Tag: Sally Hawkins

Submarine (2010, Richard Ayoade)

I didn’t know Submarine came from a novel going in. I didn’t know it came from the “Great Welsh Novel” until a few minutes ago. I was checking to see if the novel—written by Joe Dunthorne—was YA. Turns out it’s literary fiction, which makes the film adaptation, screenplay by director Ayoade, slightly more interesting, slightly less interesting. Submarine is a coming-of-age story for teenage protagonist and narrator Craig Roberts; he’s just an eighties Welsh kid who reads Nietzsche, literally spies on his parents, and likes a girl (Yasmin Paige). It’s one of those coming-of-age stories where it could be a Cat Stevens-only soundtrack and it’d just work. That sub-genre.

Only Ayoade doesn’t want to rely on the music too much, not soundtrack stuff, because music plays in an interesting way into the narrative. Submarine’s got a very tidy narrative, which makes the film feel like a literary fiction approach to a YA adaptation. It’s just actually more the inverse.

Right away, it’s clear Roberts is going to be a different kind of protagonist. His first big sequence is coldly participating in bullying Lily McCann to impress Paige, only to realize it might not be the best behavior when you consider other people may have feelings. It plays out in the narration and it’s great. Right up until the third act, Submarine is a very impressive character study of a wisening Roberts. It’s just the third act is a bunch of action montages (Ayoade and editors Chris Dickens and Nick Fenton seem to be fans of David Moritz’s excellent Bottle Rocket cutting) and trite resolves. You can be didactic, you just can’t be so obviously didactic, no matter how beautifully muddy Ayoade and cinematographer Erik Wilson shoot the film. The film’s meticulous in its visuals, like they’re going to sustain the narrative.

So it’s confident, which is good. It’s confident and ostensibly ambitious. The ending’s really pat. And cloying. And semi-cops out. But since it’s an adaptation, it was always working towards that ending, which affects whether or not it’s particularly ambitious. It’s enthusiastic.

Great acting throughout. Roberts is a transfixing lead. Paige is fine as his girlfriend, who unfortunately implies more than the conveys since she’s got to remain something of a mystery to Roberts. Though Ayoade doesn’t zoom in on the female characters, with Sally Hawkins (who’s subtly phenomenal) having to do the implying bit too. Submarine’s very much about boys and their dads. Noah Taylor plays Roberts’s dad, whose dreams of televised science communicator success have washed up because he’s too awkward and instead he’s a research drone. He’s great. It’s kind of an easy part because it’s a caricature but Taylor brings depth to it. Eventually. Hawkins is the bored housewife mom trope so it’s even more impressive how great she gets. The inciting action is her ex-boyfriend, a psychic motivational speaker played by Paddy Considine (who’s fine but not special), moving in next door. Old jealousies and flames rekindle, with Roberts trying to keep his world from changing. It’s all very epical, with lots of pseudo-cynically portrayed teenage hijinks. Submarine is an incredibly nostalgic picture, even though it always tries hard to appear stoic.

Some good jokes. Not the eighties kid homophobia, which doesn’t get used for jokes exactly but also doesn’t get examined. It’s just decoration, along with the casual misogyny and whatnot. Submarine, again, is a boy story.

And, outside the confines of that genre, it’s a good one. It’s not original but Ayoade packages it originally. His application of familiar techniques is always inventive, occasionally inspired. The writing is excellent, just not the plotting and then only because the end’s a whiff. Albeit a not ineffective one.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019, Michael Dougherty)

I wonder if, much like that one immortal monkey divining Borges’s dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, one could assemble a list of all the action beats in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which are mostly from Aliens and Jurassic Park 1 and 2, and arrange them to figure out the story to this film. Once the film hits the second act, I think it’d be more—I’m forgetting the stuff with Vera Farmiga, which is more out of a Mission: Impossible or James Bond. I’m sure Borges’s immortal monkey could do it, but I guess there is something more to director Dougherty and Zach Shields’s script than just stringing together the action scenes, fitting in the right amount of product placement for the studio (turns out it’s a lot and then a lot times twelve), and making sure there enough possible toys. See, you don’t just get Godzilla merchandise from this one, there’s also the other monsters, plus the stupid giant-sized stealth bomber-thing the good guys fly around in because Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a desperately joyless adaptation of a crappy eighties Godzilla cartoon.

Complete with annoying teen Millie Bobby Brown running around. Brown’s not just a mechanical engineer and accomplice to premeditated omnicide, she also knows how to run a ballpark sound board, which is maybe her most impressive trait.

She’s daughter of mad scientist Vera Farmiga (hashtag feminism), who has betrayed Monarch—the good guys with the giant flying fortress who tell the governments of the world to eat it while they study giant monsters, called Titans because someone wanted a trademark and this Godzilla movie tries as much as it can to forget Japan exists so you know they’re not calling them kaiju—and teamed up with eco-terrorist Charles Dance to release all the giant monsters who will once again rule the Earth.

But Brown’s also daughter of Kyle Chandler, who left Farmiga and Brown because their other kid died in the first Godzilla—unseen and stepped on, confirming it did kill a bunch of civilians but whatever. Chandler lives a simple life with a nineties movies alpha male cottage on a lake where he studies wolves nearby. He doesn’t seem to have a problem with Farmiga raising Brown in isolation at the giant monster facilities around the world.

As bad as you think Dougherty and Shields can get with the script, they somehow manage to go even lower. And not just when they’re reusing quotable lines from Alien and The Abyss. It’s all the time. They’ve got nothing good going on here. Nothing.

Obviously things don’t go well with Farmiga’s plan to give the world over to the monsters because it turns out they used frog DNA in the… sadly, no. Nothing quite so good. They really do just hinge it all on Farmiga’s ability to deliver a mad scientist speech and she fails at it utterly. She’s terrible, Brown’s terrible, Chandler’s pretty bad (his part is written as a Die Hard part for Bruce Willis, which would be amusing if Chandler were acting it that way, but he’s not), Ken Watanabe is downright hacky, Sally Hawkins somehow manages not to know how embarrassed she should look during her thankless scenes but someone doesn’t, which just makes it more embarrassing. Not to mention the stunt cameos.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters, more than anything else, reminds of the first American attempt at a Godzilla, not because of plotting, but because of the film’s inability to tell an honest scene as well as the stunt casting. Zhang Ziyi gets… one hell of a thankless part, but she’s better than Hawkins for sure. Zhang’s as good as it gets in Monsters. Same goes for—shockingly because the part is so atrociously written—Bradley Whitford. He’s got the scientist slash medical doctor slash airplane pilot slash submarine pilot maybe part. It’s a really poorly written part, but Whitford manages not to be too bad. It’s the function of his part to make the film worse—kind of like how, in addition to being terrible, Thomas Middleditch literally has this recurring thing about making O’Shea Jackson Jr. seem either stupid or dickish. Jackson’s playing one of the soldiers, Middleditch is some useless company man (Monsters basically thinks Paul Reiser is the good guy in Aliens), Jackson’s Black, Middleditch’s White, Jackson’s likable, Middleditch’s a dipshit… it’s bad. And weird. Because Middleditch is apparently going to go on to become Chandler’s offscreen bro. They act like they’ve had a big bonding thing throughout, even though they never have any real scenes together because the script’s terrible and no one has any real scenes.

Unless you count the Joe Morton going and looking for someone scene. Joe Morton and David Straithairn somehow get through this one unscathed. And CCH Pounder. It’s very nice to see her in something… especially since she’s in the first scene so you could just turn it off after she’s done.

Also bad is Aisha Hinds. Not sure how much of it’s her fault but whatever her agent convinced her was going to happen because of this part… the agent was incorrect.

Terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible music from Bear McCreary. There’s not even a lot of it. It’s sparse. But ungodly awful when it comes in. The movie ought to give some kind of warning so you can steel yourself.

Umm, what else. The editing’s not good, but Dougherty’s direction is awful so it’s not like there’s much the editors—all three of them—could do. Lawrence Sher’s photography is similarly not noteworthy. Monsters’s “mise-en-scène” is broke—Dougherty doesn’t know how to direct a single scene in the movie, giant monster or not—so what’s Sher going to do to fix it. What’s anyone going to do.

There are a handful of other things—okay, maybe a dozen but then like five things (plus the dozen)—I’d really like to enumerate but I can’t. If I list these silly, silly things, it might encourage someone to watch Godzilla: King of the Monsters because it would seem like you couldn’t not have some kind of fun with the goofy things on the list. I don’t even want to tease them.

So instead I’ll just mention Doughterty’s “Brodie Bruce” type obsession with kaiju banging—Mothra and Godzilla are (apparently unrequited) soulmates but there’s a good chance Monsters is implying Ghidorah bangs Rodan. It comes up in a lousy attempt at a joke but then at the end the plot perturbs in just the right way for it to seem like a thing, even if it’s just the movie being cheap or expedient or whatever.

Once upon a time, Charles Dance wore a t-shirt with “Cheaper than Alan Rickman” on it, referring to his casting in a film. King of the Monsters—the entire production, the entire cast, the entire crew, everyone, everything, every frame—is wearing a “Cheaper than Alan Rickman” t-shirt.

It’s an astonishingly silly movie and it’s mortifying the filmmakers weren’t able to at least make a fun, astonishingly silly movie.

Godzilla (2014, Gareth Edwards)

Instead of focusing on the giant monsters fighting, Gareth Edwards tells his Godzilla from the human perspective. It's too bad because Edwards occasionally will set up an action shot well–he's inept at following through with these setups and actually doing a good action scene, but he's always terrible with the actors. The most interesting question Godzilla raises is in regards to its character actors… why can David Strathairn keep it together with Bryan Cranston looks increasingly more humiliated to be delivering Max Borenstein's terrible lines?

There's nothing good about Godzilla. There's not some gem of a little performance, there's not some fantastic sequence to partially redeem the film. Borenstein rips off a plot point from the last American remake (with some garnish) but it's all right because most of the first half has Edwards ripping off everything he can from Steven Spielberg. Poorly, of course, because Edwards, Borenstein and Godzilla are all terrible.

Particularly bad also is Alexandre Desplat's score. There's not a single good note of music, but given the film's atrocious sound design–which is usually meant to heighten the emotional impact of leads Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen's lousy acting–one would be unable to hear it.

Real quick–Taylor-Johnson's awful, Olsen's awful, Cranston's embarrassed–Sally Hawkins looks like she's ready to cry being in this turkey. Ken Watanabe gives the second best performance (after Strathairn); Borenstein gives him the most idiotic dialogue.

Godzilla's truly American now. The film would fail a fourth grade science quiz. It's exceptionally stupid. And bad.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by Gareth Edwards; screenplay by Max Borenstein, based a story by Dave Callaham; director of photography, Seamus McGarvey; edited by Bob Ducsay; music by Alexandre Desplat; production designer, Owen Paterson; produced by Thomas Tull, Jon Jashni, Mary Parent and Brian Rogers; released by Warner Bros

Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Ford Brody), Ken Watanabe (Dr. Serizawa), Elizabeth Olsen (Elle Brody), Juliette Binoche (Sandra Brody), Sally Hawkins (Graham), David Strathairn (Admiral Stenz), Richard T. Jones (Captain Hampton) and Bryan Cranston (Joe Brody).

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Blue Jasmine (2013, Woody Allen)

There are a lot of interesting things Woody Allen does with Blue Jasmine–genre shifts, a somewhat fractured narrative style where he reveals lead Cate Blanchett’s past in glimpses–but the most surprising one has to be when she ceases to be the film’s protagonist and becomes its subject.

Blanchett sort of shares the picture with Sally Hawkins, who plays her sister. Blanchett was a rich New York wife, now she’s down and out and having to stay with working class Hawkins in San Francisco. For the first half hour or so, Allen plays it like he’s working on the relationship between the two women. Or maybe something to do with Bobby Cannavale as Hawkins’s current boyfriend or Andrew Dice Clay as her ex.

Allen gets some exceptional performances in the film. Blanchett’s peerless in the lead. She’s a target for derision, for pity, for anger, often with Allen having her change gears immediately during a scene. Hawkins is good as the sister; she doesn’t have much to do except react to Cannavale or Clay. Both of them are fantastic, with Clay being something of a revelation.

In other supporting roles, Louis C.K. and Peter Sarsgaard are both good. Baldwin’s fine in his part too. There’s just nothing to compare with the intensity of Blanchett, Cannavale or Clay.

Allen’s use of San Francisco is muted. Javier Aguirresarobe’s photography is excellent, but it’s just a setting for the story. Most of the shots are close-ups.

Jasmine’s quiet, loud and excellent.

4/4★★★★

CREDITS

Written and directed by Woody Allen; director of photography, Javier Aguirresarobe; edited by Alisa Lepselter; production designer, Santo Loquasto; produced by Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum and Edward Walson; released by Sony Pictures Classics.

Starring Cate Blanchett (Jasmine), Sally Hawkins (Ginger), Bobby Cannavale (Chili), Peter Sarsgaard (Dwight), Andrew Dice Clay (Augie), Louis C.K. (Al), Tammy Blanchard (Jane), Max Casella (Eddie), Michael Stuhlbarg (Dr. Flicker), Alden Ehrenreich (Danny) and Alec Baldwin (Hal).

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Layer Cake (2004, Matthew Vaughn)

I tried. I really did try.

It’s absurd, in a lot of ways, to even give Layer Cake any kind of chance at all. It’s one of these hipster British crime movies.

I don’t remember why I thought it might be all right–there was no empirical evidence to influence that thinking. The direction is CG aided Tarantino–well, Tarantino of the 1990s. I doubt Tarantino is as static as his emulators. He really ought to get a cut of any hipster crime movie.

What’s so crappy about Layer Cake is it pretends it’s something original. It lifts lines and scenes from Scarface–made some twenty years before–and thinks its revolutionary. And these aren’t the popular Scarface scenes, these are the drab procedural scenes–which means “The Streets of San Francisco” probably did them eight years before Scarface.

Now, I love a lot of British cinema. Well, I like a lot of it and I love some of it. A bit of it. But the lack of originality is distressing. Did every British director from 1992 on try to make something so Miramax would pick it up for U.S. distribution?

Layer Cake makes me wish Panavision had never been invented, much less popularized. Vaughn’s a pretentious director, but he’s nowhere near as atrocious as the narration.

Yes, get the author of the hipster novel to write the script of the hipster movie. It works out so well.

I loathe this film.

I loathe myself for giving it twenty minutes.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by Matthew Vaughn; screenplay by J.J. Connolly, based on his novel; director of photography, Ben Davis; edited by Jon Harris; music by Lisa Gerrard and Ilan Eshkeri; production designer, Kave Quinn; produced by Adam Bohling, David Reid and Vaughan; released by Sony Pictures Classics.

Starring Daniel Craig (XXXX), Colm Meaney (Gene), Kenneth Cranham (Jimmy Price), George Harris (Morty), Jamie Foreman (The Duke), Sienna Miller (Tammy), Michael Gambon (Eddie Temple), Marcel Iureş (Slavo), Tom Hardy (Clarkie), Tamer Hassan (Terry), Ben Whishaw (Sidney), Burn Gorman (Gazza), Sally Hawkins (Slasher), Dexter Fletcher (Cody), Steve John Shepherd (Tiptoes), Louis Emerick (Trevor), Stephen Walters (Shanks), Paul Orchard (Lucky), Dragan Mićanović (Dragan), Nick Thomas-Webster (Dragan’s henchman), Nathalie Lunghi (Charlie) and Jason Flemyng (Crazy Larry).

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Happy-Go-Lucky (2008, Mike Leigh)

I’m not sure how I feel about Panavision Mike Leigh. Dick Pope’s cinematography–and the film’s overall color scheme too–is very vibrant. Happy-Go-Lucky is a peppy, bright, Panavision Mike Leigh film. It’s got a loud–good, but loud–score (from Gary Yershon); the score’s peppy too. There’s a very definite arc to the film, with a predictable ending. It’s improvised like the rest of Leigh’s films, but it’s going for a different effect–it’s a comedy. If Hugh Grant showed up in Happy-Go-Lucky, he wouldn’t be at all out of place. In fact, he might even be a good addition to it.

The film has a deceptively small dramatic vehicle–always happy schoolteacher and all around nice person Sally Hawkins has her bike stolen so she has to learn to drive, introducing her to misanthropic driving instructor Eddie Marsan. Will Marsan eventually fall under her–unintentional–spell? I spent most of the film hoping not, since the driving scenes would only add up to something–other than just being Hawkins in driving classes, not an epical framework for a narrative–if there’s a culminating scene with Marsan freaking out and screaming at her for being so happy.

So happy-go-lucky.

The film presents Hawkins as a little annoying in her constant jubilance, but she is a good person. There’s a scene–maybe in the middle–where it’s clear Hawkins is such a good person, she sometimes puts it before her personal safety. So raising the question of her motives for her behavior in the conclusion and subjecting the viewer to a traditional romantic comedy self-reflective montage… it’s wrong. Happy-Go-Lucky spends most of its time meandering, only to get real close to attaining something special at the end, then decides to be a romantic comedy instead.

It’s a Mike Leigh movie with an intentional comic set piece. Sure, Karina Fernandez’s flamenco teacher is hilarious–but it’s a fake moment in a Mike Leigh film. It’s a good, fake moment, exactly the type of thing a theater-full of romantic comedy goers would love to see. I really enjoyed it, but it’s the type of thing where the followup joke involves Hugh Grant learning to flamenco.

Hawkins is great, no question, as is Marsan. She makes the character work, usually during the quiet scenes. The supporting cast is all solid–Alexis Zegerman plays her roommate (there are a few comments about the pair having a romantic relationship, but it’s all in jest… the movie might have worked better if it hadn’t been), Samuel Roukin’s her romantic interest (they have a lovely romantic comedy conclusion).

The stuff Leigh drops–the unique material Happy-Go-Lucky initially tries to discuss (racism, abuse)–is almost forgotten by the end. The lengthy comedy material makes it all disappear, swept under the carpet during one of the funnier scenes perhaps.

But Leigh also introduces the idea Hawkins’s innocence, her demeanor, will eventually land her in hot water. He exploits the viewer’s concern for the character, the concern he’s created for just that reason–to add tension to a number of scenes. It’s a standard move, occasionally honest, occasionally not, always with good acting from Hawkins. But the move’s a middling one, not the kind of thing I expect from Mike Leigh, lovely Panavision composition or no lovely Panavision composition.

Oddly, Leigh’s a great Panavision composer. His shots are magnificent… like he spent more time on how the shots look than what goes on in them.

3/4★★★

CREDITS

Written and directed by Mike Leigh; director of photography, Dick Pope; edited by Jim Clark; music by Gary Yershon; production designer, Mark Tildesley; produced by Simon Channing Williams; released by Momentum Pictures.

Starring Sally Hawkins (Poppy), Eddie Marsan (Scott), Alexis Zegerman (Zoe), Andrea Riseborough (Dawn), Sinéad Matthews (Alice), Kate O’Flynn (Suzy), Sarah Niles (Tash), Sylvestra le Touzel (Heather), Karina Fernandez (the flamenco teacher) and Stanley Townsend (Tramp).

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Cassandra’s Dream (2007, Woody Allen)

It’s getting increasingly difficult not to talk about Woody Allen’s films in the context of his body of work. While on one hand, Cassandra’s Dream does feature what could be construed as a Jaws reference, it’s also rather similar in pacing to some of Allen’s late 1970s, early 1980s films. The film’s first act is a purposeful character study. I almost thought–not having read any reviews in depth and only barely remembering the preview–Cassandra was a character study, devoid of any epical narrative.

When the narrative does kick in–and the film becomes a dreary examination of choices–it’s got to be more than a half hour into the film. The tone changes, as it has to due to content, immediately. Allen makes that move intentionally and life changing due to things said and done is one of the film’s recurring themes.

And Cassandra’s Dream having themes is its undoing. Occasionally (see, I’m placing it in his body of work again), Allen gets the idea doing a film with a constraint would be a good idea. Usually, it results in the film going wrong as he’s got to force it to fit the constraint. Cassandra is no exception. At some point, the script makes a wrong turn and there’s no way to recover. The end is inevitable for a lot of reasons and is uninteresting for just that reason. After spending two hours creating these complex brothers, Allen cheats them out of a real conclusion.

As the brothers, Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor quickly overcome their lack of physical resemblance–I think Cassandra’s Dream is the first time Allen’s ever done a two brothers film. Both actors get to go through enormous changes through the film. At the start, they’re about even quality-wise. They don’t go anywhere unexpected, so McGregor’s failure to shine in the end is more because Farrell is just so fantastic, there’s no room for anyone else. Farrell’s performance in the last half hour is mesmerizing. It just keeps getting better.

Past his narrative choices, Cassandra’s Dream frequently feels like something utterly different from Allen. Stylistically–in no small part due to the Philip Glass–it’s as though he’s going for a French feel, but set in Britain. The occasional character mentions of their dreams harks back to Allen’s greatest works. Vilmos Zsigmond’s photography is perfect, making the muted London skies lush. As usual, it’s a technical achievement.

Thanks to Farrell and the majority of the film, Cassandra’s Dream is a success. I don’t like when Allen’s films are so contingent on ending well. As Cassandra does need to end well and does not… it’s somewhere between a qualified success and a superior failure.