The Lost Boys Review

Sunshine on the Santa Carla boardwalk, groups of girls walking around in bikinis, groups of boys walking around in board shorts and biker gangs having a rest from breaking the road laws, all seems average in this seaside resort. That is, however, until several shots of missing persons posters are intercut throughout the carefree people roaming the beach. Director Joel Schumacher wants us to know immediately that beneath the smiles and the sunshine there is a much darker secret to this town than might first appear.

The Lost Boys tells of two brothers, Michael and Sam, who move from Arizona to California, and unknown to them at first, to a town haunted by Vampires. After seeing a girl he likes the look of at a concert, Michael follows her and she leads him to a world he could never have dreamed of, one filled with vampires. Sam, the younger brother, gets talking to the Frog brothers, part time comic book store workers and full time vampire investigators, who are initially suspicious, but let their guards down once they realise he is just like them. The film focuses on Sam, Michael, Star and the Frog brothers' journey to find and kill the head vampire, as once he is killed, all other half-vampires will be returned to their normal state.

The Lost Boys is without a doubt the best vampire film I have ever seen. Playing around with classic vampiric lore and integrating it into a part comedy part horror plot works perfectly, with there being just enough tension, action and laughs to keep the audience well invested for the hour and a half running time. The film would have been a shock to the '80s mainstream audience, with the blood, remorseless murder and general recklessness, and Schumacher was aware of this, putting a poster of '80s icon Molly Ringwald in Sam's bedroom, an ironic reminder that this film was made in the same generation as the likes of The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles, this is the polar opposite to any John Hughes film, and don't we just love it.

The soundtrack to the film is brilliant, the guitar rock emphasises just how badass the vampires are, with Aerosmith's 'Walk This Way' playing over a reckless murder spree taking place being one my favourite moments of the film. The excitement of Michael witnessing his first murder, and the catchy music leaves us tapping our feet in rhythm with Steven Tyler's high notes, making the audience feel like one of the gang simply by enjoying something associated to the vampire lifestyle, and with Kiefer Sutherland playing the lead vampire of the pack, I don't think anyone denies the tiniest feeling of wanting to join in on the activities.

The performances from both of the brothers in the film are notable, also. Jason Patric shows Michael to be a teenager torn between his now natural instincts of wanting to kill and feast on humans, and his love for his brother, with his awareness that he is a role model for the young boy being a stronger motive to become human than his desire to feast. Corey Haim plays the absolutely hilarious Sam, the younger brother who tries to find the head vampire through the films most laugh out loud scene, a dinner with his mother's new date. The constant questioning and probing that takes place to try and catch out Max is brilliant and definitely a highlight of just how classic the comedy is.

This was the most enjoyable film I've watched in a long time, with an awesome ending and buckets full of blood, everything that a vampire film should have is covered in The Lost Boys. The directing and the actors performances combined makes for an energetic thrill ride, and there is no way in Hell that you'll ever be short of ideas for a Halloween costume after this film.

Annie Hall Review

Annie Hall is often considered to be Woodie Allen's best work. It revolves around the rocky relationship between Alvy Hall, played by Allen, and Annie Hall, played by Diane Keaton. We see the couple live their day to day life in New York, take a trip to Los Angeles and... not much else, really.

It appears to me that the film was missing a plot. The film feels like a collection of home videos thrown together in chronological order, and although interesting to watch, there is a sense of emptiness about the whole film, especially once the ending is revealed. This lack of story is almost mimicked in Annie Hall's lack of ability to connect with Alvy on an intellectual level. It appears that as we are watching the film, and realising that a good plot is vital in sustaining an audience's attention, Alvy is realising that intellect in a partner is vital in sustaining a relationship and understanding a pessimist such as himself. Perhaps the intellect is in the script of a film, and if so, Allen chose a beautiful way to get across his message, however, as the film was originally intended to be a murder mystery but the idea got dropped last minute, it seems to me that this is not the case.

Don't get me wrong, the film was enjoyable to watch, perhaps due to the fact that it only runs for an hour and a half, and the quirky character of Alvy is hilariously easy to relate to. His exaggerated misanthropist opinions make for great comedy, and nobody I can think of would fit the role of Alvy more than Woody Allen himself. We listen to him and relate to what he is saying, be it through his bluntly honest opinions on Sylvia Plath, and the 'college generation' readers of her poetry, his opinions of the two states of being, the miserable and the horrible,  or his flashback to his school days.

The most interesting feature of the film is the way it shows its awareness of the differences between the film world and the real world. Alvy actually states "If only this was real life" to the camera, and frequently turns, breaking the fourth wall, and showing us his feelings, he is aware that he is only a character in a film, it appears. We see him visit his school class back in the days when he was a student, with him, a fully grown man, sitting at his desk and arguing with the teacher, and also taking Annie and Rob back to his childhood home, in a time where his parents are arguing and there is a party going on. Allen is aware of the possibilities of the film form and uses them interestingly and engagingly.

The camerawork of the film is remniscent of indie cinema. The use of natural lighting, off-screen space and sometimes handheld camerawork allows us to feel that New York is not the concrete jungle that sits thousands of miles away, but a reachable place that contains people just like those from our own towns and cities. Split screens are used for comparisons and superimposition is used to represent Annie's lack of mental interest in sex, the technicalities of the film are done very straight forwardly, which works, I don't think it was Allen's goal to achieve any groundbreaking technical work on this film, he wanted to create memorable characters, and that he did.

I did really like this film, the performances were brilliant and a definite highlight for me. The film collected awards upon awards at the Oscars and the BAFTAs back in 1977, and for a reason, an extremely quirky romantic comedy with laugh out loud scenes, this film is hilarious and a pleasure to watch.

The Film Tag

There is no witty or original name for this tag, I'm afraid. I think the idea of tags are really fun, and after searching for many film-related ones and coming to no real success, I decided to make my own. Feel free to post your own answers even if I haven't tagged you!

If you could choose one (dead or alive) director & two (dead or alive) actors/actresses to collaborate on a film project who would they be? 

→ Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock. There could be no other answer to this question, he is the absolute master of cinema in my eyes, delivering amazingly engaging films from his first in the late 1920s to his last in the late 1970s. I would want him to be in the mindset he was in during the 1950s, however, where most of my favourite Hitchcock films were produced and I feel that creatively he was at his best.
Cillian Murphy would work brilliantly with Hitchcock's style, his acting ability constantly surprises me and I love his work. I would also love to see Jessica Chastain in the leading female role, showing her versatility in her constant changes of characters from The Tree of Life to Zero Dark Thirty, she would fully deserve a role in this production.

A film from your favourite director that you think is underrated.

→ Since Hitchcock directed around 53 feature films in his career span, there are so many gems that get out-shined by the handful of films he made that are projected to a legendary status. While the likes of Psycho and The Birds are brilliant in their own right, smaller films such as Family Plot are often disregarded as mediocre films, when the truth of the matter is Family Plot is a hilarious final film from Hitchcock. The comedy is brilliant, the suspense is mastered and the film boasts one of my favourite scripts to come from Camp Hitchcock. With the film being very, very '70s, the style would be one that people, without knowing, would never think of as being a Hitchcock film, yet is as enjoyable as one of his most recognisable.

Your favourite adaptation of a book on screen. 

→ I am absolutely in love with Baz Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet, with the film being one of my most watched. There is always issues and arguments whenever a director chooses to adapt any of Shakespeare's works, however  I think that Luhrmann is a truly visionary director, and the combination of his love for challenging the canon, incorporating music so effortlessly into his films and his unique style makes his films extremely enoyable.

The last film you watched & the next film you plan on watching.

→ The last film I watched was Coraline, yesterday, and the next film I plan on watching is Annie Hall, this afternoon.

Do you own any interesting film memorabilia? Stories behind them?

→ 'Interesting' is subjective, however in my bedroom at my childhood home I have posters of Pulp Fiction and Taxi Driver, two of my favourite films growing up. In my room in London I have a picture of Alfred Hitchcock, and in my attic somewhere I have a huge, and I mean HUGE, poster that I got when I went to the Oz the Great and Powerful premiere a few months back. It's really big.

Favourite past (dead), present (living) and future (upcoming) directors.

→ Past: Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick.
Present: David Lynch, Wes Anderson, Baz Luhrmann, Nicolas Winding Refn.
Upcoming: Adam Leon, Jonathon Levine.

Someone you would like to see a film made about. Who would direct it? Who would star in it?

→ I'm extremely interested in the Royal Family, so I feel like films about them are always fun to watch. I would love to watch a film portraying a fictional dramatisation of the rumours surrounding Prince Charles having an affair with Camilla. I'm not sure that would be allowed, but I think it would be an interesting film. The reason I mention it being a fictional dramatisation is that I'm pretty sure it would be illegal to claim it was based on a real life story. I think Spielberg would be a solid choice to direct the film, with him showing he can make heavy dialogue in films interesting and moving, which I feel that a film of this type would need. Another good choice to direct the film would be Tom Hooper.

So that is the end of the questions on this tag, I enjoyed thinking about the questions and writing my answers, and if you think you will, too, don't hesitate to copy the questions and answer them yourself.

Coraline Review

If there is any film that cements one of my older posts about animation being not only for children (found here), it is Henry Selick's Coraline, a dark, stop-motion 3D animated film released in 2009. In the film, Coraline is a young girl who moves to a new, secluded house, bring her loneliness and through that, boredom. When she finds a door in her house that leads to an alternate version of her world, including improved versions of her parents and neighbours, everything seems perfect. That is, however, until she discovers the dark secrets that this alternate world holds and has to fight to get back what she realises she really loves.

Selick has proved that he is a master of animation, presenting us with wonderful The Nightmare before Christmas back in 1993, and his experience in the field is shown, with the dark and mysterious world in which Coraline lives being eerily intriguing to the viewer. The film is extremely self aware, also, playing around with the possibilities of animation in terms of creating and erasing the world in which the characters are exploring. The numerous shots of characters against blank white backgrounds shows us as an audience just how much work goes in to creating every little detail, and allows us to appreciate the art and the artists involved as we return to the stylised backgrounds of the 'other' world.

Through the films focus on Coraline as a lead character, we get to know her extremely well. Constantly misinterpreted, from her blue hair, her unique sense of style and her being frequently called Caroline by almost everyone, we feel sympathy towards the character, almost finding happiness in the way she is treated in the other world. With Coraline entering the other world and discovering that everything she could ever want is there, as an audience, we are instantly suspicious of this new world and suspect almost instantly that it holds danger, and we aren't wrong.

The villain is awesome, the story is awesome and the art is even more awesome. Derived from a graphic novel of the same name, Coraline, is a beautifully haunting portrayal of what can happen when the dark side of our imaginations are let loose.

With the dark themes and the even darker characters, Coraline would have scared the life out of me as a child. As an adult, I was able to appreciate the visionary genius of Henry Selick's directing and uniqueness of this animated feature compared to almost any other film I've seen. Selick is definitely a director to watch, with his latest feature The Shadow King in pre-production, it could be several years before a new film is released, however, I am confident it will be worth the wait.

Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt

A young woman from a small-town family in Santa Rosa is ecstatic at the news that her Uncle Charlie is coming to stay with them for a while. Everything goes swimmingly until a pair of detectives come over posing as government workers taking a survey and the suggestion that her uncle is an infamous serial killer is placed upon young Charlie. Relationships are tested and secrets are revealed in this brilliant piece of cinema from Alfred Hitchcock.

In Shadow of a Doubt, we can see that Hitchcock was beginning to discover his love for the trope of the 'wrong man'. Hitch showed extremely early on in his career that he had an interest in the scenario of a man being wrongly accused of his crime with The Lodger (1927), however what we get with Shadow of a Doubt, which was produced 16 years later, is a film so much more engaging and an example of the amount of progress that Hitchcock had made due to the experience of directing 27 feature films in that time period. The 'wrong man' trope is used off-screen in this film, which is interesting as Hitchcock has mirrored the characters in focus in his films such as The 39 Steps, where we follow a man who is wrongly accused, in Shadow of a Doubt, we follow the right man who is being pursued for the murder just as the wrong man is, somewhere else in the off-screen world of the diegesis.

Experimentation can be seen in all of Hitchcock's work and the key features of Shadow of a Doubt include canted shots, suggesting the character in frame to have an unstable mindset as he is pacing up and down the room, along with causing a feeling of uneasiness in the audience. This is where Hitchcock's brilliance lies, he knows how to experiment with film without screaming it in his audience's faces and therefore taking away from the meaning behind the experimentation. His innovational use of the camera in presenting a certain mood are used infrequently and it is there that the magic lies.
We can see that Hitchcock really grasped the knowledge that music is the perfect form of art to collaborate with film in order to create certain moods in this feature. With blaring orchestral music playing during the build-up of, and throughout, the dramatic moments of the film, we associate this music with danger in our subconscious, so when it is played quietly during the less dramatic moments of the film, we are still clinging on to our seats in fear that something is going to happen. Hitchcock would go on in his career to realise that music can make or break a film, with the screeching string soundtrack of his 1960 masterpiece, Psycho, being embedded into any viewers ears for a long time after leaving the cinema or turning the television off.

There is a certain brilliance to Alfred Hitchcock's films which one rarely finds in thrillers anymore. Hitch's understanding of the ins and outs of cinema, due to his involvement since the beginning of the mass production of films, is something that has been attempted to be replicated by other director's but has not ever been as brilliant, think Psycho II, Psycho III, or even the Gus van Sant remake of Psycho. Watching a Hitchcock film is truly a delight, even in the modern day, where technology can simulate tigers out of absolutely nothing and destroy the city of New York in post-production, there is nothing, for me, like sitting back and watching a director master the art with as much ease as it appears Hitchcock did.

Salt Review

When a mysterious Russian man comes into the offices of the CIA claiming to have information on a future assassination attempt of the Russian president, Evelyn Salt, who is pre-occupied with the thought of her anniversary dinner with her husband, dismisses the claims as false. That is, however, until she is accused of being the assassin. When the CIA's computer shows that the Russian man is not lying, Salt is forced to run, escaping from the CIA and proving her innocence.

When I think action film with a female lead, my mind immediately pictures Angelina Jolie. Jolie's roles in Mr & Mrs Smith and the iconic Tomb Raider make her almost synonymous with the phrase female action star. Her past experience in playing the heroine, or anti-heroine in this case, means that she handled the role of Salt with ease, making incredibly complex action scenes look like a walk in the park and handling a gun with as much confidence as any competitor on screen. If there was going to be a gender-swapped remake of James Bond, Angelina Jolie would be the only valid choice to play the role, and it is with her natural talent of playing the female action hero that makes her journey in this film so enjoyable to watch.

With tension being built in the typical action-film way, quick cuts and fast cars, the film does not break any boundaries cinematically, it ticks every box it needs to in order to be a thrilling spectacle but who says it needs to go the extra mile? Every box that needs to be ticked is ticked, and through the lack of focus on being innovative and uniquely stylised, the focus is put on the extremely strong script, the constant plot twists and the fun chase scenes.
With the most exciting chase scene happening relatively close to the beginning of the film, however, a bit of the excitement is lost. We see Jolie hopping from truck to truck on a speeding motorway, the CIA are on the upcoming bridge, aiming their guns and getting ready to fire, but deep down we know that realistically the female lead who is glorified in all of the film's marketing campaigns is not going to die ten minutes in. Aside from the fact that the outcome of the chase is known as soon as the first step is taken, the chase scene is wonderfully shot, with pauses for the audience to catch their breaths before being thrown back into the chase quite unexpectedly sometimes.

Salt is an extremely easy watch, one of the things I found most enjoyable about it was the length. With most action films, there seems to be ten or twenty minutes at the end of useless footage, almost distinguishing our flame of excitement with quite dull scenes giving closure for the sake of giving closure. In this film (spoiler alert) we are left with Jolie jumping out of a helicopter and running through a forest of sorts, out for vengeance on the group who killed her husband and took everything away from her. This leaves the possibility for the audience to consider the character and her actions, make a judgement on her future and also for the filmmakers to make a sequel, which has been announced, by the way, and will most probably be awesome, like it's prequel.

Roman Holiday Review

A princess living the 'dream' life, travelling Europe, living in luxury and mingling with the highest aristocracy gets bored of the monotonous days of her life and decides to run away. With sleep-inducing drugs in her system, she runs away into the city of Rome. Finding a fast asleep Princess Ann on the side of a street, Joe Bradley, a journalist, mistakes her for a drunk and being the ever so kind gentleman that only Gregory Peck could play, decides to take her to his apartment for her own safety.
The morning after, Bradley finds out that the 'drunk' he took home was in fact the Princess, and makes a deal with the editor of his newspaper to secretly photograph and write about the Princess, unknown to her, and expose the side of her that the public never see. What follows is 24 hours in Rome, a holiday for the Princess and a working day out for Bradley, however when both the Princess and Bradley fall for each other, the lines between work and pleasure are blurred.

For me, the most interesting feature of this film is the character of Princess Ann, played beautifully by Audrey Hepburn. In the 1950s, a Princess' personal life was strictly off limits to members of the public, they were presented as representatives of their family and only that. Opening up the character of a wealthy princess who is usually secluded and showing her to have human emotions and characteristics is an interesting thing to watch, with her lack of perspective of the 'real' world being both comical and saddening to watch. We feel strongly connected to Hepburn's character, from the beginning, her not knowing the value of money and walking awkwardly through a street market, to the end, allowing herself to loosen up and kiss the man she loves, we watch her grow from an almost parental perspective and the development is satisfying to the viewer.

In between the beginning and the end of the film, our attachment towards the character's grows and the dramatic tension builds up at a steady pace as the cuts back to the Embassy are shown and we realise that people are looking for the Princess. With the natural chemistry between Peck and Hepburn, the romance is entirely believable to the point of over investment by the likes of myself, with the question of whether of not Bradley is going to submit the story being right at the front of my mind for the majority of the film, however, as with all good romantic comedies, everything runs smoothly in the end.

The film's ending of both of the characters going back to reality is what completes it, in my opinion. The impression is given that after the two character's whirlwind romance, everything goes back to how it was, allowing the audience to extend their disbelief and perhaps transfer it into the world outside of the diegesis, fantasising about perhaps their country's Royal family and the lives in which they lead outside of the public eye. The comparisons that can be made to Princess Ann and princesses outside of the film are many, and is one of the factors that makes the character of Ann so well remembered in the history of cinema.

The film is simple, well-structured and not too lengthy, with many iconic moments taking place, Roman Holiday is a truly wonderful piece of cinema that can and should be enjoyed by everyone.