FILM REVIEW: TAKE SHELTER

Sony Pictures

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Note: this is an edited version of my original review which I wrote after seeing Take Shelter at the 2011 Sydney Film Festival. I have since seen the film a second time.

When Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) starts having dreams of impending doom - a gathering storm, rain like petrol, and mysterious people threatening his and his family's lives - it's not a copy of Understanding Your Dreams he checks-out from the local library but a copy of Understanding Mental Illness.

Curtis's mother (a brief but effective Kathy Baker) has been living in assisted care since being diagnosed with schizophrenia when Curtis was just 10, and he's always harboured the fear that the illness could be hereditary. But how to explain an arm, bitten by his dog in a dream, which aches for the rest of the day? Or awakening, barely able to breathe and with blood-stained sheets?

Much to the consternation of his wife (Jessica Chastain from Tree of Life) and young daughter, and bemusement of friends and neighbours, Curtis decides to renovate the disused tornado shelter in the backyard; stockpiling cans of food and buying gas masks in preparation for the mother of all storms he believes is coming. But is it coming or is Curtis slowly coming undone?

Director Jeff Nichols' second feature, after 2007's Shotgun Stories, which also starred Shannon, is an effective thriller albeit a little too much of a slow burn for my liking. Take Shelter is a two hour film and it feels like it, even on a second viewing. That isn't to say that it's dull or boring, but Nichols takes his sweet time in letting his story unfold and his protagonist unravel. Then again, that deliberate pacing helps Nichols establish a growing sense of paranoia and dread, mirrored perfectly in Michael Shannon's central performance.

Relatively unknown to mainstream audiences until his Oscar nomination for 2008's Revolutionary Road, in which he upstaged both Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, Shannon has been building on his new found success by giving commanding turns in supporting roles (The Runaways and TV's Boardwalk Empire), and seizes the opportunity of a leading role here. In a just world, Shannon would be a serious contender for a Best Actor Oscar nomination this year.

Chastain is good, too, making the role of the supportive but impotent wife, Samantha, completely different from the vaguely similar role she played in Malick's film. You get the very strong sense that Chastain's character took her wedding vows of 'in sickness and in health' seriously.

Take Shelter impressed at Sundance earlier this year and then went on to Cannes, where it scored the Critics' Prize. Sony Pictures could well have a moderate hit on their hands should they take advantage of the film's critical acclaim as well as the passing similarities to the works of M. Night Shyamalan, a thinking person's The Happening if you will.

And I mean that with all due respect to Take Shelter and Nichols, for this up-and-coming director exhibits a command of mood and mystery which Shyamalan has tried and failed to recapture since The Sixth Sense (1999). I'll definitely be going back to check out Shotgun Stories, whilst waiting in anticipation for what Jeff Nichols does next.

FILM REVIEW: WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER?

2oth Century Fox Films

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Despite being predicated on a flimsy high concept - a woman goes in search of her ex-lovers to find the one that got away just so she doesn't exceed the number of lovers - 20 - which would render her doomed never to marry - What's Your Number? is not the worst film of the year.

Don't get me wrong, Mark Mylod's film is by no means a great one and it's only ever a good film fleetingly but then, it's been a while since Hollywood has produced a truly good romantic comedy. 2009's (500) Days of Summer was arguably the last one and that was because it turned the rom-com conventions on their head, or rather, spliced them into non-chronological order and in the end, the boy didn't get the girl (or, not the one we thought he would).

There's no such doubts in What's Your Number? with recently retrenched Ally Darling (Anna Faris) destined to fall for her hunky cad of a neighbour, Colin (Chris Evans), even as they spend three-quarters of the film as uneasy allies in pursuit of her ex-lovers. As newly unemployed and a musician, the pair have time on their hands; Colin offering his people finding skills gleaned from his police officer dad, and in return Ally provides her apartment as sanctuary for him to hide in from the previous night's one night stands.

Faris and Evans are both likeable enough, he even more so as he spends the majority of the film in various states of undress, but neither can succeed in rising above the material, which like a lot of rom-coms and chick flicks of late, isn't afraid to go blue for its laughs. I don't have a problem with that, but smut and wit need not be strange bedfellows (see Bridesmaids).

One gets the feeling that Ally's reconnection with her exes - played by the likes of comic Andy Samberg, future Hobbit Martin Freeman, and The Hurt Locker's Anthony Mackie - were meant to be funnier and more absurd segments, and I'd suggest some scenes were shortened in the editing process. One set-up, where Ally visits an ex who is now a Florida-based gynaecologist is, thankfully, short on vagina jokes but makes absolutely no mention of her suddenly developing the complexion of an Oompa Loompa.

But many of my fellow reviewers would argue there's a lot more wrong with What's Your Number? than matters of spray tan continuity, and they'd be right. But worst film of the year? I don't think so. I've seen worse and, with three months left in 2011, am also certain I'll see more. What's Your Number? may rank high on the list of 2011's worst, but I'm saving my #1 for something "special".

FILM REVIEW: REAL STEEL

DreamWorks/Walt Disney Studio Films

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Rocky with robots; The Champ with microchips. Real Steel is an amalgam of every boxing film you've ever seen with the only difference being the pugilists are not flesh and blood but, well, real steel.

But in spite of the film being cobbled together from bits and pieces - much like Atom, the fighting robot at the centre of the action - Real Steel manages to overcome any deficiencies or doubts one may have (and I had a couple going in) to succeed as popcorn entertainment.

Set in the not-too-distant future where not much has noticeably changed except for a great leap forward in robot technology, Real Steel sees fighting robots as commonplace as smartphones (and just as regularly updated), and replacing humans as the combatants in the ring.

One of those former fighter's is Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) who, without a belt to fight for, has taken to travelling the backroads of the States, attempting to make a buck off the amateur boxing 'bot circuit. Down on his luck and in debt, Charlie's fortunes take a turn when a former lover passes away and his estranged 11-year-old son, Max (Dakota Goyo), is left motherless.

Charlie is happy to pass the boy off to his aunt (Hope Davis) and her rich husband (James Rebhorn), but sensing an opportunity, manages to have the rich man pay him to take the boy for the summer while the couple vacation in Italy. As far as deadbeat dads go, Charlie is as seemingly dead inside as they come.

It will come as no surprise that father and son will eventually bond, an inevitability facilitated by the discovery of an old, abandoned sparring bot named Atom who Max cleans up and decides will become a champ. The kid is nothing but persistent, almost to a fault; your tolerance for Goyo will very much depend on your tolerance for opinionated pre-teens.

More troubling for me, initially, were the fighting robots and Hugh Jackman. If the Transformers films and the climaxes of both Iron Man films taught us nothing else, it is that the sight of CGI metal men going medieval on each other does not make for great cinema.

But the 'bots here look impressive (and apparently not all of it CGI), and even more so is Shawn Levy's ability to have us care about the outcome of Atom's bouts. The film doesn't expand on the idea that Atom is more intelligent than his owners suspect, but you'll be cheering him on just the same.

As for Jackman, I'm not a fan. Yes he's charming and good looking but I've yet to find him convincing on screen. His Charlie is a grade-A jerk and hard to like, and given that the hurt at the loss of his boxing career isn't played up, his moment when it comes isn't as affecting or redemptive as the film, and the tears of Charlie's on-again-off-again girlfriend, Bailey (Evangeline Lilly), would have us believe.

Still, I defy you not to be absorbed in that final bout which constitutes Real Steal's climax, as Atom takes on the undefeated champ of the pro boxing 'bot world; a Goliath of a machine named Zeus owned by a Russian millionairess, Farra Lemkova (played by the fun to say, Olga Fonda, and no doubt intended as a nod to Rocky IV's Brigitte Nielsen).

Ordinarily I'd say a film which makes you care more for a CGI robot than the human father-son relationship at its centre is a failure, but Real Steel manages to come out a winner if only on a points decision.

FILM REVIEW: FOOTLOOSE

Paramount Pictures

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It is a universally acknowledged truth that it is humanly impossible to hear the Kenny Loggins song, Footloose, and not want to dance. Now 27 years later, that song, from the film of the same name, is about to get toes tapping once more with the release of the remake.

Craig Brewer's film is actually more of a cover version, one which remains true to the melody and without the Idol contestant vocal gymnastics; he knows what works and what the people want. Brewer (who made the excellent Hustle and Flow, in 2005) also understands that even when remaking a film, there are some things you don't mess with, and Kenny Loggins' song is just one of them.

The new Footloose (Footloose 2011? Footloose 2.0?) opens with the adolescents of Bomont living it up to the Loggins hit (they obviously live in a parallel world where the song exists but the film that inspired it doesn't?) on the outskirts of town, before a group of them, intoxicated and carefree, drive off and headlong into a semi trailer.

That tragedy inspires the town Council, lead by Reverend Shaw Moore (Dennis Quaid) who lost his only son in the accident, to enact a curfew for the Bomont youth and the outlawing of dancing.

The rest of the film plays out virtually scene-for-scene like the original, with the arrival in town of a young man with an aversion to authority and a desire to dance. Ren McCormick (Kenny Wormald), a Boston boy mourning the death of his mother, comes to stay with his uncle (Ray McKinnon) and aunt (Kim Dickens), and not only falls for the Reverend's daughter, Ariel (Julianne Hough), but sets about challenging the town's oppressive anti-dance laws, assisted by the cowboy-hatted boy who can't dance, Willard (Miles Teller, last seen in Rabbit Hole and best in show here).

If you wanted to, you could read the new Footloose as a post-9-11 parable - in the wake of an extreme disaster, laws are enacted which, whilst intended to protect, stifle and oppress - but that would be giving its creators (the new screenplay is by Brewer and original scribe, Dean Pitchford) far too much credit, and the film a heavier burden than it already has: that of living up to the original.

As it is, the new Footloose is pretty good on its feet, barely putting a foot wrong and hitting all the right notes. It doesn't necessarily distinguish itself from the original in any meaningful way - and granted, die hard fans of the Kevin Bacon classic will not so readily see let alone embrace this admittedly unnecessary remake - but nor does it tarnish the memory of the 1984 film.