X-Men: First Class

You know how they didn’t make ‘X-Men Origins: Magneto’? They did at least have the good grace to incorporate a chunk of it into ‘X-Men: First Class’. And with only a few caveats, they made one hell of a good job of it, reinvigorating the franchise and happily setting things up for the late-period shot at greatness that is ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’.

When I originally reviewed ‘X-Men: First Class’ for on this blog in June 2011, I couldn’t make up my mind if it was a piss-take, a prequel or director Matthew Vaughan’s showreel for the Broccolis. I also speculated that he’d make a darned good Bond director and that if Daniel Craig decided to hang up the mantle, Michael Fassbender would make a damned good 007.

Watching the film again, for the first time in three years, I’m still of the opinion that it’s a bit of all three, but leaning very heavily towards the Bond-film-with-mutants aesthetic, referencing ‘Thunderball’ and ‘You Only Live Twice’ specifically. The opening sequence, however, takes us back to Bryan Singer’s first X-Men flick as the young Erik Lehnsherr is pried away from his mother by Nazi guards in 1944 and responds with a metal-bending display of power until a rifle butt to the head knocks him out. Next we’re in some Ivy League part of America where the privileged young Charles Xavier meets the young Raven. They’re all kids, and they all realize they’re not exactly normal. But whereas Xavier subjugates his power (or, as he calls it, mutation) and impresses on Raven to do the same, Lehnsherr doesn’t have the same luxury. He’s delivered into the hands of Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), who quickly discovers that the key to unleashing Lehnsherr’s power is his anger. He discovers this by shooting Lehnsherr’s mother.

The juxtaposition of Xavier and Lehnsherr’s formative years continues apace as Xavier (James McAvoy), now in his twenties and a graduate of “Oxford University, England” (‘First Class’ boasts some howlingly obvious establishing credits, the next best one being “Moscow, Russia”) is steered away from the groves of academe by CIA agent Moira McTaggart (Rose Byrne) who recruits him into an unofficial intelligence branch headed up by The Man in the Black Suit (Oliver Platt); while Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbinder) – all growed up and pretty freakin’ mean with it – is on a globe-trotting mission of revenge against Shaw.

It’s 1962 by this point in the narrative, as evidenced by more of those idiot-proof establishing credits and enough stock footage of John F Kennedy that I’m surprised the family’s lawyer didn’t write to Vaughan and co. demanding a percentage point of the box office gross. Anyway: it’s 1962, all groovy tunes and Cold War shenanigans, and the world’s attention is focused on Cuba. Shaw is intent on playing the superpowers off against each other a la Blofeld, assisted by sexy but deadly right-hand-woman Emma Frost (January Jones) and their entourage of seemingly invincible goons. In addition to the Bond-isms – a globe-trotting narrative, entire swathes of funky 60s décor, a determinedly unPC attitude to female characters (Rose Byrne’s intro has her sashaying around a go-go bar in her underwear; January Jones’s cleavage puts the fucking missiles to shame); more gadgets than Q Department could shake a standard issue stick with modifications at (allowing, of course, for the fact that the mutants are pretty much gadgets in their own right) – there’s also a touch of the ‘Dr Strangelove’ in the politicking and the pseudo-tense council-of-war scenes. There were whole tranches of the movies where I was praying for someone to pop up and say, aghast, “Gentlemen, you can’t mutate in here. This is the war room.”

In between all of this business, Vaughan economically establishes the (albeit brief) friendship between Xavier and Lehnsherr, and has fun staging a “rounding up the team” kind of sequence with Xavier using a prototype Cerebro to identify fellow mutants. Cue a Hugh Jackman cameo where he delivers a gruff three-word line of dialogue and pretty much walks off with the whole film.

‘First Class’ is fun and frothy for much of its two hour plus running time, and it’s perhaps because of the sheer entertainment value that the continuity flubs don’t bother me here as much as they do elsewhere in the franchise. Flubs like Emma Frost being a twenty-something hottie consort of Shaw in 1962 while ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ has her as twenty-something hottie incarcerated by Stryker in the mid-1980s. Flubs like Xavier losing the use of his legs in the big finale whereas he’s fully ambulatory at the end of ‘Wolverine’. Flubs like Mystique seeming only to age about a decade between ‘First Class’ and the original trilogy (or maybe the gal just found a way to halt the ageing process, in which case good for her!)

It’s also very well acted for the most part. Fassbender takes the honours, capturing every bit of Ian McKellan’s ruthless charm and steely intelligence as Magneto. McAvoy doesn’t do quite as well at reverse-engineering Patrick Stewart, but he plays it utterly straight and that’s what counts. Lawrence is very good as Raven, but on less confident ground as she becomes Mystique towards the end (a problem that carries over into ‘Days of Future Past’. Bacon has huge fun as Shaw, every bit as suave, cruel and egomaniacal as any Bond villain you can imagine. Byrne and Platt acquit themselves well, if not memorably, and the only let-down is January Jones: instead of imbuing Frost with ice-maiden seductiveness, she comes across as simply disinterested.

Apart from Jones’s performance, the only problem with ‘First Class’ is that it’s so busy being an origin story, an espionage epic, a revenge thriller and a production designer’s wet dream that it barely has time to draw a breath. The scenes of Xavier and Lehnsherr working together – which are, let’s face it, the absolute heart of the film – feel rushed and Vaughan never quite finds that one defining moment that explains why, half a century later and with all manner of perfidy between them in the meantime, Xavier still refers to Magneto as “my friend”.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #7: Insidious Chapter 2

I’m at a loss how to begin this review.

Do I talk about the staggering self-importance of the word “chapter” in the film’s title, and how absurd it is that scripter Leigh Whannell aims for such a degree of literary aspiration when his screenplay is sloppy, unfocused and studded with truly dreadful dialogue?

Do I mention the spectacular anti-talent necessary to spend three times the amount that the original cost and emerge with a piece of work that looks cheaper and shoddier all round?

Do I bemoan the fact that the essential flaw in, ahem, “chapter one” – the unsuspenseful final twenty minutes set in The Further – is pretty much the raison d’etre here, and that a lot of noise and frenetic movement aren’t enough to paper over an even greater dearth of suspense this time round?

Do I basically rehash the final analysis of last night’s review and urge James Wan to give Whannell the heave-ho and start working with writers who can actually write – y’know, like he did on ‘The Conjuring’? 

Do I shake my head slowly and sadly at the laboured final scene that takes its begging bowl to studios and audiences alike and asks you to spare a penny for ‘Insidious Chapter 3’ (or ‘Volume 3’ or ‘Insidious: The Triptych’ or whatever pompous moniker it chooses for itself)?

Or do I describe one particular scene and let it stand as an example of how utterly terrible ‘Insidious Chapter 2’ is?

Yeah, let’s go with the latter. Here’s the set-up: Josh (Patrick Wilson) is acting very strangely following his incursion into The Further at the end of the first film; Renai (Rose Byrne) is having difficulty adapting to life at Lorraine (Barbara Hershey)’s house – where they’ve relocated while a police forensics team is busy at their home – and painfully unfunny comedy psychic investigators Specs (Leigh Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson) have been approached by Carl (Steve Coulter), an associate of their erstwhile employer Elise (Lin Shaye). Carl’s a medium who communicates with the spirit world by throwing dice. Information received at a séance directs Carl, Specs, Tucker and Lorraine to an abandoned hospital where Lorraine used to work and where – she only realises in twenty-year retrospect – she once saw a ghost. This quartet enter a dilapidated building which doesn’t seem to be locked up, fenced off or have any security arrangements in place – a building whose dank and decaying corridors are littered with expensive pieces of medical equipment that nobody seems to have thought of transporting to the new hospital – and, whaddaya know, they come across a file room that’s still full of patient records (confidentiality issues, anyone?) The first file they open is that of Lorraine’s former patient, a man – she recounts – who committed suicide by jumping from an upper window; a man – she further recollects – who was admitted after attempting to castrate himself. The file gives this troubled individual’s address and Whannell’s script immediately takes us to a big old house as dank and dilapidated as the hospital. It’s sat empty these twenty years … empty, that is, but for the couple of dozen corpses all sat upright in a basement room and covered with dust sheets. Carl and co. discover said bodies behind a false wall, the stink of putrefaction only assaulting them when they slide said false wall open, because, y’know, twenty years of rotting corpses wouldn’t stink out an entire house, would they? And, hey, they’d all still be in a sitting position and not just a pile of bones, amiright? And Carl’s contact in the spirit world could just have given him the address and not go through all the rigmarole of visiting an abandoned hospital whose administrators have no concept of information governance, non? And …

Oh fuck it. ‘Insidious Chapter 2’ has no respect for its audience. This review has just as little for its subject.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #6: Insidious

A couple of months ago I concluded an appreciative review of ‘The Conjuring’ thusly: “I’m curious to find out … exactly where James Wan became such an accomplished craftsman”. The answer, ladies and gentlemen, is ‘Insidious’ … kind of.

Made for a million and a half and looking like he spent ten times that much on it, ‘Insidious’ gelled with a moviegoing public fascinated by ‘Paranormal Activity’ and scared up over $90 million at the box office. It gave Wan the clout to make the bigger (but still, at $25 million, comparatively modestly) budgeted ‘The Conjuring’ and made an ‘Insidious’ sequel inevitable.

‘Insidious’ does a lot that marks it out from a slew of similar films, not least having a dictionary word for its title and not only understanding what that word means but keying in it to its aesthetic. It has a dependable cast, spends time establishing character and interaction, and allows them to behave intelligently. A major plus point here. How many horror movies have you seen where a beleaguered family stubbornly remain in their haunted residence, long after every logical and scientific rationale has been exhausted and the presence of supernatural forces proved beyond reasonable doubt? If for no other reason that the scene in which middle class couple Josh and Renai Lambert (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) decide during the first act that it might be a good idea to up sticks and relocate, I’m inclined to give ‘Insidious’ a pass and overlook how damned sloppy it gets towards the end.

Here’s the set up: Josh and Renai move, with their three kids (pre-teens Dalton and Foster and newborn Cali) into an old but spacious house. A house whose interior seems unremittingly dark, whose corners and corridors are shadowy. A house with the kind of attic that you wouldn’t want to spend too long in even if it wasn’t haunted. Weird things begin happening almost immediately: objects move from one room to another, doors slam shut, Renai hears a strange voice on the baby monitor and later glimpses a figure in Cali’s room. Dalton (Ty Simpkins), playing in the attic one day despite being warned it’s off limits, falls from a ladder. Shortly afterwards, he slips into a comatose state. Doctors are unable to determine why. Three months later, he’s still unconscious, the Lamberts are receiving help from a home nurse, and the weird happenings are just about to kick things up a notch.

The long and short of it is that Renai braces Josh and they decide to move. The haunting follows them.

So far, so good. A horror film featuring adult characters behaving in a recognisably adult manner rather than dumbass teens doing stupid things. And the “it’s not the house that’s haunted” rug-pull is a doozy, even though the posters gave it away from the outset.

Then things get a bit iffy: Josh’s mother Lorraine (Barbara Hershey) suggests her old friend Lin (Elise Rainier), who just happens to be an expert in the field of paranormal phenomena, would be the ideal person to help them. Lorraine’s motivation is a dream in which she seems a demon standing by Dalton’s bed, who conversationally informs her he has come for the boy. Enter Lin, with her grindingly unfunny comic relief assistants Specs (Leigh Whannell, who also wrote the screenplay and if alarm bells are ringing at this point then you’re well ahead of me) and Tucker (Angus Sampson). Even at this point, the characters continue to exhibit realistic behaviours: Specs and Tucker at least try to undertake a scientific evaluation before the real spook show stuff cuts loose; and the tension between Josh and Renai is exacerbated as she buys into Lin’s portentous proselytizing while he recoils from it as so much bullshit.

Then things get really iffy: Lorraine reveals that when Josh was Dalton’s age he was able to astrally project and travelled, under the impression he was simply dreaming, to a realm called The Further and by doing so was followed back into the waking world by a demon. Lorraine shows them photographs which indicate a sinister presence behind the young Josh, inching closer to him in each shot. Lin intuits that the same thing has happened to Dalton and advises Josh that he will have to descend into The Further under hypnosis in order to rescue his son.

Leaving aside the implausibility that Lorraine would keep shtum about a past Josh has forgotten until three months after her grandson initially slipped into a coma that she knows isn’t a coma but an enforced stay in The Further, what happens next devalues the film almost to the point of parody.

Here’s the thing with the unknown: it frightens the most when it intrudes into the normal, the domestic, the everyday. Reverse the process and have the everyday (i.e. one unremarkable middle class guy) intrude on the unknown (i.e. The Further) and no matter how bizarro or Lynchian the imagery you conjure, it’s never as scary as, say, a silhouetted figure passing outside a bedroom window and then - bang! - suddenly appearing inside the room; or a face emerging from a painting right behind a character who’s completely unaware of it. At its best, ‘Insidious’ wrings significant scares from relatively simple set-ups and minimal requirement for special effects. Moreover, it works because Wan’s timing is impeccable: he virtually points out where and how the big scare moment will work, doesn’t deliver, seems about to move on to something else then – again, bang! - royally fucks you up with it.

Sadly, much of this good work goes south once Josh wanders into The Further, a place that can only be described as looking like Carnival of the Bizarre were trying out so new routines in Jack Ketchum’s basement and using a lot of dry ice to disguise any deficiencies. Oh, and The Further is ruled over by a demon who looks like he came last in a Darth Maul face-painting competition. It’s all incredibly silly and leads to a twist ending that you can see coming like an ocean liner on a duckpond. It’s the point at which Whannell’s script – not that it was particularly subtle to begin with – abandons all form of restraint and goes running around shrieking “Muh-hah-hah-haaaaa!!! I’m one of the demonic talents behind ‘Saw’. Are you scared yet? Are you, motherfucker? Are you? Muh-hah-hah-haaaaa!”, to which the only polite response can be a quiet observation that yes, actually, we were so why did you feel inclined to ruin it? That, and a vote of thanks that ‘The Conjuring’ was written by somebody who wasn’t Leigh Whannell.

When ‘Insidious’ works, it works incredibly well. But it remains a transitional film. It demonstrates all the strengths Wan would bring to ‘The Conjuring’, while suffering from the weaknesses that dogged ‘Saw’ and (so I’m told) ‘Dead Silence’. I’m aware that Wan and Whannell go back a long way and are big mates. Far be it from me to break up a bromance. But Wan sure as hell seems to deliver the goods in infinitely better style when he doesn’t have a Whannell script holding him back.

The Place Beyond the Pines

I’ve always been suspicious of people who describe the narrative of cinema as “acts” – that’s the argot (and indeed the structure) of theatre. Film is different medium, and fluid in a way that theatre could never be. Theatre doesn’t have edits and, as Bunuel pointed out, where you cut from one scene to another is where the magic happens.

But fuck me, it’s difficult to approach Derek Cianfrance’s ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’ without discussing its three acts. And believe me, I really don’t want to talk about the structure because that would mean, at the very least, heavily hinting at a spoiler which occurs at roughly the one-hour mark. A spoiler, moreover, that genuinely took me by surprise since the trailers and advertising for the film had led me to expect a self-contained crime drama focussing entirely on Ryan Gosling’s stunt rider turned bank robber.

What we have instead is a sprawling melodrama that stretches across two generations. The basic set up is simple: the circus comes back to town after a year (“town” being Schenectady; a tip of the hat to the American friend who explained that the name is a Mohawk word for which the title is a literal translation, otherwise I’d have scratched my head for two hours twenty minutes wondering what bearing it had on anything) and Gosling tries to rekindle things with old flame Eva Mendes. Only to find that she has a child and a new bloke. Discovering the child is his, he tries to edge out the competition but when he’s reminded that his familial responsibilities have a fiscal element, he resorts to desperate measures. So far so good. In fact, so far so freaking excellent. The first hour of ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’ showcases a measured but intense filmmaking style redolent of the 1970s. Gosling is superb and the robbery scenes are immediate, exciting and squeamishly tense.

Then the focus drifts from Gosling’s loose cannon with, if not a heart of gold, then at least a vaguely human centre, and Bradley Cooper’s idealistic rookie cop assumes centre stage. An idealist rookie cop who soon finds himself hemmed in by his colleagues’ corruption. And before you can say “ ‘Serpico’-lite” we’re hauling ass for Cliché Central. But even this second act benefits from the best work Cooper has done onscreen, and a genuinely murky moral quandary as, in trying to extricate himself honourably, he comes to rely on the Mephistophelean guidance of his high court judge father, a man whose whiskey exterior belies a cynically political mindset.

Even with this dip in quality control, I’d happily have considered ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’ something of a success. Sadly, the third act swandives from the top storey of Cliché Central into the fetid alleyways of Shit City. A jarring flash forward has Cooper’s character simultaneously enjoying the rewards and paying the price for his earlier decision while his over privileged asshole son forms a manipulative relationship with guess who’s offspring. At this point I was face-palming in the cinema, wondering if even Dickens would have back-pedalled from this kind of coincidence. Not only are the stakes lower in this concluding section, but the young actors do a pretty shabby job. Whether this is due to their lack of facility, or Cianfrance being more at home with mature actors, I’m still not sure.

The prosecution would also like to introduce into evidence how little Mendes, third-billed, is given to do, and how similarly wasted the talented and highly capable Rose Byrne is.

Following the Cianfrance’s previous collaboration with Gosling on the unflinching honest ‘Blue Valentine’, it’s tempting to file ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’ under D for disappointment … except that its first hour is just so damn good. I almost wish the whole thing had been a POS. That would have hurt less than watching it lose the way on what should have been a straight-as-an-arrow route to modern classic status.

X Men: First Class (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Get My Sixties Groove On; or, For Your Mutants Only)

Okay, I’m pushing it a bit trying to shoehorn this one into Shots on the Blog. But what the hell, it’s got a CIA department doing covert things. And, uh, there’s more than a shade of Matt Helm to it. And, uh … all right, it’s more a spy movie than a crime movie but, as Lesley Gore almost put it, it’s my blog and I’ll review if want to. Anyway, here’s a picture of January Jones:

Now, where was I? Oh yes. ‘X Men: First Class’, Matthew Vaughan’s piss-take/prequel/showreel for the Broccolis [delete as applicable]. Things kick off with the prologue to Bryan Singer’s original ‘X Men’: the young Erik Lehnsherr being pried away from his mother by Nazi guards in 1944 and responding with a metal-bending display of power until a rifle butt to the head knocks him out. Next we’re in some Ivy League part of America where the privileged young Charles Xavier meets the young Raven. They’re all kids, and they all realize they’re not exactly normal. But whereas Xavier subjugates his power (or, as he calls it, mutation) and impresses on Raven to do the same, Lehnsherr doesn’t have the same luxury. He’s delivered into the hands of Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), who quickly discovers that the key to unleashing Lehnsherr’s power is his anger. He discovers this by shooting Lehnsherr’s mother.

The juxtaposition of Xavier and Lehnsherr’s formative years continues apace as Xavier (James McAvoy), now in his twenties and a graduate of Oxford (or “Oxford University, England” as the establishing credit trumpets)*, is jarred from his enjoyment of the academic life by CIA agent Moira McTaggart** (Rose Byrne) who recruits him into an unofficial intelligence branch headed up by The Man in the Black Suit (Oliver Platt); while Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbinder) – all growed up and pretty freakin’ mean with it – is on a globe-trotting mission of revenge against Shaw.

Meanwhile, Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) is all growed up and so damned cute with it there ought to be a law against it. Exhibit A, m’lud:

Um, sorry. Lost my train of thought again. Oh yes. Vaughan explicitly establishes that it’s now 1962, through more of those idiot-proof establishing credits and enough stock footage of John F Kennedy that the family’s lawyer is probably writing to Vaughan and co. right now to ask what their percentage point is of the box office gross. The Cold War is heating up (sorry: that was poor, even by my standards) and the world’s attention is focused on Cuba. Shaw is intent on playing the superpowers off against each other and here’s where the whole ‘X Men First Class’-as-Bond-movie thing really kicks in.

After all, we have an egomaniacal supervillain (Bacon’s performance suggests he’s channelled a big fat helping of Blofeld), his sexy but deadly right-hand-woman Emma Frost (January Jones), their entourage of seemingly invicible goons, a globe-trotting narrative, a loose-cannon operative (if Craig hangs up the mantle any time in the near future, Michael Fassbinder should immediately be signed up as the next 007), entire swathes of funky 60s décor, a magnificently unPC attitude to female characters (Rose Byrne’s intro has her sashaying around a go-go bar in her underwear; January Jones’s cleavage puts the fucking missiles to shame; and Jennifer Lawrence exists in an entirely different universe and time zone from the ugly stick), and more gadgets than Q Department could shake a standard issue stick with modifications at (allowing, of course, for the fact that the mutants are pretty much gadgets in their own right). Add to this Shaw’s labyrinthine inner sanctum, a pleasure cruiser whose hull turns into a submarine and various narrative beats that recall at least four different Bond titles and the evidence is nigh on incontrovertible.

There’s also a touch of the ‘Dr Strangelove’ in the politicking and the pseudo-tense council-of-war scenes. There were whole tranches of the movies where I was praying for someone to pop and say, aghast, “Gentlemen, you can’t mutate in here. This is the war room.”

Vaughan’s directorial approach vacillates quite wildly between moody, broody, angsty stuff (the young Lehnsherr suffering at Shaw’s hands), straight down the line action thriller business (Lehnsherr’s pursuit of same) and camp, OTT set-pieces (remember that advert, I think it was for vodka, when all the rammel on the seabed rises up, breaks the surface and erupts into the air? get ready for a re-edited version of same as part of the big finale). It shouldn’t work. It should be piss-awful. But somehow it’s supremely entertaining. Of course, it arrives in the wake of the wrist-cuttingly awful ‘X Men 3: the Last Snore Stand’ which gives it a certain advantage. After ‘X Men 3’, an episode of ‘Postman Pat’ where his black-and-white cat mutated into a slightly bigger cat and they went and delivered some letters would be a hundredfold improvement!

‘X Men First Class’ is a real curate’s egg of a movie. Plot holes abound, not least when Xavier does something during the aforementioned big finale that leaves you wondering why he doesn’t pull the same trick on two other specific people and – hey presto – problem solved. And yet there performances are generally effective, with only – surprisingly – McAvoy struggling to suggest Patrick Stewart’s Xavier. Fassbinder, however, captures every bit of Ian McKellan’s ruthless charm and steely intelligence as Magneto, while Lawrence nails the character arc that transforms Raven into Mystique.

Yup, it’s a weird ’un all right. But it’s the best ‘Dr Strangelove’-meets-James-Bond mash-up you’re likely to see this summer.



*Establishing credits are plentiful and bludgeoningly over-explanatory in this movie. Every couple of minutes, it’s reinforced to us poor geographically-challenged idiots in the audience that we’re in “Oxford, England”, or “CIA headquarters, USA” or “Moscow, Russia”, the latter particularly redundant given the proliferation of mushroom-domed buildings in every Moscow-set backdrop.

**Which is about as subtle as implying a character has Australian heritage by calling her Sheila.