Tone Blog

Gripping yarn

Starring: Steve Carell, Mark Ruffalo, Channing Tatum, Sienna Miller and Vanessa Redgrave

Director: Bennett Miller

At the heart of Foxcatcher is a simple story and three incredible performances.

You won’t need to know anything about the real-life events that inspired the film.

In fact, the fresher you can keep yourself the better. But here are a few points it won’t hurt you to know.

Channing Tatum plays Mark Schultz, an American wrestler who remains poor and on the verge of starvation despite winning gold at the 1984 Olympics.

He lives in the shadow of his brother and fellow gold medallist Dave Schultz (Mark Ruffalo), Mark’s only means of support.

Enter John Du Pont (Steve Carell), heir to a sizeable family fortune. John is interested in wrestling and wants to give Mark the support and resources he needs.

With nothing to lose, Mark graciously accepts John’s help, money and friendship.

Dave, on the other hand, is more wary of John’s motives.

The story that unfolds over the course of the next two hours and the interplay between these three characters is something that will stay with you long after the final credits roll.

Carell’s incredible characterisation of Du Pont is grotesque, and yet so sweet and feeble he sucks you in even as he is repulsing you.

His drive for Olympic gold showcases a laundry list of character defects that grow ever more prominent as the stakes get higher.

It would be desperately funny if it wasn’t all so tragic.

About three-quarters into the running time, you’ll come to realise just how much intelligence and restraint has gone into the making of the movie, where the tension and underlying menace is nearly unbearable - even before anything terrible has happened. It all leads to a heartbreaking conclusion that is as shocking as it is inevitable.

Odyssey with grit

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine and Jessica Chastain

Director: Christopher Nolan

It was 46 years ago that 2001: A Space Odyssey hit our movie screens. Promising the ultimate space trip, the movie delighted in open-ended sequences that raised more questions than answers.

Now comes Interstellar, which could almost be considered Christopher Nolan’s much more realistic 2001 reboot: a movie that promises to take us on a similar trip but leave no questions unanswered, with everything tied up in a comparatively safe bow.

Matthew McConaughey stars as Cooper, a one-time NASA engineer forced into a second life as a farmer when the Earth of the future faces an ever-worsening food shortage.

With environmental conditions declining rapidly, all looks lost for the planet and its people - until a deep-space wormhole, almost certainly designed by beings of unknown origin, is discovered leading into unknown territory.

If you’ve ever seen a science-fiction movie dealing with space travel there’ll be something familiar to be seen here.

Mankind’s brightest putting everything they’ve got into one last-ditch survival effort? Check.

At least one character overwhelmed by despair whose panic attack places everyone in jeopardy? Check.

Rather than take us anywhere drastically new, Interstellar seems more interested in galvanising everywhere we’ve ever been.

But everything seems fresh through Nolan’s trademark gritty “real-world” lens, and the performances - particularly McConaughey’s conflicted turn as a father turned reluctant pioneer - are both remendous and emotionally engaging. If the film has any weakness it is in its sincere and earnest desire not to confuse or lose the audience when certain plot threads kick into gear.

At critical moments throughout the near-three hours of running time, key arc-words are used over and over, at times obviously out of context, purely to keep everyone on the same page.

With the story so keen to signpost where it has been and where it is going, an important reveal or two may occur to attentive audience members before our on-screen heroes have time to catch up.

But with many surprises still up its sleeve, Interstellar will have you perfectly situated for the full weight of its conclusion.

Cinema of war

Starring: Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller and Luke Grimes

Director: Clint Eastwood

Is this an uplifting war movie that seeks to glorify the kind of ordinary person who shines when put on to a battlefield?

Or is it a gloomy war movie that focuses on how terrible war is and how monstrous its effects are on people?

The short answer is this movie sets out, somewhat ambitiously, to do both.

Based on the real-life story of US Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, our main character is regularly forced to make impossible decisions such as the memorable one shown in the movie’s trailer: a young boy, 6 or 7, rushes towards a group of soldiers and Kyle (played by Bradley Cooper) has only seconds to decide whether the boy is a threat.

The wrong call, either way, means certain devastation.

Following the personal journey of one man’s experiences in the 2003 Iraq War, there are lots of elements to American Sniper and many of them seem at odds with each other.

It highlights the horror of war while celebrating American patriotism.

It assures us Iraqi soldiers are humans with families too, while at the same time highlighting the enemy’s wickedness and savagery.

It seeks to put Kyle under a microscope, while also being wary that he is based on a real-life military hero and to tarnish him would be disrespectful.

With so many spinning plates, the movie is at risk of collapsing under its own weight.

Impressively however, all these ingredients work smartly together rather than confuse and stupefy each other.

While it never adds up to more than the sum of its parts, the parts themselves are more than substantial, and the action is executed with impressive craft and precision by director Clint Eastwood.

A great deal of what makes the movie work so well is producer-and-star Cooper’s pitch-perfect performance, which has earned him a well-deserved Oscar nomination.

Wick-ass revenge

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Alfie Allen and Willem Dafoe

Directors: David Leitch and Chad Stahelski

Since the first Matrix, audiences have been hungry for any movie that can properly showcase Keanu Reeves’ talent for extreme action.

The good news is that John Wick delivers action in spades.

Reeves plays the title character, a seemingly ordinary man grieving the loss of his wife to cancer. When a gang of Russian thugs (led by Game of Thrones’ Alfie Allen) invades Wick’s home and kill his new puppy, the real John Wick resurfaces, and so begins a cold, methodical road to revenge against his tormentors.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what John Wick’s tone is supposed to be.

It’s a bit too ridiculous to be taken completely seriously, but far too sombre to be considered light and fun.In the opening stages the movie seems to promise a fresh take on the revenge tale: for the first time in movie history the man behind the man, our big bad villain Viggo (played entertainingly by Michael Nyqvist) knows everything there is to know about our hero. Refreshingly, he respects the full extent of what our hero is capable of doing, and that any aggressive action taken against our hero would only end in disaster. For the briefest of moments it looks like this movie is going to go into exciting and unpredictable territory.

However, armed as he is with this much genre awareness, our villain proceeds to go through predictable motions.

It’s genuinely puzzling, and all the more frustrating when he has already admitted to himself and his cronies that these tactics simply won’t work. But while the movie certainly has weaknesses, you may forgive them all once the action starts. The world of John Wick’s past super-assassin network is intricate and engaging, and it’s clear from the extended fight scenes that star Reeves hasn’t lost a step from his Neo days.

Off the planet

Starring: Channing Tatum, Mila Kunis and Eddie Redmayne

Directors: Andy and Lana Wachowski

Hot on the heels of Cloud Atlas, an ambitious if solemn affair that failed to make big waves at the box office, writing-directing team the Wachowskis have completely changed direction.

Loud, garish and colourful, Jupiter Ascending is a sprawling space opera - and anything but solemn.

Mila Kunis is the Jupiter of the title, unwittingly born with genes that entitle her to a life of interplanetary aristocracy.

It’s a vertiable Game of Thrones as the other rulers of the ‘verse send all kinds of colourful characters to find her - some want her dead, others want to keep her safe.

Channing Tatum features as Caine, an Elfish-looking former space cop with rocket boots who just so happens to be genetically part-dog.

It’s that kind of movie.

While it might not reach the heights of last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy, the movie aspires to have the same kind of cheek.

In fact, Jupiter is an imperfect tapestry of scenes strung together like patchwork, each one borrowing liberally from everything from The Fifth Element to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

While everything in the Wachowskis’ Matrix trilogy was played more or less straight, it’s clear the duo are having a lot more fun this time around. Jupiter feels like a laundry list of gags they wanted to include in the Matrix movies but for one reason or another, couldn’t.

Once again, there are gravity-defying feats of kung-fu prowess (though this time they are aided by rocket-boots), and once again humans are a crop being grown for harvest.

This time however, everything feels just a little more tacked on, cheesy and cheeky.

Funny business

Stars: Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day, Chris Pine, Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Aniston and Kevin Spacey

Director: Sean Anders

In an age of countless remakes and reboots plus sequels and prequels and reboot-quels, there’s something charmingly fresh about the way Horrible Bosses 2 presents itself.

Hot after emerging from the first fiasco with their respective employers, Nick, Kurt and Dale are going into business for themselves.

When a sour deal with a big-time supplier (Christoph Waltz) threatens to bankrupt them and derail their self-employment plans, the trio turn to the kind of tactics they handle the most terribly - the underhanded and illegal kind.

Just as the plans for murder in the first Bosses movie referenced the Hitchcock classic Strangers on a Train, this movie focuses on kidnapping, referencing the Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda comedy from 1980, Nine to Five.

In fact, the nods this time are much, much heavier and the movie borrows far more liberally.

So how does it remain so fresh?

It’s so cheekily upfront about it.

Despite trading Hitchcock for Parton and stepping down from cold-blooded murder to the perhaps lesser charge of kidnapping, sequel escalation is in full force with the thing that made the first movie stand out from the crowd: when things go bad, they go very, very bad. Bateman, Sudeikis and Day continue their winning chemistry as a trio of modern day Stooges.

There are several fun opportunities to catch up with the characters from the original movie - Jennifer Aniston and Kevin Spacey shine in cameos - while Chris Pine is a great addition as a company heir with a slick oily facade.