Posts Tagged ‘george clooney’

Oh dear looks like I need to get my grumpy hat out for both Il Forno and The Informant…

Went to Il Forno on Duke Street in Liverpool for dinner before going to see the early evening showing of The Informant at FACT.  Things started well with quick service and an excellent swordfish tart starter (with a name far too long to remember).  Unfortunately this is the point at which I have to become Mr Grumpy.  If a waiter announces that your pizzas are amongst the 10 best in the whole country they’d better be very good.  I’ve certainly had better pizzas from two other restaurants in Liverpool, two Liverpool takeaways, a restaurant in London and a takeaway in Sheffield.  Unfortunately both pizzas we ordered were described as bland so it wasn’t just me.   Personally I’d have prefered a more interesting pizza that was half the size.  To be fair I’ve had far worse ones in lots of places too.  Then I could have tried one of the deserts they offered us three times.  Overall opinion starter good, service OK and I’d try a different main course if I went again.

So on to the real main course of the evening as it were, the film The Informant picked largely because nothing else was on that appealed.  First could someone explain to me why Matt Damon was playing Mark Whitacre in the style of William H. Macy.  Did he have a bet with George Clooney, couldn’t they get William H. Macy himself or did someone decide that William H. Macy wasn’t a big enough name to star so cast Matt Damon to try and sell the film to audiences?

The story itself was a mess that every time it threatened to get interesting ran away from itself.  The meat was the technicality of the various crimes, deceptions and alleged crimes.  Each time they got close to one they brushed it out of sight as though it was scary stuff requiring a bit of (oh no!) thought and comprehension.  It was like watching a heist film in which showing a safe being cracked was technical and boring so lets not bother.  Hang on though did they really think this film was going to attract an audience who were looking for a no brainer action flick?

Then there was the really odd sound track and the 1970s retro font.  Fine except the film was set in the 1990s.  There were a large number of supporting characters who became interesting and then vanished.  Scott Bakula in particular was there and then suddenly gone treatment.  I’d make a Quantum Leap reference but it would be too easy a joke.  Now you may say this was based on a real life story but as they made clear before the film started they’d taken liberties with it.  So why not take the liberty needed to make it interesting?

The Informant just didn’t seem to know what it was: docudrama? docucomedy? In the end it was just docudisaster.  As it stands it’s a bad attempt at making a film in the style of a sprawling based on real life drama from the ’70s.  Maybe with William H. Macy and the Coen brothers directing possibly focusing on the investigation of what must have been an ever more bizarre situation it could have been a film worth seeing.  Personally I’d suggest saving your time and money.

Fanstastic Mr Fox is probably my favourite Roald Dahl children’s story.  So today I decided I’d go and see it at the Odeon in Liverpool 1 and crossed my fingers they’d not treated the source material as a slum clearance job it like Disney did with Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

Given the source materials brevity it’s unsurprising they had to pad it to make it up to feature length.  The core story still sits at the heart of the film but a additions at the start and the end along with some padding in the middle brought it up to its 87 minutes.  While none of the additions were bad the incomprehensible sport seemed to me to be a joke forced a little to hard.  On reflection and a quick reread of the original story the ending is probably, saddly a little two Hollywood.  Maybe something less action orientated and closer to the heist movie theme that works so well earlier on.  They were almost there but not quite.  One last big job to break into a highly secure supermarket knowing it was a trap might have worked.

George Clooney and Meryl Streep had a lot of work to do and both delivered good performances.  Willem Dafoe’s take on the rat made his my favourite character of the film.  It was completely different from his Raven Shaddock performance in Streets of Fire (1984) but just as distinctive.  Part of me wonders what his take on Mr Fox would have been.  If you need someone to nail that kind of bad guy he’s still got it.  Michael Gambon was another exceptionally fine choice for Bean and while I had to check on IMDB Brian Cox was another fine piece of casting.

The animation style reminded me of Jill Bennetts illustrations in the book and was very well done.  Unfortunately it wasn’t quite up to the standards of say an Aardman Animation but was by no means sloppy.  Somehow Aardman’s work looks more cinematic and less like some of the eastern European animations of the 1970′s.  However maybe that was the look they were trying for in which case they nailed it.  Anyone with the resources or time to do stop animation deserves a great deal of respect.

Ignoring my gripes about the way the original material was expanded I’d say it was a very enjoyable 87 minutes.

I saw it on the first showing of the day in a screen which I thought I had to myself till someone else left from the very back at the end.  Odeon really need to get on top of their cleaning because if the cinema is dirty for the first show of the day what hope is there for the later shows?