Last Days in the Desert

For F*** Magazine

LAST DAYS IN THE DESERT

Director : Rodrigo García
Cast : Ewan McGregor, Tye Sheridan, Ayelet Zurer, Ciarán Hinds
Run Time : 1 hr 38 mins
Opens : 23 June 2016
Rating : M18 (Some Nudity)

There was a meme going around a while back, of a framed photograph atop an altar of Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Attack of the Clones, the idea being that some old lady thought it was a picture of Jesus Christ. Here, McGregor actually plays Jesus, referred to as “Yeshua”. This film imagines an incident during Jesus’ sojourn to the desert, during which He was tempted by the Devil (also McGregor). Jesus comes across a family living in the desert, comprising an unnamed Father (Hinds), a sickly Mother (Zurer) and their son (Sheridan). The Devil poses a challenge to Jesus, wagering that the Son of God will not be able to find a solution that will please each member of the family. Jesus stays as a guest of the family, helping them out with a construction project, while wrestling with the Devil, Father God seemingly millions of miles away.

            Writer-director Rodrigo García has repeatedly clarified that this not your run of the mill Biblical epic, and is instead an intimate drama and character study. The story of Jesus’ temptation in the desert is told in three of the four gospels, and Christians will be familiar with how Jesus refuted each of Satan’s challenges to Him by quoting from the scripture. This film departs from tradition, but also does not feel like it’s courting controversy for the, uh, hell of it. García explained his decision to refer to Jesus as “Yeshua”, which is the original pronunciation, in an interview with Christianity Today. “I wrote a few pages in which I called Him ‘Jesus’, but when you’re writing a screenplay and it says ‘Jesus walks, Jesus says,’ after a while, the weight of the name is paralyzing,” García said.

            There are individual elements to García’s approach that are intriguing, but as a whole, the film often comes off as aimless and meandering. If it was his intention to make the audience feel like they’re spending 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness alongside Jesus, then García has succeeded. All things considered, the 108-minute running time is not particularly long, but even then, this feels interminable at times. It seems like three or four good ideas are spaced out, with a vast void in between. The Oscar-winning Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki is the cinematographer here, but it is a dull movie to look at, the desolate surroundings about as dull as one imagines the average desert to look. The film was shot on location in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in the Colorado Desert of Southern California, and it might sound silly, but for this reviewer at least, the knowledge that this was filmed in the United States did rob the movie of some authenticity.

            Speaking of authenticity, this is yet another Hollywood film in which a white man is cast as Jesus. We don’t want to harp about issues of race and sure, there’s always room for poetic license, but especially with an actor who feels as contemporary as Tye Sheridan running about, it’s very hard to take this very seriously as a film set in Ancient Israel. That said, McGregor does face the myriad challenges in portraying the iconic religious figure head-on. There’s enough of a humanity to Jesus and at one point, He even laughs at a fart joke, but McGregor’s portrayal does have an undercurrent of reverence to it.

One of the smartest ideas on display is that of having McGregor play the dual roles of Jesus and His tormentor Satan. A conversation they have about the nature of God is the closest the film gets to any real theological insight. For a movie that wants so much to depart from tradition though, it seems a cliché that Satan wears jewellery as a way to differentiate him from Jesus; that the bad guy has to be coded as flamboyant. The visual effects work in duplicating McGregor is seamless and one does forget that there aren’t two Ewan McGregors after a while.

            On one level, this is a family drama, with the parents and their child working out their issues while a house guest is present. Hinds’ Father is a realist, a practical man who has his doubts about issues of faith, but does not dismiss the holy man outright. The struggles of a father in understanding his son are very relatable. Sheridan shares some genuinely affecting moments in which the son bonds with Jesus, but as alluded to earlier, he’s ultimately too American to be believable in this setting. The mother is ill for most of the film, so Zurer has less to do compared to Hinds and Sheridan, but the character’s pain still resonates.

            Last Days in the Desert feels more like a filmmaking experiment than a well-told story, but García is largely able to strike a balance between portraying Jesus’ humanity and deity without getting caught up in that, or blazing down a blasphemous path Last Temptation of the Christ-style. Alas, it is likely that this will induce thumb-twiddling rather than soul-searching.

Summary: Ewan McGregor shines in his dual role, but Last Days in the Desert’s loose structure and lack of narrative drive keep its audience at a distance.

RATING: 2.5 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong 

Jane Got a Gun

For F*** Magazine

JANE GOT A GUN

Director : Gavin O'Connor
Cast : Natalie Portman, Joel Edgerton, Ewan McGregor, Rodrigo Santoro, Noah Emmerich, Boyd Holbrook, Alex Manette, Todd Stashwick, James Burnett, Sam Quinn
Genre : Action/Drama/Western
Run Time : 98 mins
Opens : 18 February 2016
Rating : NC-16 (Violence and Some Coarse Language)

In Marvel’s ongoing Thor comics series, Jane Foster is the current wielder of Mjolnir. In this western, Jane Hammond (Portman) wields more conventional weapons. It is 1871 in New Mexico territory and Jane lives with her husband Bill “Ham” Hammond (Emmerich) and their daughter Kate. When Ham rides home seriously wounded after a gun battle with the Bishop Boys gang, Jane has no choice but to turn to her ex-fiancée Dan Frost (Edgerton) for protection. John Bishop (McGregor), a notorious outlaw from Jane’s past, has returned to torment her. Dan is still broken after losing Jane to another man, but he resolves to help Jane protect her family and her home as the Bishop Boys come a-knocking.

            Jane Got a Gun was plagued by numerous production problems, and it will be remembered more for its behind-the-scenes tumult than on its own merit as a film. The original screenplay by Brian Duffield was a hot property, landing on the Black List of best-liked screenplays in Hollywood back in 2011. Natalie Portman was attached to star and produce, with Lynne Ramsay of We Need to Talk About Kevin fame directing. Severe disagreements led to Ramsay dropping out on the first day of principal photography, with a bitter legal battle ensuing. Warrior director Gavin O’Connor was roped in to replace her, but the film’s troubles were just beginning. Michael Fassbender, Jude Law and Bradley Cooper were all attached at different points and Edgerton ended up switching roles from the villain John Bishop to the ex-fiancée Dan Frost. The release date was shifted back multiple times, with distributor Relativity Media dropping the film and The Weinstein Company later acquiring it.

            For all the drama involved in getting the film made, one would expect it to, at the very least, be bad in an interesting way. No such luck. Jane Got a Gun is soporific and dreary, sorely lacking in a key element of any revenge story: passion. It looks, feels and sounds like a western, but there’s so little energy and momentum behind it. The title suggests a fun genre piece with a feminist twist, perhaps something akin to Kill Bill in the American frontier. Some of the expected ingredients are there, including a tragic back-story and a score to settle with an old enemy, but it’s so plodding and self-serious that getting invested in Jane’s tale is quite the task. It’s sometimes a pretty movie to look at, but most of the time it’s visually dull: the picture is sepia-tinted, then the flashbacks appear to have another layer of sepia tinting on top of that and this stylistic touch ends up creating even more distance between the audience and the story.

            Portman may be playing the titular protagonist and has championed the film through the myriad obstacles it faced in getting made, but Jane Hammond will not go down as one of the great ass-kicking female characters in cinema history. There’s some emotional impact to Jane’s tortured past, but her supposed transformation into a gun-toting damsel no longer in distress is underwhelming. The love triangle between Jane, Ham and Dan bogs the movie down in melodramatics instead of creating any fireworks and nothing unconventional comes of the dynamics between the three characters. The villain in a revenge western should get to chew a good deal of scenery, but McGregor has too little screen time and too little material to work with, unable to create a particularly intimidating or striking villain. With Padmé, Obi-Wan and Owen Lars in the same movie, it’s a mini Attack of the Clones reunion.

            Jane Got a Gun has a round or two in the chamber: the climactic standoff brims with tension and the sombre atmosphere is sometimes effective. It is morbidly fascinating to read about how a straight-forward western got mired in so many production troubles and it is admirable that last-minute replacement director O’Connor was able to salvage it all. However, in the aftermath of this hullabaloo, all Jane Got a Gun has to show for it is mediocrity.

Summary: Dour and slow, Jane Got a Gun fails to make good on its promise of a fun genre piece starring a dynamic female lead.

RATING: 2 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong 

Mortdecai

For F*** Magazine

MORTDECAI

Director : David Koepp
Cast : Johnny Depp, Gwyneth Paltrow, Paul Bettany, Ewan McGregor, Olivia Munn, Jonny Pasvolsky, Jeff Goldblum
Genre : Comedy
Run Time : 107 mins
Opens : 29 January 2015
Rating : NC-16 (Sexual References)

He’s debonair, he’s dapper, he’s dumb – very, very dumb. Johnny Depp is Lord Charlie Mortdecai, an art dealer who finds himself embroiled in some very troubling business. When he is roped in by Inspector Martland (McGregor) of MI5 to assist in the case of a missing Goya painting, Mortdecai runs afoul of the Russian mafia and international assassin Strago (Pasvolsky). With his loyal valet Jock (Bettany) by his side, Mortdecai traipses across Europe and to Los Angeles to crack the case. To complicate matters, he is in crippling tax debt and a rift develops between him and his beloved wife Johanna (Paltrow) – brought upon by Mortdecai’s decision to grow a moustache.

            Mortdecai is based on Don’t Point That Thing At Me, the first in late author Kyril Bonfiglioli’s series of comic thriller novels. Film critics often describe action comedies as “romps” – there is no better way to describe Mortdecai other than a “romp”. This is a lowbrow movie gleefully prancing about in a highbrow movie’s clothes, tongue ever so firmly planted in cheek from start to finish. The plot features such hoity-toity elements as a priceless Goya painting, art auctions, a Rolls Royce, manors and manservants, yet almost all of the jokes are derived from unsubtle “nyuk nyuk nyuk”-style innuendo. For example, when Mortdecai is informed that he owes £8 million in tax debts, he remarks “I had no idea I was so deep in Her Majesty’s hole.” If you’re rolling your eyes just reading the line, then you should give Mortdecai a wide berth. But if you’re chuckling at it, you will find it easy to go along with all that silliness, and to the film’s credit, it isn’t all that hard to.

            Johnny Depp was once praised for being “daring” and “unique”, embracing oddball roles and shunning typical Hollywood leading men parts. Now, it’s hard to find anyone who takes him seriously but in Mortdecai, Johnny Depp wants to assure you the viewer that he doesn’t take himself seriously either. This is simultaneously a self-aware nod in the direction of Depp’s critics and an act of defiance, a “haters gonna hate”-type deal. Even if you dislike Depp’s shtick with all of your heart, you’ll have to admit it is pretty fun to see the actor dive so deep into the self-parody pool and with such conviction. That said, between the accent, the eyebrow-raising and that sound he makes that is somewhere between a grumble and a whimper, we understand why some viewers might find him all the more annoying after this.

            The rest of the cast do seem to be having a ball. It isn’t a stretch to buy Gwyneth Paltrow as a privileged, cultured aristocrat who has her husband firmly under her thumb and thankfully, she and Depp do share considerably more chemistry than Depp and Angelina Jolie did in The Tourist. Paul Bettany channels Jason Statham as the gruff, faithful sidekick named “Jock Strapp” (see what we mean about this being a lowbrow movie in a highbrow movie’s clothes?) There’s a running gag that the character is libidinous but largely manages not to let his dalliances with assorted buxom women get in the way of his work. Kinda funny. Ewan McGregor, reliable as always, is the straight man in all this. Unfortunately, it seems that the scenes featuring Oliver Platt and Aubrey Plaza have been left on the cutting room floor.

            Frothy and light-hearted, Mortdecai knows what it is and rejoices in that. Sure, it often seems like director David Koepp is attempting a bad Wes Anderson impression and that opening sequence borrows too liberally from that of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but as entertaining fluff, Mortdecai passes muster. Screenwriter Eric Aronson’s adaptation is comically verbose, the linguistic equivalent of a slapstick comedy routine – never mind that Aronson’s only other produced script is the execrable Lance Bass-starring 2001 rom-com On The Line. Lionsgate is planning a franchise and while that might not be particularly easy to sustain, especially when compared with the likes of Lionsgate’s lucrative Hunger Games series, it’s harmless fun that’s disposable but not worthless.

Summary: Johnny Depp knows nobody takes him seriously anymore and goes “what the heck”. While it needs a defter touch, Mortdecai is quite funny and, for the most part, enjoyably silly.

RATING: 3.5 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong

The Impossible

For F*** Magazine, Singapore

THE IMPOSSIBLE

Director:	Juan Antonio Bayona
Cast:	Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, Tom Holland
Genre:	Drama, Thriller
Run Time:	108 mins
Opens:	17 January 2013
Rating:	PG13 - Disturbing Scenes and Brief Nudity

The devastating Indian Ocean tsunami that struck on Boxing Day 2004 was one of the most horrifying natural disasters in recent history, taking the lives of many and impacting the lives of many more. Spanish director Bayona and screenwriter Sergio Sánchez of The Orphanage fame have re-teamed to tell the true story of one family’s harrowing experience of the event. 

Henry Bennett (McGregor), his wife Maria (Watts) and their sons Lucas (Holland), Thomas (Samuel Joslin) and Simon (Oaklee Pendergast) have travelled to the resort town of Khao Lak, Thailand for an idyllic tropical Christmas holiday. Their family vacation is violently cut short by the tsunami, which hits their resort head-on.  The film follows Henry, Maria and their children as they search desperately for each other in the aftermath of the disaster.

Director Bayona has crafted a powerful, emotional film that allows audiences to witness the horror that nature can wield and the triumph of family and the human spirit at the same time. Focusing on a single family caught in the midst of the madness lends the story an honest intimacy, and Bayona has carefully re-constructed the background against which it unfolds. The scene of the tsunami surging aground and demolishing everything in its path is gut-wrenchingly realistic; the ravaged landscape left in its wake meticulously re-created. There is a very effective use of sound, and Bayona certainly has an eye for haunting images.

This must have been a difficult film, both emotionally and physically, for the actors to undertake, and McGregor and Watts have bravely risen to the challenge, tossing aside Hollywood superficiality to appear truly bloodied, bruised and broken. Watts is breathtakingly vulnerable, painful-looking makeup effects assisting her portrayal of the badly-injured Maria, whose duties as a mother are always a priority – the Best Actress Oscar nomination is much-deserved. McGregor does the “everyday hero” thing convincingly, making it easy to identify with the father’s quest Henry undertakes, and Holland shines as their oldest son.

On the internet, the film has been the target of accusations of racism, some up in arms over the fact that it focuses on a Caucasian family when the tsunami happened in Asia. It is this reviewer’s opinion that this is a trite point to make, and even though the real-life Belon family was Spanish and McGregor, Watts and the other actors aren’t, it takes nothing away from their portrayal. The filmmakers had intended the family onscreen to be kind of universal, and that’s what has been achieved.

Unlike most disaster movies, The Impossible doesn’t revel in the carnage wrought and strikes a masterful balance between the sensitive and the visceral. It’s devoid of the maudlin, overwrought melodramatics of Roland Emmerich-esque blockbusters, and is a worthy picture that, cheesy though it may sound, will probably make you hug your loved ones a wee bit tighter afterwards.

SUMMARY: A moving, well-told story of survival and familial bonds, equal parts heartbreaking and uplifting. 

RATING: 4 out of 5 STARS

Jedd Jong

Angels & Demons

Movie Review                                                                                                                                  24/5/09

ANGELS & DEMONS

2009

Starring: Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer

Directed by: Ron Howard

Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures

           

 Harvard professor and symbology super-sleuth Robert Langdon is back in this second adaptation of a Dan Brown novel. Besides the main character (played again by the unimitatable Tom Hanks), the Oscar-winning team of director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer have returned for the sequel. In the wake of 2006’s critically-derided The Da Vinci Code, how does its screen sequel fare?

            This time around, Howard and big-name screenwriters Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp have made more of an effort to trim off the unwieldy excess from Brown’s narrative, and went for the ticking-bomb-thriller approach as opposed to the conspiracy theory 101 class we were forced to sit through the first time around. The filmmakers have wisely optimized the thriller material with which they were presented, so there is more running between churches than talking heads.

            The film begins with the death of the beloved Pope, and the cardinals of the world have gathered in Vatican City for the papal conclave, i.e. the election of a new Pope. However, in the midst of this, it appears that the Illuminati secret society, an old enemy of the Catholic Church, has resurfaced, kidnapping four of the favourites for the papacy and threatening retribution for the Church’s “crimes” against them some 400 years ago.

            The “ticking bomb” in this context is a canister of antimatter, a volatile experimental substance harvested by particle physicists at CERN (The European Organisation for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland. The canister has been stolen by the Illuminati, who are now using it to hold the church hostage.

            And that’s where Robert Langdon comes in. He is roped in by Inspector Ernesto Olivetti (Pierfrancesco Favino) of the Gendarme Corps of Vatican City State (otherwise known as the Vatican Police) and decipher cryptic symbols left as clues by the Illuminati and assist the Swiss Guard and the afore-mentioned Vatican Police in rescuing the four cardinals and finding the antimatter before it consumes the Vatican. Meanwhile, Commandante Richter (Stellan Skarsgard) of the Swiss Guard is largely dismissive of Langdon and is deliberately hostile to him.

            The Harvard Professor is given the blessing of the idealistic young priest Camerlengo Patrick MacKenna (McGregor), a favourite of the late Pope and his former right-hand man. The earnest Camerlengo seems the most desperate to end the madness. The beautiful CERN physicist Vittoria Vetra (Zurer) is also drawn into the fray, but even the combined expertise of both academics seems almost powerless to stop the looming Illuminati threat.

            Now, if the above synopsis sounds far-fetched, be warned that it is just the tip of this cinematic iceberg. Author Dan Brown is known for meddling fact and fiction and even passing off the former as the latter, achieving at-times laughable results. Plenty of plot points are downright ludicrious and there are enough contrivances to fill St Peter’s Square. The key prefix in this film is “psuedo” – the film is built on psuedo-science, psuedo-history, pretty much psuedo-everything. Stock characters and a fish market of red herrings also populate the picture. Therefore, suspension of disbelief is key. Thankfully though, the movie is paced well-enough, so much so that one eventually buys into the hodgepodge and goes along for the ride.

            We are treated to a wonderful tour of The Vatican City that is part The Amazing Race (but with dead bodies and shootouts instead of roadblocks and detours), part dramatic angel’s-eye-views of the world’s smallest country. The fortress-church Castel Sant’ Angelo, the famous Sistine Chapel, Santa Maria Del Popolo with its imposing obelisk and the former Roman temple of “all gods” the Pantheon all figure in this whirlwind romp. While some of Angels & Demons was shot on location, the filmmakers were not granted access to several sites within the Vatican Walls, as such set reconstructions and some digital magic was employed. The results are actually fairly impressive, one might even be fooled into thinking the computer-generated replicas are the real thing.

            This leads on to the cinematography of the film by Director of Photography Salvatore Totino. Totino excels in sweeping vistas of cavernous cathedrals, and many scenes are gorgeously lit, presenting the locales at their most mysterious and beautiful. The cinematography is ultimately one of the main strong points of the film. There is an enjoyable little sequence in which the main characters enter an abandoned church and Totino milks the location for all its horror-movie-style potential, even including a smart visual gag involving a pair of contractor’s boots.

            A quick mention must be made of the lush yet kinetic score from famed film composer Hans Zimmer, whose past credits include Batman Begins, the Pirates of the Caribbean films and even The Lion King (which gave him one of his seven Oscar wins). The violin solo by virtuoso Joshua Bell is also something of a masterpiece and even adds some depth to the film.

            Ron Howard and company are eminent forces in Hollywood today and exert that power by casting relatively big names. While this film boasts slightly less star power than its predecessor (The Da Vinci Code had actors such as Jean Reno and Ian McKellen among its cast), everyone puts in fairly credible performances here. Tom Hanks lends much credibility to the Langdon role, and gets plenty more to do in this than in the last film, from dodging bullets to saving a drowning man and from taking a dip in speedos to feverishly thumbing through ancient documents. Some of the time though, Hanks clearly has his tongue in his cheek, and especially excels in the rare humourous moments that do ease the cinematic tension. As the female lead, Israeli actress Zurer does barely as good a job as Hanks, relegated to tagging along in the mad dashes from church to church. However, she isn’t a bad actress per se and I look forward to seeing her in more Hollywood projects.

            After appearing in smaller films and adventuring around the world for the last several years, it is good to see Ewan “Obi-Wan” McGregor turning in his Jedi robes from the Star Wars prequel trilogy for the Camerlengo’s cossack and back in a blockbuster, and truth be told he does a mighty fine job. However, it is not exactly believable that the youngish McGregor plays a fairly high-ranking priest, especially when other characters have to call him “Father”, and McGregor also visibly stumbles through an unwieldly soliloquy. The character, originally Italian in the book, is now Irish to accommodate the Scottish actor, and as such the Camerlengo’s backstory seems largely implausible. Ultimately though, the Camerlengo is one of the most complex characters in the film, and McGregor is largely able to parse the finer nuances in his portrayal. The incredible Stellan Skarsgard (whom we’ve seen in such films as Good Will Hunting, The Hunt For the Red October and the Pirates of the Caribbean films) seems under-utilized as the prickly Commandante, despite this the actor still fleshes out the slight bitterness his character bears towards Langdon with much relish.

            The film’s small departures from the book seem to be a two-edged sword; on one hand the story has been streamlined and does work better for the screen, but on the other, interesting characters and other elements seem to have been sacrificed. For example, instead of the generic, bespectacled assassin-for-hire played by Nikolaj Lie Kaas, the book’s politically-incorrect but more interesting version was a brutish, imposing Middle-Eastern rapist. Also, the book came before The Da Vinci Code, but the timeline has been altered such that this functions as a sequel, and the romantic subplot has been jettisoned in favour of a strictly professional relationship between Langdon and Vetra. However, producer Brian Grazer did state that the filmmaking team was too "reverential" when adapting The Da Vinci Code, which resulted in it being "a little long and stagey". Therefore, the wiggle room this time around does more help than harm in the long run.

           

            The movie is enjoyable in spite of (or perhaps because of) its sheer absurdity, offering up legitimate thrills and even a couple of outstanding action sequences. Far from being offensive or overly-controversial, Angels & Demons ends up being more cotton candy fluff than a “lofty quest”. But have angels guided Howard and Co. in their mission nonetheless? Perhaps, though this film does have its fair share of demons to contend with as well.

RATING: 3.5/5 STARS

Jedd Jong