Clouds of Sils Maria.

Written and directed by Frenchman Oliver Assayas (Carlos the Jackal 2010, Something in the Air 2011) his latest film has received six Cesar Award nominations including best film, best director, best original screenplay and best cinematography with Kristen Stewart having the distinction of becoming the first American actress to win a Cesar by winning Best Supporting Actress.

The basic story of Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) has been compared to Joseph L Mankiewicz’s 1950 American melodrama All About Eve.  Assayas contemporary version of the story is set mainly in Sils Maria located in a very beautiful part of the Swiss Alps. An ageing actress Maria Enders has been offered a part in a stage play she did twenty years ago by the 'must work for' theatre director Klaus Diesterweg, but this time she is offered the part of the older women, while her original role is to go to an up and coming American actress Jo-Ann Ellis who brings with her a reputation as a fire-brand. Maria, accompanied by her assistant Valentine (Stewart), retreats to Switzerland to practice her lines and get her head around the fact that she is far to old for younger role!

The wonderful Swiss scenery.  

French actress Juliette Binoche, who has now appeared in over 40 feature films gives her usual accomplished performance as the ageing, but still attractive, Marie Enders. Kick-ass (2009) star Chloe Grace Moretz gives the character of Jo-Ann Ellis a Hollywood boost while German star Lars Eldinger (Was bleibt 2012) plays the stage director.

This in fact a very wordy film that come across as a stage play with real scenery, and one must be honest and admit that the scenery is stunning with great shots of the Swiss Alps accompanied by an appropriate classical soundtrack. But even allowing for the accomplished acting from Binoche and Stewart the movie can not hide its one main fault - it does becomes a touch boring with all the talking coupled with its two hour running time! I can't help feeling that Assayas is trying to be a little to clever jumping between the fiction and the fact and back to the fiction played out on the screen. It is for all sakes and purposes a fairly traditional story about coping and maintaining your identity, as you get older. The last thing I would want to do though is put you off seeing this movie, if for no other reason than to see Binoche and Stewart at the pinnacle of their art.

Some woman have natural class.

Texas Killing Fields.

What are the Texas Killing Fields? According to the trailer for the film since 1971 over 60 young women have disappeared, believed to have been murdered, and disposed of in an area bordering the Calder Oil Field, a 25-acre piece of land situated not far from the southern end of Texas City and a mile from Interstate 45, a stretch of road allegedly known as the highway of hell due to the high rate of traffic accidents. When you look up this area on the Internet you find that approximately 30 bodies have been discovered in the fields, mainly consisting of young girls between the ages of 10-25 many have similar physical features including similar hairstyles. Also the majority of the bodies were found next to water, leading to speculations that that a serial killer had been at work! Incidentally very few of the murder cases have been solved.

 

The Fields hide many secrets.

Directed by Michael Mann’s daughter Ami Canaan Mann with a screenplay by Federal Agent Donald Ferrarone, Texas Killing Fields (2013) is loosely based on the real events but focusing mainly on the two real life Detectives involved in the case Brian Goetschus and Mike Land, called Brian Heigh (Jeffery Dean Morgan) and Mike Soulder (Sam Worthington) in the adaptation. Worthington has been quoted as saying that this movie was made to raise awareness about the crimes and maybe bring fresh evidence to light. Unfortunately the movie has reawakened bad memories and mixed emotions for the families of the victims.

 

Just some of the victims. 

To be honest and despite being shot in Louisiana and having a very good cast, which as well as Dean Morgan and Worthington we have Jessica Chastain playing the hard bitten Detective Pam Stall, 14 year old Chloe Grace Moretz playing the ‘nearly’ victim Anne Sliger and our very own Stephen Graham playing a low life character called Rhino, the film is a little disappointing and certainly not as good as the not dissimilar The Frozen Ground (2013) or Memories of Murder (2003). It has a rather muddled narrative and the lack of any real tension or suspense does nothing to help its case. Other than Anne no other character deserves our empathy, in fact the movie is full of awful nasty people who according to this portrait frequent the lower echelons of American society and the police force. Sorry but two hours of your viewing pleasure would be better directed elsewhere!   

Dark Shadows.

An American T.V. gothic soap opera created by Dan Curtis, that run from June 1966 to April 1971, became a childhood obsession for a certain John Christopher Depp the Second and it was this same gentleman that persuaded Tim Burton, a man who has made a very successful career out of dark eccentric movies, to direct the 2012 film version of Dark Shadows.

One rather dysfunctional family.

Seth Grahame-Smith’s screenplay starts in 1750 at the Port of Liverpool where Joshua and Naomi Collins along with their young son Barnabas set sail to start a new life in America. It’s here that they build a fishing business and a town called Collinsport. We move on twenty years and find that Barnabas Collins is a very rich and well to do young man who falls in love with the beautiful Josette DuPres. This upsets the powerful witch Angelique Bouchard who has fallen for the good-looking Barnabas. She casts an evil curse that forces Josette to jump off a cliff and turns Barnabas into a vampire and then buries him alive.

Angelique Bouchard.

We are still in Collinsport but two centuries later, its 1972 and workmen are extending the Angel Bay Fisheries when they displace a tomb from which emerges Barnabas Collins: Vampire!!!!!!! After a quick snack Collins returns to his ancestral home where he finds that his once grand estate has fallen into disrepair and is occupied by the dysfunctional remnants of his once proud family and a live-in psychiatrist. Our rejuvenated vampire decides to restore his families fortunes but discovers that the fisheries business, and the town is know run by a certain Ms Angelique Bouchard.

More families should have a live-in psychiatrist?

Tim Burtons tongue in cheek gothic comedy, which brings to mind Edward Scissorhands (1990) and HBO’s True Blood, stars Johnny Depp as Barnabas, Michelle Pfeiffer as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard the family matriarch, Helena Bonham Carter as the previously mentioned live-in psychiatrist Dr. Julia Hoffman, the ever more beautiful Eva Green plays the vengeful witch Angelique Bouchard and Chloe Grace Moretz plays Elizabeth’s rebellious teenage daughter Carolyn. Both Christopher Lee and Alice Cooper, who plays himself, have cameo roles.

Fooling in love with a vampire is not always easy.

As well as a score composed by four time Oscar nominee and regular Burton collaborator Danny Elfman the soundtrack also includes several great rock and pop anthems from the likes of The Moody Blues, The Carpenters, T.Rex and Black Sabbath, with Depp chipping in on the Steve Miller track The Joker. The whole ‘look’ of the film is brilliant with some great sets from Rick Heinrich (Sleepy Hollow) and costume designs from Colleen Atwood (Alice in Wonderland). It was filmed entirely in England at the Pinewood Studios and on location. Depp’s performance as the wronged vampire is pure class and he is provided with some first rate dialog that is at the same time extremely funny and charming. In fact, although the critics reportedly said that this was not the greatest Burton/Depp collaboration, I found this wonderfully hammy nonsense to be a very agreeable evenings entertainment and can highly recommend it for a couple of hours pure escapism.

Hugo

Filmmaker extraordinarire.  

One of the main characters in Martin Scorsese’s first ‘family’ film is the French illusionist and filmmaker Georges Melies famous for many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema. Hugo (2011) based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret, half picture book, half novel by American illustrator and writer Brian Selznick, also features references to the Lumiere Brothers two Frenchman that were also among the earliest filmmakers.

Hugo with the old toy repairer.

Scorsese’s part fantasy, part tutorial involves a young boy Hugo Cabret played by Asa Butterfield (Son of Rambo 2007, The Boy in the Stripped Pyjamas 2008) who we find living in the walls of the Paris Montparnasse railway station. With the use of flashbacks we find out the boys father (Jude Law) has been killed in a horrendous fire in the museum where he worked. The orphan is then taken under the wing of his drunken Uncle Claude (Ray Winstone) who maintains the clocks at the railway station. When Claude disappears Hugo takes over his uncles responsibilities. The only keepsakes that Hugo has of his fathers are an illustrated notebook and a clockwork robot, which apparently hides a secret. When he clashes with the proprietor of a toy sales and repair shop Georges (Ben Kingsley) and his goddaughter Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz) he begins an adventure of discovery.

Hugo and Isabelle at the cinema.

This film is a defense of the cinema as a dream world, something I don’t always agree with, but with Scorsese I’m prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. He is a filmmaker that constructs classic movies, including Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980) Good Fellows (1990), Casino (1995) and The Departed (2006) and some great documentary’s for example The Last Waltz (1978), No Direction Home (2005) Shine a Light (2008) and George Harrison: Living in a Material World (2011). He is also a man that’s proved his personal interest in the world of film, founding both the Film Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation, and the World Cinema Foundation, which is devoted to the preservation and restoration of neglected world cinema. 

Hugo and his father work on their robot.

Hugo is not classic Martin Scorsese but one its obvious he enjoyed making and I would challenge you to find a better opening shot where the camera takes you on a brilliant roller coaster ride. Certainly a story of two parts, when first watching your led to believe it’s a story of a 12 year old boy and his mysterious robot but its not long before you relies that you are being given a history lesson about the early days of film and cinema. Its well deserving of its five Oscars including Best Cinematography for Robert Richardson whose pedigree includes working not only for Scorsese but Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino, Best Art Direction and Best Visual Effects. Entertaining, good to look at and well acted, with some very well known performers in what can only be described as cameo roles.

A famous image of early cinema.