ST. VINCENT. FILM.

If you want to know what Bill Murray's character - Vin - is like in this film, think Jack Nicholson in As Good as it Gets, or Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. Or in fact any one of a whole host of irascible, curmudgeonly, alcoholic, bad-tempered old-guys that turn out to be big softies in the end, in scores of films in the past forty years.

There is really nothing new in this movie. Just as Vincent is a variation on the pattern of lovable codger, so we have a varied but predictable cast of odd-balls. There is the obligatory scrawny but smart little kid living next door who Vincent teaches to defend himself, his vulnerable, stressed mother who entrusts her son, Oliver, to Vincent's care after school, and Daga, a pregnant Russian prostitute, again the obligatory hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold.

Even Chris O'Dowd turns up here as a Catholic brother who teaches the children in the local school about saints. Of course O'Dowd is as far from the stern Christian brother of Angela's Ashes as you could get, his is Catholicism lite, he curses and is inclusive of all faiths and none, and his vision of sainthood is a little wider than the Vatican's.

The movie follows a predictable pattern, and almost never surprises. Even the ending, which is obviously supposed to be some kind of climax to which the previous hour and a half has been building, can be seen from an hour away, and is played for every piece of sentimentality that can be wrung out of it.

At its best St Vincent is pleasant and mildly entertaining, though there are few actual laughs in a movie that is purporting to be a comedy. At its worst it is too sugar-sweet and corny and cliched to take seriously, a missed opportunity with a cast that could have done so much more. 

INTERSTELLAR. FILM.

Interstellar is, I think the technical term is, bonkers.

That doesn't mean that it isn't curious and fascinating and thought-provoking in parts, but the story completely collapses under the enormous weight of the grand ideas and speculative science-fiction that it attempts to incorporate.

Matthew McConaghey is Cooper, an ex-NASA pilot who lives with his family on a future Earth that is slowly dying. Crops are failing, the environment is slowly turning against human beings.

He and his daughter, Murphy (yes, that is her first name, after Murphy's Law) come across the remnants of the old NASA, run by Professor Brand, (Michael Caine).

The Professor has a plan to save mankind, and enlists Cooper to pilot a mission to the stars. Brand's daughter, played by Anne Hathaway, and two other scientists, go with him.

There is a subplot about Murphy being contacted by ghosts, or extra-terrestrials, and messages left for her in the movement of books in her bedroom. This is returned to later on, though never at any stage becomes anything that makes sense, and in fact only adds to the nonsensical feeling of the whole.

Matt Damon turns up for a while, in a pointless cameo, just to add to the intrigue. There is a wormhole, and a black hole, and talk of event horizons and gravity and time travel.

The film soon becomes a bizarre melange of adventure story, disaster epic and family drama, with a large dose of sci-fi (heavy on the "fiction", light on the "science") mixed in.

Things get progressively more preposterous as the film goes on. The ending is open for debate, as it isn't completely clear exactly what happens. The film skimps on detail, and tends to skip over any of the inconvenient elements that are simply too complex or ill-thought-out to explain.

But the Black Hole scenes towards the end are mostly ludicrous, and the half-hearted attempt at explaining what and how it happens is just that, half-hearted, there is little real sense in the way things wrap up, and almost no attempt at being consistent or meaningful. The part played by a watch in the denouement is particularly silly.

There is also a cringe-worthy theme running through the film, that Love is the only thing that can defeat time, gravity and whatever else gets in its way. It is hard not to laugh out loud at parts of this ridiculous script.

Still, it does have cool robots. They are probably the only successful innovation in the movie, the only thing that hasn't been seen before that actually impresses. At first glance they just look like giant metal Kit-Kats, unwieldy and clumsy, but are in fact flexible and smart, heroic and even tell jokes, and are possibly the only light relief in a movie that takes itself, and its ludicrous plot, a little too seriously.  

NIGHTCRAWLER. FILM.

Jake Gyllenhaal is Nightcrawler. He is the nightcrawler of the title, but he is also Nightcrawler, the film. He utterly dominates the movie, he is in every scene, the whole enterprise revolves around him and his character, Lou Bloom.

It is just as well, then, that he is mesmerizing in this, utterly believable. Lou Bloom is a petty thief with higher aspirations, he thinks nothing of mugging people and robbing bicycles, but he wants more, he wants a job, a purpose, he wants more.

One night while driving around Los Angeles he comes across a car accident, which is being filmed by an independent film crew which then sells the footage on to TV stations for their morning news. These are the nightcrawlers of the title. Lou gets himself a video camera, and starts trawling the streets of LA at night, searching for something to film and sell.

Lou's utter lack of compassion and empathy, it turns out, makes him very good at his new profession. He thinks nothing of getting to an accident scene before the emergency services, and then dragging a dead body into a more convenient location so that it is easier to film and gives a better shot.

He begins selling his videos to Renee Russo's character, Nina, who works as news director in a TV news station that is struggling with ratings. She sees in Lou a kind of kindred spirit, someone who is indifferent to questions of morality and ethics, someone who, like her, is only interested in appealing to the baser elements of human nature.

At first we are at least partly pulling for Lou. He appears enthusiastic and only wants to better himself. He has ambition and a project, and just wants a chance. But his sociopathic tendencies emerge as the film goes on, and this sympathy slowly wanes.

One weakness the movie has is that it has a Message. And this Message slowly becomes apparent through the characters of Lou and Nina. It is clear that it is at least partly a social commentary on sensationalist media, on TV news that is happy to exploit human misery for its own ends.

At one stage Nina asks her assistant if they can show a particularly gruesome piece of footage of a murder. The assistant asks "You mean legally?" Nina replies, sarcastically, contemptuously, "No, morally. Of course I mean legally." The implication is that morality plays no part in their decisions, the bottom line is whether it will shock, whether it will attract viewers. The bodies they film and show are pieces of meat, the wrecked lives are an irrelevance in their quest to draw in as many viewers as possible.

And this Message is a little heavy-handed, at times. There are parts of the movie that make it seem like the characters are simply vehicles for this message, those, like Lou and Nina, who put ratings above all else, and other minor characters, such as Rick, Lou's employee, and the voice of reason, who raise objections to his ever-more extreme tactics.

Yet for all that, it is a powerful, compelling piece of film-making. The visual power of Los Angeles at night is a key element in the feeling of the movie, and the whole thing is atmospheric and tense, with a hypnotic central performance from Jake Gyllenhaal.  

DAVID MITCHELL - THE BONE CLOCKS. NOVEL.

This book is shockingly bad.

'Shockingly', because David Mitchell is the author of some of the most imaginative, perfectly written, innovative novels of this century.

Cloud Atlas, in particular, is unique in its range of settings and styles and the way that it combines stories spread over centuries or millennia into a coherent narrative. The scope and breadth of imaginative power in this book is like nothing else ever written.

The Bone Clocks is, at times, similar in structure to previous Mitchell novels. The story is told in sections, spread over decades from the seventies to a dystopian 2032. The sections are all narrated from a different point of view, and so the voice and style changes from section to section.

Holly Sykes is the central character, a rebellious teenager in the first section growing up in nineteen seventies Kent, with an Irish mother and an English father. She hears voices, what she calls her 'radio people', that give her some insight into what will happen in the future.

Holly is a constant in the other narratives, though she is often a marginal character in the stories told by other characters, who are a brief lover of hers, a writer that eventually becomes her friend, and also her eventual husband.

The thing binding the stories together - apart from Holly - is a narrative about a great, centuries-long war between a group of 'carnivores', - The Anchorites - who eat people's souls in order to prolong their immortality, and another group of immortals - the Horologists - who are reincarnated into another body every time they die.

This is where the novel goes completely off the rails. Firstly the simplistic nature of the conflict - Good Horologists v Bad Carnivores - makes it read like a book for children. There is no moral ambiguity, no complexity at all.

Secondly, the whole story of this great war is unceasingly silly. All of the ideas are stolen from various sources, TV shows like Doctor Who and Charmed and Star Trek, from religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, from comics and sci-fi and a thousand books and films and programmes.

Yet the way Mitchell uses them leaches all of the wonder and fascination from the fantasy and sci-fi genres and reduces the whole concept to bland, random, silly ideas.

He invents a whole vocabulary to explain the phenomena he describes,  psychosoteric voltage, suasion, subsaying, an Act of hiatus, as if what he was talking about was unique, innovative, clever. The truth is that all he describes are simple fantasy tropes - such as telepathy, one person taking over another's mind, ESP, or psychic abilities - familiar to anyone who has ever watched Buffy or read science fiction or seen Game of Thrones in the last twenty years.

There are parts in the second last section, narrated by a Horologist called Marinus, that are frankly laughable. Where he describes the origin of the dark side of the immortals, and then the battle that takes place, it would have been rejected by Doctor Who as over-complicated, derivative and insipid.

As an example of the verbose nonsense that the writer comes up with in this section we read Marinus explaining why it is a bad idea to follow a particular course of psychosoteric action..

 “One, it’s against the Codex. Two, she is chakra-latent, so she may react badly to scansion and redact her own memories,”

The book is most disappointing because of who wrote it. David Mitchell has shown such a powerful imagination in the past that the failure of this book is a big letdown. His strength is his originality, and yet The Bone Clocks is a rattlebag of borrowed and stolen ideas, with all of the fascination wrung out. 

THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU. FILM.

The first thing to be said about this film is that it has a fantastic cast.

Jane Fonda plays the matriarch of the Altman family, the centre of the story. The rest of the cast is a list of many of the best American TV actors of their generation.

Jason Bateman (from Arrested Development) plays the middle brother in a family of four siblings whose father has just died, Tina Fey (30 Rock) is his sister, while Corey Stoller (House of Cards) and Adam Driver (Girls) are the other brothers.

Then there is Rose Byrne (Damages), Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood, Justify), Kathryn Hahn (Suburgatory), Abigail Spencer (Rectify), Connie Britton (Nashville), Ben Schwartz (Parks and Rec) who play a variety of characters connected in some way to the central Altman family.

The litany of recognisable faces is almost distracting, and in some ways the quality of the cast overwhelms what is a relatively slight film.

Nevertheless, This is where I leave you is enjoyable. It centres around the seven days after the death of Mort Altman, where the family sit Shiva, the traditional Jewish way of marking the dead where the relatives of the deceased do not leave the house and receive visitors for a week.

The interplay between the siblings is the strongest part of the story. There are jealousies, fights, betrayals, secrets revealed, nostalgia, much of which will be recognised by anyone from a family of more than one.

However, the movie constantly struggles against a tide of sentimentality that threatens to overwhelm it. Conflicts are resolved a little too easily, the film assumes everyone has only good intentions and people's flaws are mostly just used as vehicles for comedy. The score, too, lays on the shmaltz, signposting when you are supposed to be moved by a particular scene.  

Yet for all that, the film just about manages to avoid over sugaring the pill. The performances carry the story, Bateman is subtle and conflicted, Tina Fey is funny and wry and genuine, Jane Fonda is just this side of bonkers, and the movie retains a charm and an energy that is hard to resist.

A MOST WANTED MAN, SIN CITY - A DAME TO KILL FOR. FILMS BOTH.

A MOST WANTED MAN

A Most Wanted Man is Philip Seymour Hoffman's final film, and really doesn't have much more to recommend it than that.

Based on a John Le Carré novel, PSH's character is Gunther Bachmann, a German spy who runs a small, covert team in the northern city of Hamburg that are attempting to track the funding of Muslim extremism in Germany.

Isa Karpov, a Chechen tortured by the Russians, turns up in the city, with a desire to make up for his Russian father's crimes, and a hope to be allowed to stay in Germany. He is helped by Rachel McAdams, who plays an idealistic lawyer Annabel Richter, involved in a human rights organisation.

And then a lot of nothing happens. There are long, slow shots of PSH drinking or smoking, quick meetings on ferry boats, the occasional conversation that attempts to move the thin plot along, and all the time you are waiting for something like a story to develop. And it never really does.

The action meanders over and back between meeting rooms, safe houses and the street. The other German security agencies are simplistically portrayed as brutal and dumb, and we are somehow supposed to see Gunther and his team as sympathetic characters, the best of a bad lot.

Yet the whole thing is so limp and lacking in insight, energy or any real explanation. We only get to see the surface of things and characters, none of their true motivations are revealed, in fact there are no real revelations of any significance at all. There is almost no drama, and for a spy film, little real tension. A sad way for a great actor to go out.

SIN CITY

This, the second Sin City movie, follows on from the first film in the series, and is more of the same.

Jessica Alba, Bruce Willis and Mickey Rourke are all back in the same roles, playing their damaged, violent, brooding characters. The movie is based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, and retains the visual style of the original, the action is semi-animated and semi-live action, giving the whole film a curious, dream-like quality.

Apart from the visuals, though, there is really nothing else to recommend in this film. It is filled with pointless, stupid, stylized violence.  Practically everyone in the film dies or is mutilated. There are lakes of blood, and piles of bodies.

The violence becomes so commonplace that you don't even notice all the death and blood and mutilation.

The various bad guys (and gals) in the story have the usual array of goons protecting their residences, but these muscled cutthroats get murdered in their hundreds by the collected stars of Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba and Josh Brolin.

It attempts to ape the style of film noir, and achieves this, but there is no subtlety, no light relief, nothing beyond the stylized visuals and the choreographed mayhem.

This second Sin City movie is a triumph of style over substance. Utterly lacking in humour, it takes itself way too seriously.

BOYHOOD. FILM

Richard Linklater is one of the great filmmakers of his generation, and Boyhood might just be his greatest achievement.

The film was shot over a period of twelve years with the same actors playing the same roles. The "boy" of the title is Mason, played by Ellar Coltrane, who is seven when we first meet him and his family, living in Houston, Texas.

Linklater and the cast then shot a small number of scenes every year, building on the story, watching the lives of the characters change, charting the progress of the children in the family.

Lorelei Linklater, the director's daughter, plays Samantha, Mason's sister, and for the first part of the film her story is equally as prominent as the boy's.

As the years go by the characters grow and change. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke play the kids' estranged parents, and as the film goes on we see them get heavier, gain wrinkles, age before our eyes.

The kids' change is the most obvious, of course. Samantha starts off as a chubby, cheeky little girl, and we see her lose her puppy fat, get braces, and become a young woman. Mason slowly grows up too, he loses the soft features of a little boy, his voice breaks and he grows facial hair. And because of the natural passage of time, this is all without makeup or special effects.

There is little conventional plot in the movie, beyond the normal changes and developments of the people's lives. There is a lot of talking, Linklater loves to have his characters just shoot the breeze, talk about life and love and how to live.

What is noticeable is that the parents look back when they talk, and the kids look forward. The parents are nostalgic about their past, the kids excited and anxious about their future.

In the film the passage of time is marked by the changing appearances of the characters, but also by real events happening at the time of filming. We see the Iraq invasion, the first Harry Potter movie, the rise of Lady Gaga, Obama's first election win.

The music too charts our move through the noughties, from Coldplay to Flaming Lips and on to Arcade Fire and the Black Keys.

The film is so replete with ideas and emotions, is so full of layers and themes, that it is probably worth seeing a second and a third time.

Boyhood is an extraordinary, innovative, compelling, at times jaw dropping piece of cinema. A film like no other, and one that will probably never be emulated, in its scope and its examination of youth and growing up.