Dark Horse

Abe (Jordan Gelber) is a thirty-something guy who has not only failed to leave the family home but also hasn’t left behind his childhood. As his room, a shrine to cartoon and fantasy characters galore, testifies.

He has a job, sort of. He ‘works’ for his father (Christopher Walken). ‘Work’ is a loose term here. Abe does little, if any. Most of his work is done for him by a colleague, Marie (Donna Murphy). Abe doesn't even like the job and shows his contempt for it by wearing t-shirts to the office whilst everyone else is dressed for work.

His failure to get on in life though isn’t him fault, it’s everyone else's. Yep, he has a huge unjustified chip on his shoulder too. His mother (Mia Farrow) dotes on him, despite owing him hundreds of dollars in backgammon debts, whilst his father, Walken redefining deadpan, views him as total disappointment. He is not, of course, his brother who is a successful doctor but Abe has always been the ‘dark horse’ of the family.

When Abe foists himself up a woman he sees at a wedding because she is the only other person, like himself, not enjoying themselves, he senses that perhaps here is someone depressed enough to want him. The woman is Miranda (Selma Blair) and even she is uncomfortable when Abe asks for her number.

When he calls her for a date, she's too polite to say no but then forgets all about it. Not a problem, he sits outside her house in his car until she gets home. Abe then quickly proposes marriage and surprisingly she considers his offer. Having once dreamed of being someone, Miranda has now her lowered sights significantly. Perhaps she should give up on happiness altogether and settle for a loveless marriage and children with a guy... like Abe.

As she accepts his offer and kisses him, she is pleasantly surprised that it isn’t as horrible as she suspected but now she has something to tell him. She has Hepatitis B, which is contagious, possibly deadly although possibly treatable and now he's been exposed to it. Oh and she’s still big pals with her ex, Mahmoud (Aasif Mandvi), from whom she probably got it.

So Abe tries to return his new fiancé to the ‘shop’, insisting he has a receipt... yep, the film gets more and more surreal from here onwards. We learn that Abe’s work colleague, the rather plain Marie, actually lives in a swanky apartment, drives a flashy car and is a sexual cougar in her spare time or maybe not, since, midway through, Dark Horse begins existing simultaneously in the real world and inside Abe’s fantasies. Which includes his own death. I think. At least I think that wasn’t real.

I conclude that America much have as many freeloaders as we have here in the UK for director Todd Solondz to have such a dig at them. Nothing is Abe’s fault or his problem...

The film makes its point in a unique but often confusing way. Leaving you not knowing what was real and was wasn’t, just like Abe.

Thoroughly entertaining.

Hodejegerne (Headhunters)

Time to brush up on my Norwegian. Again.

'Headhunters' or to give it its original title - ‘Hodejegerne’ is ostensibly a thriller based on a Jo Nesbø book produced by those Yellow Bird folk, the Dragon Tattoo people. Usually the book is a lot better than the film of the book. All I can say is; it must be some book.

Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) works as a corporate headhunter but his job clearly doesn’t pay well enough to keep his woman (Synnøve Macody Lund) in the style she's become accustomed to. For which he has our sympathy.

He’s worried she’ll leave him because he's short with an inferiority complex whereas she's tall, blonde and beautiful. Perhaps he has a point. So to make her ends meet, he has a side job as an art thief.

Also on the side, he has mistress Lotte (Julie Ølgaard), which doesn’t really make sense. Why resort to crime to keep the woman of your dreams and then have a mistress... but then little is simple in Headhunters.

He uses his job to ascertain whether potential job recruits own any decent works of art, whether they live alone, have a dog etc... then he burgles them, replacing their paintings with fakes. He is aided and abetted by Ove (Eivind Sander), a security expert with a taste for Russian prostitutes.

When Roger is introduced to Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a man who has allegedly an original Rubens hanging in his grandmother’s apartment, suddenly he has the ‘big one’, the one that will finance his trophy wife for good but this time he steals from the wrong guy. Greve turns out to be a psychopath, things get rapidly out of control from there on in and Roger finds out what it is to be headhunted himself.

He ends up fearing for his life but at first, he doesn't really know why. As the bodies mount up, he doesn't know whom he can trust and whom he can't. Nor can we.

The film is clever in that you start by seeing Roger one way but pretty soon your perception of him changes. Roger goes through a lot, a hell of a lot and ends up doing things he wouldn't ordinarily dream of doing, just to stay alive.

The film is full of surprises and at times leads us on a right merry dance. You think one thing but then you think something else. You start rooting for one guy and then end up rooting for another. It’s all done at great pace and with a rather dark, macabre sense of humour bubbling along just under the surface, including a rather shameless rehash of a scene from Slumdog Millionaire.

It would be impossible to spoil much more of the plot for you because there's so much of it and it gets increasingly more complex as the film goes on but it always remains plausible, just about. Just don’t dare blink.

See this before a Hollywood remake appears. Apparently Mark Wahlberg already has his hands on the script. Why bother? There’s no way on earth Hollywood could better this.

Salmon Fishing In The Yemen

My partner has read the book of and therefore desperately wants to see ‘Salmon Fishing In The Yemen’, I tag along, although I’m sure it’s just a RomCom in an ill-fitting disguise.

Ewan McGregor is Fred Jones, speaking for once in his native Scottish. Fred is a fisheries expert working for the government or the Environment Agency or something like that. Fred is told of an Arab sheikh who has more money than sense and wants to do that thing in the title. So I can’t complain the plot isn’t straightforward.

Once Fred has picked himself up off the floor from laughing at the prospect of taking salmon from cold rainy Scotland to the deserts of Yemen, he is told it is going to happen anyway. The government requires a feel good story to distract the gullible public from the bloodshed that is occurring in Afghanistan. Fred is sent off pronto to see the sheik’s representative, the impressively named Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt). Ah ha, at this point flashing lights and sirens go off as the ill-fitting disguise is cast aside revealing the irresistible shag interest.

Fred is so dull though, very well acted dull by McGregor as it happens, you'd think he was into fishing, oh he is. Whereas Ms Something-Somewhat can out of nowhere summon up an impressive knowledge of Mandarin Chinese. Why is she interested? Who knows, ask the fish.

So we have two ill matched people, who are thrust together by circumstance. They will naturally start off at odds but will gradually become fond of each other, then they’ll overcome some last minute crisis before living happily ever after amongst the fish. So, the usual then.

There’s a slight complication that Fred is married and Harriet has a soldier boyfriend (Tom Mison) of a mere three weeks. These though are circumstances that can easily be circumnavigated. Rest assured it's written large across the screen that Fred is not happily married and that Harriet's squeeze is going to die in action in Afghanistan.

Although he doesn't actually die, in a slight plot twist, he is the one person who not only survives an otherwise fatally unsuccessful military operation but is totally unscathed by it. The government whisk him out to Yemen immediately in a blatant PR stunt that no one seems to see through.

Yemen is but the backdrop, the back story of why the Yemenese people so want to sabotage this project is untold. Yet, despite the employment of top Chinese engineers from the Yangtze River dam, sabotage it they do.

That the film has its humorous moments is down to the deadpanning of McGregor but also to the excellent role of Kristin Scott Thomas who plays the Prime Minister’s pushy press officer, who chats with her boss on Instant Messenger. She gets practically all the best lines.

Apparently in the book practically everyone ends up dead or miserable, whereas this has a more predictable upbeat ending. Neither seems an ideal conclusion.

It’s the most undemanding film I’ve seen in some time but it’s harmless enough. A bit like fishing really.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ is not really my sort of film, it even has a terrible title, but here I am anyway... on a 2-for-1 ticket deal at Cineworld. It is based on the novel ‘These Foolish Things’ by Deborah Moggach, which is a much better title in my opinion.

We are introduced to the seven main characters, a motley crew, all of a certain age, who have all fallen for the so good it can’t be true advertisement for the ‘Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ encouraging them to outsource their retirement to Jaipur, India.

After an arduous journey, they finally arrive and can congratulate young entrepreneur Sonny (Dev Patel) on how nicely he Photoshop-ed the advert. He has an admirable ambition to run the hotel ‘for the elderly and the beautiful’, all he lacks is the money to do so.

The guests settle in, dust off the furniture, crush the cockroaches and tuck into their traditional British roast of... goat curry.

The cast is impressive. There’s Celia Imrie as the much married Madge who’s had enough of babysitting duties back home. Ronald Pickup plays the ageing womaniser Norman while Maggie Smith plays Muriel who hates all things foreign but accepts hip surgery in India. Tom Wilkinson plays Graham, a judge who walks away from his career to return to his boyhood India and to track down a former gay lover.

Naturally we have Judi Dench, she plays Evelyn who has been impoverished by the death of her debt ridden husband and Bill Nighy who is Douglas, one half of a couple, the Astley’s, who have been bankrupted by their daughter (we know their pain). Penelope Wilton play his miserable wife Jean. Jean hates India whereas it Douglas feel liberated. You hope that eventually he’ll be liberated from her too and so it proves. She is the only one who fails to let go the past and to embrace the future. Travel is of course supposed to broaden the mind, well some minds anyway.

As a backdrop, India itself steals the show. There’s also a nice side story as Sonny tries to woo his call centre sweetheart Sunaina (Tena Desae).

As a film it’s not too taxing, well not taxing at all really. As charming as it’s predictable, with many of the jokes as old as the cast. It’s a fluffy dog story without the fluffy dog. Come to think of it, why isn’t there a dog? Fluffy or otherwise. Why didn’t one of the characters have a four legged friend? Major oversight.

It’s not a word I'd ever use to describe a film but my partner described the film as ‘lovely’. So there you go. Lovely. Apparently.

Moneyball

In 2001 the Oakland A’s baseball team lost to the New York Yankees in the divisional playoffs. This wasn’t surprising considering the payroll of the Yankees was triple that of the A’s. It’s a situation that isn’t going to change either and the A’s are set to lose three of their star players to teams who can afford to pay more for their services.

The general manager of the A’s, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), and his scouts start debating who they can recruit to replace them.

Beane is not impressed with any of the options and realises that in order to compete, they need to totally re-think the way they recruit players. Then, by chance, he stumbles across Pete Brand (Jonah Hill), an economics graduate working for another team who believes he has a better system. A system purely based on statistics. A system that didn’t care if a player was too old, spent all his time in strip clubs or if his girlfriend wasn’t photogenic enough, provided he got the runs.

Beane recruits Brand to be his assistant and then much to the annoyance of his scouts, they go about recruiting new players based on data not scouting, even the ones who frequent strip clubs and have ugly girlfriends.

Another person who was unimpressed by this was Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) the team's head coach and he refuses to pick the players that Beane and Brand have bought for him. When the club embark on a disastrous start to the season, everyone blames Beane’s purchases but the two of them refuse to be diverted from their strategy. Instead Beane sells a couple of the players the coach is picking to force his hand. I don't quite understand why he didn't just fire his coach but selling the players has the correct effect and the team embark on an all-time major league record of 20 consecutive wins.

They top their division and again reach the playoffs, only to lose at the same stage again. The point though has been made and Beane is headhunted by another team, although ultimately he decides to stay in Oakland.

It’s an interesting film and a true story. I love all the statistical stuff, but it does uses jargon that only baseball fans would comprehend, so an understanding of the game would be useful. I feel a lot of the actual results were glossed over but as this is all factual, if you’re in America you probably know the details of what happened.

Pitt is good and I'm a bit of a Pitt convert over the last few years. Although I can't see anything in this that warranted his Oscar nomination but he is as good in this as has been in most of his recent work. Recommended.

The Descendants

We have put this off and put this off because it's George and well, it can't possibly be any good, can it? Eventually we cracked. It's been nominated you know and so has George.

The Descendants is theoretically a film about a land deal because Matt King (George Clooney), a workaholic lawyer in Hawaii, is the sole trustee of a plot of land that has been in his family for ages. He and his cousins have to decide who to sell the untouched land to before the trust becomes dissolved in seven years time or they could of course do the unspeakable and leave it unspoilt.

You can probably guess how that turns out but it’s all a bit incidental really, the deal is just a side show in the film. The main plot centres around King’s thrill seeking wife (because he is so dull) who suffers a serious head injury in a powerboat accident. Now King not only has to deal with a wife in a coma but he’ll have to try to communicate with his daughters as well. Scary.

His youngest, Scottie (Amara Miller), has started to go off the rails and is acting up at school whilst Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) has been off them for some time, moving on to drugs and alcohol. King hops on a plane to bring her back from her boarding school, which is on a different island. Unfortunately, the best bit of the film, where he gets his drunken rambunctious eldest daughter on to the plane and then all the way home is cruelly edited out. All we see is him carrying her up the stairs to her bedroom. Cop out. That could have been good.

Then oddly from struggling as the self-confessed ‘backup parent’ remarkably, twenty minutes or so later, the entire family are getting along like a house on fire.

There are plenty of unbelievable moments like that but also some good bits too. There’s a strong scene where he has to tell Alexandra that her mother isn’t going to make it and according to her living will, they will have to take her off life support. Then Alexandra drops her own bombshell; that her mother was having an affair.

Faced with this knowledge, King does not go off the rails or go off to find the man to punch his lights out, as he would have done in many films. Instead we are asked to believe that yes King would want to track down his wife's lover but only to give the man a chance to say goodbye to his mistress. That may be sweet but it’s also slightly insane. At best, wouldn’t you send him an email?

So the whole family, along with Alexandra's annoying friend Sid (Nick Krause) who thinks her Grandma's Alzheimer's is hilarious, embark on one those road trips that America films are so fond of. Sid’s reason for being there is revealed towards the end, when you’re well sick of him, but even that’s an odd moment, where King seems lost for words or just lost and the moment is, well, lost.

Ultimately nothing really happens. When King finally confronts the man, again it’s all so, well nice. The whole film is like that, so lightweight, inconsequential. It’s another film where I was itching to amend the screenplay. In the end, little of it is really believable. Even his wife's eventual death isn't sad because at no point do we really see her alive nor are we given any indication that she could survive.

I can't help thinking that if someone like Mike Leigh had restaged this in some rundown housing estate in the UK with a bit of ‘kitchen sink realism’ we might have had something.

So is Clooney any good? Is he worthy of his many nominations? Not especially, he’s ok. Clooney does what Clooney does but he's been better.

It’s not a bad film, just nothing to get excited about. It’s got a sort of a RomCom feel to it; only without the Rom or the Com. I ought to say here that my partner loved it but for me... nah.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

As ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’ starts, Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) is running away, from what we’re not sure yet. She’s also pursued, by one of her new ‘family’ but strikingly he doesn’t take her back. Instead she calls her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson), whom she hasn’t spoken to for two years, but nonetheless Lucy drives three hours to pick up her younger sister.

From there they go to Lucy and her husband Ted’s (Hugh Dancy) holiday home in Connecticut. Martha won’t say much about where she’s been for the last two years, why she hasn’t called or what she’s running away from. Well apart from ‘boyfriend trouble’... ‘we had a fight’ you know.

In flashbacks we learnt that Martha has been living in a farmhouse with a host of other runaways where they are under the ‘leadership’ of the creepy and controlling, some would say charismatic, Patrick (John Hawkes). A man with a unique philosophy on life. ‘Death is but a continuation, not an end’... etc.

In this little commune, a woman's role is subservient. They all share their clothes, belongings, themselves... and sleep together on mattresses in the same room. They work around the house, in the garden and in the kitchen. They are only allowed to eat once the men have finished.

Patrick enchants Martha by singing her a song, renaming her Marcy May and making her feel as if she belongs. Which she will, once she’s undergone the initiation ceremony. Which is to be given drugs and then shagged by Patrick. Apparently, the house has many of his babies but they’re all boys...

Once she’s done a runner, Martha has problems readjusting to normal life. Her sister and her husband try to accommodate her despite her sometimes difficult attitude. Sleeping at the end of their bed whilst they are having sex etc.

Which highlights the film’s only real flaw, that she has unlearnt so many things that would have been embedded in her head from being a young child. Such as putting a swimsuit on when you swim in public and not swimming in the nude.

Otherwise it’s a clever and engrossing film, exploring how a person can get manipulated and brainwashed into an alternative way of life.

I like a film that poses more questions than answers, like this one does. Towards the end things start to happen that are simply not explained. She damages a car but whose car? Or did she? Did she really escape when she ran away or is it all so immersed in her that she may never truly escape? Is that why they didn’t come after her? Because they were confident that there was no escape in her mind and that she will eventually return of her own accord...

The film leaves us unsure of what is real. Are the things that are now happening really happening or are they just in Martha's mind? She thinks that she is being tracked down but is she? The film leaves us in the same state of mind as Martha. Confused. Wondering what is real and what isn’t. She doesn't know the answers, so how could we?

Brilliant.