The Snowman

Jo Nesbø’s book ‘The Snowman’ made for a weirdly complicated read, so how will it transfer to the big screen? Unless they’re simplified it probably badly, if they’ve made it even more complicated then very badly.

Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender) is the man chasing the Snowman, a serial killer who has the time to make an actual snowman at the scene of all his crimes. As a detective, Hole is a loose-cannon and an alcoholic who probably wouldn’t have had a hope of detecting anything had the killer not chosen to send clues personally addressed to him.

The Snowman has issues from childhood when his mother drove intentionally into a frozen lake and drowned while he escaped. Hole has issues too, his drunken behaviour has broken up his relationship with Rakel (Charlotte Gainsbourg) but they remain 'friends' largely because Harry gets on so well with her teenage son Oleg (Michael Yates) not that effective childcare seems to be a particular forte of his either.

Hole’s newbie detective partner Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson) has issues too (of course) centring around her father, another unconventional boozed up cop (Val Kilmer), who we see in flashbacks.

Her big moment is springing a honey trap for publishing mogul editor Arve Støp (JK Simmons). A man who has a disturbing habit of photographing women he’s only just met. Yet while the film contains the contractual obligation of a full frontal Michael Fassbender topless scene, the female topless scene photographed by Støp seems to have been cut during the editing. Which is disgracefully unPC. 

Needless to say the crime eventually gets solved, only after considerably bloodshed and with no great thanks to a fascinating piece of police kit known as the EviSync, which seems to do everything for the police bar actually solve the case. The only problem is it's about as portable as a tumble drier.

It’s a watchable thriller, if a largely nonsensical one where it’s difficult to keep track of who’s chasing who and why. To be fair to Fassbender, he makes a good drunk but the real stars of the film are the wintery landscapes of Oslo and Bergen.

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.

Twelve Years A Slave

It’s 1841 and Solomon Northop (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a free black man living with his family in Saratoga, New York. He is portrayed as the model of upmarket respectability, so it’s quite baffling that he suddenly accepts an offer to do a short our as fiddler with two white men he’s just met, without even seeming to tell his wife where he's going.

This takes him to Washington, where one night whilst socialising with his new colleagues, he is suddenly taken ill and wakes up in chains.

He has been sold to slave traders, renamed as Platt and is on his way to Louisiana where he will spend the next twelve years working for different owners. All of this happens pretty much within the first fifteen minutes which is a shame. The director seems over keen to get us to the beatings and whippings that are to come, of which there are many.

Once in Louisiana you only need to know one thing. That all black slaves are good folk and all the white owners are evil people, end of story. This goes for the woman as well, Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender) is a nasty chap but his missus (Sarah Paulson) is arguably worse.

Solomon’s first owner Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) does show compassion for a while but even this doesn’t last. 

Of course there has to be one token good white guy and Brad Pitt (naturally) saves the day by getting word back to Solomon's family and subsequently in 1853, Solomon is rescued. The mechanics of this are also glossed over.

The long bit in the middle, the slavery bit, goes on forever and is nothing we haven’t seen before. We all know that slavery was a horrible dark chapter in American history but all this has been done to death before. The uniqueness of Solomon's situation, his kidnapping and later release are mostly absent here.

At least he got out and got to write a book about his ‘experience’, most of the rest of the slaves were in it for keeps. Perhaps this is why I don’t feel anything much for him throughout the film.

I was hoping for more from the film.

A Dangerous Method

We had a quite a few options for films this weekend, so I was going to pick one tonight and then my partner could pick one for tomorrow. To say I was disappointed with my choice would be a bit of an exaggeration. Yes it had Keira Knightly in it, which is always a flashing amber warning light but it was also directed by David Cronenberg, starred Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender as well as being about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. So it sounded good on paper.

Actually Keira, bless her, is far from the worst thing about this movie. In fact she has perhaps found her vocation, playing a mad person who likes a bit of a spanking. I can see it would have been the odd sort of role that awards committees love and she certainly put in the required amount of overacting to be considered, if only it had come in a decent film. Which 'A Dangerous Method' isn't.

It’s nicely shot, well made and reasonably well acted. It’s just a shame about the screenplay. The film is about the professional relationship between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). Unfortunately too much of the film was taken up by discussions between these two men. These went pretty much how you'd expect discussions between two psychologists to go and you wouldn't really have wanted to sit in on that. Would you? Somehow I expected them to have jazzed it up, showed the back story, developed the characters etc etc.

I guess the spankings were there to liven things up but it was all a bit laughable really. Although not laughable enough to count as light relief. I suppose I best explain that there’s a third party in this professional relationship called Sabine Spielrein (Ms Knightly).

An insane Spielrein is sent to Jung’s clinic in Zurich for treatment, where he uses a new form of therapy known as the ‘talking cure’. Basically Jung sits behind his patient whilst they attempt to describe their problems to him. In her case, these turn out to be sexual fantasies generated by her father's ill treatment of her as a child. My diagnosis would have been that she was insecure and in need of attention but then I’m just the viewer here and not the psychologist.

As it turns out, I could have prescribed the same treatment Jung does but doubt I’d have got away with it. He didn’t think he’d get away with it either until a meeting with the maverick psychoanalyst\patient\mad man (delete as applicable) Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel). Gross convinces Jung that there’s only one remedy for her mixed up libido and, by the way mate, monogamy is for wimps.

So Jung gives Spielrein the attention she craves and the spankings via a prescription of regular sex, taken as often as needed, with him. Code of ethics? What’s that?

It does seems to work, Spielrein recovers and turns out to not be as stupid as she looks as she enrols in medical school. Where she becomes... another psychoanalyst. FFS. Meanwhile Jung takes his successful treatment method on to another patient.

So everyone is happy. Well except Jung’s wife Emma (Sarah Gadon) and even she didn't seem too bothered. Perhaps because, on the evidence provided, it seemed pretty crap sex anyway. In a clever parallel with the film itself, there is little passion or emotion on display. So she probably thought she was better off out of it.

Amidst all this 'excitement' are the insomnia curing discussions between Jung and Freud which involves a lot of reading of letters, which is hardly compelling viewing. Eventually their relationship deteriorates over a clash of ideologies.

Reading my review back it makes the film sound far more interesting than it was. It’s a weird film but sadly not remotely weird enough to be interesting. David Cronenberg made a name for himself with films about dark, controversial topics, so this seemed a perfect fit for him but it’s as tedious as a psychoanalysis session. I guess it was probably educational but only in the way an Open University broadcast would be. You have been warned.

Shame

In Shame, on the surface Brandon (Michael Fassbender) seems to be your typical office worker and typical red-blooded male, checking out the girls from behind, eyeing them up on the tube and if he can pull someone in the bar after work then he wouldn't turn down any action offered to him.

Only I hope she doesn’t want to talk afterwards. She’ll likely be ushered out of the door pretty quickly, that is if she got in the door in the first place and wasn’t just offered a quickie in the street.

The Buzzcocks would have said ‘he's an orgasm addict, he's always at it’. Nipping off to the toilets if he gets a spare minute in his work day, for a quick one to one with his right hand and then later, a night of virtual sex in front of his laptop.

Although he seems to have little problem picking up women, he prefers prostitutes. He finds it easier to relate to them, or with his right hand, than with a real person. No strings attached. No feelings, no emotions. We’re led to believe he’s a junkie feeding a drug habit.

He certainly struggles to relate to his younger sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) who turns up unannounced in his shower one night. Sissy has her own problems, is incredibly needy but probably just requires a bit of attention and to spend some time with her brother. They are both a bit of a mess, in different ways.

Brandon resents having her crash at his place as it interferes with his routine and he grows increasingly frustrated with her invasive presence. He also isn't too thrilled when she mimics some of his own behaviour by hooking up with a married man (James Badge Dale) who also happens to be Brandon’s boss. More than anything it’s not terribly good form to shag your brother’s boss in your brother’s own bed.

When Brandon actually tries to enjoy a date with a colleague from the office, it’s an uncomfortable night. He is much happier when he drags her out of work the next day and takes her to a hotel for, yes a quickie, but he can’t go through with it with someone he actual knows and respects.

Meanwhile the secrecy around his habit is starting to unravel. His computer at work is taken away by the IT department, to have all the porn he’s downloaded on to it removed. Luckily they don’t seem to suspect him. Then Sissy stumbles across one of his virtual friends on his laptop. Slowly his world begins to spiral out of control as he is forced to hunt outside his normal boundaries to feed his addiction.

There really is not that much to the film story wise. It’s a portrait of a man struggling with his inner sexual demons and it leaves a lot unresolved. There are no reasons offered for his addiction or for what is behind the strained relationship with his sister.

There’s plenty of explicitness, which in a film about sex addiction is understandable. However there is also quite a bit of gratuitous nudity... unless the film is hinting at something deeper. Sissy certainly isn't shy about being naked around her brother. If that had happened in our household there would have been plenty of choice words said on both sides.

At least the nudity isn’t discriminatory. A Michael Fassbender full frontal is followed by Carey Mulligan full frontal but then there’s that scene of Fassbender urinating... Was that really necessary?

The film sort of hangs around a shocking scene that comes towards the end, which I won’t divulge but again we’re left wondering, does it change anything?

Right at the close, he sees a woman on the tube, the same woman he eyed up right at the start of the film. On that occasion, as he pretty much telegraphed his intentions to her, she was happy to give him the eye back, clearly interested. Then when she got up, we saw her wedding ring and her expression change to one of shame for flirting with him before she ran out on to the platform. Despite running after her, he lost her in the crowd, leaving him gutted he would have to go elsewhere for his next ‘hit’.

Now she has glammed up and appears to have had second thoughts about having second thoughts but is Brandon still tempted after all he’s been through?

We came out of the cinema and my first thoughts were ‘is that it?’ I was a little disappointed but then we talked about it constantly for the next 24 hours, still trying to decipher it. Which is always the sign of a good film.

Angel

'Angel' is based on a book by Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one). The ironically named Angel Deverell (Ramola Garai) lives with her mother above their grocery store. Angel though, doesn't live in reality and isn't remotely angelic. She refuses to accept the world as it is and instead creates her own, through her vivid imagination, where she is a renowned writer who lives in the nearby Paradise House, where she dreamed of living when she was younger.

Nobody thinks she has the ability to be a writer but amazingly, despite little or no life experiences to draw on, a publisher (Sam Neill) takes a wild punt on one of her romantic novels. Even then, he has his reservations and questions among other things, a glaring mistake in her book where she writes that champagne is opened with a corkscrew, but when she throws a tantrum and refuses to change it, he publishes anyway. Fortunately, after this, we are not treated to many more nuggets of her writing.

His wife (Charlotte Rampling) clearly thinks he's mad and can't stand the rude and childish Angel. She suspects it's just because he has the hots for her.

You can't help but agree with his wife about Angel, from the moment the wretched woman appears on screen, she is simply too vile to inspire any sympathy.

Amazingly, the book is a success and one by one all her dreams come true. Angel gets to live like one of the made-up heroines in her books and buys Paradise House but continues to live a life of complete fantasy. She isolates herself from everything else in the world, including the First World War, when it breaks out.



I think the film tries to hammer home the fantasy point because some of the scenes when they are travelling are so badly done, using superimposed backgrounds, that you think you've fallen into a parody of something from the 1950's. Surely, this must have been deliberate.

She meets the Howe-Nevisons. Nora (Lucy Russell), is her obsessive number one fan who begs her to let her be her personal assistant, and her brother Esme (Michael Fassbender), an untalented painter, with whom Angel falls in love with.



At first, he appears to be almost as unlikable as she is and I think they deserve each but then, because Angel is so selfish and so possessive of him, I start to feel sorry for him. She is so annoying that I can't imagine anyone putting up with her.

He goes off to war, the war that Angel pretends doesn't exist, probably just to escape her and comes back wounded. Trapped with Angel and the wheelchair she 'lovingly' provided for him, he hangs himself.

The war is also her undoing, she starts to incorporate her anti-war feelings into her novels and her readership deserts her, at a time when the country are pulling together in the war effort. You almost want to cheer when she herself falls ill and dies.

Oddly having aged badly, the make-up was a bit dodgy (shades of 'Love In The Time Of Cholera'), on her deathbed she seems to rewind back to her late twenties.



I wouldn't say it was a bad film because I found it quite enjoyable. The problem with it was that you never felt anything for the main character and not much for any of the others either. Throughout you just wanted someone to give her a really hard slap.