s trusting wife, who didn’t have a clue what her caring, if increasingly abusive, husband was up to when he left home every day. But even a strong cast lead by an outstanding actor such as Shannon (Take Shelter) can’t diminish the feeling that there is something wrong with Vromen’s film from the outset. And this doesn’t necessarily apply only to the standard criminal biopic plot, which feels a little clumsy and heavy-handed in places. What ultimately makes The Iceman a rather underwhelming experience is the over-stylised period look, which tries too hard to re-vive the cool grittiness, low-tech feel and cliché of the classic American gangster and crime movies that ruled the 1970s, while throwing in a touch of film noir and some explicit violence for good measure. However, instead of daring to move further into darker and more mysterious horror territory, Vroman seems more interested in exploring the tragic duality of Kuklinski’s life as the proud, loving family man who killed for fun, for money, to cover up his own crimes, and to satisfy his inner rage. Yet, the calculated, episodic structure Vroman applies to ratchet up this high body count doesn’t quite keep up enough narrative momentum to carry the audience along.

In the end, The Iceman seems like a missed opportunity, as Shannon’s authority as the lead is undeniably tantalising. His performance is finely tuned and powerful as ever, displaying a kind of ascetically mature understanding of his character. Kuklinski, it seems, was a man as much at war with himself as with the world that surrounded him, and Shannon, with his unnerving charisma and emotionless, beady eyes, resembles that intelligent, cruel, animal energy required to maintain a two-fisted façade that never revealed the true killer inside, until his arrest in 1986.

Pamela Jahn

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The Place beyond the Pines

Pines
The Place beyond the Pines

Format: Cinema

Release date: 12 April 2013

Distributor: Studiocanal

Venues: Key cities

Director: Derek Cianfrance

Writers: Derek Cianfrance, Ben Coccio, Darius Marder

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, Ben Mendolsohn, Ray Liotta, Dane DeHaan

USA 2012

140 mins

For everyone who wasn’t into Derek Cianfrance’s eccentric, love and break-up story Blue Valentine (2010), the director’s latest offering starts off as a more thrilling, tense and ambiguous piece of work, not least in terms of making use of a fast-paced, crime-drama plot to explore the troubled mindset of his lead character, who finds himself confronted with his own actions and liabilities. Yet whether an abrupt genre twist in the second half of the film, and the decision to cast another of Hollywood’s currently most-wanted male actors as a co-lead, pays off to everyone’s satisfaction, may be the cause of some argument.

Ryan Gosling is Luke, a stunt-bike rider who learns that he has a son by one of his ex-lovers, Romina (Eva Mendes). All ready to man up, he instantly decides to swap his life riding the Cage of Death at funfairs for some time with his accidentally found family. Problem is, Luke doesn’t have the money to support the family in the way he feels he should, so it doesn’t take much for his new boss and drinking chum Robin (Ben Mendelsohn) to convince him that, instead of sticking to a decent, if underpaid, job as a mechanic, they are better off robbing banks, using Luke’s motorcycle and vicious driving skills to dupe the police. But soon Luke can’t get enough, a raid goes terribly wrong, and then that’s that. In a quarter of a second, the focus shifts to seemingly mild-minded but zealous street cop Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), who has his very own agenda, yet his life and Luke’s become inevitably entwined. After being injured during the raid, Avery plunges into a crisis that sees him dangerously caught in the system, while Cianfrance spares no effort pulling his new front man through every plot twist and turn that could possibly come out of such a premise, until all of the characters have finally revealed their true connections and colours.

Although the story becomes increasingly heavy-handed in places, and at times a little too clichéd, The Place Beyond the Pines benefits in no small part from Gosling’s contribution, delivering yet another convincing performance in a nuanced study of audacity and vulnerability. As long as he sets the pace, the film dazzles, surprises and amazes if, ultimately, it turns into a moody, meandering thriller-drama that falls slightly short of the mark and its bold, epic ambitions.

Pamela Jahn

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