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Showing posts with label Christopher Walken. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christopher Walken. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
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When I sat down to watch Jersey Boys I couldn't have given less of a toss about Frankie Valli or The Four Seasons. 134 minutes later I still didn't. It's not that I don't like the music, but I find it hard to get passionate about middle-of-the-road 60s pop sung by a man who sounds like he's got his balls caught in a vice. So this music biopic sinks or swim on its story and characters, with mixed results.
Based on the hit musical, Jersey Boys on screen eschews most of the conventions of a the stage version, opting instead for treating the story a straight music biopic. Fortunately the life of Frankie Valli is interesting enough in its own right, even disregarding the music. This is a solidly blue collar examination of the music industry - with the emphasis on industry. Valli and his bandmates Tommy DeVito, Nick Massi and Bob Gaudio are workmen rather than artists, treating the production of pop music more as a professional craft rather than as any kind of higher calling.
The vast majority of music biopics deify their subjects as enigmatic and individualistic geniuses; a tactic that allows us to admire them from afar and forgive them when they screw up. Jersey Boys is a bit different: Frankie Valli and his bandmates are emphatically not geniuses. Instead they're guys with decent musicianship who've concluded that their best chance of a comfortable life is to play some songs, get paid and go home at the end of the day.
Taking place largely chronologically, we follow The Four Seasons from their humble beginnings as neighbourhood kids on the humdrum streets of New Jersey, through their gradual ascent to stardom, to the top of the pop charts and finally through their acrimonious separation. There's more than a dab of the mob film in the mix too, and to my eyes it looks as if Eastwood watched Scorsese's Goodfellas a bunch of times in preparation. Both films share a grubby, pop-inflected rags to riches optimism, that becoming successful means coming under more pressure and both come to the conclusion that their working class heroes are ultimately pawns in someone else's game.
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| Also it's a bit like That Thing You Do, which I've always thought was a tad underrated. |
There aren't many directors with more of safe hand on the tiller than Eastwood, and he brings in the movie with a minimum of fuss and a professional straightforwardness. There's very little in the way of stylistic tics or visual frippery here, just utterly competent film-making. The closest we get to experimental are the character's frequent breaking of the fourth wall to directly narrate what's going on to the audience, Wayne's World style. At its most audacious (which isn't saying very much), Eastwood has his characters speak to the camera mid-song so, for example we get the bass player explaining his precise grievances with the band mid-performance on the Ed Sullivan Show.
It's a similar story performancewise. John Lloyd Young gives what is probably an accurate portrayal of Valli (though admittedly I have no idea how the real Valli behaves), managing to navigate between naivety and cynicism with as little fuss as possible, though he does pull off the on stage persona. Slightly more interesting is Vincent Piazza as Tommy DeVito, whose maniacally egotistic behaviour instigates most of the drama in the film. He takes us from loveable rogue, through tolerable scumbag and finally to pathetic moron in a nicely layered performance. There are precious few heavyweights backing up this relatively inexperienced cast though, though Christopher Walken makes a game effort as a chilled out New Jersey mobster, he's not really given a lot to do.
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| That's Joseph Russo as Joe Pesci on the left. Yes, that Joe Pesci. |
It's all a bit perfunctory to be honest, a music biopic paint-by-numbers. They go through all the old cliches of the genre; but what was exhilarating in films like Walk the Line is sadly lacking here, primarily due to a rather charisma-free protagonist in Valli and some less than heartfelt music. They even, repeatedly, do the one creaky old musobio cliche I hate the most. Paraphrasing; someone says offhandedly "Hey Frankie, you gotta walk like a man!". Cut to Frankie staring off into the middle distance with an inspired look in his eye. Cut to the band playing the song "Walk Like a Man" on TV. Cut to a man in a suit handing Frankie a gold record; "You gotta 'nother hit Frankie!". This is tired old bullshit.
I guess the word I'm searching for is mediocre. Coming from a director with a pedigree as strong as Eastwood this is a disappointment. As someone utterly neutral on the music I was expecting the film to explain why it's so great (like Walk the Line did), but Jersey Boys never comes close. In fact, the film arguably treats being a musician and making music as a grinding, joy-free chore. This makes it difficult to care, either about the characters or the music.
Jersey Boys isn't a bad film by any means, but it's difficult to gauge any reason to actually watch it save for a pre-existing love of Frankie Valli. It's just sort of there. Maybe the musical is better.
★★
Jersey Boys is released June 20th
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
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To devote yourself to mastering a single craft takes an insane amount of discipline, dedication and perseverance. A Late Quartet shows us a tumultuous period in the life of the successful ‘Fugue String Quartet’, examining the physical and emotion toll of achieving musical perfection. The quartet consists of four outstanding actors: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken, Catherine Keener and Mark Ivanir. All have their quirks and issues, and all bounce off one another in increasingly destructive ways.
Friday, December 7, 2012
Friday, December 7, 2012
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‘Seven Psychopaths’ is a very easy film to analyse as it does all the hard work for you. Rarely have I seen a film so eager to consciously pick itself apart and explain why it’s ridiculous, silly and half-baked. This is writer/director Martin McDonagh’s follow up to the transcendant ‘In Bruges’. On the surface that film is a ‘geezer gangster’ romp in the vein of Guy Ritchie, but very quickly starts grappling with some big, important themes. I enjoyed it so much that when I actually visited Bruges earlier this year I was more excited about spotting locations from the film than I was about the medieval architecture.
After I’d taken this trip I found myself wondering what else McDonagh had done, it’d been four years since his last film, what on earth had he been up to? So it was with some anticipation that I found out he’d been making another film with Colin Farrell to be released later this year. I don’t really know much about Martin McDonagh, but based on this film I think I can hazard a guess why he's been having so much 'second album trouble'.
‘Seven Psychopaths’ is about a screen-writer living in LA struggling with writer’s block and encountering a series of eccentric weirdoes. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to imagine that this roughly aligns with the McDonagh’s actual experiences in LA. The plot isn’t particularly important, it boils down to ‘guys steal dog, dog’s owner wants dog back’. What ‘Seven Psychopaths’ is really concerned with is its own writing process. We follow a character writing the film we're watching and struggling how to balance his artistic sensibilities against what an audience wants. It's almost too obvious to say, but lead character ‘Marty’ is an obvious fictionsuit for the director.
Naturally this film doesn’t skimp on the psychopaths, nearly all of the characters are unbalanced in one form or another. What this means is that the actors have license to ham it up a bit, everyone looks as if they’re having a great time in this. Sam Rockwell as Billy Bickle comes perilously close to smashing right through the fourth wall. He’s a character given free reign to pretty much do whatever he wants. I’ve always admired the way Rockwell can act extremely obnoxiously, yet still somewhere, deep down, retain a kind of wounded sympathy. Throughout the film, the characters regularly commit atrocious acts, but faced with a hyper-reality, and a gallery of grotesques, we're on their side.
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| This is basically the director as played by Colin Farrell |
Christopher Walken’s ‘Hans’ is a great creation. This is Walken playing to his type, slightly off-skewed and dignified, like an alien trying to masquerade as human. The film is unashamedly emotionally detached, and Walken plays a very stoic and zen-like character, yet if there is a heart to this film, it’s in Walken. He’s deeply in love with his wife, who’s hospitalised with cancer. It’s a very sweet relationship, one that seems a little at odds with the arch tone of the rest of the film.
Aside from this, there are a plethora of amazing character actors; Woody Harrelson, Harry Dean-Stanton and Tom Waits standing out. If you see any of these people on a cinema screen, you know you’re in for something special, even if their appearance is all too brief. McDonagh gives all three excellent opportunities to play up to their type, it’s some very clever casting. There’s also a blink and you’ll miss it cameo from Crispin Glover, someone who it’s always nice to see on screen.
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| Christopher Walken doing his thing. |
The only slightly weak link in the cast is Colin Farrell as our lead, Marty. It’s not a criticism of his acting, rather that his character doesn’t really have much to do other than react to what’s going on around him. After seeing him in loads of pretty bad movies, when I saw him in ‘In Bruges’ I finally realised why he kept getting cast, and I was expecting a similar calibre of performance here. But for all the crazy events that he gets swept up in, we never really learn much about him. His artistic motivations are wrapped up in the film’s slightly awkward criticism of gratuitous violence in film. From what we can gather he’s become disillusioned with Hollywood clichés in film and wants to make a film where people sit around in the desert: “just human beings talking to each other.”
The problem with criticising a film like this is that it’s all too ready to do the job for you. At times, this feels like McDonagh undergoing a process of self-flagellation. People point out that the in-film script of ‘Seven Psychopaths’ doesn’t have any well-rounded female characters, and any that are introduced tend to be brutally killed soon after, and as the script in the film says, so the film we're watching does. Now, just because a film outlines what’s wrong with it, does than invalidate criticism?
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| Sam Rockwell being enjoyably wacky. He's good at this. |
Towards the mid-way point, ‘Seven Psychopaths’ begins to feel like it’s a collection of vague ideas and sketches for stories haphazardly stitched together. There are so many subversive moments where what would ‘normally’ happen in a major studio film doesn't happen that the film becomes a compilation of ‘wouldn’t it be neat if…?'s. The net result of all this self-referential dialogue, dream sequences and films within films is that we don’t particularly care how the film we're watching ends up. But, of course in this film it’s difficult to work out whether or not elements in it are consciously half-baked to make a point about other films and screenplays, or just genuinely not quite there.
Frankly you begin to get a headache.
All this fourth wall nudging and self referencing is on one hand very funny, and on the other a little off-putting. McDonagh writes great dialogue and has a perfectly developed sense of the absurd. The narrative freedom that the structure and tone provides gives him the perfect excuse to be unpredictable. Characters react to events in bizarre ways, almost consciously screwing with established rules of film-making and storytelling.
Frankly you begin to get a headache.
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| Walken and Farrell in a dream-sub-film-script-writing meta sequence. |
The flipside is that the film for all its irreverence, has a bitter and cynical heart. It’s a critique of things in modern film that I presume McDonagh genuinely finds annoying and boring. I agree with a lot of his arguments, the points the film makes about use of gratuitous violence, coincidence and the role of women in film are all valid. It's just that the film tends to be a little too smug in its cleverness. It’s as if McDonagh is lashing out at his employers, saying, in effect “I’m too smart for this crap”. This is unattractive, and it should be noted that while the film rails against a lot of narrative devices and problematic cliches, the solutions it presents are pretty damn vague.
‘Seven Psychopaths’ is compelling enough while you're watching it, you’re never sure which filmic convention they’re going to ignore, or what bizarre turn the plot is going to take. Afterwards the whole exercise feels a bit hollow, perhaps because there’s no emotional core here. The nearest filmic comparison I can think of would be Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s ‘Adaptation’ which features a similarly fictionalised version of the author struggling with writer’s block. ‘Adaptation’ uses many of the same tricks that ‘Seven Psychopaths’ does, yet manages to also make us care about the plight of its leads.
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| Tom Waits and some rabbits. |
Disappointingly, this is a big step down from ‘In Bruges’. That film dealt with big universal things: redemption, revenge, guilt, grief and the afterlife. ‘Seven Psychopaths’ is more concerned about exposing silly writing clichés. It’s very much the equivalent of a band's ‘difficult second album’. The first album is written before the band are big, the songs have been developed at the band’s own pace with not much pressure and are about things people can identify with. The second album tends to be written on the road, and invariably becomes about the travails of being famous or pressure to perform. ‘Seven Psychopaths’ is Martin McDonagh’s difficult second album. I hope writing and directing it has at the very least cured him of his writer’s block.
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