Rush

Vroom Vroom. Rush takes us back to the days of Formula One in the 1970s. In what was, in most people’s eyes, the heyday of the sport. A time before it was dominated by professional sportsmen and technology, when it was still exciting and had real characters driving the cars. Sadly, in those days, a F1 contract also came with the chilling statistic that most years a couple of drivers would be killed. To take such risks meant you had to be a certain type of character in the first place. A nutter.

The story centres on the rivalry between two such nutters, James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl). We meet them both, through their own narrative, back in 1970 racing in Formula 3. Hunt has one of his trademark crashes, goes to A&E and comes home with a nurse under his arm.

This immediately reinforces the image of Hunt as the cocksure playboy of the day. A man who before each race would extinguish his cigarette, finish his pint and reluctantly put down his pit girl before heading off to win the race. He was the man men wanted to be and women just wanted.

By contrast Lauda was the purposeful Austrian professor who took a keen interest in the car he drove and lived a staid lifestyle, all in pursuit of victory. 

In truth they were not such polar opposites. Certainly Lauda, who was a consultant on the film, was the more professional but even he, liked a good party and a good woman or three. Also, far from being sworn enemies, they were actually great pals. In their early days, they shared a flat and probably their women. This bit of artistic licence though doesn’t seem to matter and the film gives us two great characters.

We fast forward through the years to 1975 where Hunt teams up with the eccentrically amateur Hesketh Team. Where, after a good season, he manages to get himself a top drive at McLaren. He now goes head to head with Lauda’s Ferrari.

1976 was a complex season and the film simplifies things a touch but with so much off the track bickering that season, lead always by Ferrari, perhaps that was wise. Even Lauda got fed up with Ferrari in the end and moved on.

The centre point of the film is the German GP at Nürburgring, an epic but horrifically dangerous 14 mile circuit that weaves through the woodland of the Eifel Mountains. Lauda tried to persuade his fellow drivers to boycott the race due to his safety concerns. The drivers refused and on the second lap of the race, Lauda himself crashed and his car burst into flames. By the time he was pulled free by his fellow drivers he had suffered third degree burns to his face and head as well as suffering lung damage. He lay in hospital in a coma and they administered the last rites to him.

At the time Lauda was the championship leader by a large margin. In his absence Hunt set about closing the gap but only three races later Lauda turned up at Monza in his bandages and raced.

It all meant that going into the final race at Mount Fuji, Lauda led by a mere three points. The race, held in appalling wet conditions, saw Lauda pull out not wanting to risk his life again and Hunt recovering from tyre trouble to do just enough to clinch the championship. No doubt he headed home with the trophy under one arm and yet another girl under the other.

It is an excellent film. Hemsworth and Brühl are both impressive and convincing in their roles. The film even manages the rare feat of making the audience root for both of them.

The era is recreated almost perfectly with numerous F1 cars dragged out of retirement and the attention to detail is impressive. All of which successfully transported me back in time to when I was nine years old.

Upstream Color

When you go see your first film for ages, you've got to make it a good one or if not a weird one. So Upstream Colour, which falls mainly into the latter category.

A lass called Kris (Amy Seimetz) is accosted by a man known as the Thief (Thiago Martins) in a night club and gets a worm forced down her throat. Once in her body this worm grows inside her, seems to brainwash her and allows him to control her. He then assigns her a series of odd tasks including making her write out each page of Henry David Thoreau's book Walden, a book which pops up frequently throughout the film. Then he sends her off to the bank, where she signs over all her money to him.

Once she's penniless, he leaves. A nice sort of twist on the woman emptying her bloke’s bank account via his credit card I suppose. He leaves her in a bit of a mess, in more ways than one. She can feel the growing worm travelling under her skin and takes a carving knife to her legs.

At this point, another man, The Sampler (Andrew Sensenig), draws her to him by broadcasting the sounds of natural, that he has recorded, back through some big speakers. He takes her to his pig farm where he surgically removes the worm from her body and transplants it into a pig. It appears that he has a group of pigs that are all connected to different people who have suffered the same fate.

Now no longer physically infected, Kris tries to return to normal life and her job but as she's been missing for some time, she loses it. Then she meets Jeff (Shane Carruth) on a train. At first she tries to ignore him but they already seem to have a connection. It turns out he has also been a victim of the same ordeal. Together they attempt to rebuild their lives and make sense of what has happened to them, as do we, the viewer.

It’s the sort of film where the viewer is supposed to fill in all the gaps. It needs your full attention to attempt to do so and there's not a lot of dialogue to help you out. The film is clearly meant to be puzzling and on that basis it succeeds greatly.

The Sampler, as well as being her rescuer, also seems to be the source of the worm drug. So maybe this is a film about drugs and drug dealers? After all drugs do make people do mindless things, bankrupts them, leaves them under the control of their dealers and even if they recover, they are never the same people again. Possibly.

There are countless theories you could come up with and there are countless theories already out there on the internet.

It’s engrossing but it's not a film that the majority of film goers will appreciate due to its lack of car chases, explosions and general absence of straightforward-ness plus the buzzing of the constant ambient soundtrack will give some folk a headache. Yet, in a year where everyone is making sequels or remakes it's good to see something refreshingly different and outlandish like this.

The Look Of Love

The Look Of Love is a biopic by Michael Winterbottom about Geoffrey Quinn aka Paul Raymond. Raymond was of course a famous entrepreneur... ok, so perhaps he was a porn baron, the self proclaimed King of Soho.

The film opens with Raymond (Steve Coogan) mourning the loss of his beloved daughter, watching old video recordings and reflecting back on his life, as in flashback we get the Paul Raymond story.

Raymond went from humble beginnings in Liverpool to being a success in London where he put on a show featuring nude models as statues, the law prevented nudes moving around on stage at that time. Then he moved on to greater success with his Gentlemen’s Clubs, the sex comedy Pyjama Tops and Men Only magazine. With each new project he pushed further against the boundaries of public decency.

He was though a shrewd businessman, who ignored the countless bad reviews and criticisms. He simply got on with making money, lots of it, and was smart enough to reinvest it in property; most notably in Soho and he became Britain's richest man.

Initially helping him run his business was his wife Jean (Anna Friel) but he wasn't a man who was good at relationships. Whether that was with his own children or with the women in his life and there were plenty of them. 

At first Jean tolerated his countless affairs with the women who worked for him. That is until he meets Amber (Tamsin Egerton), who later becomes Fiona Richmond and the editor of Men Only, his relationship with her results in the largest divorce settlement in British history.

Amber’s advantage over Jean was that she had no problem with three in the bed romps, as long as she was part of them. Well at first she didn’t, eventually she leaves him too.

Meanwhile he is mostly ambivalent to the existence of his children, save for his Daughter Debbie (Imogen Poots) and it is his relationship with her that is central to most of the story. He dotes on her but even there he condones the drug habit that ultimately kills her.

Although Raymond was fascinating figure, he wasn't a terribly likeable one and despite the money, the women on tap and the power, he never seemed genuinely happy. Except that is when he was with his daughter and he gives her a leg up to her death. After which he became a virtual recluse until his own death.

The film is an interesting watch but a bit lifeless. Surprisingly it lacks drama and even plot, possibly the process of condensing his colourful life down to first be book sized and then further to be film sized didn’t leave much, other than a long list of bullet points. The film ended up being more informative than entertaining.

The Paperboy

The Paperboy is an adaptation of a novel by Peter Dexter which isn’t about a little school kid who delivers newspapers.

Set in the late 1960s, it is about a man called Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack) who has been jailed for the murder of a local sheriff. Van Wetter is on death row and awaiting execution.

In prison Van Wetter is penpalled by Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), a woman who has cherry picked him from all the other inmates as her preferred murderer to marry.

Bless enlists the help of two journalists to attempt to get Van Wetter released. These are Ward Jansen (Matthew McConaughey), a man from the same town where Van Wetter is being held, and his colleague Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo), a black journalist from London. They are assisted by Ward’s younger brother Jack (Zac Efron), a former university swimmer who was expelled for vandalism. He is their driver and ‘paperboy’. Jack’s only real friend is the ex-family maid and narrator of the story, Anita (Macy Gray), who raised him and his brother in the absence of his mother.

Ward and Yardley set about investigating the case, where they find some of the evidence against Van Wetter to be inconsistent and they suspect that he may not have received a fair trial.

Meanwhile, Jack falls heavily for the tarty short skirted Charlotte but she only has eyes for Van Wetter. To the extent that Van Wetter, a man you wouldn’t even want to write a letter to, and Charlotte pleasure themselves at their first meeting rather than discuss the facts of the case.

It all gets even more bizarre when Jack is stung by jellyfish while swimming and Charlotte fights off all the other women on the beach to be the one to urinate on him. Apparently this helps and has nothing to do with Efron being many a young woman’s fantasy.

It is the relationships between the main characters, a generally unpleasant bunch if the truth be told, that keeps us on our toes. Each has sides to their character that they wish to hide and that we probably wished they’d continued to hide.

Ward, for instance, is revealed as a closet homosexual with a fondness for interracial masochism. This puts him in hospital and enables Yardley to print an article on Van Wetter that doesn’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Jack, who finds out that Charlotte has slept with Yardley, in order to persuade him to come up with some evidence, tries to stop publication but all he manages to do is to find out that Yardley is actually an American. This is a time when racism was rife in the States and local black men could not attain decent jobs. Even then Yardley had given Ward sexual favours to the get the job.

So it’s all pretty sleazy stuff. All we need now is for Charlotte to offer Jack a sympathy shag, which of course she does and this does nothing to ease his infatuation with her.

As a result of Yardley’s article Van Wetter is released from prison and after taking his fill of Charlotte roughly in every room of her house, he takes her away with him to live out in the swamps.

...and they all lived happily ever after. Err no.  

It’s an interesting film, which you are never totally sure where it’s headed but it all seemed to make sense when it finally got there via a rather ramshackle route. It has to be said that Cusack is terrific and Kidman plays yet another deluded lonely soul but all the cast are good. Recommended.

Good Vibrations

Not many people will have heard of Terri (with an 'i') Hooley, I hadn’t, but some will have heard of Good Vibrations. Good Vibrations was a record shop setup by Hooley. It was also the name of a record label he launched to help emerging Northern Irish bands and to him, Good Vibrations was his way of life.

The film ‘Good Vibrations’ is his story, a biopic of his life. Terri with an 'i' (Richard Dormer) lost an eye when he was a child but this didn’t hold him back and fitted with a glass eye, he opened his record shop on the most bombed half mile in Europe in late 1970's Belfast at the height of the troubles.

Hooley had seen his friends divide up along political and religious grounds as the troubles escalated. He never felt he belonged in either camp despite coming from a political involved family, having a communist leaning father who was an expert at losing elections.

Instead, inspired by the local band Rudi, part of the emerging punk scene, who seemed as oblivious to this religious divide as he was, he tried to bring these camps together using his passion for music. In an ever increasing amount of cigarettes, beer and brandy everything else falls by the wayside, including his long suffering wife Ruth (Jodie Whittaker). Considering the on screen scale of his consumption, it is amazing he is still alive today.

Hooley helps emerging punk bands like Rudi and another band he discovered, The Outcasts, record and distribute their music through his Good Vibrations shop, label and concert promotions.

Many thought he was mad and they’d be right. He was also possibly the worst business man ever born. Even when he fills the Ulster Hall for a concert he still makes a loss. Every so often he appears to be on the edge of a major breakthrough, only each time managing to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

When a certain Fergal Sharkey begs him to release a record by Sharkey’s band The Undertones, who were a far from punk looking outfit in jumpers their mothers must have bought for them. Hooley was initially reluctant, until he hears the record itself. 

He releases ‘Teenage Kicks’ on the Good Vibrations label and then hikes it all round London trying to get a major label interested. No one was but he did manage to get a copy to John Peel. Who played it not once but twice, in a row. The first time he’d ever done that. The Undertones were launched, Hooley wasn’t and again lost money.

Meanwhile Rudi and The Outcasts never hit the big time at all.

Film wise, the script could be pacier and there’s no real plot, it is more a montage of the key moments in Hooleys life but its informative and at times humorous. It is a film about the power of music and that music is of course excellent. 

To this day the record shop still exists, although it has closed and reopened many times.

Stoker

A tale of fun, games and happy families.

Stoker revolves around something that nearly all households have, a sulky introverted teenager. Only this one has no equal. Ok, perhaps at first India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) has an excuse. Her adored father (Dermot Mulroney) has just been killed in a freak car accident and her mother is Nicole Kidman. That’s not a good start to your eighteenth birthday in anyone’s books.

Just as India is wondering where she’s going to get shoes from now, because her father gave her the same pair every year on her birthday and who she’s going to shoot the local animal population with because her father did that too, long lost Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) pops up out of thin air to attend the funeral. He’s been off travelling the world apparently, funny then that no one’s mentioned him before...

The good news is he’s going to stick around for a while, maybe indefinitely. India’s mother, Evelyn, who has already been taking her suddenly widowed status far too well now perks up even more. Though that’s relative, Evelyn doesn’t really do perky. Kidman is cast perfectly in the role of an unstable woman who sits around the house looking brittle, detached and pathetic all day long, stopping momentarily to flirt outrageously with her handsome brother-in-law before reverting back to type.

To be fair, Charlie makes eyes at both of them. It’s just that while Evelyn thinks Uncle Charlie is sex on legs and may possibly be up for more than your average family bonding, India thinks he’s the creepy uncle to end all creepy uncles and continues to ignore his attempts to befriend her.

In fact there’s something more than something a little creepy about Charlie. One suspects he has a whole football team worth of skeletons in his closet. Their housekeeper seems to know something. So, she promptly disappears and then turns up later amongst the ice cream in the freezer. Auntie Gwen (Jacki Weaver) knows something about him too but before she can say very much she’s packed off for a short stay at the local motel. A very short stay. 

India too, suspects that he may have ulterior motives and yet, she becomes increasingly infatuated with him.

Of course there’s something really creepy about India too and she’s a total gift to the high school bullies, who constantly harass her for being a weirdo. To their cost when they find out that she’s a dab hand with a pencil. When she gives the come on to the nice one amongst them, she then finds out that he’s not so nice after all. Ok mate, so she bit you but is that any excuse for trying to rape her?

It’s at this point in life that a girl needs a guardian uncle, luckily she has one to hand. Uncle Charlie and his belt speed to their rescue and give the boy the Auntie Gwen treatment.

Uncle and Niece, having discovered a shared interest, now bond further by sharing burying duties in the garden. After which India tries to ring the aforementioned Auntie Gwen, only to hear her phone ringing somewhere underneath her feet, in the ground. After a moment’s reflection, in the shower, she realises what a sexual turn on it all is.

Now India feels confident in her own ability to go over the edge big time, so she does, with bells on. The murderer's apprentice has graduated.

This intriguing family tale unfolds very slowly, building a gathering air of dread and gloom as it goes. This gives you time to peer into the minds of the Stokers and examine the family dynamic. It's not a pretty sight. Then when the expected murders finally arrive, they are presented with such relish that it is a little disturbing and that's not a pretty sight either.

You may guess that I loved it. Yes it's a weird film but just go with it. I thought it was clever too and nicely confusing; some scenes could either be real or imaginary, I like that sort of thing. There’s even a hint of very dark comedy in there which sits nice and uneasily amongst the murders.

People will say there’s a lack of a coherent plot and too many loose ends at the end but I’d simply say they weren't trying hard enough. What's not to understand? and as for loose ends, what loose ends? There aren't any, everyone's dead.

The Sessions

‘The Sessions’ is based on the real story of Marc O'Brien (John Hawkes). O'Brien was a childhood victim of polio and has spent his life since encased in an iron lung, save for a few hours each day. He is almost entirely paralyzed from the neck down but retains use of all his senses and has some feeling throughout his body.

Despite this, O'Brien not only retains a sense of humour but has a positive outlook on life. He studies, passes exams and becomes a poet. Although he still remains heavily dependent on his personal carers. 

After firing a carer that he doesn’t like, he falls in love with her far more beautiful and sensitive replacement, Amanda (Annika Marks). 

One day he tells her that he loves her. Which shocks her and she disappears, perhaps realising that she has similar affection for him. Despite his predicament, he can still charm the women.

Frustrated that he will never experience love or sex, he decides at the age of 38 to lose his virginity. First, as he’s a catholic, complete with a picture of the Virgin Mary staring down at him from his wall, he has to clear this with his priest (William H. Macy). Who is a rather ‘right on’ cleric with a flowing mane of hair who believes, probably wrongly, that God may give him a free pass on this one. Perhaps our (supposedly) celibate priest also wondered if there were any 2-for-1 offers.

So enter Cheryl (Helen Hunt), a sexual surrogate. Which is a fascinating profession or maybe not, perhaps it’s just another job but not a prostitute as she makes pains to point out. . 

Her husband seems to know about her job but I find it hard to tell whether he’s bothered or not bothered about her job or simply not bothered about her.

The therapy is a success but in the process Cheryl has also discovered a place in her heart for Mark, so she also bails out before they both get too attached.

After a power cut almost kills him by deactivating his iron lung and Mark ends up in hospital, he gets chance to charm a third woman and he meets Susan (Robin Weigert) who remains his partner until the day he died. 

All his ‘women’ are present at his funeral. Along with Vera (Moon Bloodgood) who is Amanda’s replacement as one of his carers and takes him to all his therapy sessions.

It looks a bit low budget at times and doesn't zing along as it perhaps might, refusing to perhaps delve into any of the potential sub-plots it opens up. Preferring to remain focussed on its main character instead. It’s very good though with plenty of understated humour and never once does it sink into the usual Hollywood sentimentality.