A Most Violent Year.

Directed, produced and written by J C Chandor A Most Violent Year (2014) is a crime drama set in New York City during the winter of 1981 said to be one of the most violent in the city's history. Our story involves Abel Morales, a man with ambition who wants to expand his heating oil company by purchasing a dual oil terminal on the East River. This will allow him to get one over on his competitors by allowing him to directly import fuel oil from barges and to store more oil in the summer months when the price is low. Placing a down payment of 40% on the property with an agreement that the outstanding amount must be settled in 30 days otherwise he looses both the property and his deposit. But Morales has a problem in that his Standard Oil Company is being plagued by the hijacking of several of his trucks and their cargo of oil stolen, a problem that’s making it harder to raise the money for the outstanding 60%.

Morales business is not going to plan....

A grand cast makes this crime drama very easy to enjoy. Oscar Isaac, whose performance in the Coen Brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) won him many plaudits plays Morales 'a good man who deserves respect' with the very attractive Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty 2012) as his wife Anna a woman that would sooner dispense with arbitration replacing it with pure old fashioned violence. David Oyelowo seen recently in Selma (2014) where he played Martin Luther King Jnr is an Assistant District Attorney determined to expose price fixing, tax evasion and other illegalities involving the heating oil business in general and Morales in particular.

 

....he should let his wife sort it out!

The film has a cracking musical score composed by Alex Ebert, and has been deservedly nominated for whole clutch of film awards. As I said a film to enjoy and one that grows on you as the story unfolds. Commendably it down plays the violence normally associated with this type of film with Chandor attempting to put across the idea that violence is contagious but all the same it’s a good atmospheric thriller and one I can certainly recommend.

The Two Faces of January.

Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist and short story writer that was best known for crime fiction and had many of her novels adapted for the cinema these included what was probable her best-known character Tom Ripley. To this end two of the story’s were adapted, the first, and to my mind the best, was in 1960 and starred Alain Delon, in his first mayor role, as Ripley in Rene Clement’s Plein Soleil. Another version of her 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley was made in 1999 by the late Anthony Minghella and featured Mat Damon and the 1974 novel Ripley’s Game was also adapted twice, first in 1977 by Wim Wenders as Der Amerikanische Freund starring Dennis Hopper as Ripley and then again in 2002 by Liliana Cavani (best known for The Night Porter 1974) with John Malkovich in the lead part.

 

Collette Macfarland.

The latest adaptation is based on a less well known 1964 novel which has the same name as this new movie The Two Faces of January (2014). Its directed by Hossein Amin whose first feature this is and normally would be better known as a screenwriter for films that include the award winning Drive (2011) and the 2013 Japanese-American fantasy action 47 Ronin.

 

Chester Macfarland.

The story is set in 1962; a rich and attractive couple are staying in one of Athens top hotels. While Chester Macfarland (Viggo Mortensen) and his younger wife Collette (Kirsten Dunst) are out taking in the sites they meet Rydal Keener (Oscar Isaac) an American, Greek speaking tour guide. Chester suspects that he is ‘scamming’ young female tourists while showing them around the city! Impressed by the couples obvious wealth, Rydal sees’ his chance of not only making some money from these American tourists but also he is attracted to Colette! But all is not what it seems when Rydal gets involved in moving an unconscious man who its claimed attacked Chester. With events taking an ever-sinister turn we are never sure who we can trust and the threesome end up in a battle of wits than can only lead to disaster.  

 

Rydal Keener.

Amin’s old-fashioned melodramatic thriller is unmistakably similar to Highsmith’s other adapted stories with its element of middle class criminality, its good-looking well-dressed protagonists and the classy Mediterranean locations. In this case DOP Marcel Zyskind takes us on glorious travelogue of Crete, Athens and Istanbul. All three of the leads in the film carry the story with some panache, although the film is a health hazard as pointed out by the BBFC when it warned that there are ‘scenes of smoking’ a warning that certainly does not underestimate the power of passive smoking!  You will probably notice in the credits Anthony Minghella has been thanked and his son Max was the Executive Producer of this pleasantly watchable film.

                                                                                                          

Inside Llewyn Davis.

The Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre’s screening of the melancholic Inside Llewyn Davis (2012) was shown as part of the cinema’s Film Club season. Introduced by Rachel Findley she told us that the film was about a week in the life of a singer who is active in New Yorks folk scene in 1961 just before Bob Dylan exploded on the scene and ‘folk’ music was changed forever.  The inspiration for this latest Joel and Ethan Coen written and directed vehicle is the music and memoir’s, (The Mayor of MacDougal Street), of Greenwich Village folk legend Dave van Ronk and the muted hues of the front cover of Bob Dylan’s second album released in 1963 The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It shows Dylan with Suze Rotolo at the corner of Jones Street and West Village New York City with critic Janet Maslin summing up the iconic impact of the cover as "a photograph that inspired countless young men to hunch their shoulders, look distant, and let the girl do the clinging".

 

The Bob Dylan album.

Llewyn Davis (  When Davis hitches a ride to Chicago to audition for producer Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham) he meets jazzman Roland Turner (John Goodman) who OD’s on the journey but recovers with the help of his valet Johnny Five (Garret Hedlund). The audition is not successful but Grossman does offer him a chance to form another duo but he turns it down deciding instead to go back into the merchant navy. Yet another plan that did not come to fruition!

Oscar Isaac), an unreadable character, is a self pitying loser who had made a name for him self as part of a singing duo until his partner throw himself off of the George Washington Bridge and he now spends his time looking for singing gigs around the folk clubs of Greenwich Village and bumming free board and lodging from friends and intellectuals that want to show him off to their friends as their ‘pet folk singer’. Other characters in his life are the married folk singing duo Jean and John Berkley (Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake) Jean is pregnant and it could be Davis’s child, but as most of Greenwich Village fancies Jean so it could be anybody’s. All the same our wandering minstrel has to raise the $200 for an abortion!

 

The Peter, Paul and Mary type duo. 

Scraping together the abortion money!

Like the tracks on a lot of music albums from that period, the film itself is a little uneven at times, with high and low points. More like the rather disappointing A Serious Man (2009) than the brilliance of films like True Grit (2010), O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000), Fargo (1996) or my own personnel favourite The Big Lebowski (1998). But a Coen Brothers release is always appreciated and this one is very well constructed, the cinematography of Bruno Delbonnel is superb highlighting the period detail and as usual the acting is first rate but what worries me is the brothers reliance on a cute animal to under right this movie for no real reason which is not usually the case!  The music that forms a large part of the narrative is under the direction of T Bone Burnet with some input from Carey Mulligans husband Marcus Mumford and unusually the numbers in the film, which contextualise the era, are complete which has the tendency to slow the narrative down. It has been suggested that this film is not about the failure to make money but the failure to be connected to others, now theirs something I know about?