Movie Review: Gravity

Gravity
Directed by: Alfonso Cuarón.
Written by: Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón.
Starring: Sandra Bullock (Dr. Ryan Stone), George Clooney (Matt Kowalsky), Ed Harris (Mission Control), Paul Sharma (Shariff).

Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity is one the greatest technical achievements I have ever seen in a movie theater. The combination of breathtaking cinematography (in 3-D no less), special effects, art direction and sound design mean there is not a second of the film that isn’t a pure joy to behold. But the technical achievement – no matter how great it is – is only part of the reason why Gravity is one of the year’s must-see films. Sandra Bullock delivers her best performance to date in the lead role – where she is more often by herself than in a scene with another actor – and, with only a few bare facts about her character, she makes you care deeply about her. It is one thing to be visually blown away by a movie –it’s another to be visually blown away, and also care deeply for its central character.

The plot of the movie is exceedingly simple. Three astronauts are on a spacewalk to install a new piece of equipment on the Hubble telescope. This is Dr. Ryan Stone (Bullock) for first time in space, and she is the one who designed the equipment. By contrast Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney) has been in space so much, he’s approaching the all-time space walking record. Things are going okay, until the Russians (it’s nice to have them as the villains again) blow up one of their own satellites. This causes debris to fly through space, smashing other satellites, and creating more debris, to come hurtling at the astronauts, who do not have the time to get back to safety. Eventually, they become untethered and have to slowly make their way to safety. The problem – there may be nothing left for them to get to safely.

Cuaron has always been a gifted visual stylist. His modern adaptation of Great Expectations may not be a great movie, but is visually stunning – especially in its early scenes. His Y Tu Mama Tambien is a fascinating ménage a trois relationship drama that while low-key, is still well directed. And Children of Men is a dystopian masterpiece – that is at its best during the action sequences that Cuaron shoots with long takes with his endlessly roaming camera.

In Gravity, Cuaron takes his love of those long, unbroken takes to the extreme. His camera moves around the astronauts as they float through space, circling back towards them, and even sometimes through their helmet and back out again. It is dazzling to behold – and refreshing as most movies these days seem to think that in order to be exciting, they need to have rapid fire editing, with images cut up so much that they verge on incoherence, and use special effects for the sake of using special effects, and 3-D simply to milk a few extra dollars for the audience. By contrast, Cuaron uses these long takes – in conjunction with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who he worked with on Children of Men, and has also worked with Terrence Malick on his last few films, so he knows how to do these long takes. Although the film was converted to 3-D after shooting, you wouldn’t know it – every shoot seems to have been designed for 3-D, and it never seems like a gimmick. The special effects are used to create visuals that feel real – space has never quite looked like this on film before. It joins the very short list of recent live action movies that actually benefit from 3-D (the list before Gravity perhaps only contains Avatar, Hugo and Life of Pi). This is pretty much a completely digital world that Cuaron and his team have crafted – and while that often annoys me (because when technology allows filmmakers to create anything they can imagine, they often goes overboard), here Cuaron uses it to disorient the audience in an effective way. In essence, he uses visual effects to have the audience float in space alongside his characters. The effect is stunning.

If it were just the technical elements in Gravity and nothing else, it would still demand to be seen on the biggest screen possible (I fear that the movie will lose a lot when viewed on a TV screen). But Bullock’s performance in the movie is also one of the best of the year. The film gives her a little backstory, that makes her instantly sympathetic, but her performance goes deeper than that. It is impossible not to relate to her on a human level – as a woman struggling to do whatever she can to survive. It’s a remarkably physical performance, and Bullock never oversells the emotion behind it, like she has done in the past.

In short, Gravity is nothing less than masterful in its every moment. While the story is simple, the ambition of the project is huge. That Cuaron attempted it should be commended – that he pulled it off is nothing short of remarkable.

Movie Review: A Touch of Sin

A Touch of Sin
Directed by: Zhangke Jia.
Written by: Zhangke Jia.
Starring: Wu Jiang (Dahai), Baoqiang Wang (Zhou San), Tao Zhao (Xiao Yu), Lanshan Luo (Xiao Hui).

Throughout his entire career, Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke has been interested in documenting the changing economic landscape of China – that has been sold as a good thing that provides more freedom and opportunity for the people of China, but the reality is much more complex than the officially sanctioned version. Up until A Touch of Sin however, his films have been rather mournful, a series of sad indictments of the new system, and its failures. On the surface, A Touch of Sin seems like a major departure for Jia – this is a brutally violent, bloody film, that uses old school Wuxia films as a visual influence. Yet underneath the violent, angry surface of Jia’s film, lies the same concerns. The characters in A Touch of Sin are not all that different than the ones in Jia’s Platform, Unknown Pleasures, The World or Still Life – they are just a little older, and a whole lot angrier.

A Touch of Sin takes four true life incidents – three that end in murder, one in suicide – that Jia says represents a disturbing new trend of seemingly random violence in China. The movie traverses pretty much the entire country, and in four half hour segments show four characters that have simply had enough, and eventually snap. Only one of these characters seems at ease with what he does – and endeavors to get away with it.

The first segment is about Dahai (Wu Jiang), an angry man who lives in a village who more than a decade ago sold off their mining rights to a private company. As part of that deal, 40% of the profits were supposed to be funneled back into the village itself – something that hasn’t happened. Meanwhile, the owner of the company has become rich – his latest purchase is a private jet. The village Chief won’t take Dahai’s complaint seriously – and Dahai is convinced he’s on the take. The other villagers either don’t seem to care, or else are too scared to say anything for fear of reprisals – and after what happens to Dahai when he voices his objection, it’s no wonder. The entire segment builds to a violent finale – a brutal, bloody killing spree that would make Sergio Leone (or Quentin Tarantino) proud.

The film that switches focus to Zhou San (Baoqiang Wang) – or more accurately, refocuses on him, as the movie opens with a very brief scene of him on a motorcycle being confronted by the three thugs who would have been better off to leave him alone. Zhou San seems to be a drifter, travelling the country either by motorcycle or boat, wearing his Chicago Bulls toque (the fact that Chicago has its own epidemic of gun crime is no coincidence). He comes back to his hometown on the occasion of his mother’s 70^th birthday (at New Years) – and visits briefly with his wife and son. He isn’t there long, but the portrait we get of his more “respectable” brothers makes you think they’re crooks like him – but just in a different way. Before long, he heads back onto the road – and planning and executing his latest killing and robbery. His story is not unlike the ones in the documentary Last Train Home – about workers who depending on the season, travel the country for work, only to return at New Year’s. Zhou San, like them, goes to where the work is.

Next up is the story of Xiao Yu (played by perpetual Jia muse Tao Zhao). She is a woman in love with a married man, who is getting tired of his promises to leave his wife and be with her. Yet, at the train station saying goodbye, she agrees to give him another six months to decide what he wants to do – before going back to her job as a receptionist at a “massage parlor” – where she greets the exclusively male clientele with the question “Sauna or the night?”, letting everyone know what kind of massage parlor this is. She will have two violent confrontations during her segment – first when the wife of the man she’s having an affair with confronts her – goons in tow – and second when a pair of men (who we have seen in a previous segment) demand that she be the one who gives them a “massage” – finally pushing her to the point where she snaps.

The movie ends with the saddest segment – as it tell the story of Xiao Hui (Lanshan Luo), who works at a factory when the segment begins – only to have to leave that job because of an accident. He then works as a wait at an “upscale” hotel – and falls for one of the female employees there, who has to dress in degrading outfits, and dance for the male clientele again – until they want something more for them. He again leaves that job – and another – and under pressure from home to send more money, he too, will eventually snap.

A Touch of Sin is an angry film. If the previous films made by Jia were about the downside of China’s conversion to capitalism – A Touch of Sin is still about that transition, but is about more hopeless characters – people who cannot see another way out for themselves. Jia was disturbed by the rising “random” violence in China – and that is what inspired him to make the film. But the Jia, the violence is anything but random – it comes out of people in hopeless economic situations. Social issues are at the heart of the violence, and to Jia it’s only going to get worse. The film is also a technical marvel. The title is a play on the wuxia film classic A Touch of Zen, directed by King Hu, who Jia considers an major influence on his film. Though widely seen as simple kung fu films, Jia sees in the work of Hu a social and political elements. The film has been impeccably crafted, both in the more realistic sequences, and the stylized violence.

Jia Zhnagke has long since been a favorite of film critics, even if his films have never made much of a dent at the North American box office. He was cited by different polls in magazines such as Film Comment and Cinemascope as one of the best directors of the last decade. If Jia is ever to have a breakthrough film – and I doubt he will – A Touch of Sin could, and should, be that film. Because in many ways it is a genre film, Western audiences will be more comfortable with it that his previous films, that took a more realistic (and at times surrealistic) approach to his themes. But the film is every inch a Jia Zhangke film. It’s just that over time, he – like the characters in this film – has become angrier. This is one of the year’s best films.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Directed by: Robert Wiene.
Written by: Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz.
Starring: Werner Krauss (Dr. Caligari), Conrad Veidt (Cesare), Friedrich Feher (Francis), Lil Dagover (Jane Olsen), Hans Heinrich von Twardowski (Alan), Rudolf Lettinger (Dr. Olsen).

Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari from 1920 is not likely to scare viewers today as it must have back when it was first released. Yet, that doesn’t diminish the film’s historical importance, and while you won’t be scared while watching the film today, you will also have a fascinating experience. It is so unlike the films that came before it that it is startling. And its techniques have become so ingrained in filmmaking that it has to rank as one of the most important horror films of all time.

The story is justly famous, and has been copied often. Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) comes to a fair with a “Somnambulist”, who he says is “23 years old, and has been sleeping for 23 years.” This is Cesare (Conrad Veidt), who sleeps in a coffin. Caligari says he can any question about the past, and predict anything about the future. And so it seems to be true when the hero of the movie Francis (Friedrich Feher) and his friend Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski), attend the show and Alan asks how long he will live, and Cesare answers “Until dawn”, and sure enough the next morning, Alan is discovered dead in his bed. Suspicious of Caesare, Francis keeps watch all night, and yet somehow the next morning it appears as if Caesare has kidnapped his fiancée Jane (Lil Dagover), leading to one of the strangest chase sequences in cinema history.

The plot of the movie is probably a little too pat and predictable for today’s audiences. We aren’t necessarily more sophisticated than audiences in 1920 were, but we certainly have sat through more movies like this than they had. Roger Ebert says a case could be made that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was the first horror movie ever made, and while I’m sure he’d find many people to disagree with him, what really cannot be argued is that audiences certainly hadn’t seen many if any movies like this before.

The thing that stands out most about the film today is the sets. They are obviously not real, and perhaps even more obviously 2-dimensional. This was odd for the time, but because they could be built cheaply, Wiene could do whatever he wanted with them. Everything in the movie seems to be at odd angles – Wiene shoots much of the movie at these odds angles – but even the “buildings” themselves seem somewhat lopsided, and tilted. That famous chase sequence is the most obvious example of this, as Cesare carries Jane through strange streets and up an even stranger hill. None of it looks real, but it fits in with the hyper-stylization of the film itself. The film is one of (if not) the first example of German Expressionism in film – we would soon see filmmakers like F.W. Murnau take this to even greater extremes in a film like Nosferatu (1922). This marked a departure from what came before, as now filmmakers were not interested in capturing things and locations as how they were, but in creating atmosphere and terror in the audience. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a perfect example of this – and one that remains influential today. Watch the film today, and it may be impossible for you (like it was for me), not to think of Tim Burton – who uses some of the same principles in his set design as Wiene does (especially in his animated films). And as Roger Ebert correctly pointed out, the film’s camera angles and lighting, would later inspire film noir – in films like The Third Man (1949).

I suspect that most of today’s audiences wouldn’t much like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari – just like they wouldn’t like most silent films. Silent films do take a while to get used to – they certainly did for me – and have a different style than the film of today. The require more of a suspension of disbelief, and an audience who will except the exaggerated acting styles, and the technological limitations (for example, the DVD version I saw includes the original tinting of the movie – this isn’t making the film a “color film”, but does give shots and scenes a certain hue – that was meant to create atmosphere). But just because most people are longer interested in a film like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari – that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be. And it doesn’t mean that this isn’t a great film. Yes, you have to look at a film like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with an historical perspective. But if you’re willing to make the effort, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari offers more rewards than most films of its ilk made today.

Movie Review: Renoir

Renoir
Directed by: Gilles Bourdos.
Written by: Gilles Bourdos & Jérôme Tonnerre  & Michel Spinosa based on the work by Jacques Renoir.
Starring: Michel Bouquet (Pierre-Auguste Renoir), Christa Theret (Andrée Heuschling), Vincent Rottiers (Jean Renoir), Thomas Doret (Coco Renoir), Romane Bohringer (Gabrielle), Michèle Gleizer (Aline Renoir), Laurent Poitrenaux (Pierre Renoir).

That Gilles Bourdos’ Renoir is a beautiful film is fairly undeniable. Bourdos used a bright color palette to suggest the same colors used by one of the movies subjects – painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir – and tries to capture the same leisurely pace and camera work of the other – his son Jean Renoir – from films like A Day in the Country (1936). This makes Renoir never less than interesting to look at. Unfortunately, that’s about all there is to the film – the narrative arc is under developed, as are the characters, and the film is so leisurely paced that the film never really gains any sort of momentum.

The film takes place over the summer of 1915. The elderly Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet) is a renowned artist – one of the leading figures in the impressionist movement – and he is basically sitting around his country estate, being waited on by his staff – who refer to him as “maestro”. Then along comes Andree (Chris Theret), who is there to pose for the master. A fiery, red headed beauty – she inspires something in Auguste, who starts painting more than he has in years. But she is not content to be simply a passive model – her presence there upsets the staff, and their routines. When Auguste’s son Jean (Vincent Rottiers) shows up – to recover from an injury suffered in WWI – things get even more complicated. Like his father, Jean is also inspired by Andree and her beauty – and he starts to show the signs of the filmmaker he would become.

The star of the movie really is the cinematrography by Mark Ping Bing Lee. The colors are bright and bold, and the camera glides along effortlessly, taking in the sights of this family and all their problems – and in one startling scene, shows some of the ugliness of the outside world at war. If there is a reason to see the film, it’s to see just how gorgeous it is.

Dramatically though, Renoir doesn’t really go anywhere. On the surface, the conflict between father and son, who share their obsession with Andree – who becomes the last muse of Auguste’s career as a painter, and the first muse of Jean as a filmmaker (she starred in his early films), sounds interesting. And yet the character of Andree is left frustratingly unknowable. The movie implies that while she may have inspired great art by both father and son, neither man really knew or understood her. That’s an interesting idea in theory – but the film itself doesn’t seem to understand her as well. Actress Christa Theret is stunningly beautiful, but her character is only skin deep – Bourdos doesn’t see her any more clearly than the artists in his movie.

Also, I never quite bought Rottiers as Jean Renoir. Of course, it is standard practice in a biopic to cast someone better looking than the real person being portrayed – as is the case here – but Rottiers never quite convinced me that he had the soul of a great artist – or that he would be the man to make films as wonderful as The Rules of the Game (1939) – or become the man we see in that movie. Bouquet fares better, perhaps because he is asked to do less – essentially playing an old man with an huge ego – which he does well.

Both Auguste Renoir and his son Jean were important artists, in two very different mediums. Both broke new barriers in their respective art forms, and remain important figures in the art world. They deserved a deeper biopic than Renoir – a film that seems more interested in painting beautiful images than in telling a story. For that matter, Andree Heuschling deserved a deeper movie as well – the film tells us that she died a few months after Jean did – but while he died one of the most famous and respected filmmakers of all time, she died in obscurity. The movie should have done a better job at showing her as a complete person – not just a gorgeous muse for two great artists.

Movie Review: Call Me Kuchu

Call Me Kuchu
Directed by: Katherine Fairfax Wright & Malika Zouhali-Worrall.

The documentary Call Me Kuchu tells an important and tragic story – and one that remains unresolved in the film, because the piece of legislation in front of the Uganda parliament is still pending. That legislation would impose penalties – right up to and including the death penalty – for homosexuals in Uganda – and imprisonment for people who know homosexuals, but do not report them within 24 hours. The level of hatred and bigotry we see spewed throughout the film is truly eye opening and depressing.

The film spends much of its running time focusing on David Kato – Uganda’s “first openly gay man”, and a leading activist for gay rights in his country. He lived for a few years in South Africa – one of the few African countries with a more open mind about homosexuality – before returning to Uganda. Kato was bludgeoned to death during the production of this movie back in 2011. The movie does not mention the outcome of the murder – that a male prostitute was convicted of killing Kato and sentenced to 30 years in jail – something some believe is part of a smear campaign against Kato – but still something the movie should have brought up. As it stands, the movie makes it seem like no one was ever charged with Kato’s murder. . Two other leading figures in the gay rights movement in Uganda also get major screen time – Naome (if they ever gave a last name, I missed it)– a friend of David’s, and a leading lesbian activist, and Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, who was expelled from the Church for preaching tolerance of gays – and yet continues right on doing what he thinks is right. He quotes openly from the bible to support his belief that contrary to what many in Uganda think, God does not hate gay people. “We are all one in Christ”, he quotes Paul.

The movie also doesn’t shy away from showing the people on the other side – including Giles Muhame, the editor of a tabloid called Rolling Stone (that has nothing to do with the American magazine), that publishes pictures of alleged homosexuals, and encourages them to be hanged. When talking about Kato’s death, Muhame accepts no responsibility – he says he never encouraged violence against homosexuals. What he wanted was for people like Kato to be arrested, given a fair trial, and then hanged. He is a hateful person, spewing the worst kind of anti-gay rhetoric imaginable – and feels no shame at all. He’s not even humbled when he loses a court case against the people he put in his newspaper just weeks before Kato’s death.

The film tells an important story – and does serve to help give viewers more background information on Uganda and their treatment of homosexuals than they got by watching the media reports of the anti-gay bill by American news outlets. The stories the people in this movie tell – of being raped, harassed, beaten and all sort of other monstrous things truly is hard to take, but is necessary to show the living hell gays and lesbians live through in Uganda.

Still, I think Call Me Kuchu misses an opportunity to be a better, deeper film. The primary purpose of the film seems to be to raise awareness – and that in itself is a laudable goal. And yet, the film is content to take the easiest path possible in telling its story. It is important subject matter – but one that I wish was handled with a little bit more nuance and intelligence.

Movie Review: The Croods

The Croods
Directed by: Kirk De Micco & Chris Sanders.
Written by: Chris Sanders & Kirk De Micco and John Cleese.
Starring: Nicolas Cage (Grug), Emma Stone (Eep), Ryan Reynolds (Guy), Catherine Keener (Ugga), Cloris Leachman (Gran), Clark Duke (Thunk), Chris Sanders (Belt), Randy Thom (Sandy).

The best Hollywood animated films are the ones that are able to satisfy kids desire to have fast paced, colorful, funny movies with something buried in their for adults. Pixar manages this trick often – although their batting average is a little lower over the past few years – but no other studio has really been able  to pull off the trick with any sort of consistency. Since its inception with 1998’s Antz, Dreamworks animation has made far more feature films that Pixar (27 to 14) – but far fewer that are able to pull the trick off. From every film that pulls it off – Antz (1998), Chicken Run (2000), Shrek (2001), Wallace and Grommitt: The Curse of the Were Rabbit (2005), Kung Fu Panda (2008), How to Train Your Dragon (2010) or Megamind (2010) – there is a Shrek sequel, or a Madagascar film or a Shark Tale or a Bee Movie or an Over the Hedge (you get the point) that may not be a bad movie, but do leave the audience of adults left wanting a little bit more. Unfortunately, The Croods is more in line with those later films than the earlier ones. It is by no means a bad movie – it held my interest throughout, is amusing at times, and has some wonderful sequences in it – but I couldn’t help by wonder if the filmmakers couldn’t have pushed this a little bit further, and made something better. The kids will – and have – liked the film, and adults aren’t going to annoyed by it (unless their kids play it on repeat) – but that’s about it. In short, it’s a fine film – but a completely forgettable one.

The movie is about the title family – The Croods – who are cavemen who have managed to survive because the patriarch, Grug (Nicolas Cage) hardly ever lets them leave the safety of their cave. But the oldest daughter Eep (Emma Stone) doesn’t just want to survive – she wants to live. She wants to go out and explore, and is becoming frustrated that she’s not allowed to. But events are going to force The Croods to leave their cave – the earth is shaking, the ground is opening up, and lava is flowing. They meet Guy (Ryan Reynolds) – one step up the evolutionary chain from the cavemen – and he says he can help get them to safety. Having no choice, Grug agrees and the family goes on their journey.

There are some wonderful sequences in the movie – the opening hunt perhaps being the best one. The movie doesn’t pretend to be accurate historically – after all, Guy would never exist in a time where the Croods do – so the filmmakers take this inaccuracy a step further and create some creatures that never existed – like the horde of parrots who behave like piranhas. The movie is at its best when the characters are engaged in action, and not in dialogue. The story – about the conflict between the over protective Grug and the more relaxed Guy, and Eep trying to forge her own way in the world – is predictable in the extreme – but hey, it gets the job done.

And that’s about all you can say about The Croods as movie – it gets the job done. It is far from a bad movie – it’s mildly amusing, and well animated with some nice vocal work by Cage, Reynolds and especially Stone. But it's a largely forgettable experience. If you’re an adult forced to watch it with yours kids, you’ll be mildly amused. If you don’t have kids – well, then there’s little reason to see it at all.

Movie Review: Metallica: Through the Never

Metallica: Through the Never
Directed by: Nimród Antal.
Written by: Nimród Antal & Kirk Hammett & James Hetfield & Robert Trujillo & Lars Ulrich.
Featuring: Dane DeHaan (Trip), James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett, Robert Trujillo.

Through the Never doesn’t really resemble the last big screen documentary on Metallica – Some Kind of Monster (2004) – except in one way -  it is impossible to watch either film, and not come away knowing that Metallica have enormous egos. In Joe Berliner and Bruce Sinofsky’s brilliant Some of Kind of Monster (which would make my list of the best rock docs of all time), the massive egos of singer/guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich (not to mention Hetfield’s addiction issues), threaten to tear the band apart during the recording of their St. Anger album (largely considered a disappointment, although I quite like it). Bassist Jason Newsted leaves the band altogether, and lead guitarist Kirk Hammett basically acts like a little kid, straining to keep his parents from getting divorced. While Some Kind of Monster showed the almost destructive nature of their various egos, and painted a very human portrait of the men in the band, Through the Never is the exact opposite – showing off Metallica’s egos by portraying them as (almost literal) rock gods. This IMAX concert film/slash drug fuelled post-apocalyptic nightmare of a film shows Metallica at their best – ripping through a collection of their greatest hits in a massive stadium, with thousands of screaming, chanting fans, and one of the most elaborate stage designs I have ever seen. Both films could have been made about a band like Metallica – whose music, egos and performances are larger than life anyway.

The “story” of the film revolves around Trip (the immensely talented Dane DeHaan – who must be a Metallica fan), a roadie for the group, who early in their massive sold out show is sent out into the city with a gas can to retrieve a truck that has run out of gas and has “something the band needs for tonight”. It doesn’t take long for him to realize that something is not quite right in the city – and he becomes involved in some sort of post-apocalyptic riot, where he makes the massive mistake of pissing off a man riding a horse in a gasmask who is hanging people from lamp posts – and has to fight his way back to the arena, with a mysterious bag, through the raging hordes of people.

These scenes work in a goofy music video kind of way. There isn’t much real story, and less dialogue (the music plays over most of the scenes), and at times the action is an overly literal interpretation of the lyrics to the particular song (for example, during Master of Puppets, the guy on a horse commands his “army” to go after Trip). But as far as big budget music videos go, I’m not sure what else we could realistically expect.

Besides, the heart of the movie is the concert footage of Metallica themselves – performing songs spanning their entire career One, From Whom the Bell Tolls, Enter Sandman, The Memory Remains, And Justice for All, Master of Puppets, Ride the Lightning, Fuel, Battery, Nothing Else Matters and Hit the Lights are among the songs covered – often with mind boggling on stage props. Director Nimrod Antal (one of those “vulgar auteurs” who got so much attention earlier this year), captures the performances with sweeping camera work. On the IMAX screen, with their great sound, the concert both looks and sounds excellent – if you have any interest in seeing the film at all, do so on the biggest screen possible. . And in case you’re worried that the aging rockers have lost some of their edge, don’t worry – that isn’t the case here. The band rips into their songs with fury – and Hetfield’s trademark growl is on full display. Metallica, to put it simply, still rocks.

The 16 year old in me – who was a huge Metallica fan – loved every minute of this insane concert film, even as the now 32-year old me has to admit that the film is an undeniable vanity project for Metallica. It’s true that to a certain extent, Metallica made this film as an ego boost – perhaps because they didn’t want their last big screen film to be Some Kind of Monster, which showed the rock gods as flawed, egomaniacal and all too human. Another part of the 32 year old me – the father of a two year old, who has had to sit through countless annoying songs by the Bubble Guppies, Backyardians, and countless versions of the Octonauts’ “Creature Report” tune was thrilled to hear this raw, angry music pumped up full blast. In short, I knew much of what I was seeing was more than a little ridiculous, but I loved it just the same. If you love Metallica, than Through the Never is a must-see film. If you don’t – than why the hell are you reading this review anyway?