In Birding terms a ‘Big Year’ is: “to see who can see or hear the largest number of species of birds within a single calendar year and within a specific geographical area.” So, what do you achieve if you finish at the top of the list on December 31st? Money? Adulation? Endorsements? Not really, but more of a self-satisfying inner air-punch knowing that you, and you alone, are currently the greatest birder in North America. Director David Frankel, the man behind ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ and ‘Marley and Me,’ takes an interesting premise, but unfortunately he does nothing with it. Instead he creates a ‘safe bet,’ a film which is guaranteed to entertain during the brief moments which do contain some semblance of excitement and humour, whilst also refraining from being offensive in any manner whatsoever, but this results in a film which will fails to suitably engage a mass audience for its one hour and forty minutes running time.
‘The Big Year’ follows a poor, young, yet aspirational birder in Brad Harris (Jack Black), who also serves as the films narrator, and a retired former-CEO named Stu Preissler (Steve Martin) who wants to leave his world of work behind him once and for all (he’s attempted retirement before) and actually enjoy the finer points in life for once. Brad lives with his parents after his previous marriage failed and despite his financial insecurity and his father’s reluctance, he places everything he has into making a Big Year. While Stu, supported by his wife Edith (JoBeth Williams), just wants to experience birding for what it is. Despite an insurmountable mountain of wealth at his fingertips, he instead opts to drive, pillage and work toward his birding conquest by himself and along the way he meets the determined Brad as they strike a friendship up over their common love for the feathery creatures.
Alongside their story, there is also Kenny Bostick (Owen Wilson) who holds the Big Year record, once a contractor, he decided to turn his efforts toward his childhood hobby of bird watching, and his hard-work eventually paid off as he became the most recognised birder in the world, but this wasn’t without consequence. Fast forward a few years later and now Bostick is attempting to settle down with his new wife Jessica (Rosamund Pike), but when January 1st rolls around again he can’t shake the fact that somebody may be attempting to break his record and he sets out once again to complete yet another Big Year and in the process he places yet another marriage on the slippery black rocks of potential divorce-hood as he must carefully navigate a tight-rope between his hobby and his future.
The picture opens with on-screen titles stating that this is a true story, except for the fact that all the facts have been changed in this adaptation of Mark Obmascik’s book, a relatively subtle and mild-mannered joke which sets the tone for the rest of the movie, the key word here being: mild. ‘The Big Year’ contains an established cast, a well-developed script, and an experienced director at the helm, but it consistently fails to grab the audience’s attention, instead opting for the precariously easy route of birding puns and slapstick gags instead. For the birding enthusiasts among us, the constant quick-witted use of bird names in various puns and humorous jokes is no doubt going to tickle a few feathers, but to uninitiated it becomes a painfully slow descent into somebody else’s hobby and somebody else’s dream scenario.
While, the characters themselves all seem to develop at a pace, it is the script, despite being neat, concise and thorough it lacks anything of vigour. The characters, despite being slightly more than one-dimensional caricatures, have very predictable and tired journeys, whilst Bostick also comes across as somewhat of a red herring. For one moment he comes across as the brash, arrogant antagonist of the piece, whilst the next he is the honourable birder who wants to do nothing less than recreate the blissful childhood joy he had when he was a child growing up around many winged creatures. This could have been bird-watching’s quirky equivalent to Christopher Guest’s ‘Best in Show,’ yet it is more of an example of how filmmaking, no matter how competent, can still refrain from fully engaging with an audience by simply refusing to take any chances whatsoever, especially when it is attempting to bring a mass audience into such an original and individual recreational activity.
Tuesday 20 December 2011
In Time - Dir. Andrew Niccol
According to statistics from the United Nations, there are now seven billion people inhabiting this planet and with this figure the issue of overpopulation is once again reignited. Andrew Niccol’s latest feature explores this concept of a dystopian future where the population is curbed by the time you are allowed to live for, and while it is a simple, yet innovative concept, it doesn’t quite live up to expectations. ‘In Time’ is the typical cinematic case of having a really interesting and promising concept, but being unable to capitalize on any of its potential, leading to a disjointed plot and a poorly paced narrative which ends up simply recycling the same old sequences again and again.
It is sometime into the future where time has replaced currency as the fruitful commodity of civilisation. Once every human being reaches the ripe old age of twenty-five years old, a clock begins on their arm which counts down the time until their death. Death can be postponed and time added to any civilian’s clock through the completion of work and other related day-to-day tasks within society. But with the cost of living continually rising, time starts to become an increasingly valuable commodity which thrives with the rich and desecrates upon the poor. Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) is just another patron of the ghetto; he lives his life from day-to-day with his bodyclock constantly teetering on the edge of expulsion, but after a chance meeting with a seemingly immortal wealthy socialite Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer), Salas is given the opportunity to experience the other side of the divide. Prosperity, bodyguards, and luxury await him in New Greenwich, a place where immortality is no longer a myth, but with his new found life comes new and dangerous obstacles for him to overcome.
Salas’s narration opens the picture by announcing that there isn’t enough time for him to explain why society is time-centric and biased heavily towards the wealthy, and initially this doesn’t provide any distraction from the narrative. But once the third act begins, plot holes begin to originate due to the lack of information being relayed to the audience. With a constant lack of engaging material to keep the audience hooked on the plot, the film becomes somewhat stale and formulaic. Also, instead of intertwining the plot with a deep-seated moral and financial message aimed primarily at those who are at the centre of the current economic recession, Niccol’s script fails to dutifully act upon the message it wishes to convey and stops short. This is no more evident than in the final concluding sequences of the picture, which contain some ambiguous socio-political sentiments regarding the nature and solidarity of the human race when it comes to change, difference and revolution. Despite gearing up to make a resounding point during its conclusion, ‘In Time’ instead decides to take the safe, Hollywood and financially friendly studio route instead.
Following on from its constant lack of engaging material, the nature of ‘In Time’s’ formulaic plot creates a repetitive sequence of events which becomes very old, very quickly. Once Salas has teamed up with a rebellious, yet incredibly wealthy socialite Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried), they attempt to repair their imbalanced society through a crime spree. Coming off as a futuristic Bonnie and Clyde, bank-robbing, hold-ups and Robin Hood-esque deliveries of time to people who are less fortunate becomes their mission. However, while this aspect initially provides moments of exhilarating action, the repetition of each sequence, almost down to a tee, quickly takes away from its impending impact. Essentially for the entire second act, and the beginning of the third, Salas and Weis relatively easily break into banks, steal time, distribute the time among the poor, and then hide in a downtrodden motel where they don’t expect to be found, until the street-smart Time Detective Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy) deduces where they are and initiates an attack upon their location.
This repetition becomes increasingly tedious as the remaining running time of the film dwindles by, resulting in a rushed and poorly crafted final act in which each character’s own stories are tied up quickly to give the appearance of some form of a conclusion as the final credits roll. Unfortunately ‘In Time’ has a very interesting premise, but Niccol’s failure to create an engaging narrative beyond the first act leads to a film which ends up regurgitating the same sequences over and over again as the characters motivations become devalued in the face of lacklustre set-pieces.
It is sometime into the future where time has replaced currency as the fruitful commodity of civilisation. Once every human being reaches the ripe old age of twenty-five years old, a clock begins on their arm which counts down the time until their death. Death can be postponed and time added to any civilian’s clock through the completion of work and other related day-to-day tasks within society. But with the cost of living continually rising, time starts to become an increasingly valuable commodity which thrives with the rich and desecrates upon the poor. Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) is just another patron of the ghetto; he lives his life from day-to-day with his bodyclock constantly teetering on the edge of expulsion, but after a chance meeting with a seemingly immortal wealthy socialite Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer), Salas is given the opportunity to experience the other side of the divide. Prosperity, bodyguards, and luxury await him in New Greenwich, a place where immortality is no longer a myth, but with his new found life comes new and dangerous obstacles for him to overcome.
Salas’s narration opens the picture by announcing that there isn’t enough time for him to explain why society is time-centric and biased heavily towards the wealthy, and initially this doesn’t provide any distraction from the narrative. But once the third act begins, plot holes begin to originate due to the lack of information being relayed to the audience. With a constant lack of engaging material to keep the audience hooked on the plot, the film becomes somewhat stale and formulaic. Also, instead of intertwining the plot with a deep-seated moral and financial message aimed primarily at those who are at the centre of the current economic recession, Niccol’s script fails to dutifully act upon the message it wishes to convey and stops short. This is no more evident than in the final concluding sequences of the picture, which contain some ambiguous socio-political sentiments regarding the nature and solidarity of the human race when it comes to change, difference and revolution. Despite gearing up to make a resounding point during its conclusion, ‘In Time’ instead decides to take the safe, Hollywood and financially friendly studio route instead.
Following on from its constant lack of engaging material, the nature of ‘In Time’s’ formulaic plot creates a repetitive sequence of events which becomes very old, very quickly. Once Salas has teamed up with a rebellious, yet incredibly wealthy socialite Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried), they attempt to repair their imbalanced society through a crime spree. Coming off as a futuristic Bonnie and Clyde, bank-robbing, hold-ups and Robin Hood-esque deliveries of time to people who are less fortunate becomes their mission. However, while this aspect initially provides moments of exhilarating action, the repetition of each sequence, almost down to a tee, quickly takes away from its impending impact. Essentially for the entire second act, and the beginning of the third, Salas and Weis relatively easily break into banks, steal time, distribute the time among the poor, and then hide in a downtrodden motel where they don’t expect to be found, until the street-smart Time Detective Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy) deduces where they are and initiates an attack upon their location.
This repetition becomes increasingly tedious as the remaining running time of the film dwindles by, resulting in a rushed and poorly crafted final act in which each character’s own stories are tied up quickly to give the appearance of some form of a conclusion as the final credits roll. Unfortunately ‘In Time’ has a very interesting premise, but Niccol’s failure to create an engaging narrative beyond the first act leads to a film which ends up regurgitating the same sequences over and over again as the characters motivations become devalued in the face of lacklustre set-pieces.
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