The Town; Devil; The Other Guys; Mary and Max; Jackboots on Whitehall
This year opened on a sad note indeed with the death of Pete Postlethwaite, star of The Usual Suspects, The Lost World and the underrated 90s British gem Brassed Off, whom Spielberg once called "the best actor in the world". A stalwart and often admirably brusque presence, Postlethwaite always brought something special to the screen, even when the films in which he appeared (such generic remakes as Dark Water, The Omen and Clash of the Titans) were unremarkable.
In the Boston-set thriller The Town (2010, Warner, 15), Postlethwaite plays a comparatively small role as sinister florist-cum-crime boss Fergie, whose malign influence seeps through the crime-breeding neighbourhood of Charlestown. Director Ben Affleck, who proved his mettle behind the camera with Gone Baby Gone, stars as disenchanted bank robber Doug MacRay, whose attempts to discover how much a witness (Rebecca Hall) knows about his gang's identity blossoms into intimacy with predictably allegiance-testing results.
It's increasingly overcooked stuff, with a screenplay (adapted from Chuck Hogan's novel Prince of Thieves) that tips too far into melodramatic contrivance, and boasting a couple of grand scale shootouts that aim for (but fail to hit) the high target of Michael Mann's Heat. Yet despite these flaws there's an earnest grittiness to the proceedings, boosted by some believably macho male-bonding between Affleck and a convincingly unbalanced Jeremy Renner, whose trigger-happy Jem provides the real dark heart of the piece.
As for Postlethwaite, he has rarely been more quietly unnerving than in the few scenes in which he appears, and during which the film's threat level moves from amber to red. A posthumous best supporting actor Bafta nomination last Tuesday may well provide The Town (which has already received a couple of prestigious ensemble cast awards) with another significant victory next month, a fitting tribute to Postlethwaite's powerful legacy.
Considering the horrifying dramatic potential of confinement within enclosed spaces (witness the claustrophobic audience anxieties provoked by both Buried and 127 Hours in the past few months), it's amazing just how tension-free Devil (2010, Universal, 15) manages to be. Written by the talented Brian Nelson (who penned the leg-crossingly taut Hard Candy), from a story dredged 'from the mind of M Night Shyamalan', this sub-Twilight Zone hokum traps a disparate group of people in a lift and then proceeds to kill them off one by one during curiously orchestrated blackouts. You'd have to be trying pretty hard not to guess the inevitable 'twist' regarding the killer's identity, but there's still plenty of potential for camp creepiness which Quarantine director John Erick Dowdle signally fails to exploit. As for Shyamalan (whose possessive the Night Chronicles credit suggests that this is but the first in a series of such minor diversions), surely after this and The Last Airbender things can only get better?
Speaking candidly about his leading role in Shyamalan's woebegotten 'nature in revolt' clunker The Happening, Mark Wahlberg was recently quoted as telling a press conference that 'it was a bad movie... fuckin' trees, man!' Clearly, Wahlberg has no such regrets about the altogether less ambitious odd couple comedy The Other Guys (2010, Sony, 12), in which he co-stars with Will Ferrell as a hapless New York cop attempting to escape the desk to which he has been shackled in punishment for a past mistake and finally achieve heroic status.
Despite the familiarly goofy set-up, this is an uneven and rather peculiar movie that swings between enjoyable slapstick comedy with strangely sustained running jokes (gormless Ferrell's ability to attract beautiful women) and oddly ill-fitting socioeconomic seriousness (the credits sequence looks like something Michael Moore would have left on the drawing board). Like Shyamalan, Anchorman director Adam McKay doesn't seem to have quite decided exactly what movie he's making, but at least this time the laughs are intentional. Plentiful extras include featurettes, extended gags, a music video for 'Pimps Don't Cry' and a 'first-ever mom-mentary' track in which the proud parents of Ferrell and McKay applaud their sprogs' work.
Finally, two very different puppet shows. Mary and Max (2009, Soda, 12) is a bizarrely engaging antipodean stop-motion tale of long-distance friendship between a lonely Australian girl and an obsessive-compulsive New Yorker given to anxiety attacks whom Mary contacts through the random use of the Manhattan phone book. Described with its usual deadpan accuracy by the BBFC as 'comedic, sometimes warm and ultimately uplifting [but] also dark in places', Adam Elliot's award-winning feature reminds us just how expressive claymation techniques can be in a world in which 3-D digimation increasingly rules the roost. A well-chosen voice cast featuring Toni Collette, Barry Humphries and Philip Seymour Hoffman perfectly completes the bittersweet off-kilter picture.
No such plaudits, sadly, for Jackboots on Whitehall (2010, Soda, 15), a sub-Team America-style 'marionation' satire set in an alternative history in which Nazis occupy London during the second world war and the resistance is forced to fight back from the other side of Hadrian's Wall. Despite a veritable who's who of homegrown A-listers, including Ewan McGregor, Rosamund Pike, Tim Spall, Stephen Merchant, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Tom Wilkinson and Richard Griffiths, this rarely manages to raise a laugh. It's a shame I didn't enjoy it more, particularly considering the effort that has clearly gone into conjuring this unruly visual canvas, and the love brought to the project by creators Edward and Rory McHenry.
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