MOVIES with Michael Dalton
Cowboys & Aliens
Director: Jon Favreau
Stars: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Sam Rockwell, & Adam Beach.
Rating: 2/5
Running time: 118 minutes
Undeniably one of the most packaged movies to hit the screen this year, Cowboys & Aliens has all the ingredients for a great opening weekend. If only the director Jon Favreau had maintained more control and understood how to milk a cliché (for he clearly doesn’t), this loopy, popcorn adventure might’ve worked.
Instead, he presents us with images that have been long imprinted on our movie-going consciousness and then leaves them, and us, hanging. It begins with Lonergan (Daniel Craig), a stagecoach robber, waking up in the middle of nowhere, with no memory and a strange metal bracelet clamped on his wrist. After a quick demonstration of his lightning-speed agility (he flattens three roughnecks), he stumbles into the town of Absolution, which is ruled by the wealthy Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) and soon to be overrun by fast-moving spaceships that neatly lasso the residents up, one by one.
There’s not a second here we’re meant to take seriously and from one scene to the next, Favreau keeps kicking the insanity higher. Lonergan soon learns what his bracelet is for, the motives of the extraterrestrials become clear, the Indians show up and join in, Olivia Wilde disrobes, and Ford, still looking good at the grand age of 69, growls relentlessly in a role I could dub “Uncle Indiana”.
Apparently Steven Spielberg (whose DreamWorks studio bankrolled this “effort”) handed Favreau a bunch of western movies and ordered him to study them but even with all the nuttiness and the melding of genres, Cowboys & Aliens quickly wears thin.
Clocking in at two hours and heavily padded by an overlong climax, watching Indians hurling spears through the strangely clichéd aliens turns out to be less fun than you might think. This is for audiences who thought Fast Five was good.
A decade that seems to have just flicked by....
Last week, when Dear Editor, Don Gordon-Brown, delivered an edict ordering his loyal minions to draft up some glorious words in praise of our ten years of publishing excellence, my mind took me back to the moment I walked out of the Schonell Theatre after the curtain closed, and wrote my first review for The Independent – for the record, the film in question was Fernando Trueba’s Calle 54, a documentary about Latin American jazz.
My, how things have changed! I had always been a cinephile, but the last decade has heralded some huge changes in my own tastes for cinema, but also for the film industry at home and overseas.
More of us are watching films in our own hi-tech theatrettes, and cinemas have reacted for the most part by finding ways to increase the cost of going to the movies, with the latest debacle involving surcharges for 3D glasses that drive the cost of a ticket in excess of $20 for some screenings. DVDs are going the way of VHS, with Blu-Ray positioning itself as what may become an ill-fated replacement in the face of downloading.
Almost eight hundred reviews later, my personal highlights include a terrifying interview with Helen Buday, who seemed well cast as the deranged housewife in Rolf de Heer’s Alexandra's Project. The Schonell also cemented what has become my central passion (for Korean cinema), after I went there to see Park Chan Wook’s gloriously violent Oldboy.
And reporting for The Independent back in 2009, I sat on a Brisbane Film International Film Festival jury that chose Robert Connolly’s powerful Balibo as Best Film. I cannot finish up without offering a parting jab at my film reviewing counterparts at The Independent’s sadly-missed sister journal, The Bug.
I still consider the castigation of my sixty word review of Hollywood Homicide by David Pomeranian and Margaret Strappon as entirely unfounded. Despite this single lowlight, writing for this paper has been a great pleasure, and I look forward to many more years of working with Don and our other colleagues, especially given our exceedingly generous remuneration packages, which have doubled each and every year!
Tim Milfull
THE BINGE
Worth a trip to the DVD store
Steve Coogan Live now available through Roadshow
Thirteen (MA15+) available through Icon from 14th September
Babies (G) now available through Madman
The Illusionist (PG) screening from 1 September at the Blue Room
The Magnificent Tati (G) now available through Madman
Roadshow has recently released a very funny DVD compiling two stage shows by British comedian, Steve Coogan, whose faux-documentary The Trip is still on screens around the country.
Painting Coogan as a painfully egotistical performer surrounded by a long-suffering support cast and crew, Live ‘n’ Lewd and The Man Who Thinks He’s It sees the comedian trot out a series of well-crafted characters, and occasionally offers a glimpse of the man behind the impressions; or is this just another construction?
A few years ago, I was stunned by Géla Babluani’s film 13 Tzameti, and the director evidently impressed someone in Hollywood as well, because the film has been remade as Thirteen, and features some big names. Sam Riley (Brighton Rock) stars as Vince, a struggling electrician who steps into the shoes of an overdosed junkie to take on a job he knows nothing about. Unfortunately, the junkie was due to take part in an elaborate game of Russian Roulette, and while the stakes are high, the rewards are even greater.
Alongside True Blood’s Alexander Skarsgård, Jason Statham, and Mickey Rourke, Riley quickly ratchets up the tension in this taut thriller.
For some, the prospect of eighty minutes of screen time about brand new babies would be tantamount to poking blunt pencils into one’s eyes. But Thomas Balmès’s fascinating film, Babies, is surprisingly engaging. Over the course of a year of filming in San Francisco, Mongolia, Namibia and Tokyo, the director watches the growth and learning of four children.
The resulting story — without any narration or dialogue — is utterly absorbing and entertaining.
Almost a decade ago, writer-director, Sylvain Chomet brought the beautiful animation The Triplets of Bellville to our screens. With The Illusionist>,(pictured above) Chomet returns to his glorious, understated form telling the story of a magician forced to leave the stage in France for a career in the backblocks of Scotland.
Using a screenplay written by the famed absurdist, Jacques Tati, Chomet’s quietly gorgeous story eschews dialogue in favour of form, and the result is enchanting. In fact, if you wish to know more about The Magnificent Tati, check out Michael House’s fascinating documentary about the multitalented writer, director and actor. have doubled annually over the last five years.
Tim Milfull
