This review by David Gritten suggests an overview of the films plot with attention to plot and character details, it also while recognising some potential in the story gives a negative view overall about the relationships of characters and length of script and shots. Although it does give some credit to the visual look of the film.
Cannes Film Festival 2010: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, review
Oliver Stone's follow-up to his era-defining 1987 film Wall Street, again starring Michael Douglas, lacks the punch of the "greed is good" original.
By David Gritten 2:55PM BST 14 May 2010
It was so much easier 23 years ago, when Michael Douglas carved a place in movie history by mouthing Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” mantra in Oliver Stone’s first Wall Street film.
We all knew where we stood back then. Some loathed Gekko, while enjoying Douglas’s hammy bad-guy performance. Others among us took one look at him, with his slicked-back hair and colourful braces, and realised he spoke to them – of career possibilities as traders in investment banks.
Well, times have changed a lot since, then, and the economic crisis has revealed banks as more voracious in their dealings than even Gekko could have imagined.
This might have prompted Stone to deliver a compelling, angry sequel that directly addressed today’s world. Instead, what we get is a fudge.
Gekko, we learn, served eight years in jail for his financial misdemeanours, and in the film’s opening scenes we see him being released – dishevelled, unshaven and re-claimng his old possessions.
(The opportunity for a sardonic gag about the size of old mobile phones is not resisted.) The action then fast-forwards to 2008, when he’s made a recovery of sorts and has written a best-selling book titled – wait for it – Is Greed Good? He has to ask? If he doesn’t know, who does?
He has now positioned himself as a prophet of gloom: surveying the banks speculating, leveraging debts and exploring the short-term gains of sub-prime lending, he foresees disastrous times.
There are complications in his life. His estranged daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan) is involved with Jacob (Shia LaBeouf), a hungry, eager young trader making a fortune for his investment bank: a younger version of Gekko, of course. Winnie is conveniently idealistic, and loathes her father’s obsession with money, while he wants above all to reconcile with her.
Meanwhile, Jacob’s bank crashes, triggering the suicide of its founder and Jacob’s mentor Lou Zabel (Frank Langella). Jacob plots revenge against a partner in a rival bank (Josh Brolin) whose double dealing has brought Zabel’s bank to its knees.
There’s plenty of story here, then, but Stone is, shall we say, greedy for more. He and his screenwriters (Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff) batter the audience with financial jargon, spoken very fast in staccato tones: shorting, sub-primes, hedging, the Fed. Without a close daily study of the financial pages, it’s hard to keep up.
Still, we keep coming back to Gekko’s question: Is greed good? Here, Stone tries to have it both ways. I lost count of the times a character says: “It’s not about the money,” but visually the film suggests otherwise: it’s stuffed with long tracking scenes and aerial shots showing Manhattan, and especially the temples of Mammon on Wall Street itself, in a flattering, golden-hued glow. We see them at sunrise, at dusk, and it’s clear we are meant to feel awe.
The film’s emotional relationships feel awkward and forced. Carey Mulligan does her best in the role of Winnie, who is meant to be pivotal – the battleground between Gekko and Jacob. But she’s essentially a liberal cipher, and somewhat passive. (This is, of course, primarily a film for and about men.) LaBeouf is just about old enough to play a smart young trader, and does so efficiently, if not particularly interestingly.
But those looking forward to seeing Michael Douglas in his pomp may be disappointed. He disappears from the movie for long stretches: after the first scene at the prison gates, it’s agood half-hour before he re-surfaces. He certainly has his moments: a rousing speech at his alma mater about his new book is pure ham (think of Stone doing the same for Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday), but at least it makes you smile. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps could use even more of Douglas.
Instead, it’s a handsomely-shot, smoothly edited vehicle that lurches its way to that wearisome climax. Annoyingly, Stone has also littered his film with cameos – Charlie Sheen (yes, that’s right: Bud Fox from 23 years back), Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, various luminaries from New York society – and, on three occasions, Stone himself. It looks as if everyone involved had a ball. How cosy it all looks. Who said the global recession couldn’t be fun?
Original: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/cannes-film-festival/7724216/Cannes-Film-Festival-2010-Wall-Street-Money-Never-Sleeps-review.html
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The Last Airbender (PG)
Plot: M. Night Shyamalan's live action adaptation of the Nickelodeon animated series. Set in a world of Asian-influenced martial arts and magic, Avatar...tells the story of Aang (Noah Ringer) and his quest to save the world from the ruthless Fire Nation.
Review: By design or otherwise, M. Night Shyamalan will never occupy the middle ground. He’s the self-anointed auteur dressing B-movie genres in A-movie glamour, his becalmed style — autumnal, serious, tricksy — attempting to blend Spielberg with Kubrick: high adventure at a snail’s pace. But this former golden boy is now a laughing stock: Lady In The Water über-flopped, and his psycho-pollen thriller The Happening was by any reckoning misconceived. Things appear to have got worse.
American critics, braying like a pack of hounds, have spilled loud, vituperative scorn on his latest, a would-be fantasy epic. Tedious! Nauseating! Incompetent! Hamstrung by a last-minute conversion into 3D! Hateful wouldn’t be putting too fine a word on it. Inevitably, upon viewing this so-called atrocity, it turns out to be just a film. A clunky, occasionally stirring, but largely botched fairy tale targeting its saga of child-empowerment towards juniors dreaming of saving the world without the assistance of their parents. Adapting a cult US cartoon series, bathed in a manga-like mythos of martial arts and quasi-Buddhist rhetoric, was an intriguing enough challenge.
Could Shyamalan apply his aesthetic to the robust demands of the Lord Of The Rings-style world-building? He’s hired Rings cinematographer Andrew Lesnie, and spooked up some original special effects: water and fire swirled like pizza-dough by the tai chi moves of the (ahem) ‘benders’. And if the 3D is wishy-washy (but hardly ruinous), there are visual splendours: temples perched on mountain peaks, cameras racing across frozen wastes (Greenland in person), and the splendid steampunk battleships of the Fire Nation spewing corrosive smoke. There’s an anti-industrial vibe on hand that echoes its namesake, Avatar — the original series is awkwardly titled Avatar: The Last Airbender.
For Shyamalan, the pace is positively athletic. We flit, with disorientating swiftness, between the elemental nations on the back of a gargantuan furball, a monkey-faced familiar to the dog-eared dragon of The Neverending Story (an appropriate touchstone). And in amongst the mystical dot-to-dot (a quest, indeed, for balance in the Force) appear Shyamalan-like grace notes as James Newton Howard’s swelling score lingers over the balletic moves of the miniscule hero (Noah Ringer). It’s when anyone speaks that it turns to stone. Unfathomably, in adapting a cartoon Shyamalan has written a cartoon.
The script is a childish muddle of voiceover and rampant exposition, its young elementals robot-reading stage directions to one another: “We must go.” “Yes, we must go.” Out of the youthful troupe — a lithe, cheery bunch struck cardboard when forced to entertain acting — only Slumdog’s Dev Patel reveals any bite as the petulant Fire prince. But then, he is the only one with a discernable character. Shyamalan is surprisingly unsure of the material, and his tone haphazard. The plot creaks, great sacrifices and dazzling secrets slip by meaninglessly and the film falls dangerously short of the conviction that made the Rings trilogy sing. The Last Airbender is also due to be a trilogy (this is Book I: Water, and the final scene is a teaser for Book II).
That might make Airbending fans content, but most of us would opt for the once-promised Unbreakable sequels. For Shyamalan to get that icy-calm mojo back. Perhaps, try one of those twist endings again.
Verdict: Far from the catastrophe the US bewailed, but still disappointingly clunky. Notch it between Eragon (below) and Dragonslayer (above) on a sliding scale of fantasy filmmaking.
Original : http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/review.asp?DVDID=118561
2 Stars
By Total Film Aug 31st 2010
Read more: Eat Pray Love review TotalFilm.com
Eat Pray Love review - A career as a successful travel journalist, a swanky New York apartment and a post-marital fling with James Franco: things don’t appear to be going too badly for Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts).
Yet still, she can’t find her “centre”. She used to have “an appetite for life” and she’s lost it. Woe. Woe is her. Clearly what this woman needs is a 12-month voyage of self-discovery around the globe.
Roberts’ character is difficult to feel sorry for before she sets off on this postcardperfect self-healing binge. She becomes near impossible to like as it becomes apparent we’re watching a huge holiday video.
You know those montages on A Place In The Sun that make everywhere look like paradise? There’s a lot of that.
Eat Pray Love sounds like a self-help solution before you get past the title, and Glee creator Ryan Murphy is indulgent with our time as well as the expensive location shooting: 140 minutes.
The original book – a memoir by the real Elizabeth Gilbert – has legions of fans, though. Those able to ignore the narcissism of it all will simply relax into Roberts’ leisurely gallivanting.
They’ll enjoy the colourful charismatic types that surround her: Richard Jenkins’ grumbling semi- Buddhist musings; a Balinese guru issuing mantras like a shrink with a prayer mat; Javier Bardem knocking her off her bike then falling in love with her.
On some levels, it’s just easygoing tourism: a cinema-priced round-the-world ticket. But the introspection, accompanied by a voiceover as well-suited to a PowerPoint presentation as a movie, goes on and on as Roberts seeks her “balance”.
By the time she lands on a theory she calls ‘The Physics Of The Quest’, you’ll wish you were homeward bound.
Verdict:
A neverending, inward-looking travelogue that’ll only find love from devotees of Gilbert’s writings. From coast to coast, Roberts coasts.
Original http://www.totalfilm.com/reviews/cinema/eat-pray-love
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