The Word on Films

A Place For Me

The emotional shrapnel of a divorce scars a family of writers in A Place for Me. An acclaimed author (Greg Kinnear) and his teenage children (Lily Collins and Nat Wolff) are silently suffering after mum (Jennifer Connelly) bails.

Due to a ridiculous amount of publishing success, the characters have an air of pompousness and talk like they’ve got all the right answers, but none of it seems genuine. These are people with big houses and even bigger problems, but it’s hard to feel sympathetic. Sure, the characters have the Hollywood flawed virtuoso gene, but they are always one wine glass swivel away from complete arrogance.

The cast delivers tiny bites of charm, but the smugness is overwhelming and the story is a mediocre walk through the breakdown of a marriage; dad can’t move on, the daughter avoids intimacy and the son does drugs. Before you can ask, ‘Where’s the character with a brain tumor?’ you’re dumped bedside, ready to be milked for tears.

It’s strange that writer/director Josh Boone chose to make his film about writers. There is dialogue in a scene where a character is lifeless after a bad reaction to narcotics and someone yells, ‘She has a drug problem!’ In this scene, Boone forgets that sometimes actions speak louder than words on film, especially when the prose is lazy.

A Place for Me is ripe for a daytime soap opera drama but the concept is stretched as a film.

CAMERON WILLIAMS

Spring Breakers

Spring Breakers isn’t your usual film about spring break. Hell, it isn’t your usual film.

Brit, Candy, Faith and Cotty head off on spring break, but after a night of the usual hijinks (beer bongs, cocaine, dancing in foam) they get thrown in the slammer…only to be bailed out by James Franco, as gangster Alien, and that’s when the party really begins.

The deliberate casting of Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez and Ashley Benson, angel-faced teen idols turned into sex-crazed, criminally-inclined college students, is a pretty obvious move, but also kind of inspired. The fourth player is Rachel Korine, wife of director Harmony Korine.

Don’t see Spring Breakers if you’re bothered by hair regrowth, scene repetition, out-of-sync dialogue, or intentionally pervy uses of the male gaze. It’s hedonistic but ridiculous, disturbing yet trashy, and all in this dreamy sort of way. It’s bikinis and bullets, Disney princesses turned rogue and plenty of tongue-in-cheek angst. Franco is eccentric but magnetic, and Hudgens is probably the only convincing/memorable one of the girls, who are shallow metaphors for coming-of-age dissatisfaction turning into delinquency.

If you’ve seen anything of Korine’s before (he wrote dark teen film Kids and directed the controversial Gummo), you’ll know what to expect.

I guess what I'm saying is…I loved Spring Breakers. But you might legitimately hate it. It’s sort of the ‘anchovy on pizza’ of films – it’s either your sort of thing, or it isn’t.

MEGAN McKEOUGH

The Place Beyond the Pines

Writer and director Derek Cianfrance is ambitious. His films are tough work. They are tough to watch, his characters are tough to understand and the conclusions are tough to deal with (because they barely feel like conclusions).

The Place Beyond the Pines starts off with Ryan Gosling as Luke: a stunt motorcycle rider who wears a leather jacket, is in love with a woman who isn’t really his to love (Eva Mendes), and who gets embroiled in a life of crime. Before you stop watching because you think you’ve accidentally walked into Drive – don’t worry. It all gets very different from there. Luke’s criminal activity connects him with cop Avery (Bradley Cooper). Their lives become seemingly intertwined – as do the lives of their families.

This film is being touted as a crime drama, but it is really more of a character study. And what characters to study. Each personality – even those of the minor, supporting roles – is complex. No one is all bad, or all good: merely human.

Some critics have called it an epic, or a tragedy, or a tale of redemption. It could be called all of those things. But what makes this film compelling is not the whole or the sum – it is the parts; the individual moments and the individual choices the characters make.

(P.S. Ladies – Ryan Gosling holds a baby in this film. It’s adorable.)

MELISSA WELLHAM

Drift

There are lots of great Australian surfing documentaries, but for a country surrounded in water we just can’t nail a really good surfing drama. Drift has a pretty good crack at it.

Set in Western Australia in the ‘70s, two brothers (Xavier Samuel and Myles Pollard) start up a surfing business. Working with the beautiful canvas of the coast of Western Australia, directors Ben Nott and Morgan O’Neill, with cinematography from Geoffrey Hall, manage to capture the majesty of the ocean.

While it’s easy for Nott and O’Neill to find the best breaks, it’s not as simple when it comes to the plot. Samuel and Pollard are great playing the siblings and a lot of the film’s charm comes from their interactions, with a little spice added by a troubadour/photographer played by Sam Worthington.

The biggest problem is that, while the brothers are chasing the perfect work and surf balance, not much really happens and instead the antagonists pile up in an attempt to kick-start a narrative. There are tough bikers, an evil bank manager and a drugged up employee. Throw in a last minute surfing competition to save everyone’s financial skin that feels ripped from the final act of a Mighty Ducks film and you’ve got a really lukewarm drama.

Drift is a film that is superb on the water but a little wobbly on dry land.

CAMERON WILLIAMS.

Star Trek: Into Darkness

In the spirit of full and dull disclosure, I am something of a Star Trek fan – and I have such love for the work of Gene Roddenerry (creator of the franchise) that it’s difficult for me to separate my heart and my head.

Following on from the rebooted Star Trek released in 2009, Into Darkness shows our heroes facing a threat that is both old and new. Captain James Kirk (Chris Pine), the logical Vulcan Spock (Zachary Quinto), Doctor ‘Bones’ McCoy (Karl Urban) and Uhura (Zoe Salanda), as well as the rest of the gang, must come together to fight a threat from within the Federation (that’s the futuristic intergalactic UN, remember). An agent named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) has gone rogue. He’s smart, he’s strong, and he seems to be unstoppable. What’s a group of plucky space adventurers to do? Band together as a team, of course, and beat the bad guys with no small amount of banter.

Into Darkness is nothing like the original series of Star Trek – there are more explosions, there’s more extravagance, and there are more emotions from the inhuman Spock. But that’s part of what makes the reboot so much fun: it’s unashamedly Hollywood – providing humour and heartthrobs alongside its lessons about democracy and daring.

Into Darkness is well scripted and slick – just try to ignore the excess of solar flare.

MELISSA WELLHAM