ALLIED : Tuesday 3rd January 2017.

'ALLIED' which I saw earlier this week is Directed by Robert Zemeckis and Written by Steven Knight based on a story he had been told some thirty years ago during his days travelling around the US, which whilst not confirmed as being true, proved too good to be true not to make a film out of it. And so whilst the notion has been kicking around for thirty years or so, it is only now that his story has been committed to celluloid. Costing US$85M the film opened in the US in late November and has so far made back US$87M, and garnered mixed reviews since, although its two lead performances have been largely praised.

Here Royal Canadian Airforce Intelligence Officer Max Vatan (Brad Pitt) must travel to Casablanca to assassinate a German Ambassador. The film picks up with him parachuting into the French Morocco desert sometime in 1942, being picked up by a car en route to Casablanca to rendezvous with his 'wife', a new identity for the mission, and a suitcase full of secret agent stuff! He is partnered up with French Resistance fighter Marianne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard) who fled from France after her resistance group was compromised and killed. The couple masquerade as French husband and wife, under the guise that they are being reunited in Casablanca after a long period of absence from each other due to his career in remote phosphate mining. She is trusted by the German's who have a stronghold on the territory.

Their planned assassination is still ten days away, so the couple get acquainted and do the things that couple do - enjoy the streetside cafes, party with acquaintances, be seen together arm in arm, take machine gun shooting practice out in the desert, and make love in the cramped front seat of a car in the middle of a raging sandstorm the day before the assassination attempt (must be a metaphor in there somewhere methinks!), because hey, they both might be dead in 24 hours time if their plan doesn't pull off.

After their mission to kill the German Ambassador at a glitzy gathering goes according to plan, and they are able to escape unhindered, Max asks Marianne to join him back in England. She agrees, they marry, fall pregnant, they set up home in Hampstead and settle down to a life of domesticity with him still working for the British Government and reporting to Frank Heslop as his Commanding Officer (Jared Harris) and friend. In time Marianne gives birth to a baby daughter, Anna, during a bombing raid over London, and the three return to the family home in the suburbs and all is good in the world.

Fast forward a few more months and Max learns from a Special Operations Executive (SOE), that Marianne is in fact suspected of being a German spy, having assumed the identity of the real Marianne, now long since dead. The SOE intend to run a 'blue dye' test whereby at a given time (11:07pm) a phone call will be made to their home and Max is to write down a piece of false intelligence, where Marianne can easily find it. If the information is picked up from intercepted German transmissions within a few days, Max must personally execute her, or be hanged for treason. He is told otherwise to act normally, and not to discuss the matter with anyone. Max is needless to say distraught with this news, and believes it all to be a big mistake - after all Marianne shot and killed the German Ambassador!

Defying orders Max first confides in his sister Bridget (Lizzy Caplan) knowing that she will keep a secret. He then visits a former colleague in hospital who knew Marianne well, but he was blinded in battle and is therefore unable to identify a photograph of her, but points Max in the direction of someone who may be able to help. Ultimately, Max flies to France to meet with someone who knew Marianne and will be able to identify his wife from a photograph. Landing under cover of darkness he learns that his contact is in fact in a local Police cell for drunken and disorderly conduct. Knowing that time is running out and this is his last ditch attempt to clear his wife's name, he and some Resistance Fighters break into the Police Station and confront his contact, who coming out of a drunken stupor recalled that Marianne was an accomplished pianist.

Back in London, Max forcibly takes Marianne to a local pub after hours, but where he knows there is a piano. They break in, and Max orders Marianne to play the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, on the piano because he had been told that she can, and beautifully. Marianne confesses to Max that yes, she is a German spy but her feelings for Max had always been genuine. She advises that her handlers in London had threatened both her and Anna if she did not continue complying with orders. Max refuses to kill his wife as instructed, and instead kills her handlers en route to the local RAF airstrip so that the three of them can effect their escape before the SOE close in with the news that he now knows is inevitable. In the pouring rain at the airstrip their escape plans are foiled by Heslop who intercepts their plans to commandeer a plane. Heslop confirms that their suspicions are confirmed as the Military Police arrive. Marianne gets out of the car, having secured Anna in the back seat, confirms her love for them both, and then promptly shoots herself in the head. She slumps to the ground beside the plane dead. Heslop who witnesses this commands the Military Police that what they saw was Max execute his wife as per his orders, to avoid any repercussions on him.

I enjoyed this romantic war time drama because it is a throw back to the war time melodramas of yesteryear that seldom get made any more these days. Ever since the days of 'Saving Private Ryan' and right up to the recent 'Hacksaw Ridge' war time films have been about the horrors of war writ large in graphic detail of severed limbs, flayed bodies, psychological trauma, physical injury, bloodshed and pain. 'Allied' offers us some welcome respite from this - it is a simple enough story, but well told by Robert Zemeckis who has a track record of delivering great performances from his Actors. And so he does so with Pitt and Cotillard. The pair are well matched and well suited to this period piece both looking very dapper and debonair in their '40's uniforms and fashions, and the era is recreated well enough to make the film complete. Certainly worth the price of entry, and worth looking at in homage to those films this one pays tribute to, albeit with a few random acts of violence, sex and profanity that those films of yesteryear wouldn't have deployed. Nonetheless a good watch.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-

POLTERGEIST - Saturday 23rd May 2015.

Back in 1982 Tobe Hooper Directed a film based on a Steven Spielberg story, called 'POLTERGEIST' which he made for US$10.7M and it ended up grossing US$122M and spawned two sequels in 1986 and 1988. The influential Director who had made the cult classic horror film 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' back in 1974 crafted a modern ghost story with a backdrop of a suburban setting involving an everyday young family caught up in terrifying malevolent otherworldly circumstances. Fast forward 33 years, and 'Poltergeist' has been remade for a whole new audience with an insatiable appetite for such scare 'em offerings and who will be largely unfamiliar with the earlier classic horror film of the same name, which I saw last night.

I sat in the movie theatre with what seemed to be an audience of teenagers, and mostly girls who at the required moment let out shrieks, nervous laughs and stilted screams when the horror elements clicked in. Directed this time around by Gil Kenan, with horror master Sam Raimi taking a Producer credit, and with a US$35M budget, I can tell you that there is nothing new to see here!

This updated contemporary offering follows an identical story line - same family unit, same suburban estate, same things that go bump in the night, same paranormal investigators, same root cause of all the spectral shenanigans, and to a large extent same effects. Only the technology has been updated this time to give us smart phones, tablets, flat screen TV's and computer wizardry that shorts out, springs to life of their own accord and pick up static from 'the other side' when you least expect it. Some of the effects have been improved upon as you would expect given the advances in CGI over the last thirty plus years, but none of this does anything to improve on the original!

Our family comprises recently retrenched and out of work Dad Eric Bowen (Sam Rockwell) who I must say puts in a good turn, his writer wife Amy Bowen (Rosemary DeWitt), and three kids - it's all about me selfish teenage girl brat Kendra (Saxon Sharbino), frightened by his own shadow Griffin (Kyle Catlett) and young six year old innocent Madison (Kennedi Clements). Moving into their new home, things get highly suspicious and irregular from the get go, when the kids at first notice weird things going on about the new homestead. Straight away Griffin want's outta there as he suspects that something ain't quite right.

Sleeping in the attic room with a window skylight directly above his bed and a huge tree whose limbs sway menacingly in the wind directly above that window, Griffin is on edge from the very first night, and even more so when against the moonlight those limbs seem to come alive. Of course that night things do go bump and the ghostly activity starts to manifest itself. It doesn't take long before young Madison is singled out for attention and she starts talking to 'imaginary' friends. The next night having already settled down to a level of domesticity and dismissive of all the unexplained activity as 'rampant imagination' Eric and Amy are invited to a dinner party leaving the kids at home and Kendra baby-sitting. Cue bad shit going down in the house of a thousand ghosts!

Naturally there is a storm outside and as the kids tuck themselves up in bed so a shit storm is unleashed inside that effects all three in different sinister ways. Kendra's new smart phone starts to pick up unexplained static that becomes more clear as she moves around the house and into the garage; the tree outside Griffin's bedroom window springs to life (literally) and crashes in on him, and the clown toys discovered in his room the night before spring to life and attempt to kill him; and Madison is drawn to the TV set and the voices coming from it. With all this mayhem going on Mum and Dad arrive home just in time to save Griffin from death by tree, Kendra from breaking a finger nail, but as for Maddie - she has gone to the netherworld inside the flat screen TV abducted by evil malevolent unseen forces residing therein.

With only Maddie's broken voice emanating from the TV to show she is still alive but someplace else, Amy enlists the support of the local ghostbusters by way of her old University Department of Paranormal Research. They come to the house, rig up their high-tech computer gizmo's to detect activity in every room in the house and pretty soon learn that the place is well & truly possessed! As more bad stuff goes down so more danger is thrown at the resident householders now desperate to cling on to the fading contact they have with Maddie. Enlisting the help of TV celebrity ghost hunter and exorcist Carrigan Burke (Jared Harris) ultimately good overcomes evil but not before they learn that the estate was built 20 years ago on an old cemetery, and whilst the headstones were relocated 20 miles away, the corpses were not! Underneath the house therefore are the disturbed, resentful, mightily pissed off souls of all those who have gone before, now looking for a way out - and Maddie is the one to guide them!

Griffin gets his moment of glory when he goes 'in' to the other world through a portal in Maddie's closet  to retrieve her, and the spectral shit kickers are banished to damnation forever . . . or are they? Of course it doesn't end there and as they strive to leave the house forever, more bad stuff goes down before the house gets torn apart all around them and the dead rise up from the earth beneath. What is interesting to note is that while all this ghostly mayhem and demonic destruction is going on in and around the Bowen house, what of the neighbours, and the guys down the street and the whole estate - nothing else to see there, and the other locals don't even come out to see what the commotion is all about! Strange, but true!

Having seen the 1982 original 'Poltergeist' first at the movies when I was a late teenager, several times subsequently on video, DVD and then the TV, it remains a firm favourite of the genre. This though is a by the numbers facsimile that offers nothing new, is formulaic, predictable and could have been given a whole new take on the story - instead it is a chapter by chapter repeat that suffers as a result. Do yourself a favour and skip paying $20 to see this on the big screen and instead download the original and by far the best 1982 movie - you will be more richly rewarded for it, and twenty bucks better off!

-Steve, at Odeon Online-