What's your Number? (2011)

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9stplJF1ek

Dir: Mark Mylod

Starring: Anna Faris, Chris Evans

Anna Faris is Ally, a twenty something single woman living in the city who has problems with guys. After being fired she finds out that 96% of women who have slept with more than 20 men don’t get married. Since she is nearing this figure she freaks out and instead of finding a new job, decides to track down all her ex boyfriends to see if they’ve become marriage material. She enlists the help of her handsome next door neighbour Colin (Chris Evans), who is a slacker playing in an unsuccessful band and is the opposite of the perfect man she is looking for. He also just so happens to be the son of a policeman and is therefore adept at finding people. OH I WONDER IF THEY’LL GET TOGETHER AT THE END?

If you haven’t guessed the ending having read the synopsis then watch the trailer. If you haven’t guessed it after watching the trailer then I assume the cave you’ve been living in was comfy enough to spend 20 years in. The film piles on cliché after cliché, her sister is getting married, Ally has a quirky passion she hides in favour of a real job, her parents are divorced and her father is dating a much younger woman, Chris is the ‘funny’ womanising slacker with the heart of gold etc etc. There isn’t an original idea in its unfunny 100 minute run time. The film even tries to make little post modern jokes about the cliché of the situations before just ploughing on ahead with the cliché regardless.

Anna Faris is fine as a twenty something woman, and judging by all the pointless semi nudity, she definitely is a woman. Chris Evans is handsome and arrogant and can play some chords on the guitar which manages to cover the depth of his character quite well. Other vaguely recognisable actors appear with the only effect being that their bank balance should have gone up slightly. None of them should put this film high up on their CV.

The film raises questions which are just brushed off without explanation. How does either Ally or Colin afford their lovely, exposed brick city apartments without any means of income? Whose car does Ally steal? What happened to her job interview and how did she get it in the first place? Why the need for bestiality and paedophilia jokes? Why did I pay to watch this? The film manages to come dangerously close to actually having a message along the lines of it doesn’t matter how many people you sleep with, your number won’t mean anything to the love of your life, but then it undercuts it at the last minute with a pointless gag involving vomit and hand jobs. The film does nothing to break from the conceit that all a woman wants and needs is a man to fall in love and settle down with.

What’s your number? Is the same film you have seen a hundred times before and which will be made many more times until we all evolve into a society of telepathic, gelatinous organisms who have decided monogamy isn’t the most efficient mode of behaviour to ensure the survival of the species. If you want to watch an original, funny and intelligent Rom-com, watch Annie Hall, Easy A or (500) Days of Summer. And if you’ve already seen them, watch them again.

1 out of 5 Buttons

Red State (2011)

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ1v6oFHefc

Dir: Kevin Smith

Starring: John Goodman, Michael Parks, Melissa Leo

Kevin Smith takes a break from his usual genre of the slacker comedy to tackle action and horror in Red State. The film begins with three teens (Michael Anagarano, Nicholas Braun and Kyle Gallner) in southern states America who find a woman on the internet who will have sex with them. After travelling out to her trailer, they are drugged and find themselves held captive in a church, about to become the unwilling victims of a murderous sermon of the congregation of the Five Points Church.

The film takes aim at hardcore Christian groups in America, more specifically the Westboro Baptist Church.  The religious sect is a great subject for horror as we already think their views and actions are monstrous, and so their murderous actions don’t seem farfetched. The film also scrutinises the government and its policy on terrorists and the Terrorism Act, its stance on culpability and its willingness to take lethal action when it perceives a threat. The Waco siege of 1993 was an obvious influence on the second half of the film. The event, in which the FBI initiated a siege on a Protestant Sect on a ranch after being unable to execute a search warrant, which lead to 76 deaths including children and pregnant women, is reflected in the siege upon the Five Points ranch, the FBI in the film ordered to kill everyone including women and children.

The film ultimately poses to us the problem of evil. Who are the bad guys in the film? The ultra conservative Christians who are killing people for what they believe is a God ordered purpose or the government who kill people because they can and who cover up the whole massacre, hiding behind legislation, and then sleeping peacefully at night?

The main problem with the film is that it does not know what genre it wants to be. It starts off as a horror as the Christian group are shown as righteous murders, willing to kill homosexuals and rampant fornicators as is God’s will. The film then wildly changes tack to become a siege action film in the vein of Assault on Precinct 13, as its focus shifts from the three terrorised teenagers, and onto Joseph Keenan (John Goodman) and his squad of police waiting outside of the church. The tension is never really built up in the beginning for the horror element to work fully and though the deaths of some characters come as a surprise at points, as the focus of the film is changed from character to character, you never really get a sense of loss when one of them dies.

However, the film is certainly entertaining and better than many of the leading reviews have proclaimed. It has some interesting themes and some good performances; Michael Parks is creepily effective and convincing as a pastor strongly attached to his religious convictions, and Goodman is always watchable as the government official struggling between his sense of right and wrong and his orders.

It’s good to see Smith trying something different, especially after a recent string of poor films, even if Red State is a slight disappointment.  It would be good to see him tackle different genres more often. 

4 out of 5 Buttons

Drive (2011)

 Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDO_OtAwV8s

Dir. Nicholas Winding Refn

Starring: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston

The film opens with Ryan Gosling’s Driver acting as wheelman for hire to a pair of thieves. Tracking the police and a basketball game on the radio, he uses the streets, shadows and eventually a crowd of revelling basketball fans to drop off his clients and blend into the night unseen. A synth song then kicks in over the soundtrack as the title appears on the screen in hot pink announcing Nicholas Winding Refn’s homage to 80’s driving movies.

The film plays out in two halves. In the first, Driver and Carey Mulligan’s Irene quietly fall for each other over a series of long looks and charged silences. It is in this half that we see the Driver’s human side as he bonds with Irene’s son whose father, Standard (Oscar Isaac), is in prison. When Standard returns the film changes gear as Standard’s criminal past catches up with him and Driver helps him out for the good of his family. The job goes wrong and the long wistful looks are changed for blasts of explicit violence and gore. Forks go in eyes, knives slice wrists and shotguns take off heads.

The shift in tone could have been jarring but it works well as the Driver’s violent side comes out because of his affection and his willingness to protect Irene and her son, despite what may happen to him. The two aspects are blended perfectly in a memorable scene in a lift where, in slow motion, the Driver kisses Irene before stamping on a man’s head till his skull crushes.

The first half of the film can seem a little slow as the arty long looks stack up but the film still retains a good pace. Those turning up to see a bullet a minute action film with car chases thrown in after every couple of lines of dialogue will be disappointed and bored by its artistic leanings and 80’s nostalgia, but these are what make the film interesting and truly great. It’s the films expertly crafted images which will stick in the mind; the driver wearing a stunt mask, framed in a window staring in at his antagonist while an operatic song soars over the top, two hands wordlessly coming together on a gear stick and Ryan Gosling chewing a toothpick, wearing a silver jacket with a golden scorpion on the back looking effortlessly cool. The film climaxes with a well edited scene which matches dialogue and violence effectively before putting us back on the road, travelling through the night.

The cast is padded out with familiar faces, Bryan Cranston (Malcolm in the Middle’s dad) being Driver’s father figure, Christina Hendricks looking beautiful in a surprisingly small role and Ron Perlman being his usual menacing self with his aggressive, bulbous face.

In a week where I saw both Drive and Thomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy it was Winding Refn’s film that stuck in my mind in the following days. With great visuals, soundtrack, performances and atmosphere, Drive emerges as one of the best of the year.

4 out of 5 Buttons

(An alternative version of this review appears in Pulp issue 1 10/10/11)