REVIEW: Cowboys & Aliens (dir. Jon Favreau)

Cast: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Paul Dano

Arizona, 1873. Jake Lonergan (Craig) doesn’t remember anything. He doesn’t know that he is a wanted man, he doesn’t know that he is on the outskirts of a town run by ruthless landowner Woodrow Dolarhyde (Ford), and he certainly doesn’t know how this damn extraterrestrial bracelet got shackled to his wrist. He doesn’t know that he shouldn’t be talking back to the pistol-wielding town drunk (Dano) because he is Dolarhyde’s heir, and he doesn’t know why the doe-eyed beauty at the bar (Wilde) is so desperate to know where he came from. Jake’s amnesia is getting him into a whole world of trouble; but then an alien strike-force descends and plunges the whole world into trouble.

That’s right, it turns out New Yorkers weren’t the only impatient alien species invading the Wild West during the nineteenth century in search of gold. This brutal species carpet bombs the frontier town and lassoes innocent men, women and children before disappearing into the night. With so powerful a common enemy, Lonergan and Dolarhyde’s conflict pales into insignificance; along with the remaining townsmen and Ella (the mysterious beauty from the bar) they race off in pursuit of the alien base, hoping to recover their loved ones.

Just in case anybody is still uncertain, we really are talking about actual aliens here. This isn’t about a gang of Mexican’s crossing the border; these are the sort of aliens that man, even a century later, was unable to destroy without the help of a suicidally drunk Randy Quaid. So how does Favreau get around the obvious imbalance of power? Well his previous masterpieces (the Iron Man dilogy) should point the way to the disappointing answer: man is boring and worthless, but stick a futuristic machine on his body and he can be a hero. Jake’s mysterious bracelet, which blows up aliens when they get too close, is the humans’ only weapon throughout the entire film. Unsurprisingly, this one simple device gets old quickly; but Favreau never attempts to escalate the conflict by finding a new and interesting way for the cowboys to fight the aliens. So in much the same way that Transformers is essentially a robot war with a few humans stumbling around trying to get laid; this film should really have been called ‘Alien bracelet vs Aliens… with some cowboys falling off their horses’.

Disappointing conflicts aside, there is actually something in the tone of this film that commends it. After all, who doesn’t love a film set in the Wild West with Harrison Ford on the team? The cinematography is often exquisite, and the central performances are solid throughout. You can’t ask for much more than 007 and Indiana Jones for a central duo; and Sam Rockwell and Olivia Wilde round out the palette beautifully. The aliens are mysterious and eerie while they stick to aerial attacks; but when we meet them up-close-and-personal it is a shame to see how anthropomorphic the animation team have gone. All-in-all, an average disaster movie with enough heart and production quality to justify the cinema entry price.

REVIEW: Project Nim (dir. James Marsh)

In 1973, Columbia University professor Dr. Herb Terrace embarked on one of the strangest scientific experiments of his generation (a generation, let’s not forget, that included Timothy Leary). He decided that by bringing up a newborn chimp, Nim, in a human environment and teaching him sign language, he could prove that the capacity to form language is not a uniquely human trait. The experiment failed to provide conclusive results; but what Terrace did prove is that if language is a defining characteristic that separates man from ape, then it is the only one, because compassion, reason and foresight clearly do not play a part.

The opening of Marsh’s film follows the aesthetic of his previous project, Man on Wire, by splicing grainy documentary footage with a stylised, almost noirish dramatic element. This approach worked so well for the suspense of Man on Wire, but it does little justice to Nim’s melancholy and bizarre story. Where Man on Wire was a high-octane heist movie, Project Nim is a slow-burning story of human endeavour and pathos. Marsh quickly retires this style, but with no back up plan he never quite works out how best to tell his story, and reverts to ‘talking heads’ and archive footage for the rest of the film.

It doesn’t take long to realise that Nim’s first surrogate, Stephanie, is bat shit insane. She allows him to run amock and becomes obsessed with his “sexual awakening” and watching him masturbate. When Nim outgrows city life Terrace sets him up in a huge country mansion with a harem of buxom and pliable young female teachers who, in the space of a few months, teach Nim a considerable vocabulary of signs with which to express himself. Terrace remains distant throughout, his interest only piqued by occasional newspaper attention and regular sex with one or more of the “teachers”.

Eventually the entire experiment is abandoned as Nim becomes too powerful for his teachers; and he is dumped in a chimpanzee enclosure. Terrace confirms himself as a repulsive and apathetic man: he has satiated his lust and is happy enough with the half-baked and arbitrary results of his mangled experiment. He allows Nim to tumble from enclosure to medical testing facility to lonely farm sanctuary without ever trying to intervene.

After 10 years of confusion, one of Nim’s old carers locates him and decides to visit. Bob approaches cautiously as a barely recognisable Nim rocks back and forth in his cage. Nim turns to face his old friend and immediately throws out his most simple and favourite sign, one of the few signs he created on his own, “play”.

Our sympathy for Nim, and our wonder at the madness of his captors, only takes us so far, however. By the end of the film we feel as if we know a bit more about Project Nim, but we aren’t sure why. Marsh is too content framing the entire film around the narrative spun by its subjects, rather than stamping his own authorship on the film, and as a result it lacks the power and depth of his previous work.

INTERVIEW: Ryan Roberts on Oliver Sherman

Ryan Roberts’ feature debut, Oliver Sherman, follows the lives of two US war veterans as they struggle to come to terms with life after war. Franklin has left his old life behind and is happily married with children; but this tranquil life is thrown into turmoil when old friend Sherman shows up on his doorstep in need of bed and board. Sherman has not recovered from the trauma of war, and his presence in Franklin’s home has chilling consequences. Roberts’ film, based on Rachel Ingalls’ short story Veterans, is a tragic and poetic exploration of friendship, trauma, and broken masculinity.

FtF: So what attracted you to Ingalls’ short story?

RR: Well I had spent almost five years on what I thought was going to be my first feature, but it turned out to be too big for a first feature. And there was a momentum behind it in terms of development and financing, in terms of producers and crew attached, so I knew I could get some sort of movie made. I had never attempted adaptation before but I thought that it might provide an easier immediate answer in terms of making a movie; so I started reading short stories by the boat load thinking I could read something and than make it my own if it was a short story. I was in Canada, in my local bookstore Indigo Chapters, and I spotted this book that I had seen over five years earlier in a Village Voice ‘Best of Year’ list. And just in the store I started reading this short story and read the whole thing in one fell swoop and started having ideas then and there. I suggested to my producers that maybe this should be the first feature; so they went and got the rights, and that’s how it happened.

FtF: So you weren’t actively seeking something in the thriller genre? Or something with a military theme?

RR: No, but weirdly it turned out to be quite similar, thematically, to the project I had been working on for the previous few years: in terms of the threat of violence and the notion of damaged masculinity. Those things from the previous project are evident in what I did with this short story.

FtF: What was your experience of adapting the story?

RR: Well it was almost a novella, it was about 70 pages, but this is a very loose adaptation. I didn’t work with the author in any way because I didn’t want to be indebted to her or feel guilty that I was deviating from her initial impulse. So I never talked to her or contacted her, and I don’t know if she has seen the movie. The short story is more literary than the movie; the main character is a bit more cold and removed than he is in my movie. But I think the movie respects what she was doing.

I would say the short story was not inherently cinematic. The majority of scenes are not actually in the short story; they are a visual embodiment of ideas from the short story. What I like about her work is that it is very timeless and you don’t know where it’s set. I embrace that thoroughly in all my work. I try to aim at something lyrical and displaced, and that drives some people nuts but I like it a lot.

FtF: The film is certainly timeless. You avoid any mention of specific times and places for their military service.

RR: Yes that was a conscious decision. There have been so many movies that are political and are specifically about the Gulf, etc. But even if there wasn’t a war on I still would have made this movie. The novella actually takes place during the Korean War, but in the entire 70 pages I think it is only mentioned in one line. I would say her work is not really alluding to any given context. She doesn’t want to make political things, she wants to make timeless things, and that’s why I chose it.

FtF: Did you already have this superb cast in mind? And what was your experience working with them?

RR: Well the first person we cast was Molly Parker. It sounds ridiculous but to get Canadian financing you need to cast a Canadian actor in a lead role. But I thought she was perfect for the role, and I knew she had been on Deadwood with Garrett (Dillahunt) so I thought she could help us get to him as well. Sure enough she did help to facilitate that so I went to meet Garrett and we got along. Strangely the hardest part to cast was the third lead, the husband, because the Canadian financiers were literally counting lines and decided that Molly’s character had fewer lines than Garrett and the Franklin so we needed to cast another Canadian actor in the third role. So in the end we cast Donal (Logue) because it turned out that he had been born in Ottawa and lived there for about two days. But Garrett and Molly had been on Deadwood together and Garrett and Donal had been on Life together about a month prior to shooting. So I didn’t know them but they all knew each other well.

FtF: Did any of them bring anything specific to the table regarding their characters?

RR: Well, you would have to ask them. I mean I know that Garrett lived next door to a Vietnam vet when he was younger, and he said that a lot of what’s in that role is what he witnessed from that guy back in Seattle, where he is originally from. We had about five days of rehearsal, and it was sort of frightening for me because I had never done rehearsal before, so there was no one giving their all in terms of rehearsing scenes, it was more about the four of us reading through the script and talking through it, discussing what things meant and making sure we were all on the same path. I would say that Garrett, especially, was so disciplined and such a gentleman at all times during the making of the film. Nothing like his character at all! If every movie I make could have Garrett in it I would have him in it.

FtF: There is an unseen TV set playing in the background during some of the domestic scenes. What was that about?

RR: It is a movie without any real soundtrack; it is just natural sounds. So we were trying to figure out how you build tension with background sounds, and also how you fill the background without it being too predominant. But in that specific instance there is no hidden message or specific reason for that track; it was just an attempt to fill space without using some giant Spielberg score. I think it is more unnerving when there is no score and there are just background sounds. I embrace that, although it makes the sound design all the more difficult because you need to fill the spaces and stop things from being flat or boring. I wanted to keep things quiet, I didn’t want a score, we wanted to work with diegetic sound. People expect a score now, so to withhold that creates another type of tension.

FtF: So what are your plans for the future?

RR: Well I spent five years on what I thought would be my first feature. We had a whole crew for it, government funding for development, producers, etc. All of that ended up going into this so this film actually got made quite quickly. At the moment I sort of feel like I am recovering from this. Toronto was the festival premiere and that was almost a year ago. But at the moment I am still concentrating on this and we will see if the other project gets off the ground soon.