Sully

In January 2009 Captain Chesley Sullenberger (otherwise known as Sully) crash landed US Airways Flight 1549 into the Hudson River after colliding with a flock of birds which knocked out both engines just thirty seconds after take-off. Incredibly the aircraft stayed afloat long enough for all 155 people on board to be rescued amidst very cold conditions.

From the moment the plane lost power there were only 208 seconds before it crashed. That’s not a lot of time to work with if you want to make a film. So director Clint Eastwood mainly focusses on the aftermath as Sully (Tom Hanks) deals with the resulting media attention and then, along with his co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), faces goes the National Transportation Safety Board who are investigating the incident. Although Eastwood also struggles to make a story out of that.

Oddly the investigation seems to take place immediately after the incident and we don’t even see Sully go home to his wife, Lorraine (Laura Linney), who we never actually see without a telephone attached to her ear. Neither she nor Sully seem very fazed by the fact he’d just been involved in a place crash.

The flight was bound from New York's LaGuardia Airport for Charlotte and the investigation asks whether the plane could have made it back to LaGuardia or to nearby Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. Flight simulations allege that the plane could have successfully landed at both LaGuardia and Teterboro.

Sully however disputes this and argues that the ‘human element’ needs to be taken into consideration. This causes an immediate sea change in the investigation as if they’d never thought of something so bleedingly obvious. 35 seconds human reaction time is then allocated, the simulations are rerun, the planes crash and now Sully can officially be declared a hero. I’m sure it didn’t quite happen like that.

There is nothing particularly wrong with the film except that there isn't really a story here to tell. I’m also sure the NTSB’s investigation was more to ascertain the cause of the accident and to ensure it wouldn’t happen again rather than the total witch hunt against Sully as is portrayed here.

The crash landing into the Hudson was the story but they seemed to go out of their way not to make a disaster movie which is fair enough, we have had more than enough of them. Instead the story is so flimsy that the film wraps up in 90 minutes and that’s after they have needlessly shown the whole crash landing sequence twice.

I didn't know that much about this story beforehand so I went in hoping for more insight but didn’t learnt much. However there are some nice shots of the real Chesley Sullenberger at the end as they show film of the flight's reunion.

Snowden

Snowden tells the story of the events that led Edward Snowden to becoming one of the most wanted men in the world.

Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was a computer expert who got his dream job with the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). As a strong believer in his country it was the perfect job for him, helping to track the spies and terrorists that wish to cause damage to this country.

The film tracks his rise through the ranks of the intelligence community from his military service, his stationing in Geneva and Japan, then finally his employment with the NSA (National Security Agency) in Hawaii. Where they have a facility that is right out of any James Bond film.

At first he loves he job but then his conscience started bothering him when he discovers that besides spying on other countries and terrorist organizations around the world, the government also has a massive espionage network in place in the USA itself. In fact twice as much data is being taken from the USA as it is from Russia.

What's mind-blowing is the sheer scope of everything the surveillance program comprised. How the NSA can link up computer to computer and therefore person to person using all their available technological devices. If you believe it, and this film is telling you believe it, then it is chilling. So do what Snowden does and always put a sticking plaster over your laptop’s webcam when you’re having sex with your girlfriend.

 

His girlfriend is Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley) and she is alongside him all the way, being shunted all around the world, yet she has little idea what he is up to most of the time and naturally he can’t tell her.

She stays impressively by his side throughout even he downloads evidence of the surveillance program and flies to Hong Kong with it. It is from a hotel there that much of the story is told in flashbacks as he reveals all to documentary filmmaker Laura Poitros (Melissa Leo) and journalists Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewan MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson) of The Guardian.

When they publish his revelations he has to go on the run and winds up at Moscow International Airport, where he becomes a fugitive charged under the Espionage Act for revealing classified information. The government and the media initially portrayed him as a spy but as everyone took in the information he had revealed public opinion generally swung behind him but the government’s stance remains the same and he remains in Russia, although not at the airport, to this day.

It’s a very well made film, informative and riveting which keeps you engaged and more importantly gets you thinking. It’s also well acted and well directed by Oliver Stone, a man well known for his critiques of the American government. Consequently the film perhaps does try a little too hard to paint Snowden as a hero but then, perhaps he was.

A United Kingdom

A United Kingdom is set in post-war 1940s London and based on the true story of Seretse Khama, the heir to the throne of Botswana or Bechuanaland as it was then.

The events portrayed in the film are factual but not that well known in the UK. I personally knew little of this story before watching the film but I do now. I do love a good education.

Khama (David Oyelowo) is over in London studying while waiting to take over as leader in his own country. He inherited the rule as a young boy but his uncle is ruling as regent until he is old enough to take over.

It is while he is in London that he meets every day young lass Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike), the daughter of a salesman, at a church dance that oddly seems only to attract black African men and white British women. The Daily Mail would have had a field day.

He and Ruth hit it off, fall in love and marry. All rather quickly. We've seen a couple of films with instance romances recently.

Naturally this mixed race marriage is going to raise a few eyebrows and being shunned by her father (Nicholas Lyndhurst) turns out to be the least of their worries as she moves to Botswana with her man, not quite knowing what she's getting herself into.

When they arrive in his homeland, his choice of queen does not go down that well with the locals, with his uncle or indeed the British government whose protectorate Botswana is currently under. They all refuse to accept her and call for Khama to either give up his new bride or to give up his country.

Khama then seems to win over his people with his ‘I love my people’ speech but this does not work with the British government who are in hoc to the South African government, who are in the process of implementing their policy of apartheid. Naturally the prospect of a black leader in a neighbouring country marrying a white woman does not sit well with them.

The film takes us back and forth between a drab post-war England and bright sunny Botswana as it documents the political struggle that ensues. Prime Minister Clement Attlee exiles Khama from his own country leaving his newly pregnant wife marooned there where she actually makes a decent fist of being queen-elect and eventually wins over the people of Botswana.

There is hope when Winston Churchill, the leader of the Opposition, promises to reverse Attlee’s decision were he to win the forthcoming General Election. However, when he does, he changes his mind and takes an even harder line than Attlee did.

A solution comes in the form of diamonds. When there are discovered in the territory they belong to the people under a Protectorate but if they were a colony, as they British government wanted them to be, they wouldn’t have.

This knowledge enables Karma to reconcile with his uncle and they agree that he should he a renounced the throne allowing him and his wife to return to the country as private citizens while setting the country on a path to independence. Independence which is fulfilled in 1966 when Karma himself becomes the first democratically elected president of the Botswana. Their son is now the current President.

It’s a decent, if unspectacular film, which seems to be at least accurate in the majority of its historical detail which is rare these days. Well worth a look.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Ok. So I admit I was the one who watched all the Harry Potter films without fully understanding what was going on. Well, I did follow the first one which was utterly charming and the second to last one which was a bit like a proper film but the rest were all well, full of the sort of stuff I didn’t really understand. Wizardry you might call it. Made up stuff. So it’s fair to say that ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ probably wasn’t made for me.

It's been five years since the last Harry Potter film and it’s a surprise that it’s taken that long for them to decide to bleed the original idea dry but now they clearly have now. ‘Fantastic Beasts’ is based on a fictional textbook Harry and his classmates studied at Hogwarts and JK Rowling published as a short story in 2001.

We are now back in the 1920’s and in the interests of coining the more lucrative American market the action has been moved to New York. Former Hogwarts student and now wizard zoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) has arrived in the city on route to Arizona where he is going to release a Thunderbird into the wild.

When he arrives he is arrested by Porpetina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) aka Tina a downgraded Auror from MACUSA (Magical Congress of the United States of America) whose job it is to investigate any unregistered wizard who comes into the city.

By now Newt has lost his suitcase, which contains not only the Thunderbird but other fantastic beasts, after one of the oldest tricks in the world, the old swapped suitcase affair. Consequently his beasts end up with no-maj (aka muggle) wannabe baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler).

The charges against Newt are dismissed by Percival Graves (Colin Farrell), presumably the boss, when he examines Newt's suitcase to find nothing but doughnuts while the contents of his original suitcase escape and run amok in NYC. 

Newt and Tina along with Jacob and Tina’s mind-reading sister Queenie (Alison Sudol), who seems to have the hots for Jacob, now team up to recapture them Pokémon-go style. Queue comic chase sequences.

Yes the Niffler, a magical platypus with an expensive strain of kleptomania, is cute and funny as it attempts to cram all the world’s valuables into its bottomless stomach but Eddie Redmayne performing a mating dance with the aim of luring a rhino-style beast, an Erumpent, is beyond excruciating.

You know that studios have run out of ideas when they end up resorting to more and more special effects. An hour into this I already have a CGI related headache along with a severe case of boredom.

Headache aside, I was sort of with everything to this point but new characters such as Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller), the adopted child of the wizard hating Mary Lou (Samantha Morton), keep coming at you from all angles without much in the way of an explanation. 

None of these characters added up to much which meant I didn’t really care much for any of them. What made the Harry Potter watchable was that the brilliant characters which are sadly absent here.

Rowling is capable of much better than this. We know she is, Casual Vacancy, Cormoran Strike etc. To me ‘Fantastic Beasts’ is a cluttered mess and I haven’t been so unentertained in a long time.

At least you know it's a wind up when Johnny Depp appears at the end as Grindewald... it is a wind up, isn’t it? Apparently not, this is going to be a series of five films. Wake me up when it's all over.

The Light Between Oceans

Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) is war veteran returning from WWI to Australia. Haunted by the experience, Tom is intent on withdrawing from the human race completely and he accepts a job as the lighthouse keeper on some desolate island somewhere off the coast of Australia called Janus Rock. 

Before he departs he is given a send-off on the mainland where he meets Isabel (Alicia Vikander), who sees something she quite likes under his ridiculous WWI moustache. Well I guess the post-war man market was probably a bit depleted, so she quickly expresses a desire to get withdrawn and desolate with him on Janus. The only problem is the lighthouse has a wives only policy, so they quickly get married.

It’s an odd match with Vikander very much the toy girl here. In real life she is 28, eleven years Fassbender’s junior, but here she looks about 18 whereas he looks every day of his real age. Which is somewhat sinister for starters. 

Still they start married life on the island and we get treated to scenes of idyllic sex as the waves lap furiously up against the lighthouse. My partner says filmmakers are incapable of making a film with Fassbender without putting a sex scene in for him but in his defence it was Alicia Vikander. What's the guy supported to do? Well, he could at least look like he's enjoying it.

Fassbender’s facial expression doesn’t change much from sad/gloomy during the whole film even when he is getting down to it with Vikander. She at least gives pleasure a go and, after this film, they became a ‘real life’ couple. So she obviously wasn’t faking.

Isabel gets pregnant but has a miscarriage. Then she gets pregnant again but has another miscarriage and it is at almost this exact moment that a rowing boat is seen bobbing up and down close to the lighthouse.

The boat contains a man who is dead and a baby who is not. It is later revealed that the man was German, as if this explains why he would leave his wife, put his baby into a rowing boat and head out on to the ocean before eventually ending up at a lighthouse a hundred or so miles from anywhere. There is no attempt to explain how the husband died while the baby survived this journey.

Isabel’s urge to have children is so great that rather than ask her husband to move back to the mainland where she could get some decent antenatal care, she persuades him not to report the incident, to bury the dead man and to steal the baby to raise as their own. Erm, somewhere of course there is likely to be a grieving mother? No matter, the infant Lucy is raised by them.

 

Four years later, Tom comes across a memorial for a missing man and baby which leads him to find out who the real mother is, namely Hannah Roennfeldt (Rachel Weisz). It really makes you wonder why nothing was in the local paper at the time or perhaps a few ‘missing’ posters? Why did no one say to the lighthouse keeper ‘seen any random rowing boats Tom?’ but implausible plot twists are de rigueur here. Tom promptly goes off to send a note to Hannah to let her know her baby is safe. Pillock.

Then the police gets involved and it all quickly boils down to a murder\kidnapping trial and a nasty custody battle over poor Lucy aka Grace who doesn’t know which mummy to turn to. Well she does and it’s not a popular choice.

There’s still time for more implausible plot twists as Isabel inexplicably puts her husband in jail for the alleged murder of the man in the boat and the film ends up tying itself in such a knot with its own twists and turns that the ending makes even less sense than what has gone before it. 

You’ve probably guessed by now that I didn’t enjoy it that much.

The tagline of this film is ‘you only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day’. I have forgiven my partner for taking me to see this.

Nocturnal Animals

Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) is a failed artist who now runs a gallery. She is married to Hutton (Armie Hammer), her second husband, but she isn’t enjoying her life very much.

One day she receives a package from her first husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), almost 20 years after she divorced with him. The package contains a manuscript of a book entitled ‘Nocturnal Animals’, a phrase he often used to describe her being a chronic insomniac. It is also dedicated to her and comes with a note explaining that it was a book she inspired him to write.

When her husband departs on yet another bedroom based ‘business’ trip she starts to read it. Edward always was an aspiring novelist and her younger student-self fell for him. She thought she could marry him and make things work. Which was not something her mother (Laura Linney) agreed with her on, telling her he was weak and not her ‘equal’.

Susan always criticised his writing for being autobiographical and as she starts to read she seems to automatically cast him as the head character Tony. Tony is on holiday with his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and daughter India (Ellie Bamber) when they are driven off an isolated stretch of road by a group of men led by Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Tony’s wife and daughter are kidnapped by the men and they are eventually found naked and dead.

Susan becomes consumed by the story and its disturbing plot which hits home inside her head. It causes her to reflect back on her life with Edward. Both the good times and when she finally took her mother’s advice, all women eventually turn into their mothers, and terminated her marriage to the man she claimed to love along with his unborn child. Instead she turned to a materially perfect life and a loveless marriage to a 'real' man who was a complete bastard.

The film mixes scene from the present, the past and fiction with great style with the ‘fiction’ feeling as impressively real as the ‘real’ story. In the book Tony enlists the help of cancer struck detective Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon) to hunt down the perpetrators but, even as they find them, Tony’s life spirals ever downwards as he attempts to make amends for not fighting hard enough for the ones he loved. Tony never recovers from having his wife and daughter ripped away from him in one of many parallels with the ‘real’ story. 

His book makes Susan realise what a soulmate she gave up on, what she did to him and perhaps even causes her to fall in love with him all over again. She must also be wondering whether Edward is now in the same state as Tony. Just how autobiographical is his story or has Edward simply channelled all his hurt into this dark tale so that he can move on. The film leaves us to decide for ourselves.

It is a beautiful crafted film, superbly acted particularly by Adams and Shannon, which moves along at a cracking pace. It gets under your skin and into your head in ways that not many films do.

At the end she tries to see Edward but perhaps you have to live with the choices you’ve made and their consequences for other people, whatever they may be, and move on or maybe not.

Highly recommended.

The Girl on the Train

Apparently the film rights were acquired to Paula Hawkins’s ’The Girl on the Train’ before it was even published. Obviously they'd had a premonition that it would be a big hit and they’d have ‘Gone Girl 2’ on their hands. So before they’d realised that its very British setting would be a key reason why it was taken to its reader’s hearts they’d already exported it to America.

So out goes the grim commute through the London suburbs with terraces and semis backing on to the line and in comes upscale New York with its mansions and lush green gardens. Oddly Rachel even gets a seat for the whole journey. Everything is completely Americanised bar oddly our lead character Rachel, a professional drunk, played by the very British Emily Blunt.

Now we've all done the daily commute to work at some point. The same places, the same faces, the same overheard conversations, the same overheard music, day after day. It’s enough to drive you to drink. Well Rachel loses her job but still does her commute for reasons only she can rationalise. Perhaps rail season tickets are cheaper in New York than they are in London?

 

Every day she gazes into the homes that pass by her window, swigging her vodka from her drinks bottle as she goes, and becomes particularly obsessed with one couple Scott (Luke Evans) and Megan (Haley Bennett) who she sees groping each other on their balcony.

Ironically they live only a few doors down from her old house where her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) is now shacked up with a newer blonder model in Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). Rachel imagines that both these women have it all or in Anna’s case both Rachel’s ex and the baby she couldn’t have. Rachel becomes a professional stalker.

The film, more so that the book, has come under fire for its portrayal of women and it’s true that all three women are hardly role models for female empowerment. They are all essentially victims of their own men, who are naturally deceitful and controlling, and perhaps (whisper it quietly) themselves. In fact the whole lot of them, the men as well, are messed up beautiful people with too much time on their hands. Only one of the three women works, part-time, sometimes.  So unable to get their collective acts together it’s perhaps not surprising that they have affairs with each other instead.

It’s certainly not a feminine drama even if there is a lot of talk about babies even from Megan, a borderline nymphomaniac who is so messed up that she starts seeing a therapist Dr Kamal Abdic (Edgar Ramirez). However once it dawns on Megan that her therapist is a man rather than just a therapist, she tries to seduce him as well, naturally.

Then Megan goes missing and Rachel finds herself embroiled in the police investigation as a potential witness too drunk to know what she’s witnessed.

So it’s a cocktail of real life. You know infidelity, alcoholism, chauvinism, voyeurism, lust, lies, manipulation, murder... it’s a checklist of all the things you'd perhaps like to get away with but can't and don't obviously and of course you're not even allowed to think any of these things out loud anymore. I thought it was wonderfully entertaining.

Throw in an absurd amount of sex scenes just for good measure, preferably involving trees, and it’ll be just about perfect. Oh, they did that as well.

The plot itself is fairly transparent even if you haven't read the book, well at least I thought it was, because the murderer looks like a murderer from the moment you first see them on screen.

The acting isn’t too shabby especially from Blunt. Rachel looks dreadful most of the time, half dead mostly, which is a credit to Blunt who can do this look in her sleep. I would recommend it but it’s probably best watched Rachel style with a drink in hand.