Really enjoyable basic buddy-cop movie set in dirty sleazy 70s LA. Borrows from 70s cops shows, and movies such as Boogie Nights, LA Confidential and Guy Richie's later works.
Entertaining script well delivered with great chemistry between the recently out of sorts Crowe and the in-form Gosling, backed up by a good ensemble cast.
The only disappointing performance came from Kim Basinger, whose performance I strongly suspect has been heavily edited out.
The action is snappy, the dialogue clever but not pretentious and harks back to Black's previous work on Lethal Weapon and even As Good as it Gets.
The lack of obvious special effects shows a great restraint on the part of the director--it would have been tempting to have huge explosions and Matrix style slow motion. The only time physics was defied was in the revelation that bullets do not pass through car trunks and wooden doors--forgivable.
I thoroughly enjoyed it in story and film making terms.
A classic? Not quite, the ending is oddly unfulfilling and the climactic action scene is a bit convoluted, so a 9/10 from me.
I was sitting in McDonald's wondering why, despite not sharing Michael Moore's politics and being very wary of his editing policies, I really enjoyed this movie.
...and then it struck me: As I ate my hash-brown, contemplating the downfall of western civilisation, I watched some rapper (dressed the same as the same rapper) telling me over and over to "lean back...lean back...lean back..." (that's what counts as lyrics these days). This song's video looked and sounded exactly the same as the last one, and the same as the next one. Money for nothing and your chicks for free.
Yes actually, I AM a cultural snob, I'm quite happy looking down on this crap, because it is crap.
For once it's good to watch a movie, any movie, that is unabashedly polemic and isn't made by a committee of executive producers. New York, London, Paris and oddly San Francisco seem to be destroyed anew again and again and again, until....this year...a hero will rise. Sponsored content masquerading as a movie.
When once Edwyn Collins complained that there were too many protest singers, not enough protest songs, now there's neither.
The concept is a simple, but very interesting one--America has spent billions sending its troops around the world to invade the scum of the earth, and has managed very little tangible gains....why not "invade" countries with high standards of living, or socially progressive policies and cherry pick them, taking this plunder back to America.
As a piece of documentary film-making the film stands up well. The medium is one in which Moore can spread out and shoot. Equal parts comedy, mockumentary and political statement, and Moore delivers a fun easy to watch and ahem pretty convincing argument.
Yes, I'm sure that this is edited ....extensively to give the required tone, and I'd want to fact check the hell out of this but at least it's funny, and thought-provoking and doesn't expect you to go into a coma in your seat.
2016, 108 minutes, written and directed by Matthew Brown
Accurate trailer? Not really.
I was actually left quite disappointed and flat by this film. It manages to turn fascinating (TRUE) subject matter--one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century is a lowly self educated clerk from Madras, sent to pre World War I Cambridge-- and make it as uninteresting and traiatitious as the Cambridge fellows it predictably demonises.
I am unsure in which sense I am most disappointed--as a film enthusiast or as a mathematician, since it seems that writer and director Matthew Brown does not understand mathematics, and instead sets about making a trope filled fish-out-of-water biopic in which even the camera angles are straight on and uninteresting. Imagine "Eddie the Eagle", but with real talent and none of the snow.
Shall we number the cliches? There is the lonely outsider, the doubting parent (complete with hidden letters; which never happened), the over-bearing but well meaning father-figure who oversteps his boundaries and learns a valuable lesson himself, the patronising imperialist racist, the stuffy aristocrat who refuses to see genius...is that enough data?
Worst of all is my personal pet hate--some professor looking at a page of algebra and instantaneously declaring it a work of unparalleled genius. My Coke Zero nearly headed towards the screen.
Ramanujan's single greatest love was mathematics, and the obscure but then-burgeoning field combinatorics, so why is there a sum total of 10 seconds devoted to explaining the mathematics? Why do we never see into the mind of the mathematician at the peak of his autodidactic powers? Why are audiences allowed to leave the theatre without knowing how important Ramanujan's work would be in the computer age, and to later geniuses such as Turing?
Good Will Hunting has already been made, why, oh why would you need to remake it when you have the real thing, and far better actors?
There are so many squandered chances in this film and I hold director Brown responsible. Film direction is a series of choices and Brown's choice to ignore the intellectual, play down the professor-student dynamic, gloss over so many things is baffling to me. The much lower budget 2014 independent Tamil-language "Ramanujan" does a much better job of opening the man's head, possibly because it is Indian, and is rooted in the Indian soul.
Worst yet is the inaccuracies of the film--all sorts of liberties are taken with the truth that simply don't need to be taken: 10 minutes into the film we are informed that an apple tree on Trinity College's Great Court is the very same that produced the apple which landed on Newton's head. There is no apple tree there, the apple did not fall on his head, and it didn't happen in Cambridge.
Why would you do that? Don't they know that we boffins are by tautology pedantic? I'll forgive you for fudging the maths, I'll forgive you for fudging the film--but to fudge both? Inconceivable!
This isn't a bad film, but it is certainly within a standard deviation of the mean average. 5/10
