#107: SKYFALL (2012)

 

STARRING: Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Judi Dench, Naomie Harris, Ralph Fiennes, Berenice Marlohe and Albert Finney. Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan. Cinematography by Roger Deakins. Edited by Stuart Baird and Kate Baird. Music by Thomas Newman. Directed by Sam Mendes. Budget $200 million. Running time 143 minutes. Originally released in 2012.

And so it came to pass that Bond turned 50 in 2012 and much fanfare and excitement surrounded Skyfall, the 23rd official entry in the Eon Bond franchise. Helmed by heavyweight director Sam Mendes, with peerless cinematography from Roger Deakins, editing from the legend that is Stuart Baird and a banging soundtrack by Thomas Newman. It proved to be a massive hit, the biggest of the entire series and grossed $1.09 billion dollars worldwide, making it only the 14th film to make more than a billion! It was the first film in UK history to gross £100 million. 

The plot sees leathery, human toby-jug, James Bond (Daniel Craig), in his third go at Bond, shot off a bridge by Miss Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) during a mission to stop a freelance spy from stealing a hard drive and presumed dead by M (Judi Dench), and dead he remains until an attack on MI6 by a villainous ruffian by the name of Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) that leaves six agents dead brings him back in game. It turns out Silva has that stolen hard drive which contained a list of ALL British agents currently working undercover for every terrorist organisation in the world and he's releasing the names in batches. it's all part of a stupendously elaborate revenge scheme aimed at M. So, Bond is sent out to bring him down. Meanwhile M is appearing at Parliament to answer for the data breach, oh and she and he, Sliva, share some back story that's come back to bite her on the bottom like a coconut loving rat.

And that's it, basically for the plot. It's a plot that ultimates robs this of a perfect 10/10 score seeing as it's not so much filled with plot holes but rather a plot colander. The entire plot of Skyfall makes the ludicrousness of Return of the Jedi seem like a tightly written crime noir and relies on a series of preposterous events and coincidences to propel the whole shebang along. Silva bombs MI6 knowing exactly where it will relocate its base of operations, where his cell will be, that his computer will be examined by Q so he can infiltrate their server, he's placed bombs to bring a tube train crashing into an underground crypt at the exact moment Bond arrives, he knows the complete layout of not just Temple Station but also, Charing Cross and Embankment, he knows Bond will kill his agent in Shanghai and will get bought to his poison island, where Bond will kill all his men, before he's captured by Bond. And then once he's escaped from MI6, blown up the Loindon Underground and evaded capture his grand plan is to walk into a closed parliamentary meeting and try and shot M with a gun, and when people shot back, to run away. Then Bond has to play his own plot tricks by pretending to lead Silva to his own country estate, Skyfall somewhere in the Scottish highlands, while actually driving there in a car that's 45 years old, which means that Bond must either be well into his 80s, or just one in a long line of agents using the name James Bond. Finally Silva takes the bait and a final boss level fight takes place at, of all places, Skyfall, but that's the title of the film, and the name of James Bond's ancestral home! Gosh, what were the odds? 

Without doubt the single best produced and best looking film of the entire canon, just beautiful, truly magnificent. Roger Deakins deserved an Oscar for it. Sam Mendes directs this brilliantly and the acting is great. Craig isn't as sharp and angry as he was in Casino Royale, but he's got an incredible masculine physicality that hogs the screen and you really can't take your eyes off him. With a damn fine rogues gallery of supporting actors to elevate this to a whole new level, it's plain to see the writing was was being written on the wall of this one and that the series could only get more serious, more over burgeoned with back story and incident ultimately leading to Bond's death in 2021's No Time to Die.

Still, to watch a Bond film, almost any Bond film, on the big screen is a treat too good to miss and this delivered in spades. 

A solid 9/10

#106: WILDWOOD

 

STARRING VOCAL TALENTS OF: Carey Mulligan, Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Richard E. Grant, Awkwafina, Amandia Stenberg, Tom Waits, Charlie Day, Blythe Danner, Arthur Knight, Angela Bassett and Mahershala Ali. Screenplay by Chris Butler. Based on the book, Wildwood by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis. Directed by Travis Knight. Budget $100 million. Running time 132 minutes. 

This is the latest release from the exceptional Laika studio the stop-motion animation masters behind Coraline, ParaNorman, The Box Trolls, Kubo and the Two Strings, and Missing Link. It was 16 years and 100 million dollars in the making and for once you can see each of 504,911,232 seconds and every single cent up there on the screen, this film is a magnificent visual masterpiece of such exceptional breath-taking artistry that it constantly takes you out of the film itself as you gasp and marvel at each and every scene. From the movement of the leaves, to the vast epic crowd scenes, the exquisite detail in the background of Oregon wilderness and the city. This is a film that shows you just how much better handmade stop-motion animation is to CGI, this is a film that puts to shame each of the generic, seen a million times before CGI movies, screened during the trailers. This is a film that shows you just how much better something created by humans is compared to pixels moved on a screen. This has a weight, a momentum, a sense of physicality that elevates it to a whole different level. And I marvelled at every scene. 

The story, which borrows liberally from Labyrinth, Time Bandits, Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Hitchcock's The Birds, and The Faraway Tree, sees the young brother of 13 year-old Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) kidnapped by crows and taken to the dark forest on the orders of the Dowager Governess Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), an exiled, once loved ruler, who used witchcraft and dark magic to bring her dead son back to life and now wants to sacrifice Prue's baby brother to the  Ivy that strangles the forest to bring him back to life again, even it it will mean the destruction of the whole forrest. Through a series of incidents only found in movies, fellow 13 year-old nerd, Jacob Tremblay (Curtis Mehlberg) gets literally dragged into the deep dark forrest along side Prue on a rescue mission and discovers the hero inside. 

The wonderful thing about this film is it doesn't explain itself, it doesn't set out the ground rules first, it doesn't provide a huge back story it literally just drops you right into the middle of a fairytale nightmare and expects you to deal with the fallout. The story is big, the characters many and the the sense of jeopardy and drama from the opening scene when a young naked boy plucks out his mechanical heart and falls to his death to the genuinely staggering battle at the end of this 2 hour and 12 minute masterpiece is sublime. 

In fact so extraordinary is the visual look and feel of this film that it actually robbed it of a point, the trouble is, it's so goddam beautiful that you keep stopping to gasp at what's on show. 

That said, I bloody loved this film and it made me realise that so far Laika has yet to make a shit film, their outré is peerless and reminded me of the golden age of Pixar before Disney turned it into a factory. 

I hope to god that Laika continues to make films as wonderous as this, it truly needs to be seen at the cinema and I urge you to see it before its damned to a life on streaming where you'll lose the sheer wonder and scope of the whole thing. 

9/10

#105: STREET FIGHTER

 

STARRING: Noah Centineo, Andrew Koji, Callina Llang, Joe Anoa, David Dastmalchian and some other people, frankly I can't be arsed to name them all, there's too many of them. Written (that's a laugh, right there) by T.J. Fixman and Kitao Sakurai. Directed by Kitao Sakurai. Budget $82 million. Running time 120 minutes.

The plot. There are these two brothers, both orphans raised by this bloke who trains them to be fighters. Then one of them awakens a demon during a fight tournament, the demon goes on to kill the father figure. the two brothers, split up and one goes missing, the one who awakened the demon. Then 6 years later there's this bloke called Bison (David Dastmalchian) who's trying to harness psycho power so he can be big and evil. So he puts on the same fight tournament that awakened the demon and invites only 8 of the world's best fighters, two of which happen to be the brothers. Then they meet for the tournament and shit happens, and there's fighting and stuff. Then Jason Mamoa as a green skinned creature arrives near the end, then the demon and one of the brothers fight, then the demon is defeated and Bison kidnaps him and runs away so the two brothers team up with this girl who's an interpol agent and some of the other defeated fighters from the tournament go off in a car to find them leaving the film to end on a motherfucking cliffhanger. 

What the actual motherfucking what? What a huge slap in the fucking face this film was, just a real kick to the batteries, how dare this film that robbed 2 fucking hours of my life, not counting the sodding adverts and trailers, oh and the walk to and back from the cinema have the sheer naked nerve to end with a fucking cliffhanger! Because believe me, The Empire Strikes Back this most certainly isn't. 

What this is is the fourth film in a year based on a video game and the second on a fighting game, the first being the excremable Mortal Kombat, which this is marginally better than, but just. In fact it's saved by having some simply superb anime and David Dastmalchian who seems to be having the time of his life playing Bison the baddy. The same could not be said of the rest of the cast, I don't know who they were, who they played or what the fuck was going on. I recognised a couple, there was Fifty Cent and Jason Mamoa for sure and I think I recognised one of the brothers, Andrew Koji, but the rest, not one iota of a fuck could I care less to know. 

This film was overly loud, overly bombastic, overly saturated and overly long, dear god you feel each and every second of it. Oddly enough this starts off strongly, the anime sequences are good, well mounted and dynamic and in fact if it weren't for those this would struggle to make a 2/10. it's also played solely for laughs and at time bordered on being a panto. Visually for the first 30 minutes or so this looked great the over saturated colours worked well to create the illusion of if not a video game well then a live action anime, the fights were for the most part okay, but the dialogue was all shouty and trope ridden and repetitive, the acting is OTT to the Nth degree and by the end of it you're just bombarded into submission, it's all just so goddam tedious, for a long time this was safely in the 6/10 camp but as it dragged on and on and on and on, my patience was tested by by the time it ends not with a full stop but an out-and-out cliffhanger I was well and truly pissed off with it. 

Given the choice between this and Mortal Kombat I'd opt for this, the bums are nicer. 

3/10

#104: CLAYFACE

 

STARRING: Tom Rhys Harries, Naomi Ackie, David Dencik, Max Minghella and Eddie Marsan. Screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini. Directed by James Watkins. Budget $44 million. Running time 108 minutes.

Hang on, didn't the makers of Clayface get the memo? Did no one tell them that these sort of films have to be as shit as Blue Beetle, Shazam, Wonder Woman 1984, Morbius, Madame Webb or god forbid John Kraven The Hunter? What were they thinking? Because against all expectations this was actually rather good! A horror-based origin story for Clayface, a pretty ludicrous Bat Man villain who has the ability to morph into anybody.

The plot sees stupidly handsome and wholesome Gotham actor, Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) horrifically disfigured and mutilated by crime lord Markos Szabo (David Dencik) after Matt sleeps with Szabo's girlfriend Mia Torrez (Joana Ribeiro). A rigged courtcase sees his life and reputation further ruined as he loses his agent, his mansion, his wealth and his future. A series of terrible botched surgeries only make matters worse and before long Matt's back in living in his old Gotham City slum apartment with only cockroaches the sizes of fists for friends. Then one day he stumbles across a magazine article about Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie) a pioneering doctor experimenting with nanite technology to rebuild damaged tissue. The initial treatment is a huge success and Matt briefly regains his fame, but when his body starts to reject the nanites, he does the only thing anyone in his position would do, he overdoses on Corr's only stock of the stuff and is cured. It turns out the nanites react to his mental state of mind and when that slowly begins to unravel the true extent of his new found abilities are revealed. And it's not long before Matt is off on a murderous revenge spree against all those who wronged him. And that's about it for the plot.

This was a surprisingly enjoyable and well made horror romp, with good performances, some truly gross-out special effects and some good and grizzly deaths. It didn't outstay its welcome, it didn't have too many plot holes and the whole thing had a fiesty, grim feel to it. Most satisfying, surprisingly so.

8/10

#103: GHOSTS: THE POSSESSION OF BUTTON HOUSE

 

STARRING: Charlotte Ritchie, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Lolly Adefope, Mathew Bayanton, Simon Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas, Jim Howick, Laurence Rickard, Ben Willbond, Scott Ellis Watson,. Written by Mathew Baynoton, Simon Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas, Jim Howick, Laurence Rickard and Ben Willbond. Directed by Simon Hynd. Running time 97 minutes.

There's a great tradition of British Sitcoms getting movies and changing the situation, so for example, Porridge took Fletcher and Godber out of Slade prison, in Are You Being Served, the staff of Grace Brothers went off on holiday to Costa Plonker and in Holiday on the Buses, Stan and Jack lost their jobs as bus drivers to become bus drivers for a holiday camp, surely the most perfect example of a busman's holiday? Modern times saw The Inbetweeners, Absolutely Fabulous and Bad Education all leave their 'situations' for pastures green, and now to that august group can be added, Ghosts: The Possession of Button House. More or less.

The plot set just nine months after the events of the very last episode of the TV show, sees Button House in sad disrepair, the developer's dream of converting the run-down house into a hotel and golf resort seemingly abandoned, much to the chargin of the ghosts. Things go from bad to worse when a group of eco activities turn up taking up residence in the woods and demanding that the hotel/golf course plan be cancelled for good forcing the ghosts to take action. Convinced that only Alison and Mike can help the Ghosts are offered an opportunity to seek their help when a gang of teenagers break into Button house one night to hold a seance resulting in Julian (Simon Farnaby) possessing the body of teenage orphan called Jack (Scott Ellis Watson) and at last the Ghosts have found a way to leave the confines of Button House! What follows is a glorious delightful, charming and lovely comedy that never fails to cause mirth in its wake as first Julian and then the other ghosts all find a way to escape the house to aid in the mission. A mission made much desperate when it's revealed one of the eco warriors is actually an professional arsonist with orders to burn down the house so a corrupt politician can build an airfield. Then there's just the matter of Alison and Mike being accused of child kidnappers and a massive police hunt to contend with.

Some films don't need to be analysed or discussed to the Nth degree and can just be watched and enjoyed as they are, undissected and such is the case with this wonderful little gem of a movie. With a good natured soul, a seemingly endless supply of jolly japes and gags and offering no cringey afterlife lessons, no fake American sentimentality just a bigger canvas to play for the cast of ghosts, who are also the writers of this splendid little British comedy that wouldn't be out of place in an afternoon of Ealing Comedies. 

8/10

     

#102: DIGGER

 

STARRING: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Huller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons. Screenplay by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolas Giacobone and Sabina Berman. Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Budget $180 million. Running time 129 minutes. 

Digger, Digger, Digger. You magnificent, outrageous, deranged, bi-polar bastard. You teased and played with my emotions for over two hours, you had me loving you, delighted by your outlandish antics, then bewildered by your coquettish teasing, then frustrated and then ultimately bemused and emotionally sated by your final trick. 

I can't really synopsise this without spoiling it for you, kind and lovely reader. So, in broad strokes, tycoon Digger (Tom Cruise) the richest man in the world, beloved by President Compson, (John Goodman) and his entourage of lackys and boot lickers who agree with everything he says and demands. Digger is an elderly oil man, like his daddy and his daddy's daddy before him. He's utterly greed obsessed and orientated, he knows everything about everything, he's always right and if he's wrong it's someone else's mistake. He lives in a magnificent and insanely opulent stately home, which might be in Scotland, or not. The only object of love in his life is Maggie, his, barely alive,  30 year-old cat, who he spoon feeds with tinned fish from the tip of his pinky fingernail. We meet him as he awakens on the worst day of his life, indeed the worst day of the entire world's life as we're about to discover. You see, Digger's men are drilling for oil in Greenland and pulling out a million barrels of oil out of it every day, that is until a huge undersea pocket of methane gas explodes severing an ice shelf the size of Maryland and sending it careering  towards Norway. Rather than warning the world, Digger warns the President and initiates an information firewall which scrubs any mention of the impending disaster from the internet. Then despite the advice of Digger's Environmental safety officer, Dr. Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) the President, who's dying from 'arsehole cancer', decides to do nothing, hoping the berg will somehow avoid Northern Europe and instead head-off into the Atlantic Ocean where it'll melt. But it doesn't, instead it, the iceberg, smashes into Northern Europe causing a huge tidal wave that floods Europe causing the worst environmental disaster of all times. And then the shit really hits the fan. 

And that's the plot, without spoiling anything.

Although, there's more at play here and the film pulls the rug on you in the most unexpected way and reveals itself to be something altogether different. For a while there was a rumour that this was a musical, well rest assured, kind reader, it most certainly isn't a musical, but it is playing a trick that will either ultimately win you over or utterly alienate you. For me, I was mostly won over, but also a little disappointed because it left me with more questions than answers.

For the first 30 minutes I was utterly onboard for this remarkable film, it was funny, intense, and Tom Cruise was simply mesmerising! He's in every scene and goddam can that boy act! Weighed down by kilos of make-up and an old-man fat suit, Cruise dominates this film, but not to the detriment of the other actors. Likewise the acting from everybody is top notch, John Goodman channeling little-handed Donald Dump. Riz Ahmed, the only nice character in the whole thing, Sandra Huller playing Digger's daughter and right down to the lowliest bit part character, and yet there's something strange going on, the actors all 'act', and don't seem to mind if we notice. Although there are clues littered throughout as to what the bigger picture here might be. 

Then there's soundtrack that grates and niggles with its strangely discordant tonal sounds, which helps to enhance the experience. Alejandro G. Iñárritu directs this with vision and guile, he has a vision and he knows what he wants to say and boy does he say it. I've only seen two of his other films, The Revenant, which I found hard work and deeply exhausting and Birdman which I loved, in fact, this shares a lot of the same DNA with that. 

Most of the reviews for this film berate it for its gargantuan budget of $180 million, with reviewers complaining that it shouldn't have cost that much, that somehow that's obscene. Well, I disagree them, where were those wanky little tossers when the likes of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Tedium with it's budget of $387 million, or Glad He Ate Her Too at $310 million, or Jurassic World: Deterioration with $465 million, when those clunking, awful films waddled our way, now that's obscene.

This is a film that is impossible to promote or market properly without spoiling it, it's a film that's at one point a grim environmental warning, the next a broad satirical farce, then a comedy and a disaster movie. It's a film I started off loving, delighted and enthralled by both Cruise and Goodman and the outrageousness of the it all, but then my delight dipped dramatically, mostly thanks to the reveal, before I found myself slowly regaining my love for it. Overall, it's fantastically well made, it's well written and it looks great but it's too long and that 'twist' is hard work and it's really going to polarise the audience; in fact already has. In the States its opening weekend haul was just $8 million dollars, so that's already sealed its fate as one of the biggest flops of the year. Also, I don't think audiences are quite ready yet for old man Cruise with his potbelly and receding hairline. 

I would suggest that much like Blade Runner, The Thing, Brazil and many other wonderfully misunderstood films this will ultimately come to be seen as something really rather special in years to come. It's a film I find myself still thinking about a week later and when I talk to people about it I realise it resonated with me far more than I at first realised. Part black comedy, part political satire, part environmental warning and part post apocalyptic science fiction disaster film.

For me this started out as a strong 8/10, but when the 'twist' arrives, the film lost its momentum and dipped to a 6. But, then it started to win me back, thanks to its vision, style, its direction, its passion and ultimately its sheer audacity. You'll never see another film like this, a film so unique and challenging and it ended up scoring, what's sure to be a hotly contended 8/10.

#101: CASINO ROYALE (2006)

 

STARRING: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Jeffrey Wright, Judi Dench, Giancarlo Giannini, Simon Abkarian, Caterina Murino and Jesper Christensen. Screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis. Produced by Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli. Music by David Arnold. Directed by Martin Campbell. Running time: 144 minutes. Budget $150 million. Worldwide box office haul $606 million. Originally released in 2006.

The 21st official Eon Production movie in the franchise, the first to feature Daniel Craig as James Bond, the third adaptation of the original source book after the 1967 movie production starring Woody Allen and David Niven and the original TV movie, which featured Barry Nelson as Jimmy Bond - an American P.I. working in Las Vegas - and the second movie to be directed by Martin Campbell. This also heralded in the most financially successful period of Bond movie franchise with the Craig era generating a staggering worldwide box office haul of over $3,957 billion. Casino Royale held the record for highest grossing Bond film until the release of Skyfall six years later, which shattered the record with takings of over a billion dollars.

With a new Bond, Eon decided to something new with the franchise and present him as if he was new to the world of the Double O and just starting out his career as a hired killer for the British Government. Eon decided to bring back Martin Campbell to handle the direction as he'd also launched the Pierce Bronson era back in 1995 with Goldeneye the 17th in the Bond series.

The film sees Bond, pre-credits confirm his status as a Double-O agent by killing two targets before teaming up with MI6 accountant Vespa (Eva Green) and heading off to play poker against international terrorist banker Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), his mission is to bankrupt Le Chiffre, who's using his customers money to bankroll the game. Naturally the film's far more complicated than that, but I'm guessing you've probably already seen this and if you haven't then stop reading this and get yourself down to your nearest Cineworld to see it! It's an absolute hoot and one of the best of the series.

Seen writ large on the big screen gives you a chance to thoroughly enjoy one of the best James Bond films of the series. Daniel Craig is superb in the role, his steely blue eyes nail you to your seat, everything he does is sharp and angry, every move, even the smallest of actions and it gives his performance a power and edge. The dialogue sparks, with not a single cliche or soundbite spoken, you can see, or hear, this has been polished to within an inch of its life, as witnessed by the conversation between him and the excellent Eva Green on the train where he admits his lamb has been skewered and that he sympathises. A Bond film needs a strong villain, and Mads Mikkelsen is simply superb, bringing real threat and menace to the role, that wicker chair torture sequence is brilliant. But what makes this film so good is that we see Bond working as a detective, investigating a series of clues that lead him from a fantastic Parkour race through an African building site to a breath-taking airport chase through Miami airport, he's not just an action man, he's cunning, clever and to see him working like this is the true joy of the film.

I've watched each and every Bond film multiple times and this one ranks as one of my absolute favourites, and I'm not afraid to admit that Daniel Craig is my joint Number One favourite Bond actor alongside Sean Connery and Roger Moore.

A magnificent masterpiece. 10/10