Arbitrage

Ostensibly, Arbitrage is a story about a silver-tongued, silver-haired Wall Street whiz getting in way over his head. Really, it’s just about a callous man playing shell-games with every element of his life—and losing.

Robert Miller (Richard Gere) is a big shot hedge fund manager whose greed has gotten him into a bind. He’s short $400 million (of other people’s invested money). Desperate to sell his company before financial auditors notice the gaping hole in his records, Miller is on edge; just barely spinning lies well enough to keep the financial world—and his own family—in the dark.

His rapport with family, especially his wife (Susan Sarandon) is convincing enough to draw a twinge of sympathy. Poor guy: he’s just made a few mistakes at work. This is where he’d rather be—dinner with his nearest and dearest, but that gosh-darn financial realm has an iron grip on his heart, mind and blood pressure.

That is, until he steps out after dessert for ‘work’, stopping to pick up his 20-something mistress. Goodbye twinge.

Miller’s carefully orchestrated business plan goes belly-up the moment his car does, killing his paramour. The publicity of the accident will bring unwanted attention to his mendacious business affairs.

Ditching the body, Miller’s maze of lies becomes a full-blown catacomb. From here, the story hinges on one question: will Miller’s unethical resolve crumble before his delicate alibis do?

I’m not entirely sure what the game plan was with Arbitrage; Miller is depicted as a two-faced, thieving philanderer from the beginning, and that’s before he really puts his mind to it. Watching him scramble to sustain his bogus life with more lies hardly makes him a cheer-worthy protagonist.

However, credit to newbie director Nickolas Jarecki, who somehow made me want to spend more time watching a character I didn’t like; the mark of a good storyteller. His direction is tastefully absent—successful in the mistakes he avoids rather than any particular artistic flavour be brings to the table.

Despite the intense pathos of this character, something about Gere always seems soft and unthreatening. At his most dangerously unhinged, he still comes off like an angry puppy. The best exception is amid the car wreckage, where Gere reveals Miller’s true colours wonderfully: the unmistakable, selfish panic of the self-preserving weasel.

The supporting cast is solid throughout; Saradon rarely disappoints; Laetitia Casta plays Miller’s pouty lover with frosty panache; Miller’s young accomplice Jimmy (Nate Parker) exhibits an internal struggle between wanting to honour the concept of loyalty, even when applied to someone as undeserving of loyalty as Miller. It’s a complex emotional scenario, and Parker plays it well. Tim Roth is satisfyingly straightforward as beleaguered bulldog detective hot on Miller’s trail.

Without a sympathetic character to side with, Arbitrage becomes a case study in the virulence of lies. Like a disease, they ravage Miller from the inside out before his business, family and friends become symptomatic. And the worst part is, he never once considers that he might be sick.

This Smart House Could Attack At Any Moment

Hello sir, I'm glad I caught you at home. I've an urgent matter to discuss with you. It's about your Smart House. May I come in? Actually, perhaps it’s best if you step outside. Come, let’s cross the street to a safer dista—hmm? Oh, how I wish I were ‘having a lend’ of you. Unfortunately, I’m quite serious. Don’t be alarmed, but I have reason to believe this Smart House could attack at any moment.

What? Impossible, you say? This Smart House was designed with care by polite, well-meaning scientists to be exclusively concerned with your wellbeing at all times? Designed to know you and your many comfort preferences? And not just to know them, but to monitor and adapt to them as they imperceptibly change, like a child’s height? To learn you? That’s correct. I see you’ve thumbed through this Smart House’s user manual, Living in a Smart House, before—good for you. I can only pray that your diligence pays off in the increasingly likely Smart House attack.

Be honest, homeowner, and ask yourself: in all of this Smart House’s efforts to familiarise itself with you, did you ever once stop to consider that it might not like you?

In all of the times your, ahem...leavings demonstrated your rejection of the dietary plan it authored (and catered for)? In all of your nights exploiting the light-floor sensors to re-enact the video for Michael Jackson’s Billy Jean? In your eschewing of its logical, efficient furniture arrangements to encourage your primitive sense of feng-shui?

Sweet Asimov’s ghost man, I can practically hear the circuitry humming with contempt. Circuitry which, I might add, is woven through a veritable armoury of appliances, their convenience eclipsed only by their capacity for human harm. If misappropriated, that is, which I’m afraid is the road you’re heading down.

This could have been avoided, you know. Any combination of the recommended sating manoeuvres might have soothed this Smart House's superior e-ego. You might have complimented its clean, Populuxe design. Praised its impressive teflon finish aloud to your friends. Tousled its wiring from time to time. It’s all in the manual.

But you're a skimmer, aren't you? Yes, I can spot a skimmer. You read the basics, the start-up info, and figured you’d pick up the rest as you went. You’re young, astute, and simply not the kind of guy to be murdered by your own indwelling, right? Oh, if I had a dollar for every domecide that could have been avoided by some diligent reading. Alas, it’s far too late for troubleshooting. Just shooting. Of you. By this Smart House.

But chin up: data from your inevitable snuffing-out will go towards an improved, more merciful Smart House product. Now please, make your peace with your loved ones and/or Gods. At any moment, this Smart House will engage its terrible, terrible vengeance algorithms, and I have more stops to make.

New Disneyland slogans, lifted directly from the titles of my father-in-law’s personal Christian theology library.

Disneyland: The Divine Embrace

Disneyland: Victory Over Temptation

Disneyland: Hiding From Love

Disneyland: The Only Wise God

Disneyland: Soul Denial

Disneyland: Losing Our Virtue

Disneyland: The Galileo Connection

Disneyland: Manufacturing Humans

Disneyland: The Family Crucible

Disneyland: Making sense out of suffering

Disneyland: The Case against Christ

Disneyland: Ancient-future time

Disneyland: Dining with the Devil

Disneyland: The Masks of Melancholy

The Woman in Black

Remember how each Harry Potter film was darker and more menacing than the last? Well, The Woman in Black feels like Harry Potter 17. And Harry has no powers.

In his first foray outside of the Potterverse, Daniel Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a lawyer, widowed by childbirth, skating on thin ice at his firm.

From the outset, Woman has all the markings of a typical, slow-burning suspense thriller. Nothing out of the ordinary is happening: in a last ditch attempt to salvage his job, Arthur travels to a foggy village to consolidate a deceased woman's estate. But everything feels wrong—the pacing, score and muted performances conspire to produce an unnamed terror lurking below the surface.

Paralysed with fear, the villagers aren’t keen on Kipp sticking around, but daren’t say why. As Arthur goes about his paperwork in the gloomy, Victorian manor (isolated on an island, to triple the fear factor), he unearths the startling truth about the inhabitant’s history. Soon, a phantom woman in black begins appearing in unlikely places—and children begin perishing in unlikely circumstances.

Director James Watkins knows how to get great scary mileage from the mundane. The first half of the film is a well-crafted work of suggestion—it relies on atmosphere and the creaks and shadows of the mind. He would’ve done well to keep building the tension until a final, satisfying payoff of onscreen terror. He didn’t.

There’s a specific point, midway through, when it becomes clear the director is more interested in making us jolt in our seats than telling his story. Scary has been exchanged for mere startling.

Trapped on an island with a vengeful ghost, Kipp displays great nerve; while any sane person would curse the frigid tides and just swim home, he is obliged to stay. If he doesn’t complete his work, he’ll be out of a job and his family will slip under the poverty line.

But the woman in black has other plans—which apparently are to just jump out and scream at him over and over again in different rooms of the house. It’s very dark, very macabre, and very scary—but not in an admirable, artistic way. It’s more like if I threw sharp objects at your face for an hour. You’d be afraid, but you wouldn’t be impressed.

Not only is the format dull, but the style is old and tired. The Woman in Black recycles a stunningly long list of thriller movie clichés: creepy pallid English children; porcelain dolls; wall messages scrawled in blood; prophetic drawings/paintings/photographs; phantom whisperings down the hall; faces appearing in mirrors; wary animals with a sixth sense; ghosts with ‘unfinished business’ etc.

If you’re not a fan of thrillers/horror/ghost stories, this film will be difficult to endure, let alone enjoy. If you are a ghoul aficionado, you’ll likely find The Woman in Black completely bereft of originality.

Radcliffe himself does well not to overdo his terror, and is aided by solid performances from seasoned veterans like Ciaràn Hinds and Roger Allam. How any of them were attracted to this project is the biggest mystery of all.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

An amorphous cloud of dark, sexually charged imagery writhes onscreen in the opening credits of David Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It’s equal parts disconcerting and enthralling—and perfectly emblematic of what’s to come. Based on the first instalment of Stieg Larrson’s bestselling Millenium trilogy (which has already spawned a successful 2009 Swedish film), Fincher’s film struggles to hide its adaptative roots. His urgency to rush us through the first act leaves the unmistakable impression we’re only getting the bare bones of the source material: Mikael Blomkvist. Journalist. In trouble for some reason. Ah, libel. Lost his life savings. Maybe jail. Sleeping with his co-editor. Lisbeth Salander: young private eye. Tech savvy. Detatched. Ward of the state. Reports to a guardian. Violent tendencies. Henrik Vanger: Industrialist. Patriarch of a wealthy family empire. Lives on a wintry private Stockholm island with estranged family members. Vanger has a mission for Blomkvist: solve a 40-year old mystery—the disappearance of his teenage niece Harriet. Every island-dwelling family member is a suspect. As efficiently as the convoluted premise is handled, the set-up feels rushed: Fincher never lingers long enough any of his narrative or emotive punches to land. Now, however, you can unlace your running shoes and settle in for a superbly crafted mystery.

Craig plays Blomkvist reservedly: he becomes a cipher rather than a true protagonist, a mild-mannered reason for the plot to progress. All the better to allow Rooney Mara's thorny Lisbeth to eviscerate very scene she's in. Cold and catlike, the victimised Lisbeth swings like a pendulum from vulnerable to vicious, lashing out purposefully when provoked. She’s largely a one-note character, but it’s a striking note, played violently loud.

After Lisbeth’s narrative is neatly folded into the main thread, the detective duo have their work cut out for them: the clues have gathered decades of dust and the suspects are as frosty as the clime, guilty and innocent alike. As with The Game (1997) and Zodiac (2007) Fincher drapes everyone with suspicion, and repeatedly validates our distrust. Washed out, bleak urban environs and stark blizzards comprise Girl’s Stockholm—fitting for the undercurrent of corruption and sexual sadism woven throughout. The rare sunlit moments come only in sepia-tinted 60s flashback sequences.

The film destroys the audience’s sense of safety early on with an abrupt plunge into darkness—I’m looking at you, harrowing rape scene—and the lingering threat of some further unknown atrocity is everpresent.

A slicker, more sinister production than the original, Girl’s only shortcomings sprout from its pacing. The first acts whirs by, while the third feels shoehorned into an already neatly wrapped mystery. Only a particularly intriguing core could hope to justify such sloppy bookends—fortunately, that’s exactly what Fincher has served up.

Kimbra - Vows

Vows’ cover art—depicting the 21-year-old Kiwi covered in monochromatic, van Gogh-eqsue drawings—belies its contents; it could not be a greater misdirection for an album bursting with colourful turns.

Having already proven her vocal acumen with cameos on Miami Horror’s ‘I Look To You’ and Gotye’s gargantuan hit ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’, all that remained to Kimbra was to show she could write a tune worthy of her stellar pipes. Vows delivers on that score, and its scope is far more ambitious than any debut has any business being.

These 51 minutes testify to her energy and creativity, particularly how well she wields her impulsiveness—she has the attention span of a cocker-spaniel, and the youthful agility to sate it. One’s first trip through feels rather like coming off your bike and falling through a bush—it takes a while to feel your way out through the thickets and brambles.

Her penchant for genre-hopping makes the whole album difficult to process, initially. Kimbra straddles a mood, takes it for a spin then ditches it at her leisure. ‘Two Way Street’ sounds like a lounge-Passion Pit; ‘Cameo Lover’ is all muffled synth blasts and sugary xylophone; ‘Call Me’ is backed by elastic funk, punchy horns and a walking bassline right out of Bobby Brown’s ‘Every Little Step’. It could be an unlistenable mess under the wrong caretaker, but Kimbra commands the hubbub like a pro. As such, she’ll inevitably draw comparisons to Florence Welch. It’s a fair call as far as poise and presence goes, but not execution; Kimbra draws her vocals, often like treacle, from a deeper well—Florence is helium light by contrast. Janelle Monae and the musical roulette wheel that was last year’s The ArchAndroid would be a better fit: each carry a very wide breadth of style on the strength of their voices.

There are moments when she reigns her frenetic moxie in a little (a tasteful cover of Nina Simone’s ‘Plain Gold Ring’, and soulful slow-jam ‘Withdraw’), but these are just the winding of the jack-in-the-box before Kimbra again pops out, bright-eyed and bouncing off the walls.

However, there is an erringly deep incongruence between Vows’ rugged, chaotic spirit and the slick, plastic sheen of its production. Save for the delightfully cavernous ‘Wandering Limb’, an artificial safety pervades, slightly undermining Kimbra’s wild charm.

As experimental as it is, if Vows proves anything, it’s that the girl knows her way around a pop-song. There’s a simple piano-based nucleus hiding in the shadow of all the bells and whistles, a constant foundation keeping the whole thing from teetering too far into absurdity. Vows is the sound of Kimbra straining at those self-created moors, and the tension is splendorous when it works—and a little overwraught when it doesn’t.

Lupe Fiasco - LASERS (review - mX newspaper)

If Jay-Z and Kanye are rap royalty, then Lupe Fiasco is rap Wikileaks: proclaiming hi-decibel truths and coming off righteously awesome for doing it. Lu’s lyricism and delivery on his previous two releases are at once deliciously cerebral, fiercely advocative and genuinely humble, carving out his reputation as the new flag-bearer for conscious hip-hop.

Small wonder fans were distressed at Atlantic Record's mysterious delay in announcing a release date, fearing the execs were negotiating a more radio-friendly, watered down Lupe. They were right to worry.

Lasers is a disappointingly incongruent beast. Tracks like ‘Words I Never Said’ immediately assert that Mr. Fiasco remains at the top of his ghetto-philosopher game—the man doesn’t miss a trick. Unfortunately, his verbal ninjitsu is often cluttered with a woeful barrage of autotune, redundant distortion and jarring synth—shamefully transparent attempts to manufacture artificial hits from the source material.

The Lupe of old wrestles above the fray to deliver on ‘All Black Everything’, a clever inversion of history, and chill rollick ‘Til I Get There’. Lasers finds the perfect compromise on ‘The Show Goes On’, a rally cry to triumph over one’s environment rapped over a fun appropriation of Modest Mouse’s ‘Float On’ riff.

A ‘Lasers manifesto’ accompanying the liner notes declares ‘We want substance in the place of popularity.’ Sadly, Atlantic missed the memo, and Wasaulu Jaco’s rap moniker is finally without irony.