White Bird in a Blizzard.

Kat Connors (Shailene Woodley) is 17 years old when her perfect homemaker mother, Eve (Eva Green), a beautiful, enigmatic, and haunted woman, disappears - just as Kat is discovering and relishing her newfound sexuality. Having lived for so long in a stifled, emotionally repressed household, she barely registers her mother's absence and certainly doesn't blame her doormat of a father, Brock (Christopher Meloni), for the loss. In fact, it's almost a relief. But as time passes, Kat begins to come to grips with how deeply Eve's disappearance has affected her. Returning home on a break from college, she finds herself confronted with the truth about her mother's departure, and her own denial about the events surrounding it...

The synopsis is as good as it gets, going down hill from here on in. This extremely unconvincing TV type drama set in the late 1980’s relies totally on a wee twist at its conclusion to hide its rather obvious narrative. Based on a novel of the same name written by Laura Kasischke, White Bird in a Blizzard (2014) has been directed and written by Gregg Araki, who also directed and wrote the screenplay for the much better Mysterious Sin (2004) a film I would certainly recommend. This latest painfully unhurried drama is a complete let down with Eva Green miscast and Shailene Woodley’s obvious talents completely wasted. Although it was premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival it was only and not unsurprisingly given a limited release.

Now You See Me.

Thanks to an unknown benefactor, four down on their luck street magicians form a collective called ‘The Four Horseman’, although incidentally one’s a woman, with the sole aim of pulling off robbery’s during their high concept magic show performances and with an added touch of Robin Hood they give the money away to their audiences. In the first show in Las Vegas they pull off an ingenious bank robbery in a different country. In the second show in New Orleans, they manage to steal $140 million dollars from a wealthy insurance broker. By this time FBI agent Dylan Rhodes and his French Interpol assistant Alma Day realise that they should track down and make an attempt to arrest the these ‘magical’ criminals.

The synopsis for this ‘big’ movie is actually far better than the finished article, “The more you think you see, the easier it will be to fool you” a statement made by one of the illusionists aptly describes French director Louis Leterrier’s latest outing. Like his previous films, including 2008 The Incredible Hulk, there are some great set pieces in a heist movie that involves deception and illusion to steal rather than the normal gunplay. It does its best to make the narrative interesting by constantly jumping from one plot twist to another without a lot of success. A slight of hand movie where you’re never sure who are supposed to be the bad guys and who are the good guys?  It does have a grand ensemble cast that includes Mark Ruffalo, Jesse Eisenberg, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Caine, Isla fisher, Woody Harrelson and French actress Melanie Laurent. But even the high profile of these involved can’t seem to lift this movie beyond its rather dull predictability.

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?