Unknown (2011)

Your first question is likely to be is this, Taken 2? 
Sadly, it is not. But is it any good at all then, you may possibly ask? Well I'll say... it would be great to come home to after a night out and see on ITV4 but under no circumstances should you attempt to watch Unknown UNLESS drunk; You'll be far too concerned with the concept of it making sense.
Good action thrillers have the giddying sense of making you feel high; making you scared or excited, producing testosterone prehaps(?)- bad ones just remind you of the good ones. I guess it's also like news. Good news means you could celebrate without even any booze - bad news just makes you want a drink...
I guess there is one fun things about this film- you can try to guess which of the German actors was the one who played Hitler from the movie Downfall and the Internet memes and there's another stupid bizarre bit where Neeson and Aiden Quinn have a wooden dialogue sing-off but...  beyond that it's not at all remarkable.  Speaking on the writing, it's like their commitment to stoic pulpy dialogue is such, you could have sworn it was even written on woodchip wallpaper.
I can't remember which movie i was talking about but I said in an earlier post that, that film was that sort of film Harrison Ford would make 20years ago- Liam Neeson makes these movies now like Taken, yes but also The A Team.  But thinking back to The A Team, that was a great recent example of an fun dumb action movie.  Forgettable? Entirely but I remember explosions and no ill will towards it.  My beef with this movie is that they just go further then is necessary with the story; I mean the concept is not that great-'guy loses his memory and finds no-one recognises him' but really the resolution to this film should be a lot simpler and the film-makers shouldn't have tried to be clever and come up with a smart ending because as much as I loved watching stupid people trying to be smart, stupid films labouring under the misconception that they can have a better pay-off is just horrible. I mean the ending of every episode of Doctor Who is the product of some macguffin that wasn't there in the 1st place and arrives in the last 5mins. Here the macguffin is something that completely exceeds your expectations of what the mystery was going to be and it's far too rich compared to the last 1hr of the film you just watched. Hold up. I don't. want anyone going to the trouble of watching this and I'm bothered I might be selling it as complex.  Don't think that. It's like eating a fish fingers and then being fed smoked salmon. It's still fish but it just don't sit right.


I watched Unknown (2011) at the cinema.
My 2011 in Movies continues with Another Year (2010)...

The Next Three Days (2010)

Paul Haggis. What a fascinating career. Created Due South...won Oscars for Crash, a film I still think should have been called 'Carry On, Casual Racism'- now polishes Bond film scripts. Okay, that's pretty short-sighted- he's a premier league Hollywood scriptwriter, writing for Eastwood as well as directing his own movies. 
The Next Three Days is a remake of a French thriller called Anything for Her. I've not seen that but I'd hope that The Next Three Days marries together his skill for adapting stories and producing genuine thrillers.


Before I start- she breaks free and they get away with it, and I can't accept that ending.
Not because Russell Crowe, Elizabeth Banks and the kid playing their son are unconvincing- au contraire, considering they're acting, I thought they made a lovely family. 
In fact, the kid who plays their son is very good at playing a child slowly withdrawing from reality. Russell Crowe is not bad in the film, pretty good but I’m not surprised by that. 
I will say, Russell Crowe has taken over the mantel of making Harrison Ford movies. All the way though this film I was thinking ‘God, if this was 15years ago, this would totally be a Harrison Ford vehicle.’ Harrison Ford made the ‘wifes-dead-now-I’m-on-the-run’ movie 3times in the space of 5years between 88’ and 93’.
It should also be said that a lot of great actors pass through this movie. Not for very long mind you. Should you want to see this movie (I know- You don't...), you'll see The RZA (who's becoming a great actor. No jokes.), Brian Dennehy, Kevin Corrigan (GOD i love the 'young Walken'-ness of Kevin Corrigan), Daniel Stern (Yep. The same.), Liam Neeson (in a bit of a character part-he'll always be playing Liam Neeson but here, i almost forgot. Kudos.) and my personal favourite, Ziggy Sobotka from Season 2 of The Wire. 
I'm happy to see them all pick up a check.
No, it has to do with Crowe's character's sociopathic need to have his wife escape jail. Now i realise- this is the story, the main conceit of the film but he's SO prepared to risk everything to see his wife skip jail- even at the cost of seeing his child. This is where I dialled out of the movie. Because you don't need to be a parent to understand and maybe it goes without saying, BUT on the hierarchy of importance it may be your partner/wife/husband and i'm sure they're the love of your life BUT as soon as you have children, they zip-up to the top of the list. It's almost unfair, you've put in years of your life and love and this brat pushes in to the front of the queue but if you put your partner ahead of your child and your child's development, that's psychopathic. You're not fit to look after children. Your priorities are out-of-whack.

So in the end, Paul Haggis has made a film where you can’t empathise with the hero. And you might argue that it’s a remake but then, why would you want to make that?

I watched The Next Three Days at the cinema.

My 2011 in Movies will return with Strangers On A Train (1951)...
("Tired of all these muthafucking Strangers on this Train!!")

Chloe (2009)

If Chloe turned out to be a more pretentious Fatal Attraction, I’d be alright with that.

Hey, when the woman from Heroes and Beyonce fought for Stringer Bell on the big screen, I paid to see that. It was cheesy and fun. The beauty of the 'psycho hose beast' genre is the stupider and OTT and unlikely things get the more enjoyable, it's likely to be. Just talking about it, I wanna watch Single White Female or Basic Instinct 2- Tits Magee Takes a Holiday. But what would happen if you took a arty director like Atom Egoyan and a script from the writer of the exquisite Secretary? Does that mean it would it turn out so-bad-it's-good or just bad?


Chloe, simply told, is the story of a woman doctor (not being sexist -the term gynaecology just freaks me out) Julianne Moore who suspects her husband, Liam Neeson of having an affair or infidelity. She arranges for a prostitute to test him, to see if he takes the bait, the titular Chloe (Titular.)
Through the eyes of Julianne Moore's character Catherine, she seems to be stuck in an episode of the Twilight Zone where all the men are guilty, boorish leches and the women are naive, attractive nubiles. The exception being Chloe. She seems to embody all these things. She seems as guilty as she is naive. She'd be androgynous if she wasn't so feminine.
Chloe's (Amanda Seyfried) relationship with Catherine develops as she reports back what happens at these meetings with her husband. We can see that Chloe doesn't really seem in this arrangement for the money; she's not exactly yeoman-like with Liam Neeson's character David but she's much more interested in Catherine herself.
If she isn't doing it for the money, what's driving Chloe? 
We wonder what her intentions are for David? But really, what are her intentions for Catherine?
It almost goes without saying, it's so well written by Erin Cressida Wilson. Every character could have been lazy architypes- the vengeful wife, the mental other woman, the arsehole husband but you don't think of any of the main characters that way and Moore and Seyfried are just phenomenal here.


Julianne Moore- I expect it from. Julianne Moore has always had a knack of being brilliant in anything she’s in; from Boogie Nights to A Single Man to *BFF* (Best Film Forever), The Big Lebowski. Chloe is no different- I’m not a middle-aged woman who’s unsure of her place in the world, but I felt like I was with her character does every step of the way.
So if Julianne Moore is one of the best, most consistent actresses working today, if must be horrible for the young actress who has to keep up but the real success of Chloe is Amanda Seyfried. The character of Chloe is no-cake walk. She has to be the anti-hero – the villain you love to hate but by some miracle, she’s comes across as this sensitive girl who develops this deep obsession. It would be understandable, perhaps even, forgivable if her character becomes this Fatal Attraction-style baddie in the end but it’s testament to Seyfried, that she never becomes that. In the end, you just wish someone had given Chloe the love she needed earlier.
The amazing thing that Egoyan pulls off with Chloe is that it's sexy without being explicit. When the characters do get nekkid, it's not salacious or for effect or if it is for effect, it's because the characters are responsible NOT the director. The other sexy character in  Chloe is Toronto, it looks like gorgeous hot chocolate in this film- almost a different city from the exciting Toronto, we saw in Scott Pilgrim...


I watched Chloe on DVD, rented from the lovely Cardiff Central Library.
My 2011 in Movies will return with A Perfect Getaway (2009)...