The Martian Trailer Typecasts Matt Damon

Poor old Matt Daaaaaaaaaamon. You'd think somebody in Hollywood had it in for him. First he got stuck out in the far reaches of space in Interstallar and now he's all on his lonesome again in the new trailer for sci-fi thriller The Martian.


Don't feel too sorry for him though. First, Christopher Nolan. Now, Ridley Scott. Matt Damon is getting his pick of the great directors in Hollywood. Maybe all this solitary stuff on faraway planets is Damon just trying to get away from all these other Hollywood actors and their spoiled behaviour on sets. Have you seen the cast list on this one?


Kristen Wiig, Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Donald Glover, Jeff Daniels, Michael Pena and Chiwetel Ejiofor. That all adds up to a lot of talent and just maybe a lot of tantrums that Damon got to mostly avoid.

This looks great so far but as it's not out till November, I hope this is the one and only trailer we'll get. It's already over 3 minutes long so we really need to see nothing more of this until we sit down to watch the film in cinemas thank you very much. 

More trailers at I Love That Film

A Most Violent Year Review

In 1981, New York is having its most violent year in the city’s history. Abel Morales is an immigrant with huge ambitions for his legitimate fuel transporting business, but is increasingly having difficulties with his potentially dangerous competitors. As his business grows, the District Attorney starts to take an interest, just as it seems that one of Abel’s competitors turns to a series of violent hold-ups. With a massive deal to expand onto a bigger property and a great deal of money at stake, Abel must figure out who is attempting to steal from him and sabotage his empire’s growth. Abel’s similarly driven wife Anna (Jessica Chastain) demands that he protect their family from escalating threats, potentially leading Abel to a path of violence and corruption.

J.C. Chandor, director of the almost completely silent Robert Redford on a boat survival drama All is Lost, returns to the big city and to a highly dialogue driven narrative for his third film. Emulating classic films from the 70s, A Most Violent Year is an incredibly mature film from a director who is unafraid to completely subvert expectations. A Most Violent Year is not really all that violent so don’t expect an action thriller with bullets flying every five minutes. Instead, it’s a smart exercise in mounting tension, when the stakes are more often financial than life-threatening.

Not that you’d know it from the performances of Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain. Isaac is a dead ringer for Pacino in The Godfather and Chandor milks the lighting and production design to amplify the similarities between Morales and Corleone. Chastain’s Anna could have been a screeching Lady Macbeth-alike character but actually comes across as ballsy, bold and smart; a simmering complement to her ambitious husband.

While A Most Violent Year has some attention grabbing sequences, including a French Connection aping car chase, it doesn’t manage to make the business of being in business as thrilling as Chandor made the world of finance in Margin Call. It’s a grown up semi-thriller and wonderfully crafted homage to classics of the 70s. But it could have done with being a more violent, exciting film.

Watch the trailer:

More awards-bait film reviews from I Love That Film:

 

Wild Review

Whiplash Review

Testament of Youth Review

The Theory of Everything Review

Into the Woods Review

American Sniper Review

Unbroken Review

And more on awards season:

35th LONDON CRITICS' CIRCLE FILM AWARDS WINNERS

Oscar Nominees (Almost) Full List

Golden Globes Gambling

Top 10 Best True Stories of 2014

Cannes Film Festival Day 4 (Saturday)

Got to see 4 films today but haven't got round to reviewing any of them yet:

The Rover (brilliant)

The Rover is revolutionary for Robert Pattinson  but he is still in the shadow of Guy Pearce in this Aussie drama #Cannes2014
— Pete Turner (@ilovethatfilm) May 17, 2014

The Owners (from Kazakhstan... didn't really do much for me)

White God (my second favourite of the festival so far!)

The canine star of White God takes the stage. Another excellent film at #Cannes2014 pic.twitter.com/EuGoqCym2i
— Pete Turner (@ilovethatfilm) May 17, 2014

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby

McAvoy and Chastain in the house for The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby tonight #Cannes2014 pic.twitter.com/i7s2DmyN7g
— Pete Turner (@ilovethatfilm) May 17, 2014

I got to see the stars of White God and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby and sat just a couple of rows in front of James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain and Harvey Weinsten during the screening! Here's some pics:

Canine star of White God

White God talent

The Moral Murkiness of Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty tells the ten year tale of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow it is a morally complex, ambiguous film that is both thrilling and intellectually stimulating.

It is a thoroughly engaging, if not a little hard to call entertaining, real life thriller. As an example of a film about the fight back against terror, it pales in comparison to United 93 in terms of raw emotional power but its realism and careful construction come close to that film’s documentary style. In the final sequence at bin Laden’s secret hideout, it is hard to believe at some points that it was not filmed at the exact location of the true events, so meticulous is the reconstruction. The thriller and the procedural elements are wholly gripping and powered by horrendous torture scenes, references to real life tragedies and a climax that is edge of the seat exciting and simultaneously depressing.

It is the politics however that make Zero Dark Thirty the most difficult to watch and comment on. It shows torture in all its disgusting glory from water boarding to treating detainees like dogs to sleep deprivation and humiliation. It positions scenes of torture immediately after the real life voices of the innocent victims of 9/11 fill your ears with cries for help giving context to why America would feel the need to commit such inhumane acts. It only shows the torture of detainees who are clearly guilty of some involvement in terrorism. It seems to almost implicitly suggest that more torture could have prevented later tragedies in 7/7 and elsewhere and it makes a CIA operative who commits the worst, most degrading and reprehensible acts of torture to be a reasonable, kind of nice guy who has to get out of the job because of what it is doing to his mental health. Torture it seems is a tough job but the film seems to say someone has to do it. When Obama comes on the television saying he plans to scrap torture, it puts a right spanner in the works of the characters we have come to care about.

But the film does not celebrate torture. It does not glorify it. And it even sort of suggests that torture failed and that instead good detective work solved the case of where in the world bin Laden was hiding. It suggests the impact torture has on the people who commit it but fails to say much about the devastation it causes detainees and certainly not the ‘perhaps hundreds whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments’. It’s a streamlined Hollywood narrative film so perhaps there is no time for such issues but as it is, the film seems to suggest torture had its merits, might have been necessary and perhaps even should still be allowed. This strict sticking to narrative conventions also explains why there is no context to the 9/11 attacks, no sense of the CIA’s past sins or the reason for jihadist’s hatred of America; not that that would excuse the attacks, just as the attacks don’t excuse the murder of Afghan and Iraqi civilians. And on the subject of inexcusable, so is the using of 9/11 victims phone calls without the families’ permission.

But beneath the politics is a solid film, well acted, incredibly sombre in the face of what should have been a great victory and subtly feminist. Jessica Chastain is fantastic as Maya, supposedly a composite of many CIA officers (mostly women) who were deeply and determinedly involved in the hunt for the world’s most wanted man. The score resembles the anticipation inducing dull thudding of United 93, a film that similarly created a pain staking reconstruction of real events.

One of the most interesting points of the film is where it makes your sympathies lie. You can’t help but sympathise for the torture victim despite his involvement with 9/11. You want Maya to succeed in her quest but then the final fire fight makes you sympathise with the people closest to bin Laden as they wail and weep. It’s a tricky, morally complex mess, just like the real situation.

Zero Dark Thirty certainly does not shy away from the controversy surrounding the ‘war on terror’ and should be commended for that. Simply as a film, it stands tall amongst real life thrillers. Its politics might me morally dubious but they are complex enough to provoke serious and stimulating debate and for that I highly recommend it.