[Locke]

I watched a bunch of stuff since this thread last got bumped!

The Great Gatsby:

The Great Gatsby's main meta point is that the world of the roaring twenties is basically our world, without the iPhones. That is why the book is still relevant, almost a hundred years later. Sadly the film version makes no attempt to play this idea with any subtly, replacing twenties jazz with modern pop music and rendering the entire world in extremely dated looking CGI.

That said, because the true nature of Gatsby is a reveal left late into the movie, he becomes a very intriguing and complex character, probably marking the performance from DiCaprio that I have enjoyed the most. The film deliberately makes his history convoluted and difficult to follow, to attempt to distract you from who he really is and what is really going on.

The two other must mentions in the cast are Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire, especially as they are in stark contrast of one another.

Mulligan on the one hand, has the stunning beauty to capture Daisy, but also has the acting chops to control her complexity. Daisy is shallow, and ultimately not really worth the lengths Gatsby goes to, but Mulligan makes sure she is never played as a straight conduit for the audiences hatred. She never feels like a villain, and she is so carefully steered, it takes you a long time to truly process how not worth it she ultimately is.

Tobey Maguire on the other hand, is utterly terrible. Nick Carraway is infamous for his passive nature, and I can't think of many choices worse than Maguire for the character, as the movie attempts to recreate Carraway with feeling. If that is their intention, why didn't they get someone who could act?

Honestly Gatsby's narrative is so complex, that it is pretty much impossible to discuss. Firstly, the whole thing is being narrated to us by an alcoholic in a mental asylum, which already proves problematic for how much we can truly trust what ultimately transpires. But even beyond that, The Great Gatsby is a movie about lying, where no one tells the truth even to themselves, constantly parading in masks which often deliberately distracts from the point. So even when Carraway is telling the truth, that doesn't stop him from being lied to, which means what he may believe to be the truth, isn't the truth at all.

What this ultimately means is everything The Great Gatsby is about, it isn't, but it also kinda is. For example at its very core, it's a very typical fairytale. There is a princess, a brute and a brave knight. But in reality none of these roles really exist, they are just fabrications by Carraway, and the movies opinions are simply his, not unbiased truths for the audience to make up their own mind. It's all Carraway's dream world.

And honestly, if that is the case, The Great Gatsby is a gay romance as much as it is anything else.

Out of the Furnace:

Bale is one of the best actors of our generation, and this may well be his finest performance. He lowers his gun, and both he and the audience, let out a long sigh as if none of us realised we were holding our breath. We see his character, Russell Baze - who is a pent up volcano of brotherly love - at his most peaceful during his moment of greatest violence. Windows of his performance let out small bursts of everything that is raging inside of him, but with one pull of the trigger he just lets everything go. And my GOD is there a lot of stuff raging inside of him. The grief of losing his brother, the death of the child that tore away any chance of him ever having a good life and the reality that the town he lives in is slipping off of the map, so he can't even just get by and live.

Perhaps most powerful though, is a scene where he finally plucks up the courage to see the love of his life for the first time since he got out of prison. She drops the bombshell that she is with child, after running to the Town Sheriff after he went to prison. His reaction to this news feels so real, so palpable, it's just magic, magic in the making. I'm really sad that this movie has met largely mixed reactions, because Bale's performance is one for the ages. It's the kind of breathtaking acting that is just so perfect, and so utterly rare, you wish you could go back and experience the whole sequence fresh and new.

He isn't the only actor worth writing home about either, but I find that every character aside from Russell is painfully problematic. Take Casey Affleck's Rodney for example. He plays a soldier who has done three tours in Iraq, who has seen and done some incredibly horrific things for his country, and then he has to return home to the same piece of shit town. The same piece of shit town where the best chance he gets is working in a dying steel mill and it just fills him with untapped hatred for everything. Affleck is no Bale, but he does a wonderful job of carefully downplaying his character, and then unleashing him at all the right moments. He becomes as lost in Rodney's shoes as much as Bale does in Russell's.

But the problem is, unlike Bale who tells Russell's story with his body, Rodney is the complete opposite. The stuff that drives his entire character happens entirely off screen with only a vague piece of dialogue dropped now and then (and one aggressive outburst) to allude to the horrors he has seen.

Ultimately what all this means is Rodney is more invested in himself, than the audience ever is. We never truly know the horror he has seen, and this works to his detriment, not to to his betterment. The most crucial thing he does in the movie is die, but as he defiantly utters "I don't care... I don't care.", it's a character moment much more profound for himself, than it ever is for the audience.

Woody Harrelson steps in to be the movies villain, DeGroat, playing completely to his type as a ridiculous psychopath. If he wasn't so good at playing this kind of character, I'd call his performance tired. He chews the scenery gloriously and his hands steer some of the movies most impressive moments.

Aside from those three, the movie utterly wastes the talents of Willem Dafoe, Forest Whitaker and Zoe Saldana. I really don't know why Dafoe was in the movie, Whitaker is used as a shameless plot device and although Saldana's character is crucial, her story appears to be taking place in a very different movie.

Ultimately there was a great movie in here somewhere, but it's lost in the bloated run time. This film is impossible to hate, but the execution also makes it impossible to love, either. Which is a shame, because I want everyone to experience Bale's performance, it is wonderful.

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. :

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters was a film I was initially very excited for, but then seeing it get torn a new one by critics, I completely avoided it. However, with the release of an Unrated Home Video release, I found myself looking into the film again and seeing that revisionist horror fans have come out of the woodwork in the films defence for its apparent unashamed fun. Armed with that, and the relatively new knowledge in my film watching life, that critics have a unified hatred for all things fun I decided to dig into Witch Hunters and see just how wrong the critics were this time, the miserable old scrotes.

Witch Hunters is visually splendid, with just over ten percent of the effects done with CGI. CGI here is used as it should be, they don't use it to do effects easier, they use it to tweak and perfect what was already captured on the camera. I love that. From the awesome makeup of the witches, to the fabulous designs of the Witch Hunting weapons, to the beautifully dressed sets like the Candy House. Oh and Edward, the lovely animatronic troll. This movie is just lovely to look at.

This is all wrapped up in ridiculously gory action sequences which zip along like the witches do on their brooms. The hits are heavy, the impact is visceral and it bleeds style. The badass dial is ramped up to eleven. I just love fun, cool movies. I guess I'm still a little boy at heart

If there was to be any problems with the action, it's the tone. For the most part it plays the action like your typical action comedy, full of heavy hits that don't actually do a lot of damage and a lot of swearing, one liners and banter. But weirdly in the middle of all this slapstick action, are the witches, and the witches are some mean bastards.

At one point, they make a boy turn a gun on his mother, at another they force a guy to turn a gun on himself and another, they murder and eat a child - and this is just three examples, amongst many brutal things like the flashaback to Hansel and Gretel's parents or the rapist sheriff. Where the fuck is this coming from, in an otherwise fun little movie?

Renner plays Hansel exactly how Hawkeye should have been depicted in the Avengers. You can almost feel the pent up frustration for that character, unleashed here, making Renner so fun to watch. He's just a really great character. The ridiculously sexy Arterton adds all her sex appeal to Gretel, while also being a no nonsense badass who regularly outcools her brother. And that is fine by me, fuck your Catpiss Nevercleans.

Perhaps most fun though, is they are both 'flawed' heroes. A cheap device maybe, but it's more depth than I was expecting from a movie that has been so quickly written off by so many. Set right in the middle of Witch Trial Hysteria of 1700s Europe, the movie pulls no punches when it comes to presenting the horror of it.

Hansel calls himself 'old fashioned' in that he's happy to let someone under the suspicion of being a witch burn, without evidence. Living by the code 'the only good witch, is a dead witch'. His prejudice against witches is only turned around, when he ends up fucking a White Witch who numerously saves his life. It says a lot about his character, but not perhaps in quite the damming way you're probably expecting

His sister however is a woman who requires evidence, before she starts slaying, creating a series of checks she's trained herself and her brother in. But despite perhaps being the most grounded, logically, she sees nothing wrong with head butting the town, that is paying their bills, sheriff to the floor, even if he is a douchebag, on first meeting.

Best of all though, is seeing them together. They may not exactly be as much of a well oiled machine as you're probably expecting, but Gretel reserves a certain vulnerability for her brother and likewise although her brother is a bit of a douche, he is so fiercely protective of his sister, you can see she is the only thing he truly loves.

The only real downside to this, is as other reviewers have pointed out, they are just a little too...sexual with one another. I was never really convinced they were siblings. No one with real brothers or sisters, looks at their siblings this way or acts this way around them.

Really though, my biggest problem with the movie is how sequelbaity it is. Luckily that sequel is already secured and locked down (although who will still be on board after the first films critical failure is unknown at this point) but it's still somewhat disappointing that the whole film feels a bit like a feature length TV pilot, leaving you at the end ready to watch the next episode, only to remember there isn't one.

I guess at least at only having just over and hour and a half to tell your story, the mythology stays largely coherent and consistent. It almost feels well thought out, considering what we usually get from this genre.

Witch Hunters is pretty much the embodiment of 'you either get it, or you don't' and I don't mean that in some kind of intellectual way, actually I mean it in the complete opposite. It's the kind of movie where the lovers and the haters use exactly the same stuff for their argument. Some, like myself, will appreciate the films unashamed silliness and get behind it wooing and fist pumping all the way. Others will find the film stupid and frustrating, which I can really understand even if I can't really appreciate.

In short, If you find yourself asking before the first half an hour, why the two heroes are dressed in near bondage gear in 1700s Europe, you can be damn sure this isn't the movie for you. And that is okay.