Rust And Bone (2012) Review

The French are known for making great films and when you look at the foreign films getting world-wide attention there often is a good French film in there somewhere and in 2012 there have been quite a few French films being critically acclaimed world-wide, but why this film?

The film is about Stéphanie, a killer whale trainer, who suffers a tragic accident while working. As she is trying to recover from the accident she meets Alain, a man who is very beastly in his nature, enjoying fighting and sex and not very much else. The two connect and then there is some stuff with his son. The big problem of the film is that the story feels very sloppy and unfocused. You can´t really get a sense of whom the main character is, as it opens with Alain as the clear main character and focuses a lot on his problems, as well as his relationship with his son. However then we are introduced to Stéphanie and all of sudden it just seems like Alain´s problems become irrelevant and the film solely focuses on the after-math of her accident and their relationship. I enjoyed these parts, however as the film goes on, I started getting really annoyed with Alain, as his character never really developed or learned, but just remained this dumb brute and it didn’t work for me because I couldn’t buy that she would forgive him for all he does and support him fighting so much.

Yes I do get the whole Alain symbolises the killer whale metaphor they got going and I completely see the idea behind it, however it just doesn’t work.

While watching the movie I was thinking the end was going to tie it nicely together, however the ending just came off as lazy to me. The last half-hour or so, shifted focus from Stéphanie again and she didn’t really matter anymore. Of course I won´t say what happens, but it felt pretty useless. It really felt like they had no idea how to end the story and just had to come up with something and hope it worked, but it really didn’t as firstly, it changed tone and felt like a different film entirely, borderline melodramatic, secondly, it felt like they didn’t properly resolve the relationship between Alain and Stéphanie, or her character at all for that sake, and thirdly, it didn’t finish Alain´s character at all. Alain (sort of spoiler) doesn’t in any way get punished for his behaviour throughout the film, he doesn’t learn anything and if anything I would say he gets a happy ending without earning it in any way.

It may sound like I hate this film, but I don’t, there are many good factors to it, the main aspect being Marion Cotillard. She gives a truly extraordinary, vulnerable performance and I did really get into her character. Whilst Alain didn’t get enough development I felt she developed really well throughout the film, despite suddenly just disappearing from the film, and I did enjoy the film whilst focusing on her.

It also worth noting that cinematography and music is very good however that along with two good, one great, lead performances really isn’t enough too overlooked a very flawed script. There was much potential, but they just didn’t know where to go with it and so it became uninteresting too often since it just didn’t have enough focus. I see what the filmmaker was trying to do at times, but I don’t think he accomplished a whole lot of what he tried to do and ended up with an uneven drama with moments of greatness, but undeniably mediocre in the end.

2.5/5

Nominations For The 2013 Fanatic Awards!

Instead of just writing a top 10 or 20 list, I decided to do my own awards so to speak, with nominations and all that. It may seem kind of late to announce nominations now, but since I live in Europe many films are released much later over here and so instead of including these films for 2013, I wanted to do it while they were relevant and so here they are, the creatively named 2013 Fanatic Awards!

Best Film

·      Amour

·      Argo

·      Beasts Of The Southern Wild

·      The Dark Knight Rises

·      The Hunt

·      Les Misérables

·      The Master

·      Moonrise Kingdom

·      The Perks Of Being A Wallflower

·      Zero Dark Thirty

Best Director

·      Ben Affleck for Argo

·      Christopher Nolan for The Dark Knight Rises

·      Michael Haneke for Amour

·      Behn Zeitlin for The Beasts Of The Southern Wild

·      Paul Thomas Anderson for The Master

Best Original Screenplay

·      Paul Thomas Anderson for The Master

·      Michael Haneke

·      Quentin Tarantino for Django Unchained

·      Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola for Moonrise Kingdom

·      Tobias Lindholm and Thomas Vinterberg for The Hunt

Best Adapted Screenplay

·      David O. Russell for Silver Linings Playbook

·      Tony Kushner for Lincoln

·      Stephen Chbosky for The Perks Of Being A Wallflower

·      Chris Terrio for Argo

·      Behn Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar for Beasts Of The Southern Wild

Best Actor

·      Daniel Day-Lewis for Lincoln

·      Logan Lerman for The Perks Of Being A Wallflower

·      Joaquin Phoenix for The Master

·      Mads Mikkelsen for The Hunt

·       Omar Sy and François Cluzet for The Intouchables

Best Actress

·      Jessica Chastain for Zero Dark Thirty

·      Jennifer Lawrence for Silver Linings Playbook

·      Emmanuelle Riva for Amour

·      Quvenzhané Wallis for Beasts Of The Southern Wild

·      Marion Cotillard for Rust And Bone

Best Supporting Actor

·      Ezra Miller for The Perks Of Being A Wallflower

·      Michael Fassbender for Prometheus

·      Samuel Jackson for Django Unchained

·      Cristoph Waltz for Django Unchained

·      Philip Seymour Hoffman for The Master

Best Supporting Actress

·      Anne Hathaway for Les Misérables

·      Samantha Barks for Les Misérables

·      Emma Watson for The Perks Of Being A Wallflower

·      Sally Field for Lincoln

·      Amy Adams for The Master

Best Composer

·      Hans Zimmer for The Dark Knight Rises

·      Alexandre Desplat for Moonrise Kingdom, Argo and Zero Dark Thirty

·      Jonny Greenwood for The Master

·      Mychael Danna for Life Of Pi

·      Howard Shore for The Hobbit

Best Cinematography

·      Roger Deakins for Skyfall

·      Robert Yeoman for Moonrise Kingdom

·      Danny Cohen for Les Misérables

·      Mihai Milaimare Jr. for The Master

·      Claudio Miranda for Life Of Pi

Best Special Effects

·      Life Of Pi

·      The Dark Knight Rises

·      The Hobbit

·      Prometheus

·      The Avengers

Best Art Direction

·      Moonrise Kingdom

·      Les Misérables

·      Life Of Pi

·      Prometheus

·      Paranorman

Best Animated Film

·      Paranorman

·      Frankenweenie

·      Brave

·      Madagascar 3

Best Film Not In The English Language

·      Amour (Austria)

·      Oslo, August 31th (Norway)

·      The Intouchables (France)

·      The Hunt (Denmark)

·      The Orheim Company (Norway)

I just want to add a couple comments here at the end, firstly the absence of five nominations in the animated category. I have not seen Wreck-It Ralph and so could not nominate it and of the other animated films I have seen in 2012, none were deserving of a nomination. As for the foreign language category, there is a possibility of a nomination being switched during the next week as there is a good chance I will be seeing Holy Motors, which is supposed to be good and if I consider it better then ay of the five nominated, then I will update it (kind of unfair I know, but it was that or waiting until I see it before posting this). The winner will be announced sometime during the next week!

Les Misérables (2012) Review

Just to get this out of the way, I have never seen or read any incarnation of this story before and so I came into the film completely fresh. Despite being nominated for several Oscars the general public has had a rather mixed response to the film, where as some people love it, I have talked to several people who dreaded every minute. The fact that the film is two and half-hours of purely singing makes it really hard for some to like it, however it may not help that it is incredibly ambitious in its craft either and I kind of worried about these things going into it.

The story itself is also a rather ambitious one, set in France in the 1800s telling a massive story of love, justice and revolution, presented in an often morally ambiguous way. The main character, Jean Valjean, is a former slave who was released on parole, which he eventually skipped, but left the life of crime and became an honest man. However this does not keep his parole officer, so to speak, from being obsessed with hunting him down as he constantly eludes him over the years. As this is going on he also promises to take care of the daughter of a factory worker turned prostitute as she is unable to care for her and it sort of becomes his purpose in life to make sure this child is happy and gets the happy life her mother is unable to give her, or have herself for that matter.

Tom Hooper, who won the Oscar a couple years back for The King´s Speech, directs the film and you can definitely recognize his style when it comes to choice of camera angles and production value. The cinematography has been getting a lot of crap for overusing close-ups, however I must say I absolutely adored the cinematography. It is very ambitious and takes many risks, however it really paid off. By being so ambitious and risky, we got something that is very unique and so interesting too look at. When doing something like this, the biggest risk is that the camera work becomes distracting and takes attention away what is actually going on, however despite using many odd angles here, it flowed so well and I had to really focus to even notice the camera work.

However good camera work is nothing without anything to film, luckily the production design is out of this world. The sets and costumes are absolutely beautiful too look and while keeping a sense of theatricality to it, as it is an musical after all, it still felt like I was is 1800s France, but not in that dull costume drama way. I cannot quite put my finger on what it was, but something just felt so unique about the look of everything and it really helped me getting immersed in the film.

All that good stuff aside, the one thing that really makes the movie, is the acting. I was so blown away by the acting in this film, where even people singing only one line are great. In a film as melodramatic as this, where there is someone crying almost every ten minutes, the acting really has to work and it does on every level. Despite being big and melodramatic, the film still manages to bring chilling emotion because the acting is so unbelievably good. One of the problems I find with musicals is that I have a hard time caring or taking the characters seriously because they are singing, however I was emotionally invested throughout this film. A huge factor this is the fact that they have the actors singing live on set, as opposed to recording it in studio in post-production. This makes the singing feel more real and raw, more affected by the scene.

Like I said the acting is brilliant pretty much all around, but some people deserve a special mention, most notably Anne Hathaway. I had heard she was good, but from the trailers it just looked like one of those performances that tries too hard to get an Oscar and get one, but while it was all that, it was so incredibly brilliant. She isn’t in the movie very much, however when she is she brings such a presence in every scene, such vulnerability and most of all so much emotion. There is a scene where Hooper leaves the camera on her for maybe three-four minutes while she is singing and it is one of the most incredible things I have seen in quite some time. While being an Oscar screaming performance, she really brought so much more to it then just screaming for an Oscar. Then there is of course Hugh Jackman in the lead role, who is also mesmerising to watch. However someone who I think has been overlooked is Samantha Barks, who I don’t think I have ever seen before, but she pretty much stole every scene she was in. People have been complaining about Russell Crowe´s singing and while he is no where as good as others in the film, I thought the singing complimented the character as this very brute man. Two other I quickly want to mention are Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bohem Carter, which were in the film much more then expected as a sort of comic relief and they worked surprisingly well considering the most of the characters are depressed, yet they worked as comic relief with breaking the tone of the film.

One exception that I have to make for the acting is Eddie Redmayne as Marius who has a couple of solos in the second half. Sadly I just couldn’t stand this guy, whilst all the others actors managed to find that place in the melodrama where they still managed to pull us in emotionally, this guy was just melodramatic and I never managed to care or connect with him. The solo moments with him were the definite low in the film; luckily they were few and didn’t really ruin the film for me.

I hate musicals to be honest, I usually find them excruciatingly painful to watch, however somehow this film just worked so well. The 2 and half-hours flew by and I was genuinely invested throughout the movie and never found myself bored. It is a huge credit the director and the actors, who took these risks, but which paid off in the end, giving us an epic and emotional film, quite unlike anything I have seen before.     

4.5/5