We Bought a Zoo, Dir. Cameron Crowe

We Bought a Zoo

Director: Cameron Crowe

Starring: Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson.

The most stunning part of We Bought a Zoo, for me anyway, was that I genuinely liked Matt Damon in it. To clarify, I am not a Damon fan; I like him in Good Will Hunting, Dogma and Green Zone the rest of his filmography sets my teeth on edge. We Bought a Zoo made me like him 100% more, so it’s already pretty awe-inspiring.

In all seriousness though, it was fantastic. Sentimental and sweet with plenty of humour (there’s a Chilean miner joke that will come entirely out of left field, if it doesn’t surprise the laughter out of you, you’re dead inside).

Obviously it has its problem and it has a lot of the faults you can find in other Crowe works – the happy ending is a shade too easy, the obstacles are overcome in a simplistic manner in a timely fashion, fairly life-changing decisions are made with little to no regard for how they’ll feed themselves or not wind up homeless and frankly the son is a little jerk. I’d punch him in the face – but he did upset Elle Fanning so I think that’s fair. But who cares? Like I said, it’s sweet and funny and has a happy-ending, how can you hate the film equivalent of Christmas?

One of the films strong points was its characters; it was full of odd, yet compelling characters with Damon’s Benjamin as the heart at the centre (I was actually more enamoured by Rosie, the daughter, but that was as an extension of Damon anyway). The bizarre employees of the zoo in question, including a drunk, enraged genius played by Angus McFadyen and a massively underused Patrick Fugit – who was seen at all times with a monkey, as in many of his earlier roles he was constantly seen with a skateboard, are the reason Damon and the kids manage to take over management of a zoo when they have literally no zoological knowledge or basic animal experience. Then there’s Scarlett Johansson who, aside from being stunning, is pretty unremarkable. She’s a strong female character, which is nice and she calls people out when they’re being dicks (mostly the son) but she’s pretty basic. The important relationships are Damon and his son, Dylan, as the conflict, Damon and his brother as the odd-ball advice and frequent comedic relief and Damon and an elderly lion named Spar which is just so sad but lovely at the same time. Dylan’s obnoxious and kind of a dick but his mom just died and his friend’s don’t really care about him so it’s sort of understandable and it’d be boring if there wasn’t someone yelling at each other. There’s also Elle Fanning but her character was sort of disturbing and sandwich-obsessed, but I love Elle Fanning so that’s fine. And the little girl who played Rosie was genuinely more adorable than Jonathan Lipnicki in Jerry Maguire.

The script is witty and kind of goofy with very little clunky exposition, although Damon does massively overuse the word ‘man’ throughout. It’s probably about twenty minutes too long and there are a couple of unnecessary scenes but it’s fine because the scenes you could arguably cut are still sweet and enjoyable to watch. There are a lot of golden tinted filters on the shots and it’s all quite shiny but there was similar lighting used in Jerry Maguire and I’ve always thought it was a better film for it.

Sometimes a little bit of over-sentimental, schmaltz is exactly what you need and this film pretty much bulls-eyed the spot for me. 8/10

Oh, and the line “We bought a zoo” Is used three times. My friend counted. 

The Raven, Dir. James McTeigue

The Raven

Director: James McTeigue

Starring: John Cusack, Luke Evans

The Raven is not a horror film; I feel I need to stress that first and foremost. It has horrific elements (namely the script, the acting and the treatment of Edgar Allan Poe) but it’s not a horror story, it’s more of a gothic thriller/detective story.

For a gothic thriller it’s not very thrilling – the reveal at the end of the film is, as described by a character no less, not very exciting but at that point the entire thing has gone past formulaic and into tedious so no one-ones paying attention anyway. The murders themselves start out as exciting depictions of death well known from Poe classics like The Pit and The Pendulum and The Murders in the Rue Morgue and although fairly accurate realised murders they’re more Saw than literary imagining. The tie-in with Poe ends abruptly early on, as such it’s now just another murder story that has Edgar Allan Poe as the main character and tries desperately to maintain tenuous links with the real life of the writer. It doesn’t work very well.  

Do you remember when John Cusack used to be awesome: Grosse Pointe Blank, High Fidelity, his iconic Say Anything turn? Following Hot Tub Time Machine and The Raven I think it’s safe to say Cusack’s quirky, cult rep is officially dead. The only time he looked interested was when he directly quoted Poe. To a certain extent that is the fault of Hannah Shakespeare and Ben Livingston, two relatively obscure script-writers I only bothered to look up so I would have someone to blame. Ridiculous and ill-informed would go part of the way to describing a script that included an American use of the term ‘twat’ in 1849 and the term ‘going nuts’. Right, so research wasn’t high on the list then?

 It’s embarrassingly obvious that James McTeigue, the director, wanted this film to be 3D (…why?) the use of sweeping camera shots that pan up to uncomfortable aerial views and blood spraying directly at the screen as well as various weapons swinging in the audiences direction made it very clear they hoped they’d get the money to lay over the 3D post-production and some very wise exec told them no. It’s usually the best way to make a bad film worse i.e. Clash of the Titans, but in this case apparently the money would have been too much of a waste.

Something good? It’s quite gory, which I think people like nowadays. It probably introduced Poe to a new generation. And it included the insult “You’re a mad oyster!” I can’t think of anything else good to say, probably because there isn’t anything else good to say.

Oh and Luke Evans does a lot of shouting, like a lot of shouting in a really bizarre breathy voice. Not really sure what was going on with him to be honest but he figured out the whole mystery due to some magnetic ink so I can’t help but be impressed with his deductive reasoning. (Or psychic abilities.)

Basically, it was bad but if you’ve got nothing else to do and like making fun of bad scripts, this one’s for you. 

4/10