By Colin Covert
FILM: A Most Violent Year
CAST: Oscar Isaac, Jessica Chastain, David Oyelowo
DIRECTION: JC Chandor
Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) wants to be a real American man. When we meet him, he’s striving to fulfil the dreams of many immigrant Latinos, speaking his New York City English with flawless intelligence and emotional restraint, trying hard to outpace anyone he regards as a business rival to his profitable Standard Heating Oil Company, and to protect anyone he considers a colleague.
Yet the municipal offices, homes and courtrooms he visits look ominous and fateful. His beautiful wife, Anna (Jessica Chastain), who manages Standard’s books, is the daughter of a Brooklyn mob kingpin. Morales’ truck drivers are being hijacked, his door-to-door men beaten on sales calls. His drivers’ union leader warns that unless they’re given unlicensed handguns for protection, they’ll walk out. He’s being ceaselessly investigated by an ambitious prosecutor (David Oyelowo).
The handsomely coiffed, elegantly dressed, solemnly spoken entrepreneur is learning that success is the most perishable item known to man.
A Most Violent Year is set in 1981, the first chapter in a Big Apple murder surge that pushed a full decade into the future. The cool thriller’s writer/director, JC Chandor, uses the jaundiced past of a crumbling city to critique the present. His film is a guide to dark inner realms.
The hazardous materials Abel and his competitors truck across the five boroughs are less dangerous than the malevolent effects of commercialism and greed.
Chandor launched his feature career with a Wall Street financial collapse in Margin Call, then showed a solitary seaman navigating troubled depths in All Is Lost. Here he presents an even deeper study of angst, anxiety and paranoia.
Cinematographer Bradford Young mirrors the dark and dirty urban aesthetic of Gordon Willis, genius cameraman of The Godfather and The Conversation. Wide frames hold the actors in dim bareness that makes you worry what could cross the emptiness and threaten them.
Chandor follows the psychologically penetrating tradition of Sidney Lumet, Alan Pakula and Francis Ford Coppola, observing crime as a microcosm of society. It’s a loving salute to auteurs who had admirable careers before their industry took an ugly 1980s turn, leaving the good-drama business for the boredom-killing business.
As the fundamentally decent Abel, Isaac is breathtaking. He looks like the young, primly dressed early Al Pacino. He also nails Pacino’s skill of acting judicious even against resentful competitors, until things become eruptive.
He’s shockingly good in a tense car chase with a stolen Standard truck that takes him through a pitch black abandoned subway tunnel that could be hell’s main entrance. In scene after scene, surrounding corruption attacks.
Even his marriage to Anna tests his ethics. In a highway scene involving a wounded deer, each of them tries to end its suffering, one with a tool, the other with a shocking weapon. Chastain plays Anna as a seductive, self-righteous Lady Macbeth with a purse-sized pistol, one of the toughest female characters in ages. Their relationship is a nonstop wrestling match. By the time Abel becomes a real American man, he is in control, but inside is a frightened child. It’s not the destination he once imagined. —Star Tribune/TNS
Abduction drama
By Roger Moore
FILM: Kidnapping Mr Heineken
CAST: Jim Sturgess, Anthony Hopkins, Sam Worthington
DIRECTION: Daniel Alfredson
Anthony Hopkins ferments a fine rage, perhaps at the “dying of the light”, in Kidnapping Mr Heineken. As mega-rich Dutch brewery mogul Alfred “Freddy” Heineken, his quicksilver flashes of temper are worthy of other Hopkins creations.
Freddy Heineken was a man used to ordering people around, used to firing people, used to getting his way. He might labour to present calm, unworried face to his kidnappers. But inside, he was seething, plotting and trying to reason his way out of the fix he found himself in back in 1982.
Hopkins’ Heineken is the most interesting character in this entirely-too-straightforward caper picture from the Swedish director Daniel Alfredson, who helmed the last two Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movies. It’s a shame the film isn’t really about Heineken, but about the generic, younger and in-over-their-heads building contractors who nabbed Freddy and demanded the highest ransom ever paid up to that time.
Jim Sturgess is the ringleader — Cor — a man who lost the business he shared with three other guys (played by Sam Worthington, Ryan Kwanten and Mark van Eeuwen) in a recession. The bank won’t lend them money, the authorities won’t let them lawfully or unlawfully evict the squatters who have taken over the one building they own together as collateral.
But that attempted eviction hints at the violence they’re capable of. Cor pitches a kidnapping scheme to tide them over, and the others, with varying degrees of reluctance, sign on.
Early 1980s Europe had terrorist gangs pulling jobs just like this, so Willem (Worthington) insists that they “look professional” about it. They’ll hit a bank first to finance the kidnapping. They’ll speak German in front of their victims and make like the whole thing is a Red Army Faction of Baader-Meinhof Gang heist.
Alfredson stages the bank robbery and the kidnapping that follows with verve — WWII vintage machine guns blazing, a chase along Amsterdam’s canals. The script elects to not spend much time on the planning, hiding the details of what they’re trying to pull as a way of ratcheting up the tension and surprising us with the action. That almost works.
What comes later, though, dominates the film — a long waiting game, with the occasional nakedly cunning moment when Heineken promises them a clean escape if they’ll let him and his driver go. Tensions mount, fissures open in the gang.
It’s a good-looking film, just a tad on the dull and predictable side. But the occasional flash of Hopkins threatens, at several moments, to turn this formulaic true-heist tale into something more psychological, more pathological or at least allegorical. He isn’t really given the chance. -Tribune News Agency
A valiant effort
By Haricharan Pudipeddi
FILM: The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
CAST: Jeremy Irvine, Helen McCrory, Phoebe Fox
DIRECTION: Tom Harper
We’ve had enough haunted house stories. And seriously, filmmakers are running out of ideas to scare audiences. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death makes a valiant effort of actually telling a ghost story, but it uses the old tricks in the book to scare viewers.
Set during World War II, the film starts with a group of children being evacuated from London to a safer place. The group is sent to stay at a remote, abandoned house in the hinterlands, where an evil spirit is lurking on the premises.
What’s interesting to an extent is to see how children will prepare themselves and grim up during the times of horror. It could’ve been an interesting story about terrified children torn from their families and shoved into what turns out to be greater danger. But this aspect is short-lived as the story treads the same haunted grounds we’re all
familiar with.
The first part, The Woman in Black, starring a familiar cast of Daniel Radcliffe, was set in the Victorian era. It became the biggest horror hit of the decade because of its wonderful period setting. The sequel fails largely due to the monotonous path it takes to scare the viewers, who are not even hooked on to the story at the first place. -IANS
DVDs courtesy:
Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha
