Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004)

Genre: Documentary/Musical/Drama/Biography

Starring: James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett, Robert Trujillo, Bob Rock, Phil Towle

The world most popular heavy metal band, Metallica were facing a crisis and were at an all time low in their career during the year 2001. The band hasn't toured in three years and just as the band was about to regroup for their 8th album, bassist Jason Newstead decided to quit the band. Newstead was apparently unhappy about the direction in which the band was heading and was unhappy that band leader James Hetfield wasn't allowing Jason to undertake side projects. Hetfield himself was battling drug and alcohol abuse and went into rehabilitation just months after the band started recording. Hetfield was away for over a year and drummer Lars Ulrich along with lead guitarist Kirk Hammett were annoyed with his continued absence. The band had previously hired a therapist, Phil Towle with whose help they wanted to get over their differences, improve performance and get rid of all the negativity. The band started recording once Hetfield returned and band producer Bob Rock filled in as bassist for the album recording until a new bassist, Robert Trujillo, was taken on the band. Metallica has ever since risen out from the ashes and retain their No.1 spot till this day. The documentary focuses on intra-band disagreements, the verge of the band breaking up, their battle with Napster, the making of St. Anger, selection of Trujillo and the eventual album release. It focuses on most of the core areas that any fan would want to know about Metallica and clearly reveals all the ups and downs that the band went through. Dont be mistaken that the movie is only for metal-heads. Apart from the blaring music that would smack a smile on the die-hard fans face, any other person would appreciate the movie and revelation of the functioning of a band. A must watch for fans and a recommended for anyone else.

Thumbs up: Great portrayal of every aspect, personal as well as professional, of each band member

Thumbs down: A boring 2nd part after a strong start and an equally strong end.

Rating: 7.4/10

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Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)

Genre: Action/Adventure/Crime

Starring: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton, Michael Nyqvist, Vladamir Mashkov

The second and third movie of this series was criticised by me for not being impossible enough as the series had initially set out to be. The fourth movie of the series attempts to bring back the character of the first movie and by heavily including a lot of impossible moments in it. Agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) of the Impossible Missions Force (IMF), a discreet wing of the CIA, has to break into the Kremlin and retrieve information on Cobalt (Nyqvist) a leader of a terrorist organisation who intends to get hold of Russian nuclear missile codes and launch them against the United States of America. The Kremlin infiltration goes wrong with a bomb planted by Cobalt going off. The Russian government learns of IMF presence within the Kremlin and declares war on USA. Agent Hunt and his team members, Agent Dunn (Pegg) Agent Carter (Patton) and Analyst Brandt (Renner) must retrieve the codes from Cobalt before he could use them and bring catastrophic damage to the world. The movie is an improvement over what the audience is being served in the previous two attempts and is a far more enjoyable watch. However, the plot line is too basic and predictable and lacks the twists and complications of the previous movie. Hence, although the movie has taken giant leaps of improvement, it fell back on other vital aspects. A great action movie nonetheless.

Thumbs up: Improved from previous movies, addition of more 'impossible' tasks

Thumbs down: Story is too simple and predictable

Rating: 7.3/10

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THE SWELL SEASON

THE SWELL SEASON

Directed by Nick August-Perna, Chris Dapkins and Carlo Mirabella-Davis

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova’s story is a lovely one. In fact, you’re likely familiar with it if you’ve seen the tender 2006 indie, ONCE (click title to read review), as it was loosely based on it. The film shows two musicians falling in love while discovering the beautiful music they make together as artists. One of the songs they wrote for the film, “Falling Slowly”, went on to win the Oscar for Best Original Song and their lives have not been the same since.

A new documentary, named for their band, THE SWELL SEASON, explores how this unexpectedly famous couple navigate their relationship, and their band, through their newfound fame. The couple are no longer together and, while the film does give a very fair and intimate insight into why that came to pass, it may not be of any interest to those of us who would rather dig our heads in the sand and pretend that their love is as special as it once was. It also may not be of much interest to those unfamiliar with the band and their history but that's almost always the case with music documentaries. Despite my personal reluctance to believe though, I cannot deny the delicacy with which their cracks are depicted here. The music is still beautiful, just that much more heartbreaking.

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THE IRON LADY

THE IRON LADY
Written by Abi Morgan
Directed by Phyllida Lloyd
Starring Meryl Streep, Jim Broadbent and Alexandra Roach


Margaret Thatcher: It used to be about trying to do something. Now it’s about trying to be someone.

In 2009, Margaret Thatcher attended the unveiling of her own portrait as British Prime Minister, held at her former office, London’s 10 Downing Street. Phyllida Lloyd’s THE IRON LADY supposes it knows Thatcher’s frame of mind in the time leading up to this event. The presumption is that Thatcher’s later years are spent mostly in solitude, facing her own mortality and inevitable dementia, whiling away the hours looking back on her life. There is some element of truth to this portrayal (Thatcher’s daughter has mentioned memory loss in the press), but the question is not whether the device is appropriate or not. It isn’t even the doors that it opens that matter most. THE IRON LADY hinges on but one thing - who walks through those doors and how she walks through them.

Meryl Streep, not surprisingly, is THE IRON LADY. Her performance, as Thatcher both during her rise to power in the late 70’s and early 80’s, and during her later years, is so focused and so commanding that she seems at times to be carrying the entire film in a cart behind her with a rope over her shoulder. Not that there aren’t other standout elements of the film, the most notable of which being Jim Broadbent as her deceased husband who has come back to her life through the power of hallucination, but just that Streep’s caliber of talent is clearly in full force as this iconic political figure. It is as though the breadth in Streep’s performance somehow became entwined with Thatcher’s stature as a politician to form a cross-generational super power of feminine strength. Does Lloyd know what to do with this though?

Lloyd does spin the film a little too often in the all too obvious feminist direction unfortunately. Yes, Thatcher was the first female Prime Minister and yes, she had to fight her whole life to be taken seriously in the relentless boy’s club that is the British Parliament. When she likens her struggle as a woman to those of a soldier in battle though, I’m less inclined to take her as seriously as she deserves to be. Abi Morgan’s screenplay, which misses no opportunity to be dramatic, operating in stark contrast to the bare bones work she did on Steve McQueen’s SHAME, pits Thatcher more often against her male detractors and herself, than the very real political issues she faced during her 11 years in office, sometimes glossing over major events. While this may not make for a great biography in then end, it still makes for some fairly compelling drama. And not one moment of Streep’s performance should be missed.

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Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)

Genre: Crime/Action/Adventure/Thriller/Mystery

Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Noomi Rapace, Jared Harris, Stephen Fry

'Steps on how to tarnish a brilliant piece of English literature'. Step 1, find Guy Ritchie. Step 2, give him the book. Step 3, ask him to make a movie on it. The earlier movie was widely criticised for being too far-fetched from the original Sherlock Holmes created by Arthur Conan Doyle. The sequel still suffers from the same drawback, making Holmes appear to be a James Bond of the 19th century. Detective Sherlock Holmes (Downey Jr.) is investigating a series of murders and terrorist attacks to which he has found a single common link, the widely acclaimed Prof. James Moriarty (Harris). Moriarty is trying to take control of various weapons manufacturing factories and all possible war supplies. In order to fuel the demand for his products, he intends to start a world war. Dr. Watson (Law) Sherlock's close aide has taken time off to get married and enjoy a honeymoon but is rudely interrupted by Holmes and is forced back to work and prevent Moriarty from achieving his objective. The clear improvements in the movie is the aspect of mystery which was largely missing from the earlier movie. The saddest part of the movie is its overtly stretched plot. Had the movie been below a 2-hour runtime, it might have been far more enjoyable and less of a drag. Holmes appears to be an action hero and the entire plot is not derived from any of the books but conjured from thin air. The world loved the novel due to the personality of the character and the story portrayed within it, however, the movie has altered both and hence leaving no real trace of Sherlock except the name. The movie is not for those who loved the book but for those who would drool over mindless action and murder mysteries.

Thumbs up: Twists in the tale

Thumbs down: Not Sherlock in the slightest of ways

Rating: 6.7/10

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Black Sheep interviews David Cronenberg

On paper, it would make perfect sense to any outsider that famed Canadian director, David Cronenberg, would be the only appropriate choice to direct A DANGEROUS METHOD, an exploration of the complex relationship between the great grandfathers of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung and Sigmond Freud. Melding the cerebral and the hyper-sexual in this heightened a fashion might seem like old hat for the director of DEAD RINGERS and A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, but suggest this to the man himself, and you might be surprised to hear what he has to say.

“I have to tell you I don’t think in terms of theme at all,” Cronenberg tells me over the phone, right before my chest gets tight at the prospect of insulting one of this country’s most acclaimed talents. “Anyone telling this story would be dealing with those same things. When I’m making a movie, for me, creatively, it’s as if I’ve never made another movie.” Cronenberg is also quick to explain to me he isn’t trying to be evasive in his response. With that, my tension is relieved and we move on happily.

“In retrospect, I could say I always wanted to do something about Freud,” Cronenberg, 68, says, upon further reflection. “To say that isn’t really to say anything at all though because Freud is such a big topic.” And so, he just needed the right project to come along and he found that project in Christopher Hampton’s (DANGEROUS LIAISONS) stage play, "The Talking Cure". Cronenberg had heard his Spider star, Ralph Fiennes, was playing Jung on the London stage and, while he couldn’t attend, he did read the play and found the angle he had been looking for all this time.

“I thought it was very doable as a movie and it would be fascinating to approach it just the way Christopher had, which is to say very neutrally,” Cronenberg explains. Hampton’s play does not pick sides between Jung and Freud, played on film by Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen, respectively, but rather allows the audience to take in their differing points of view and assess on their own where their allegiances lie. The play pits the two against each other by framing their relationship in context with another, that of a shared patient and one of the first female psychoanalysts, Sabina Spielrein, played with great fervor and bravery by Keira Knightley.

Fleshing out the stage version for the screen was easier than one would expect. “As they were both psychoanalysts, no detail went unnoticed. They were their own first subjects after all,” Cronenberg quips. So there was a plethora of information to draw to fill out the story but there was still some things that required a certain creative flair, namely most of the intense sexuality that happens behind closed doors. “There are some very intimate moments which are speculative, of course. There was still some modesty involved in these relationships because of the era.”

As impassioned as it gets onscreen, Cronenberg insists that the set itself, located in Vienna and in various German locations, could not have been more ideal. “It was as though, after one or two days, as if you’d worked with everybody many times before,” he recalls fondly. Of course, Cronenberg has actually worked with Mortensen before, most recently in 2007’s EASTERN PROMISES. While Christoph Waltz was originally due to play Freud, he had to drop out because of scheduling conflicts, and Mortensen stepped in. “With Viggo, I would say I have a long hand rather than a short hand,” Cronenberg describes of their working relationship. “We would exchange something like 25 e-mails about what kind of cigars Freud smoked and when.”

Cronenberg is currently in post-production on his 20th feature, COSMOPOLIS, based on the Don DeLillo novel and starring Robert Pattinson. First up though, he must contend with awards season, as A DANGEROUS METHOD is naturally garnering attention. Though happy with the acclaim, Cronenberg takes the arduous process in stride. “Awards season isn’t a real season; it’s not like fall or winter,” says the man whose first brush with Oscar came when his 1986 film, THE FLY, took home the statue for Best Visual Effects. “It can be very exhausting if you’re nominated so at a certain moment, part of you is almost praying you don’t get any nominations.”

Well, consider my fingers crossed for you, Mr. Cronenberg. Wait.

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Best of Black Sheep: A DANGEROUS METHOD

A DANGEROUS METHOD

Written by Christopher Hampton

Directed by David Cronenberg

Starring Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley and Viggo Mortensen

Otto Gross: If there is one thing I’ve learned in my short life, it’s this: Never repress anything.

Canadian director, David Cronenberg, is synonymous with exploring sexuality and psychology on screen. In his latest epic, A DANGEROUS METHOD, he lets our minds get lost amidst these two forces as they intersect in Austria during the birth of modern psychology. What should have been an explosion of intense thought and tantalizing eroticism unfortunately amounts to little more than awkward conversation.

Like so much of psychoanalysis, some things make perfect sense on the page but do not necessarily apply past the theory. On paper, A DANGEROUS METHOD should work. Michael Fassbender plays Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, who engages in a father-son like relationship with Sigmund Freud, played by three-time Cronenberg collaborator, Viggo Mortensen. Freud’s beliefs surrounding psychological trauma tended to be sexual in nature and this would inevitably cause an irreparable rift between them as Jung thought there had to be more to it than that. The situation was only further exacerbated by Jung’s own affair with one of his own patients, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley). The two enter a kinky relationship that really only proves Freud’s point but men being men, neither will admit any fault.

A DANGEROUS METHOD is aptly performed by its talented cast and beautifully shot and composed but it never truly comes alive. Considering the film itself is about repression, it certainly feels as though it could have used some loosening up. Instead, its tightly wound setting and nature eventually lead to its own unravelling.

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