Moofies - Sherlock Holmes

EXPECTATIONS: The casting in this looks great, but I really don’t like Guy Ritchie films. When I saw Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels I thought it was a pretty neat, stylish movie. Then Ritchie rehashed the exact same thing over and over again and I lost interest about half way through Snatch. Maybe he will surprise me with this one.

REALITY: Sherlock Holmes is a great character and this film would be far more interesting if it had tried to capture that instead of wowing us with stupid fight scenes. I understand that perhaps the idea was to re-invent Holmes, but I think that in order to do that there has to be more drastic changes made. You can’t just take the familiar Holmes setting and tack on a bit more testosterone and sex appeal and call it a re-invention.

Robert Downey Jnr. is fairly likeable I suppose, but his accent in this is pretty ordinary. He mumbles through his lines in what sounds like a piss take of a British accent. Jude Law plays a fairly whiney Watson who, again, is mostly likeable but doesn’t quite work. I don’t even know why Rachel McAdams is in this movie. She switches between being a sort of Catwoman character to being Holmes possible lover to being bad/good. She’s not on screen long enough to actually define who she is because she’s always doing something different and mostly irrelevant to the plot.

There are glimpses of a good film in here. Holmes and Watson have a couple of scenes where their banter is amusing and endearing, but then the plot moves on to another stupid stylish looking fight and I get bored. The ‘plot’ involving the supposed resurrection of Lord Blackwood is played as this big, evil thing, when the audience can obviously see that Holmes will figure it all out. There are far too many ‘I am so evil and this is some evil prophecy’ scenes that belong in an Underworld film and not in bloody Sherlock Holmes. Seriously, even Blackwoods haircut and jacket make him look like a vampire. It’s ridiculous.

At least it wasn’t another British gangster movie.

**1/2

Moofies - Precious : Based on the novel Push by Sapphire

EXPECTATIONS: I’ve read some pretty glowing reviews for this film, but I’m still wary that it’s going to be way to annoyingly tear jerky with little else. It also has a ridiculously long title.

REALITY: For the most part this is a convincing portrayal of a story that we never see on screen. The main character, Clarice Precious Jones, is an obese 16 year old girl, who has had one baby by her father and is pregnant with another. Clarice gets herself through awful situations by escaping into her mind and fantasising about being famous or having a boyfriend. She is sent to a special school where she is put into a classroom with five other girls and we see her grow and learn throughout the film.

The plot is fairly straight forward, but the performances are mostly subtle enough that the awfulness of Precious’ home life seems real. Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz both have small roles in this film for some reason, but they are almost unrecognisable and they both give pretty good performances. I never thought I would ever be typing that sentence.

I think where the film fails for me is when it decides to just push things that little bit further. After 75 minutes or so the film feels finished, and then we get an extra bit of bad news for Precious; her father is HIV positive and he has passed that on to Precious. I just felt like the film makers wanted me to be a bit more upset than I already was, and it just felt forced and tacked on. However the final scene, where Precious confronts her mother, was worth waiting for.

Precious is pretty grim, but it manages for the most part to stay realistic and not dwell in uber-nastiness and get a little silly, like a Darren Aronofsky film. The realistic portrayal of the horrible stuff is also balanced with the convincing friendly relationships that Precious makes at her new school.

***1/2

Moofies - Up In The Air

EXPECTATIONS: Jason Reitman wrote and directed Thank You for Smoking which was a pretty decent film, so this should be good. Up In The Air has also won a bunch of awards, and will probably win much more, which means I’ll either really like it, or it will all be a bit too obvious and over the top to stomach.

REALITY: This is probably the best role George Clooney has been cast for. It’s not that he gives some kind of outstanding performance or anything; the role just feels like it has been written for him. Clooney plays Ryan Bingham. Bingham is hired by different companies to fire people. He lives on the road and is in love with his routine. His character is set up very well and very quickly in the opening scenes. Bingham’s world is shaken up when young Natalie (Anna Kendrick) introduces a cheaper, more efficient way to fire people; using webcams. Bingham takes Natalie on the road to show her how it’s done properly and the back and forth between the two of them is really funny. It was great to see Kendrick, a relative unknown, act against a Hollywood giant and hold her own.

The plot almost falls into regular rom/com/drama territory, but it never does. One of the strengths of the film is that all the people we see getting fired (other than J.K.Simmons) are real people who lost their jobs in the recent economic downturn; their stories and their emotion are real. Pitting this alongside a character who is slowly realising what it is he has lost makes for a great film, and it’s not all super serious either. I laughed a fair bit throughout. This is probably one worth rewatching.

****