PLAIN AMAZING

DIRECTED BY KEN LOACH

STARRING: STEVE EVETS, STEPHANIE BISHOP, GERARD KEARNS, STEPHAN GUMBS, LUCY-JO HUDSON, JOHN HENSHAW, JUSTIN MOORHOUSE AND ERIC CANTONA

Halfway through ‘Looking for Eric’, Eric Bishop (Steve Evets) sits down to have a smoke with Eric Cantona, a metaphor of his conscience, wishes to digress into football like he always does when confronted by a situation. Eric Cantona (Himself) in turn, dances with him. We don’t see him for the rest of the film from there, even the sequence where he’s most anticipated, where he doesn’t show up but still sends a deputy: Lily. It’s a done deed, what needs to be said had been said and Eric surely had been found. The end result of a search that had in no way been agonizing, but which had been filled with buckets of happiness and awesome goals.

So, how many films have we come across before that dealt with a supernatural character to keep a lonely man company? It would be incompetence on my part (not to mention ignorance) if I fail to quote names over here, but that’s not my point. The question I chose to ask myself instead is what can possibly make Eric Cantona stand out from the multiple geniuses who had nurtured losers in film-town through the ages, up until Chef Gusteau in Brad Bird’s ‘Ratatouille’? Simplicity, perhaps, because the character isn’t stressed, he just walks around and exists, there’s no puff of smoke or surprise. Eric is at home with Eric, and even with a troubled inner self, he’s still able to sit with the same and talk with it. The decisions are his, no minds changed, with the most far-fetched sequence being the most inspiring of the lot: Cantona’s best moment had been in seeing someone else score because of him, he quotes proverbs to substantiate that and he plays the trumpet too (“I’m not a man. I am Cantona.”). A cynic could be prickled here, but I thought it played along pretty well, I was more than happy with the deflation of this celebrity.

The contrast of build almost develops a sort of cool chemistry between the lead characters. Cantona being the tall and sturdy self that he is, while Bishop hovers far on the runty side, Steve Evets proving to be riveting with his performance, a sort of ‘live-in’ act more than a staged show. Lily (Stephanie Bishop, Laura Ainsworth) is amazing, the moments are amazing, I’m thrilled to know that the man Ken Loach could be this romantic at his age, but then again that’s nearly how old Eric is too. Dear me, lots to say, lots to say! Well, moments when Jess (Stephan Gumbs) watches militant rap videos with his friends, moments when I actually suspected him of having hidden the gun, moments when there’s a porn club in Ryan’s (Gerard Kearns) room, and there’s moments when there’s Eric in Eric’s. Goes to show that a man who’s messing his life up messes his children’s life more, because what’s suicide and depression to him turns out to be aggression and violence in the case of his ‘kids’. And I personally found their individual rooms irritating, too much of near-nudes. On the other hand, there’s also the well-mannered (not that the boys aren’t, they had just ‘forgotten’) daughter, the actual offspring Sam (Lucy-Jo Hudson) who is pretty much a breeze, the kind of child parents patch-up for, not to mention the fact that she has a girl of her own, adorable Daisy.

As I mentioned before, there wasn’t a moment when I was bitter and waiting for something good to happen, because everything was just impending and not doubtful. Lily had ‘moved on’ with just herself and Eric merely has to find the one who loved her, because that’s pretty much the only part of him that can love. Everything’s alright once he lays his hand on that version of him, love lights the rest. This is the kind of film that incessantly keeps one in good spirits because that’s exactly what it is: A depiction of a life that’s full of love and acts of love and I think you’ve just got to face it – Love’s fun.

THEY'RE 'KIDDING' ME!

DIRECTED BY MATTHEW VAUGHN

STARRING: AARON JOHNSON, CHLOE MORETZ, MARK STRONG, CHRISTOPHER MINTZ-PLASSE, LYNDSY FONSECA AND NICOLAS CAGE

A sense of evolution apparent, I’ve observed that superheroes got younger as time progressed, not to mention the debate surrounding the necessity of superpowers in order to be one. If ‘Superman’ flew and did all such things and ‘Batman’ defied that cliché, it was up to ‘Spiderman’ to even break through the aspect of mental-determination and need for change by inflicting personal intentions as base motive. Now, I’ve no mind at all to touch upon the ethics of it already, but what was College in the case of Peter Parker turns to school for Dave Lizewski a.k.a ‘Kick-Ass’. He is (most probably) 17 years old, but he isn’t a superhero. But ‘Hit-Girl’ (Chloe Moretz) is: And she is (again, most likely to be) eleven.

I needn’t say how outrageous it all is, the film speaks for itself. ‘Big Daddy’ (Nicolas Cage) is hailed towards the end by his very own daughter ‘Hit-Girl’ that he’s the best father in the whole world. To inspire vendetta is one thing, but it is certainly not in the same league to be living just for that. In that context, I’d actually like to question the whole set-up, the backdrop, the city involved, the government. Gotham functioned in its own regard, save for the slightest of mentions of the USA. The city in ‘Kick-Ass’ is ambient of it, and I was outraged (yes) to see a cop being introduced just for the purpose of him foster-fathering ‘Hit-Girl’ in a post-climactic epilogue. We’re to assume that the superheroes almost entirely operate underground, which I find hard to believe considering there’ve been films like ‘Eagle Eye’ lately, which show that it’s pretty damn hard even for a machinery of the tiniest level to function without governmental knowledge. I thought it ought to be pretty much established that drug-lords thrive only because they’re let to me, not because the system is ignorant about them, but it seems that no one in this vicinity other than Daddy and his little girl seem to know of such shady deals. I’m not assuming things over here, I’m merely playing by the idea that policemen in ‘Kick-Ass’ city do nothing but drop their superheroes at school.

What surprises me most is the thought that I could actually substantiate even a positive review of this film, because it’s fast, often wacky and so insensitive that it’s actually the most contemporary of superhero movies, better than ‘Hancock’ in terms of lethargy and an overall laid-back nature. Bodies are walked-on and the film is outrageously funny even in the direst of situations, consequential injuries even, and I think that’s something awfully wrong. If I was rolling with laughter when Kick-Ass got stabbed the first time, it was because I was supposed to be and that’s what makes the film questionable. Hit-Girl inspires awe in sequences, pounding dozens of fully-built men to the ground, affected in no way whatsoever by blood unless in an inspirational way, and Chloe Moretz (the big mouth in ‘(500) Days of Summer’) only makes us forget that she’s probably not even pubescent yet. Surely deserves a mention, this kid, who masters fight sequences in ways that could render the likes of Milla Jovovich and Angelina Jolie speechless. What she would also deserve is some grounding for a lifetime and also some quality time in military school as any ‘normal’ parent would agree.

That was how ‘Kick-Ass’ went for me. Each moment was a rush, a rage but I was constantly nagged by this voice that asked me to keep my eyes open, to know what was actually happening instead of what was being shown. Perhaps an older Hit-Girl would have kicked Katie Deauxma (Lyndsy Fonseca) off the plot, but I still liked the brother-sister kind of bond between the wannabe and the overgrown kid. I’ve got nothing on Chloe, though. Loved her, all through.

SOULFULLY FUNNY!

DIRECTED BY FATIH AKIN

STARRING: ADAM BOUSDOKOS, MORITZ BLEIBTREU, PHELINE ROGGAN, ANNA BEDERKE, BIROL UNEL, DORCA GRYLLUS, WOTAN WILKE MOHRING, LUCAS GREGOROWICZ AND CATRIN STRIEBECK

Warning: The following is not a piece of criticism but rather a perspective of admiration, possibly to fanatical extents, which is what could predominantly have helped me like ‘Soul Kitchen’ to the level that I ended up liking it, left in splits by a couple of sequences and entirely carried ahead by the rest without an apparent dull moment. I have to say that Fatih looks to be a sort of a reciprocal of Woody Allen in this digression into unfamiliar territory, that of comedy, like how the latter does serious to get his wares ahead. Allen casts Tchaikovsky, Fatih is more grunge, house and underground, and they deal with spectacularly diverse sections of society at that. Fatih Akin, still, is the only man who could have made ‘The Edge of Heaven’ and having said that, what was done was solely an analogy and not a comparison.

‘Soul Kitchen’ is funny. I wouldn’t call it hilarious or entirely justified, but it is what it is, a funny film that has a story to tell, and the humour here is for humour’s sake, it isn’t a prerequisite. Zinos is in real a tragedy, a sob-story, a laughing stock of an otherwise perfect robbery. He needs his brother to teach him something he already knows, he needs his girlfriend to show for real that she’s exactly what he fears she’d be and he has to lose his flourishing restaurant to make all this happen. He has (and earns) the friendship of Lucia, a naïve, yet committed romantic, that of Shayn, the trump, soul of his kitchen, knife on the wall, his brother Ilias, of course, and not to mention the enmity of one who’s written to be screwed by the one he screws (goes both ways), as part of which Catrin Striebeck gets to show that she can’t miss out on the sex on screen. Not the comedy, though. It’s not constructed: it hovers as it’s supposed to.

I wouldn’t call it slapstick, the physical condition, which ironically forms the backbone and isn’t an mere element. It’s the beings that are funny, the characters don’t have to be. Of course, I’m talking about Zinos and not Adam; Ilias and not Moritz, ‘Bonebreaker Kebel’ and not Ugur. Technicalities, well… the soundtrack was impressive, it had Fatih written all over it. Birol Unel extrapolates his ‘Head On’ slouch, except that it comes off to be surprisingly humourous. Pretty much a personnel overload, still it’s all good. There’s room for adoration, for empathy and most importantly, there’s a lot of laughs. Some goodness, of course, yeah. Even ‘Sideways’ ended on an optimistic note.

‘Soul Kitchen’ to me, is an example of how Fatih Akin would handle comedy in pretty much his own way. And I found that substantially soulful.

TIMID THAN FIERY

DIRECTED BY HENRY BEAN
STARRING: RYAN GOSLING, BILLY ZANE, THERESA RUSSELL AND SUMMER PHOENIX

Finally, this is a review that can never have as much dimension as the ‘New York Times’ (ruling Mr. Scott out of this) or maybe even ‘Washington Post’, predominantly because my house doesn’t overlook an anti-Semitic scenario. Not even a Semitic scenario at that, and that’s why I can’t touch upon the content of ‘The Believer’ as much as I can about the effect it produced.

I wonder how much this man can do, you know. This is not his only dilemmatic role, although Dan Dunne definitely had a way higher level of clarity on chaos than Daniel Balint, who plays a Jew who wants to blow Jews up. The world calls it ‘self-hating’, I frankly do not understand the relevance of the term. I don’t believe Danny hates himself but just the idea that he’s one among the kind of people he can never bring himself to like, although he is sub-consciously emotionally attached to his religion, particularly because he believes that he’s one of the very few who has actually understood it. What he feels is hatred towards the rest who don’t show as much clarity as he does, just like a laid-back, angst-ridden teen would hate an academically successful geek in school, partly because he thinks he understands the world better than the science-hogger can, possibly. He is, however, afraid or mortified to admit the fact that he is a Jew, although there is the substantiated opinion inside his head that one must know in order to even try to hate. To ‘be’ isn’t the same as to ‘know’.

I couldn’t find enough conflict in Danny to die, really. At least, maybe not this way, it could have been better if it was an inescapable situation where he just gives up fighting and gives in. Thought it looked a little too amateurish, to be honest. Ryan Gosling sparkles, fizzes, explodes even and yeah, he’s pretty much the bomb, it’s like everything’s on him. I cannot say that the ideas expressed in the film, be it the anti-Semitic theory based on sexuality, that which even goes as far as including Marx, are in anyway buyable, but I can safely state that Gosling’s vigour and energy in this performance made me raise as little questions about the context as possible, and I personally liked the idea of loving a Jew to destroy him, like a Godly finality curbs any sort of further development (at least that’s how I interpreted it). Again, it helps me if beautiful women play substantial parts, like Carla Moebius (Summer Phoenix) and the fascination she shows not for a ‘religion’ as such, but its language, which she finds intriguing. Sort of told that there’s more to religion than hatred, or that there’s more to religion than the religion itself, which could help one hate it less, like maybe a digression into Persian beauty to avert anti-Islamic tendencies (I’m just making an irrelevant parallel here, it’s not a big deal).

I’ve no verdict on this film, I just plainly thought it’s been a while. But yeah, thumbs up for Ryan Gosling, it’s certainly soothing to know that the man’s been in quite a substantial haul of roles.