Before I Go To Sleep

Christine Lucas (Nicole Kidman) not only wakes up every day with no memory of the events of the previous day but she also wakes up alongside Colin Firth. Yes the girl has problems. Just when she’d thought she’s got over the Railway Man, here he is again.

Every morning she looks across at Firth, looks confused and maybe a bit pissed off before heading off to the bathroom where she is confronted with a wall of photographs. These are of herself and of herself with Ben (Firth) including several of their wedding.

Back in the bedroom, Ben confirms the whole horrible truth. Yes, she is married to Firth, again, and what’s worse is she can’t even remember doing it.

Well actually it’s worse than that, she has no recollection of the last twenty years. Which might appeal to some people but does seem a bit inconvenient.

Ben goes on to explain that she’d had an accident and can now no longer retain memories, then he buggers off to work and her doctor (Mark Strong) rings her. He tells her that she has been recording herself on a video camera to help remember things. Each day she’ll start to piece things together until it's time for bed again... and they’ll all be gone again.

Problem is he has to tell her where she’s hidden it. This incident, hiding the camera from her husband, sort of gives the plot twist away in the first ten minutes and undermines what is to come.

Her doctor gradually helps her unravel the mental mist and she also meets up with an old college friend Claire (Anne-Marie Duff) who disappeared from her life under somewhat dubious circumstances as the films builds to a somewhat grisly finale.

It's an odd but quite good film with a lot of ‘hang on but...’ moments. The overall premise is intriguing but ultimately once you’ve grasped that the film on the whole disappoints and peters out at the end. Kidman is again excellent though, Strong is good and Firth is, well, Firth. Probably a bit out of his comfort zone to be honest but he copes well enough.

A Most Wanted Man

A Most Wanted Man, from a novel by Jon le Carre and directed by Anton Corbijn, is set in Hamburg. Hamburg being the city where the September 11 attacks were planned and a city in a state of constant high alert ever since. Gunther Bachmann (Philip Seymour Hoffman) leads a small anti-terrorism unit there who are tasked with monitoring the local Muslim community.

When Chechen immigrant Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) arrives in the city suspicions are aroused and he quickly comes under scrutiny from both Bachmann’s unit and the local German authorities who have a hotline to the American security services.

Issa is put in touch with Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams), an idealistic lawyer specialising in asylum seekers, and tells her he is entitled to a significant inheritance which is held in a Hamburg bank.

Bachmann moves in and cleverly manipulates Issa, Richter and Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe) the CEO of the Hamburg Bank. Together they lead him to Mohammad Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi), a man who supports Muslim charities but is also suspected of supporting terrorist organizations through a shipping company in Cyprus. In return he promises to protect everyone from the authorities, a promise he probably can’t keep.

Bachmann himself is a highly unkempt figure who seems to survive purely on cigarettes, whiskey and coffee but he knows his job. Unfortunately while Bachmann is content for Issa, Abdullah and co to gradually lead him to the bigger fish, the Americans are far more impatient and send in the cold calculating Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright) to move things along. Bachmann manages to keep them at arm’s length for a while whilst he sets up his operation.

Given the chance to donate Issa’s inheritance to who he sees fit, Abdullah can’t resist syphoning some off to his shipping company and Bachmann knows his trap has been a success. Unfortunately his honourable intentions to all concerned will be thwarted when the American led authorities wade in.

A Most Wanted Man is a stylish, sophisticated thriller with no explosions, car chases or any such clichéd shenanigans. All we have is an insight into a rather subtle espionage game and it’s rather good because of that.

Sadly it was the last film that Philip Seymour Hoffman made before his sudden death earlier this year but at least it’s a good one to remember him by. Hoffman simply propels this film along although he is ably assisted by an excellent supporting cast. He will be missed.

The Fault In Our Stars

I’ve seen the ‘Fault in Our Stars’ coming over the horizon for quite a while, so when my partner says ‘what are the chances of you taking me to see this?’ I’m ready for it. How bad can it be?

Quite bad. Based on a best selling book by John Greene, our ‘heroine’ is Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodly), a teenager with terminal thyroid cancer and part-time grenade. Her lungs no longer work and so she carries an oxygen tank around with her in a handy backpack.

She’s also your typical surly teenage grenade, so she has to be coerced into attending a cancer support group. You do feel for her though when the group leader, a testicular cancer survivor, turns out to be religious nut that rolls out a large rug of Jesus at the start of ever session.

At this group she meets Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort), a fellow teenager who has lost the lower part of his leg to cancer. Augustus, or should I say Gus, is with his friend Isaac who has eye cancer. Everyone knows that Isaac’s attractive big-chested girlfriend is going to dump him the minute he goes blind but he doesn’t see it coming. Notwithstanding that, Isaac is by far the best character in the film and is seriously underused.

Hazel and Gus immediately fall in love, they don’t know it obviously but we do. Now in true romantic fiction style, we just have to wait a couple of hours for them to get it together. Yes, it’s the same old format where boy gets girl, eventually.

Gus is seriously odd. He carries around a pack of cigarettes and occasionally puts one in his mouth saying ‘they don't kill you unless you light them’. It's a metaphor apparently as well as being ridiculous. Surely most girls would have dumped him on the spot.

She lends him her favourite book, he lends her his. We never find out what she thought of his but we do launch off into a rather random sub-plot where they track down the author of her book, which takes them all the way to Amsterdam where the author breaks his reclusiveness just for them. This then allows for an even more random visit to Anne Frank’s house where their first kiss is applauded by the general public. Not that anyone would have dared clap or kiss in such a sombre place.

This spurs them on to spend one night of passion together, although of course if they both hadn’t prevaricated and lived life for the minute they could have been at it for months. The message of the film seems to be to value every minute but these two don’t.

Back in America, it is revealed that Gus’s cancer has returned, his number is up and he asks Hazel to write a eulogy for him. Which is sort of sweet.

When Gus dies he could have been hit by bus, choked on his beef burger or even killed by aliens rather than dying of cancer. Any of these would have only required a minor script rewrite. Sadly this is a film about romance with a side portion of cancer as opposed to what it could have been, a film about cancer with a bit of romance.

Hazel goes on about ‘pain deserves to be felt’ but I think she means the pain of a teenage romance not the pain of cancer because the film never gets into what it’s like to live with cancer and they both look so damn well throughout.

So it’s hard to buy into the constant sniffling in the cinema which I at first put down to the high pollen count today but clearly it moved some people. As you can perhaps tell, this film clearly wasn’t made with me in mind.  

I do occasionally shed a tear at films, well I did at Marley and Me, but this film was seriously lacking in dog.

Of course Hazel could have saved the whole film if she’d quoted Ade Edmondson in her eulogy. Poor Gus, now he's died for real. Without me. Selfish bastard.

The Two Faces Of January

The Two Faces of January, which is based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith.

Chester MacFarland (Viggo Mortensen) and his wife Colette (Kirsten Dunst) are touring the sights of Athens when we first meet them. They appear to be a normal-ish couple, affluent and with a largish age gap between them but seemingly happy together.

They meet an American tour guide called Rydal (Oscar Isaac), who makes most of his money scamming tourists. Rydal sticks with them, thinking he’s found another rich and easy target. Along with the fact he clearly likes the look of Colette and hopes there might be some fringe benefits in that direction as well.

Rydal quickly finds out that he just a small time crook compared to Chester. Who is mixed up in something far dodgier and more lucrative. When someone comes calling to get their money back, they wind up dead and the MacFarlands suddenly end up trying to flee the country.

Now lured by prospect of even more money and of Colette of course, Rydal decides to help them. He knows someone who can get them new passports and get them out of Greece. 

It’s a promising setup with three promising characters. Rydal doesn’t trust Chester and Chester certainly doesn’t trust Rydal. We get treachery upon treachery and double-double-dealing but the interplay between them just doesn’t quite stack up. The relationship between Colette and Rydal is undeveloped and in the end the plot resolution is far from convincing. Still the acting is good and the film moderately engaging. Not bad.

Locke

The whole ninety minutes of Locke takes places inside his car and Tom Hardy (as Locke) is the only actor you see on screen. The supporting actors and actresses appear only as voices on the other end of his mobile phone. Thankfully on a hands-free kit or else it may have been a bit hard to follow, not to mention dangerous. 

I was a little sceptical about the whole idea and almost skipped this one in protest at such dullness. Good job I didn’t.

Ivan Locke is a construction manager about to oversee a massive foundation laying exercise for a huge new building. On the eve of this he climbs into his car and makes a phone call to tell his boss Gareth (Ben Daniels) that he isn’t going to be there to supervise. That isn’t going to go down well.

Then he phones his wife Katrina (Ruth Wilson) to tell her he isn’t coming home to her tonight and to tell his sons he won’t be there to watch the football with them. Katrina has even put the club shirt on for him and has the sausages under the grill. Then he tells her why, another woman is about to give birth to his child. That's going to go down even less well.

Then he phones Bethan (Olivia Colman). A woman he describes as plain and old with whom he once briefly worked and had a one night stand with, mostly out of sympathy. She is now giving birth to his child with very poor timing.

He has decided to abandon everything to attend the birth even though he barely knows her and certainly doesn’t love her because the child is his responsibility. 

While he makes the drive down the motorway from Birmingham to London, we are party to the calls he makes and receives. All the while his personal and professional life collapses around him.

After confessing his infidelity, his wife bans him from their home. Meanwhile his company bosses in Chicago fire him, yet his sense of duty means he takes every step to ensure the pour of the concrete that will make the foundations will succeed, talking his stand-in Donal (Andrew Scott), a man who likes a drink or two, through what he needs to do.

Locke is a man with an unrelenting belief that he doing the right thing.

I though it was excellent. A refreshingly low budget, captivating voyeur type film and something quite different. Tom Hardy is terrific but he has to be, no one else was going to carry the film if he didn’t. Simply because there is no one else.