Welcome To Marwen: The figure picture

Like many children of the '80s, my life was nudged in a specific direction by Bob Zemeckis and his little film about the boy whose mum tried to fuck him in the past. Zemeckis channelled 1.21 gigawatts of power into my interest in cinema, and I repaid him by watching everything else he made, up to and including Beowulf. But his forays into motion capture left me as cold as CG Tom Hanks' dead doll's eyes, and forgive me father, for I have forsaken Bob this past decade; not one of his post-2007 films have passed mine eyes.

But then along came Welcome To Marwen, with its intriguing blend of motion capture and live action, and its bizarre claim to be based on a true story despite having a trailer full of scenes that appeared to be from a spectacularly violent, war-movie version of Toy Story, and like Doc Brown I figured: what the hell.

Steve Carell engages Serious Steve Mode for his role as Mark Hogancamp, a lonely and apparently eccentric man who takes photos of dolls posed in WWII costumes and situations, and who has a thing for women's shoes. Hogancamp's true story was told - reasonably well, by all accounts (I haven't seen it) - in Marwencol, a 2010 documentary that provided the inspiration for Zemeckis' film. The reasons for Hogancamp's model behaviour are undeniably fascinating and tragic, but the first problem with Welcome To Marwen is that it takes two hours to explain them when they could have been dealt with in a ten-minute prologue. This has two immediate effects: firstly, to summarise the premise here would count as a spoiler for the whole film; secondly, Zemeckis needs to pad out the running time somehow. And if there's one thing Hogancamp's story doesn't have that Bob Zemeckis can add, it's a metric fucktonne of motion capture action sequences.

And so about half of Welcome To Marwen consists of those war-movie Toy Story scenes, in which 'Hogie', a heroic GI action figure in 1940s Belgium (who looks suspiciously like Steve Carell) is repeatedly captured by Nazi action figures, then rescued by a collection of sexy female action figures who kill the Nazis in increasingly violent fashion. Hogancamp merely photographed these imagined stories; Zemeckis splashes them on the screen in stunningly-realised fantasy sequences that are undeniably fun to watch, but which add little to the film's emotional core that the photographs don't. In fact these sequences unbalance the story, creating a weird tonal mixture of effects-driven action comedy and weighty drama that is going to be a nightmare to sell to audiences. Here's a film that wants to cover transvestism, Neo-Nazism, hate crime, violence as a solution, substance abuse, PTSD and other assorted mental health issues, but at the same time foregrounds cutting-edge CG action and visual gags. It's certainly not boring, but it is a little uncomfortable.

Carell is fine as Hogancamp (although clearly has an absolute ball as his 1/6th scale alter-ego), and Leslie Mann is wonderful as his near-mythically non-judgemental neighbour Nicol, but every other character is a cliché of some kind or other - Gwendoline Christie's Russian carer, for example, is teeth-itchingly ill-advised. Zemeckis' script, co-written with Caroline Thompson, is clunky and obvious at times: a barman drops a lead weight of exposition on a character who is only there to receive that exposition on our behalf, for example, and unnecessary narrative devices are crowbarred in to ramp up dramatic tension. Good Characters 100% accept Mark for who he is while Bad Characters 100% reject him for being a weirdo, as if the script is terrified of offending anyone with nuance. And Zemeckis can't resist a distractingly meta, extended Back To The Future-referencing gag which made me wonder if he'd lobbed it in after watching Ready Player One.

There's a truly original and inspiring film in here somewhere, but you can't help thinking it's the one that somebody else made eight years ago. Hogancamp deserves to be acknowledged for his art and the events that led him to create it, but he probably didn't deserve to have those events diminished by embellishing them with button-pushing melodrama and a side order of mega-budget kids' holiday filler. Welcome To Marwen isn't a total failure while you're watching it, and if more people look up Mark Hogancamp as a result then all well and good. But I'm fairly sure Bob Zemeckis can do better than this, and I hope it's not another ten years before I can be arsed to find out.

Bridge Of Spies

"A battle is being fought by two competing views of the world," intones a character in Steven Spielberg's Cold War drama Bridge Of Spies, and the subtext hangs in the air like a dense cloud of obviousness. It'd be easy to accuse the line of being trite - yes, that battle is always being fought, we get it - if it wasn't hammered home by two recent real-world events: the terrorist attacks in Paris, and Turkey's violent removal of a Russian jet from what may or may not have been its airspace (an incident chillingly mirrored half way through Spielberg's film). The timing is, of course, tragically coincidental, but it's not hard to see that Bridge Of Spies' gloomy geopolitical outlook would indeed be depressingly relevant whenever it was released. To dismiss that dialogue as hackneyed cliché would be a heartless shrug at everything Spielberg - and, by extension, his protagonist - believes in and wants you to have a good old think about on the way home and, preferably, for some time afterwards.

While that might sound like you're in for 141 minutes of being guilt-tripped for not giving sufficient shits about international conflict, Bridge Of Spies isn't really interested in patronising you. Quite the opposite, in fact: its densely-worded script and stubborn refusal to throw in frequent action-packed, or even tension-laced, set-pieces (barring the aforementioned plane-downing) demands your full attention and intelligence from start to finish. Nip out for a wazz in the middle of this and you'll return to find borders and allegiances have shifted, at least three secrets will have been revealed (or hidden) and Tom Hanks' Tomhanksness will have multiplied tenfold.

Tom, cardy

As the insurance lawyer bafflingly assigned to the defence case of Russian spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), Hanks' James Donovan opts not to take the easy way out by losing the case and sending Abel to his death, instead saving his life AS INSURANCE (do you see?) in case any US military personnel should find themselves behind enemy lines and a bargaining chip is required. The storytelling rug-pulling that follows is incessant and exponentially ambitious: just when you think the story's about Abel, the focus shifts to Donovan and his literally fist-clenching stoicism against a tide of hate from his own countrymen (fuelled by a biliously jingoistic press; again with the modern-day parallels). Before you know it it's about tensions in a newly-divided Berlin, and by its climax it's reaching for nothing less than world peace and understanding, albeit with the soft edges of Spielberg's trademark optimism sharpened slightly to offer an inevitable edge of cynicism.

Hanks, frequently and comfortably typecast as the all-round Good American, seems on a mission to up the stakes here to Apex Of Humanity. Donovan couldn't really give a toss whether or not Abel is guilty; he sees him as a human being first, an honourable soldier second and a treacherous spy third, if at all. His fight to save Abel's life is motivated in part by clinical forward thinking but mostly by a streak of compassion wider than the Iron Curtain, and when the time comes to employ Abel as leverage for the life of a captured American soldier, Donovan takes his crusade a step further than anyone expects - or, for political reasons, really wants - him to.

This is what happens when you go for an evening stroll with Janusz Kaminski

It's a complex tale, deftly delivered by fully qualified masters of the craft (the revisions done to Matt Charman's script by the Coen brothers eschew their trademark oddballery in favour of clean storytelling lines), and although it very obviously belongs to Spielberg's late, grown-up period, he's not afraid to have fun with his omnipresent god lights, lens flare or hammering rainstorms. There's a pleasing smattering of dark humour too, not least in Rylance's amusingly laconic, Scottish-accented Russkie. What you take away from it is up to you, but a sequence involving the erecting of the Berlin Wall echoes the appearance of the World Trade Centre in Munich, and this shit isn't just thrown together. History, as told by Steven Spielberg, rarely stays in the past, and right now it sure as hell isn't confined to the screen.

Latest Spielberg/Hanks collaboration is final film to be inspired by T'Pau album

The next Steven Spielberg film to hit cinema screens will be the Tom Hanks-starring Cold War espionage thriller Bridge Of Spies, according to reports. Due for release in October, the film marks the fourth collaboration between the two Hollywood titans, but more importantly it's also the fifth and final film to be inspired by the discography of '80s power balladeers T'Pau, who famously had that song that time.

The movies' obsession with Flame-Haired Carol Decker and her band of generic bemulleted nobodies has been a defining feature of 21st century cinema, so in the absence of anyone else wasting their time writing about it, I decided to put my - heh - heart and soul into investigating further.

Bridge Of Spies

 

T'Pau's first and best album (i.e. it's the only one anyone remembers) is, ironically, the last to give its title to a movie. Released in 1987 and immediately launching Flame-Haired Carol Decker into everyone's faces, it contained such era-defining classic tracks as Heart And Soul and China In Your Hand. "I am walking / over the bridge of spies today / freedom is only one more step away / you only have to hold me," warbled Decker on the title track: words which composer John Williams looks forward to setting against his lush strings as Tom Hanks clambers over the bodies of deceased secret agents in order to cross a river while clutching a teacup. Made of china. In his hand.

Rage 

 

Released just a year after Bridge Of Spies, T'Pau's second album Rage somehow reached number four in the UK album charts despite nobody actually buying it. The LP is now the scourge of charity shops everywhere, which, with a pleasing symmetry, is almost certainly the destiny of the movie adaptation starring Nicolas Cage. Cage plays a furious Flame-Haired Carol Decker, whose anger at being beaten by Shakin' Stevens (Channing Tatum) in the final of ITV's pop dinosaur party Hit Me Baby One More Time results in the live, on-air disembowelling of host Vernon Kay (Eric Roberts).

The Promise

Following a three-year silence which nobody noticed, T'Pau stormed back in 1991 with their third album, The Promise. The record's performance ensured that Decker and her pals would go their separate ways once it dropped out of the Top 40's arse, and the tragedy of the band's situation was so moving that respected Chinese director Chen Kaige took it upon himself to tell their story in a 2005 film. Cecilia Chung plays Qingcheng (Chinese for "Flame-Haired Carol Decker") and Jang Dong-gun essays the role of rhythm guitarist Ronnie Rogers, with whom Decker enjoyed an alarmingly hirsute relationship.

Red

Seven years passed before, contrary to popular demand, Flame-Haired Carol Decker reformed T'Pau and released Red, the cover of which featured Decker pointing at her vagina and looking unimpressed. When it came time for the movie version, the obvious choice to play Decker was Bruce Willis, who reformed his own band of past-it has-beens in order to take on an apparently corrupt US administration (a thinly-veiled metaphor for the British music industry). Nobody expected that either the album or the film would get a follow-up, but fate had other plans.

Pleasure And/Or Pain

In a futile attempt to drag this feature out beyond its blatantly limited capacity, T'Pau re-returned early this year with their eagerly unawaited comeback album Pleasure & Pain, which is so brilliant it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page. The cunning twist in the tale is that the album is a musical version of erotica-peddling director Zalman King's 2013 smutsplosion Pleasure Or Pain, in which - according to IMDb - a young woman (portrayed in song by Flame-Haired Carol Decker) is shown "a world of decadence and debauchery that pushes her sexual limits to the brink". As literally no human ears have heard the album, its faithfulness to the film cannot be verified. When asked about the discrepancy between the two titles, which somewhat defeats the object of this feature, the author feigned a heart attack before running away cackling like a loon.

Undead Checkout Operators

Robert Zemeckis is parping out another of his motion-capture films this Christmas. A Christmas Carol doesn’t star Jim Carrey, it stars Jim Carrey’s performance and voice. Here’s a trailer to clarify my ramblings:

I really don’t get all this motion capture stuff. It’s too close to looking photo-real to be animation but it’s not close enough to actually look real. As a result “mo-capped” (ugh) people just look like dead-eyed dolls moving in a manner unnervingly similar to humans, in much the same way as Shia LaBeouf approaches acting.

In films like The Polar Express and Beowulf, mo-cap (eurgh) has been used to capture the movements and facial features of actors like Tom Hanks, Angelina Jolie and Ray Winstone, in order to create an animated character that looks a bit like Tom Hanks, Angelina Jolie or Ray Winstone and stick them in an animated world. Am I missing something here? Why not just film these guys against a green screen and make the effort to put a realistic-looking world around them? That’s what happened in the Lord Of The Rings and Star Wars prequel trilogies, and their actors didn’t look like undead checkout operators at the end of a 10-hour shift. Well, except maybe Hayden Christensen.

As it happens Peter Jackson did use mo-cap (bleurgh) to create Gollum and King Kong from the performances of the inhumanly awesome Andy Serkis, so I suppose it does have its place, and its place is creating non-human characters, not vague approximations of humans just peculiar enough to give you nightmares. Of course Jackson has now blown his winnings by teaming up with Steven Spielberg to waste years of quality movie-making time on the Tintin films, to be filmed entirely in, yes, motion capture.

So sorry, I love Robert Zemeckis for giving us the Back To The Future trilogy, but I wish he’d stop mucking about with mo-cap (hrrreeuurrrrgghh) and get back to making proper films. You know, ones that use actual film? If he’s unsure, here’s a handy cut-out and keep guide to the difference between success and failure:

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