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gilesdereis
Reviews
Sibirskiy tsiryulnik (1998)
beautiful but a mess
What wonderful cinematography! The colors are great. The whole cast is well photographed. The sets are lovely to look at. Even the US Army camp is made to look like a resort.
Julia Ormond glowed, and warmed the screen with her smile.
But the storyline dragged. Actually, "dragged" suggests movement, which is at time the opposite of what happened. The story just came to a complete stop at times. You found yourself in two minute scenes which lasted fifteen minutes, but seemed more like an hour. And these halts did nothing to advance character development, plot or anything visible.
The director can't blame the writer, or vice versa, because they were one and the same person.
You could back a very large truck through the holes in the plot and not touch their sides.
In addition to a sputtering storyline, whose idea was it to make the Russian cadets 30+ years old, but act as if they were 16? Is there such a shortage of young actors in Russia? I knew that their national demographics have gone to hell, but I assumed that there were still enough presentable Russian 20 year olds to play 16 year olds to cast one film. Except for the lead, they didn't even have to say anything much, so they could have rounded up a bunch of eastern European catwalk models from D&G.
Also, I got the feeling that there WAS supposed to be a big age difference between the principals. In fact, the 38 year old actor who played the romantic lead is referred to as a "boy" several times. Its just that he wasn't. And to avoid this being too obvious, they made all of his friends the same age.
The Tsar in 1885 is clearly Alexander III, but looks like a portly Nicholas II, and has a son seen with him - the Crown Prince - who could not possibly be the next Tsar (that would have made Nicholas about 30 when WWI began, rather than the actual 45 he was). Why bother to play with history like this? It just makes the film clang with dumb anachronisms.
Too bad, because there was some real talent on show here. 5/10
Black Gold (2011)
By Allah, THAT was terrible
When Ibn Saud captured Mecca, it is said that he personally chopped off the head of the defeated governor, and tossed it over the city wall.
Such a fate would be deserved by the screenwriter.
It is hard to know what to make of this beautifully filmed train wreck of a story. The one thing that is clear is that no one involved had ever seen an oil well, nor had any idea what the Middle East was like in an ill defined period in the early 20th century.
The anachronistic technical bits in the film came thick and fast - planes jumped from WWI biplanes to, unless I am mistaken, a late 1930s German Storch - cars went from Model-Ts to late 1930s Packards. Oil was produced, but there was no visible way to get it from the four, pokey wells to anywhere it could be used, no pipeline, no trucks - apparently the director thought that just producing the oil is enough to make you rich. Typical of a French intellectual like the director.
And the behavior of ALL the characters was so wildly at odds with the Arab world as to verge on farce. At one point there is the suggestion that there might be some Koranic mechanism for a wife divorcing her husband. Other cultural references mainly involved women's veils.
The turgid and strained dialog would have mortified a first year drama student. Antonio Bandaras and Mark Strong must have decided that the only solution was to chew scenery whenever possible and perhaps the whole effort would become camp. Both did what they could with the feeble screenplay, but that was not much.
There was a cartoon Texan, as well, although his role, outside of being a hate figure, was never wholly clear. The story is (VERY) loosely based on Saudi Arabia, but given imaginary names, but somehow there is no reference to the British, who really ran that part of the globe until WWII. Note to the writer at the end, in the 1930s, even Texaco was headquartered in New York City, not Houston. Pre air conditioning, Houston was quasi uninhabitable for half the year.
It only cost me £2 to rent it, but I still want my £2 back.
Burn Up (2008)
Painfully Dumb Storyline - Worse Script
There is good case that the issue of energy and climate needs to be addressed as fiction, since the public is more likely to grasp actors saying lines than it is scientists showing charts.
There is a huge amount of drama in upper corporate life, even without the obligatory, and in this case, improbable, sex that needs (according to some unwritten law of scripts) to be included.
However, if you are looking for either, don't look here.
From the first scene onwards, the improbable aspects of the script overwhelm us. The shooting in the desert could have been carried out by Boy Scouts, for all its effectiveness. They start shooting in broad daylight and still, somehow, manage to miss 14% of the targets.
The main character jumps from a middle level flunky position to being chairman of the board, with absolutely no rational explanation. An apparently British oil company reports its earnings as "12 billion Dollars" time and again, as if Pounds didn't exist - as if, by Big Oil industry terms, $12 billion was a lot of money. It is a lot of money, for a decent quarter, for a year it puts them squarely in the middle ranks. The new chairman seems to have nothing to do - which is unlike most chief executives of major companies in my experience - no meetings, no business trips to see operations, clients or bankers etc. He cheerfully accepts a Maybach as a "gift" from some unexplained Arab on his first day at work, which would mean, in the real world, his last day as chairman.
The first episode dragged so much, and the story veered all over the place, that there was a danger of getting car sick.
The second episode, was, if anything, stranger. Much of it takes place in Calgary, a city I know fairly well (full disclosure: I have spent three decades in and around the oil business) and which is, as a town, almost totally..functional. The Canadian side of the production decided to save money (and energy?) by cutting down on the use if lights, so many of the Calgary scenes are very difficult to see, much less follow.
Silly things continue to abound. The Saudi oilfields are in the EAST of the country (generally referred to as "The Eastern Province") and yet the writer kept talking about "The Western Desert" - a term used in Egypt, not in Saudi. Geologic data on an area as large as France and Germany is supposedly gathered by seven secret geologists, and fits into a hard disc the size of an Iphone. The main character looks at it for ten seconds and knows exactly what it is.
By 2008, when this was made, the prospect that the Saudis have been exaggerating their oil resources had been a frequent topic of conversation within the industry, and well beyond. Nothing in an Iphone was likely to prove, or disprove that very complicated discussion.
I won't even go into the politics, except to say that the BBC managed to "get back" at Hollywood's idiotic habit for many years of automatically casting a Brit as the Bad Guy by casting the entire American government as The Collective Bad Guy.
Why did they cast Japanese to play the PRC delegates? Since when did Chinese bow when they shake hands (a Japanese habit, which the Chinese would NOT do just for that reason)? I sincerely hope that oil lobbyist are not quite as incompetent as they are portrayed here, or you have to wonder how they could possibly be effective.
In the first episode, the Inuits are central. In the second, they have vanished altogether, in spite of the fact that much of the action takes place in Canada. Were they cut out for reasons of environment?
There was some decent music. Direction was slow. The storyline a mess. The characters cardboard cutouts. The issues were so vulgarized as to become meaningless. In short, a waste of time and money.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Neither Great nor Bad
Technically an excellent film, with good to very good performances by all the main actors. Some of the "games" were cute, such as never actually seeing the supposedly beautiful Ann Smiley.
While it is always fair game to re-do a screen story, there were at least a couple of annoying "improvements" to both the book and to the 1979 BBC mini-series. The one the sticks in my throat is making the character of Peter Guillam - played robot-like by "Sherlock" - gay. Why? It added nothing to the story, unless you assumed that his devoted service to Smiley was somehow sexual, which is absurd. Also in 1973 an open gay would probably be quickly booted out of the SIS.
But I do sympathize with those who complain that the storytelling was "boring." There were too many long shots of Smiley walking along a street, for no reason. I lived in London in the 70s, and, while much glitzier today, it was not all the grim, dirty, run down place the director created. That was more London of the (early) 1950s.
Also there was actually no "puzzle" for the viewer to solve, as we get only a tiny look at any of the potential traitors. So this business about a "thinking man's thriller" is nonsense. No thought is required.
Once again considerable talent has been invested in a film which somehow just doesn't reach its potential. Sad, really.
The Debt (2010)
Oldest Action Star?
Helen Mirrin has done plenty of good things in her long film career, and the dramatic quality of her acting was on top, brittle form in The Debt. But, in the last part of the film, this very skilled actress also showed that she could still do credible action sequences, well into her 60s.
That said, the film was uneven. The direction was first rate, and two of the three younger versions of the main characters - Jessica Chastain as the young Rachel, and Marton Csokas a the young Steven, are both excellent. I found Sam Worthington neither compelling as a character, nor credible as an Israeli. Camera work was technically very good throughout, and at several points one looked at the lovely young Ms Chastain and saw the older Ms Mirrin.
You only had two of the characters in their older version for any amount of screen time. And, big a fan as I am of Tom Wilkinson, I think that he was wrong for this role. Like Worthington, I just didn't believe him as an Israeli. Helen Mirrin, as above, was great.
The way the story ended was a little hard to take. At one point, Mirrin says to Wilkinson "You are insane" which is about my view of the conclusion. Suspended disbelief is one thing; accepting total improbability in a serious and otherwise realistic scenario is quite another.
On a more fundamental note, the theme of the film - the cost of truth and lies, the need to "balance the books" in life, is strong and clear. One can ignore the way the screenwriters needed to tidy things up at the end, and still appreciate the film.
One minor point: I think Mirrin was speaking her native Russian, rather than Ukrainian, in the Kiev sequences. That is not totally unrealistic, since the languages are very close, and lots of Ukrainians speak Russian, but for a spy, one never wants to call attention to yourself, so speaking the most common language allows low visibility.