La La Land (2016)

Director: Damien Chazelle

Screenwriter: Damien Chazelle

SPOILERS AHEAD!

The film that took the world by storm. I don't remember a film so hyped - completely out of nowhere, I might add - in the past five years. Perhaps the closest any film will ever get to winning 'Best Picture' at the Oscars without actually winning 'Best Picture' at the Oscars. So, is it any good?

Let me get this out of the way first: La La Land is not a musical. It is wrong to call any film that goes more than half an hour between songs a musical and this is not what La La Land is. It is a film about music with songs in it, but it is not a musical. So I will not be judging La La Land mainly on how good a musical it is, or comparing it to West Side Story, Grease or Les Mis.

Aside from that...this film is a lot of fun. Throughout, I got the sense Damien Chazelle has dreamed of making this for a long time. For better or for worse, it adds to the theme of dreams - the theme that drives this film. It feels like the movie is one long dream, with many fantastical scenes and shots throughout and Chazelle uses this effectively to further the movie's main theme.

The movie does fall down a little bit when it comes to plot. The plot is perfectly simple and easy to follow and it tells a great story - but it is a little too simple. Things fall into place a little bit too easily all of the time and the main conflict of the film is over far too quickly. John Legend is undoubtedly the cast's weakest member as Keith - while the casting of the only black member of the main players in the role of the "enemy to jazz" could be seen as a bit riské given the history of jazz as a music genre influenced more by black people than any other.

There are plenty of positives, however. The film is surprisingly funny and has a strong charm to it, aided by its two leading lights, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. Two of the most talented young actors currently in Hollywood, the two drive the story brilliantly and have obvious chemistry as star-crossed lovers. Stone deserved her Oscar based on the audition scene alone, while Gosling was unfortunate to come up against Casey Affleck's star turn in Manchester By The Sea. Any other year and Gosling's name surely would have been on the 'Best Actor' trophy.

This film is kept afloat by the superb acting of its two leads, alongside two other strong elements: the cinematography and the music. Whatever about Stone, this film was always guaranteed two Oscars and they were 'Best Cinematography' and 'Best Original Score'. There's at least one gorgeous shot in each scene and several jaw droppers throughout the film. And the music...can you tell me honestly that you didn't sway and click along to Another Day of Sun?

This gorgeous shot is just one example of this film's superb, Oscar-winning cinematography

There is one final element of this film I have to address: the ending. One of the most divisive endings to a film of recent years, my opinion has changed over repeated viewings. I've now watched this film three times and, while I do like the execution of the ending (that dream montage and its accompanying Epilogue piece are simply gorgeous), I like it less and less every time I watch the film. I enjoy a bleak ending to a film when it's done right but...I feel like it goes against everything Chazelle has spend telling us throughout the film: that dreams do come true. I feel like Chazelle slightly undermines his main message of the film with the ending and it's my one main bugbear with this film.

But, on the whole, La La Land is great. It's a very easy to watch film and it's a lot of fun, explaining why it's so rewatchable. If you haven't seen it yet - and my description of the ending hasn't put you off! - you should definitely check it out!

by EOIN HARRINGTON

Dunkirk (2017)

Writer/Director: Christopher Nolan

Oh. My. God. My mouth was left open gasping for air after the tension in this film. Whereas most films start at 0 and get up to 100, this starts at 100 and rises to 1000 very quickly. Every cut to the Spitfires. Every tick of the clock in the score. Every time a character looks up at the sky in fear, you too are in fear. All components of this film serve a purpose: to grab you by the throat and squeeze harder, and boy does it pay off. If you wish to see a run-of-the-mill war film, don't. Watch this instead. Not a drop of blood is spilled. No wasted exposition from the characters about their women back home or the morality of war is spoken. Everything is told through their faces, their reactions, their emotions. Modern cinema is so hell-bent on filling us with dialogue and loud Michael Bayesque explosion porn that this film is a necessity just for being different. I saw this in 70mm, and I've never understood more than now why film is so much better than digital. At the beginning, when Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) is running through the streets of Dunkirk, and bullets are being fired at him left, right and centre, you feel like the bullets are being fired at you too. This is immersive cinema at its finest. Christopher Nolan himself said that this film is like "virtual reality without the goggles". It puts you on the beach, on the boats, into the Spitfires. Rarely does a war film do that for its entire run-time. That alone is worth seeing.

The film starts, as I mentioned previously, with Tommy running through the streets of Dunkirk, escaping German gunfire from all angles. He arrives at the beach, and from there the film's experimental narrative kicks in. We switch between Farrier (Tom Hardy) and Collins (Jack Lowden) in the Spitfires, Tommy and Alex (Harry Styles) on the beach, Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance), George (Barry Keoghan), Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Shivering Soldier (Cillian Murphy) on the civilian boats, and Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh) and Colonel Winnant (James D'Arcy) on the makeshift pier. The narrative ebbs and flows and bends the common time structure seen in films. We see the Spitfires fight the German planes. We see the soldiers fight for their return home on the beaches. We see the civilians sail off into war. We see the commanding officers try to make sense of evacuating roughly 340,000 men while the German army closes in on them.

This is where the music is vital. The ticking clock slowly crescendos and/or gets quicker throughout the whole film. These soldiers are desperate for more time as it seems to run out faster than possible. For the most part, the score is there, ticking away. But when it disappears, pure silence. These moments seem like respite not just for the characters, but for us too. This film is emotionally jarring, and Hans Zimmer's tense score serves this purpose perfectly. Never has he done a better score for a film. For Hoyte Van Hoytema, it could have been too easy to simply shoot the film and then degrade the colours to make it seem bleak for the characters, but instead he lets the camera run after the soldiers, float along with the boatmen and twist and turn with the pilots. In real life, colours aren't degraded, so why would they do it here? The cinematography for the whole part is brilliant, but towards the end, when the sun comes out, it is stunning. The shots of Farrier being captured by Germans are beautiful, even though for the character, death is imminent. All the actors are brilliant, too. It's always harder to act with no dialogue, but everyone does it very well (yes, that includes Harry Styles).

Now for Christopher Nolan. Call him pretentious. Call him a Luddite, but there's a method to his madness. Instead of using CGI, he brought in real vessels, some of which were used in the actual evacuation. He brought in real Spitfires. He brought in cardboard pop-ups of soldiers instead of CGIing them in. Why? It serves two purposes. It gives the actors a sense of what they're doing, and therefore their performances can be truer and more credible. The other aspect is the immersive cinema I mentioned earlier. So goes the phrase "there's nothing like the real thing". That couldn't apply more here. Sure, he could have CGIed the boats and planes, but that looks fake. And in a film that you intend to shoot purely on film and project on film, it must be better to have the real ships and planes. The purpose is to put us on the beaches, and after seeing this film I feel like I lived through Dunkirk. For a film, there's no higher compliment. The only complaint I have is that the film isnt as rewatxhable the second time around. It seems on its historical basis and tension, and tension is harder to recreate on a repeated viewing. That being said, I'm nit-picking. This still is the film of the year. Ten out of ten for me.

The Social Network (2010)

Directed by David Fincher

Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin

Spoilers ahead!

The Social Network tells a story. Whether or not that story is completely factually correct, one cannot deny it is a damn good story. Elevated by a pacey script by Aaron Sorkin and stunning performances by Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield, this film is about more than just the creation of Facebook.

The movie opens with one of the most memorable opening scenes of recent years. An incredible nine pages of dialogue are worked through in just under five minutes. Mark Zuckerbeg (Jesse Eisenberg) is seated in a bar with his girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) discussing how best to distinguish himself from the crowd in college. Seeing as this will become the main theme of the film, the structure of the opening scene is genius. The opening scene in itself becomes a condensed version of the entire film. Within five minutes, we see Erica attempt to empathise with Mark, but she gradually tires of him as it becomes increasingly evident he is not interested in what she is saying. This is effectively the plot of the film – Mark losing those around him as he becomes more and more self-obsessed.

Perhaps the biggest strength of this film is the quick pace of Sorkin’s screenplay. Zuckerberg says himself in the film’s third act that Facebook is growing faster than any of the founders could ever have imagined and the films pacing plays up to this. The script is a whopping 168 pages long – the same length as Pulp Fiction, a film forty minutes longer than this one. If anything conveys the pace of this film, surely that’s it! The opening hour is frantic – the audience don’t have a moment to breathe as we are introduced to character after character and plotline after plotline – but not a single scene is wasted. Every scene furthers the plot and the characters brilliantly, another huge strength of this film. The screenplay keeps the film moving at this pace with wit and levity – rightfully winning Sorkin his first Academy Award.

The acting performances are what keep this film afloat, however. The screenplay is exceptional, but it demands good acting and boy is that what we get. Eisenberg is obviously outstanding in a career-defining role. It may seem like he is just playing the bog-standard character he plays in every single film, but this performance is so much more than that. He perfectly conveys the detached – almost cynical - emotional nature of his character, while still retaining some tiny bit of likability. I’m as big a fan of The King’s Speech and Colin Firth as anyone, but how Eisenberg did not grab an Oscar for this film is beyond me.

Andrew Garfield’s performance as Zuckerberg’s only true friend, Eduardo Saverin, is admittedly less flashy than Eisenberg, but it deserves commendation, particularly the raw emotion shown in his final scene. Garfield may be better known to audiences for his all too brief time as Spider-Man, but this performance is one of the best in a supporting role I have ever seen. As for Justin Timberlake? Yeah, I didn’t hate him in this as much as I thought I would. He actually does a pretty good job as Sean Parker, admittedly in the film’s least challenging role. Still, he gets his character’s nastiness and flaws across to the audience well.

This film is perfectly crafted. David Fincher – a man who made his name with visually striking films such as Se7en and Fight Club – does a great job with a more understated visual film and the score is simply stunning. Everything from the writing, to the acting, to the directing and to the music, is exceptional and this film is undeniably one of the best made this century.

One final note: as a die-hard Beatles fan, I couldn’t help but adore that final scene. The framing of Mark’s unhappiness against the title cards depicting his wealth, against the pending friend request to Erica and against the unashamedly life-affirming Baby, You’re A Rich Man by Lennon and McCartney is one of the best closing scenes I have seen in any film.

The Social Network is one of the best films I have watched all year long and is well worth any amount of watches.