Disappointing... yet brilliant

My Favorite Wife Director Garson Kanin Stars Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Gail Patrick, Randolph...

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:20:00 -0400

My Favorite Wife

Director Garson Kanin Stars Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Gail Patrick, Randolph Scott USA 1940 Language English 1hr 28mins Black & white

Classic screwball with an emotional tug

Because their films were sold on the fact of their easily identifiable presence, it is easy to assume golden-era Hollywood stars just did the same thing in every movie. That idea, as I tried to suggest in my look at Sight & Sound’s Top 10, has led to certain films - Vertigo and The Searchers, in this case - being overpraised for letting us see the dark side of Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne, as if either of those men had only played one-dimensional heroes before the mid 1950s. Bogart may not have done different voices or dyed his hair to help us distinguish between, say, The Big Sleep and In A Lonely Place, but his performances are very different.

Likewise, while I would say that Cary Grant’s Cary Grantness is central to the pleasures of both My Favorite Wife and Notorious, what we get from him is not the same thing each time. Oh, he is funny and elegant and charming in both, but in Notorious he is also assured, competent, looks capable of professional violence and is - I can’t think of a better way of putting this - manly.

In My Favourite Wife, Grant’s lack of manliness is a running joke. He has to wander around in the ill-fitting leopard print dressing gown from the hers-and-his set his second wife has bought. A psychoanalyst brought in to examine him catches him holding up women’s clothes against himself in the mirror. He’s forced to compare himself to muscle-bound Randolph Scott*. And the fact that he ends up paying for suites for two women at the same honeymoon-favourite hotel isn’t - as the staff imagine - because he is a super-smooth Casanova but because he is a coward.

He is a bigamist by accident, but stays one for a couple of days through indecision. The accident is the unexpected return of his (first) wife Ellen (the terrific Irene Dunne) who he has just had declared dead seven years after she went missing in a shipwreck off Indochina. Ellen discovers that Nick has taken his new wife Bianca (Gail Patrick, who specialised in haughty beautiful women) to the same hotel they went to for their honeymoon and follows him there…

In a lot of ways, My Favorite Wife is a classic screwball comedy, full of rattling dialogue, scheming, misunderstanding and perplexed authority figures (the hotel manager, the long-suffering judge). It is very funny, and Grant and the quick-witted Dunne had already proved themselves as an excellent pairing in The Awful Truth three years earlier. This essay about Leo McCarey, who directed The Awful Truth, points out that his screwball comedies aren’t as full tilt as those made by Howard Hawks (or PrestonSturges, for that matter) and have more of an inclination towards more openly emotional moments. This is true too of My Favorite Wife, which McCarey produced and helped come up with the story for. While Nick is afraid of telling Bianca the truth, Ellen is can’t bring herself to reveal her identity to her children, who were too young to remember her when she went missing**.

This side of the film dominates the final 15 minutes or so, after crashing around has finished. It’s played well, but I prefer the high velocity trading of insults and evasions. And that’s what you get for most of the running time. My Favorite Wife is a chance to see Cary Grant at his best, surrounded by a cast fit to be in his company.

* Considering the treatment they normally get in fiction, it’s interesting that Scott’s super-toned athlete is a strict vegetarian.

** Ellen vanished while covering a scientific expedition as a photographer. In the 1963 remake, Move Over, Darling, with Doris Day and James Garner, the whole family had been caught up in the disaster but Ellen was the only one to go missing – was the idea of a professional woman leaving her young children for weeks at a time a harder sell in the early ’60s than 1940? Or was the change prompted by the fact that Move Over, Darling was a Doris Day vehicle?

The Human Factor Director Otto Preminger Stars Nicol Williamson, Iman, Robert Morley, Derek Jacobi,...

Sun, 12 May 2013 14:32:00 -0400

The Human Factor

Director Otto Preminger Stars Nicol Williamson, Iman, Robert Morley, Derek Jacobi, Richard Attenborough UK 1979 Language English 1 hr 55 mins Colour

Uneven but intriguing late Greene adaption

Obscure films come in two broad categories: those whose low profile is easily put down to unknown actors, film-makers, source material and/or a small budget, and those whose lack of fame is a little harder to explain away. The Human Factor fits firmly in the second group – greatness abounds among the people connected with this movie. The book was by Graham Greene, adapted by Tom Stoppard, the director (admittedly long past his best) was Otto Preminger, responsible in 1940s and ‘50s for dark Hollywood classics including Laura, The Man With The Golden Arm and Anatomy Of A Murder, the cast includes Derek Jacobi, Dickie Attenborough (star many years before of the best adaptation of an already published Greene novel, Brighton Rock) and John Gielgud. There’s even a title sequence by Otto’s genius mate, Saul Bass.

For all that, it’s not hard to see why this one has stayed under the radar. There are problems of tone, of setting, of acting. It starts off feeling a lot more like Stoppard than Greene, as clever, satirical dialogue introduces to a highly dysfunctional MI6, whose bosses are in one of their customary searches for a traitor. What that will bring to mind for many viewers is the BBC’s mighty Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, made in the same year. This goes, initially, more for uneasy laughs, playing partially on the class gap between the service’s upper-class leadership and its middle-class functionaries – intrigued by the Maltesers he finds in the briefcase of Maurice Castle (Nicol Williamson), the new security chief (Attenborough) asks whether you can get them in Fortnum’s.

That brings us on the question of a setting, because there is no getting around the fact that this is a Cold War spy drama that spends a fair chunk of its running time in the sleepy Hertfordshire town of Berkhamsted. That is where Castle lives with his South African wife, Sara (Iman*) and their son, Sam. As the film goes on, we learn that during his time working in Pretoria, Castle grew a little more sympathetic that the job called for with the anti-apartheid movement, and then fell in love with Sara. This brings a moment of crisis when MI6 is visited by Castle’s antagonist in South Africa’s notorious security agency, BOSS.

Which brings us to the acting: there’s no question that there are a number of different acting styles going on here, from the fairy broad comedy of Robert Morley to Jacobi’s not-quite-there portrayal of a would-be hip bachelor who is actually a sad sack, and from the brittle anxiety of Williamson to the stilted, is-it-acting-at-all? work of Iman. In end, though, I found her performance quite touching.

In fact, for all its awkwardness, maybe because of its awkwardness, it’s an affecting film, bringing us back – as the title suggests – to personal considerations that drive decisions made by the smallest cogs in big world events. Betrayal, as often in the work of Graham Greene, is a central theme.

I find it interesting that Preminger and Greene, both in their seventies, should have been drawn to what was then the very current issue of South Africa’s place in the Cold War. It was a tricky one, one that most supporters of the anti-apartheid movement rather wished away. The democratic West officially disapproved of apartheid and the exiled ANC leadership was based in London… but the South African Communist Party, which despite a lot of interesting thinking within its ranks, remained officially pro-Moscow, was a major element in the ANC. With Portuguese Southern Africa now in Communist hands**, the apartheid regime was able to use its strategic position to dampen pressure on it from the US and Europe (It wasn’t a coincidence that the fall of the Berlin Wall was swiftly followed by the collapse of white South Africa).

In any case, the politics of thankfully long-gone regimes aside, does The Human Factor deserve to at least be rescued from complete obscurity? I’d say yes, there’s something compelling about its low-key take on the intelligence world and its perverse logic.

*I hadn’t spotted her name during the credit sequence, so I keep puzzling over this oddly familiar yet clearly out of place figure.

**East German agriculture advisers were doing enormous damage in Mozambique around this time.

La Vida Util Director Federico Veiroj Stars Jorge Jellinek, Manuel Martinez Carril, Paola Venditto...

Mon, 06 May 2013 08:21:22 -0400

La Vida Util

Director Federico Veiroj Stars Jorge Jellinek, Manuel Martinez Carril, Paola Venditto Uruguay/Spain 2010 1hr 10mins Language Spanish Black & White

Lovely look at the life of a professional film obsessive

Jorge (Jorge Jellinek, a real Uruguayan film critic) works at Cinemateca, a serious-minded (overly serious minded, one might argue) art-house film theatre in Montevideo. They rely on charitable donations to stay afloat, unsurprising as the audiences for screenings seem to barely creep into double figures. Before each film, over the PA comes an appeal by Jorge insisting, ‘You need Cinemateca, Cinemateca needs you’.

It would be easy to slip into regarding Jorge as a sad sack - he’s a big, middle-aged man who lives with his dad and doesn’t look like he gets out much. But I think that sells him short: he’s good at a job that keeps him connected to the thing he loves, and allows him the chance to do a weekly radio show about movies, although admittedly one I think I’d struggle to stay listening to. And those big photo-reactive glasses and slightly long hair were probably considered cool in Montevideo back when he started the job in the 1980s.

Still, the film takes a big shift half way through, when Jorge has to step out of Cinemateca into the city. But the cinema doesn’t leave him, it’s just that instead of spending a day watching and talking about film, he spends it living as if he if were in the movies. It’s so much more subtle than that sounds - this isn’t, say, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid or Pleasantville. It’s mostly a series of small, joyful, liberating moments of the kind most of us have dreamt of having at some time or other. In some ways (and I’m sure this is a comparison those involved would relish) reminded me of the great silent movie, Sunrise.

It’s in black and white, which doesn’t make feel like a truly vintage movie, or at least not until near the end, more 1970s art house b&w - Wim Wenders’ Alice In The Cities, maybe. It looks terrific. But just as important, probably more important, is the combination of the sound design and the score, which does a look of the work in setting the mood. It’s a sweet, funny, sometimes sad movie that is deeply in love with films but knows there is life outside of a Manoel de Oliveira retrospective.

The Ryan Gosling Sort-of-Paradox, or why it’s surely possible to gather your girls together,...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 02:56:34 -0400

The Ryan Gosling Sort-of-Paradox, or why it’s surely possible to gather your girls together, eat Ben & Jerry’s and watch one guy stomp another to death on screen

[There are spoilers ahead. Also sexism, probably.]

There are women I know who have only seen one film starring Ryan Gosling. For them, he will always be the cute guy in the 2004 weepie The Notebook. As they have warm memories of that movie, and continue to see pictures of Ryan looking handsome on the red carpet, or incongruously bemuscled in photoshoots, they wouldn’t mind catching him on screen again. But reviews of his later work don’t really promise a comfortingly teary experience. Someone I work with learnt how true this was when she saw Drive. Not that she didn’t like the film – no, she really enjoyed the synth-and-neon saturated thriller. But she was also still in shock the next day about some of the things done by Gosling’s character in that movie.

Many years ago, I wrote a Winona Ryder-inspired piece titled Actors Aren’t Indie Bands. My point was that it is generally wrong to look for some kind of unifying aesthetic vision behind a actor’s career choices. They can end up in a flick because they like a bit of variety, because they wanted to work with a friend, because their agent is putting pressure on them, because they have a debt to a bookie or the taxman, because they want to be in something their kids can see, because they want to be 2,000 miles away from their husband or the back-room pick-up who keeps calling. Or because they genuinely feel that Goodfellas and My Cousin Vinny are of equal worth.

But Ryan Gosling seems to be unusual on that count. Since his post-child actor career effectively began with him playing a Jewish neo-Nazi in The Believer, Gosling appears to have steered away from obvious crowd pleasers, and only made an incursion into biggish budget movies for the all-guns blazing Gangster Squad.

He’s played a bloke in love with a sex doll. He once starred as an idealistic white middle-class teacher working in a school full of impoverished black and Latino kids… which could sound like Dangerous Minds until you discover that Gosling’s character is addicted to crack (and also a left-wing intellectual rather more attuned to the massive contradictions of his situation than your standard Hollywood inspirational educator).

In Drive, Gosling plays a Hollywood stunt driver who turns his particular skills to profitable criminal ends, has a capacity to be extremely violent and is a lifelong loner who experiences a brief moment when he feels part of a family. In The Place Beyond The Pines, by contrast, he plays a carny motorbike stunt rider who turns his distinctive skills to criminal ends, has a capacity for extreme violence, and is a lifelong loner who experiences a brief moment feels he’s part of a family. You can tell the difference because in Drive he has light-brown hair and sports ’80s-does-’50s bowling alley chic while in TPBTP he has a bleach job, wears his T-shirts inside out and has the kind of DIY prison tats usually seen on someone drinking Special Brew in a Glasgow park at 11am.

(The poster above severely undersells them).

The common ground between Gosling’s roles (rather than the two movies themselves, which are in some ways very different, although both terrific) suggests he is aiming for a persona that is a chunk Steve McQueen, a seasoning of Lee Marvin and a side order of the young Mickey Rourke. It’s admirably minimalist, pleasingly unshowy and reactive.

At least in The Ides Of March, a fairly high-minded film about the dark inner workings of an election campaign, he looks presentable. As it also stars George Clooney, I suppose it could serve as a tub-of-ice-cream at home movie, although the only tears obviously on offer are those mourning the inherent corruption of American politics and the media.

Blue Valentine (obviously) has the word ‘valentine’ in the title, is a relationship movie and contains, as showcased in the trailer, a cute scene with Ryan playing a ukulele as Michelle Williams dances. But the song he sings is, ominously, You Always Hurt The One You Love. The presence of Williams, too, is a hefty clue to abundant gloom on offer, culminating in a sex scene of somewhat terrifying bleakness.

So The Notebook is an outlier in Gosling’s career, a red herring. Basing your impression on what he does in that film is like only having seen Tom Cruise in Magnolia* or indeed Michelle Williams in the perky-teens-unravel Watergate comedy Dick, before her career fully became a (frequently impressive) slough of despond.

And yet, Gosling remains a favourite with the more excitable parts of the showbiz media, suggesting one of two things - people are happy to fancy him despite not seeing his movies (making him, in a strange way, something of a male counterpart to Scarlett Johansson, whose dried-husk screen anti-presence surely makes her only attractive to those who never see her films, or not post-Lost In Translation, anyway). Or, alternately, and this is what I am going with, many of the women who loved him in The Notebook also love him in the movies he has made since, even when (especially when?) he crushes a man’s skull with his boot or stabs someone in the face with an Allen key. Of course it’s possibly to be enthralled by both weepies and moody ultra-violence.

Meanwhile, I still feel I like Gosling’s films more than I like him. Oh, he is usually good, and was very good in Half Nelson. I like how quiet he is on screen. But I don’t think I have ever thought he is the only person around who could have done what he did in a film. And when he arrives on screen, I don’t get that subliminal sense of looking forward to what he is going to do for the next two hours in the way I do with, say, Jeff Bridges or Philip Seymour Hoffman.

He makes good choices, though. You could fill a decent weekend mini-festival of interesting Ryan Gosling films. I’m looking forward to Only God Forgives, his second film with Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn, the man who made Pusher, Pusher II: With Blood On My Hands, Pusher III: I’m The Angel Of Death, Bronson, Vahalla Rising and the not inaccurately named Bleeder. That’s the cinematic company Gosling keeps. Yet no matter what atrocities he commits on screen, there always seems to somewhat ready to say ‘But he’s soooo cute!’

I think that’s probably Gosling’s blessing, but I suspect he might see it as a curse.

*Although as I’ve argued before, Frank TJ Mackey, the self-help guru peddling the art of using and discarding women played by Cruise in Magnolia, is just the inner creep at the heart of all other Cruise characters allowed out into the open.

The Gay Divorce Director Mark Sandrich Stars Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Alice Brady, Edward...

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 07:34:56 -0400

The Gay Divorce

Director Mark Sandrich Stars Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Alice Brady, Edward Everett Horton USA 1934 1hr 47mins Language English Black & White

Fred & Ginger turn up in a wonderfully improbable 1934 Brighton

Everything I know about Brighton in the 1930s comes from two novels, Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square (1941) and Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938). Between, they evoke a seaside town that’s an exciting, dangerous, very British place – lively (in season), chaotic, sinister, seedy, and yet sometimes full of hope. Here’s Hamilton: ‘It was crowded everywhere, with the shelters and the deckchairs full, the blinding satin-blue sea glistening and purring on one side, and the tar and the dust and the people all smelling of heat. And behind, and mingling with all the noise and colour and heat and haze and smell, there could be heard, if you cared to listen, the distant church of people walking, or rather slithering about, on the difficult and crowded beach below – the characteristic noise of Brighton at the height of the season.’

It’s true that both Hamilton and Greene were naturally inclined to search for the darker side of life, but I’m also pretty sure that Brighton never resembled the extraordinary art deco fantasy conjured up in the first proper Astaire/Rogers movie (they had danced together in Flying Down To Rio, but they were not the stars of the film). You might at a stretch believe that Miami or Cannes might have been a little like this at their peak, but, bless it, never Brighton.

The funny thing, though, is that what brings Astaire and Rogers’ characters (Guy and Mimi) down to the South Coast is one of its grubbiest industries – the staging of the ‘discovery’ (and photographic documentation) of one member of a married couple and a person (hired for the purpose) who was certainly not their spouse in order to secure divorce on the grounds of adultery, this being a comparatively quick way out of unhappy marriages in the pre-permissive era. In The Gay Divorce, this miserable business plays as low-velocity farce in vast hotel suite, during which Ginger and Fred have time to nip out for the spectacular, lengthy sequence built around the song The Continental with a sizeable chorus line and a number of different singers having a go at the lyrics. It’s enchanting and enthralling.

The plot isn’t very important, but it goes like this: Guy meets Mimi in Dover, when her dress has become trapped in her aunt Hortense’s trunk. He’s instantly besotted by her – she doesn’t respond, for reasons that later become clear. She seeks legal assistance from Egbert (Edward Everett Horton), who, she doesn’t know, is Guy’s best mate (and, from a 2013 perspective, is desperately in love with him). And that leads them all to Brighton…

…where the movie comes to life. Fred and Ginger don’t even dance together until they get there, and that’s a good 50 minutes into the film. Brighton also means a showcase number from a teenage Betty Grable that looks almost enough to tempt Egbert into the obscure delights of heterosexuality, and a terrific turn by Edward Blore as the waiter. Blore became a regular in the Astaire/Rogers series, although his greatest moments come in the tremendous Preston Sturges comedy The Lady Eve.

In the early part of the film, Astaire can seem a bit lightweight, and the whole thing seems flimsy. But as it gets going, it takes flight. As Graham Greene, in his other capacity as film critic, later wrote of Astaire: ‘He might have been drawn by Mr Walt Disney, with his quick physical wit, his incredible agility. He belongs to a fantasy world almost as free as Mickey Mouse’s from the law of Gravity.’

Like its star, this delightful movie turns out to be weightless in the best possible way.

Spring Breakers Director Harmony Korine Stars Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson,...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 17:50:00 -0400

Spring Breakers

Director Harmony Korine Stars Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, James Franco USA 2013 Language English 1hr 34mins Colour

Faux-exploitation movie set during bourgeois America’s tiny window of misbehaviour

The line above this was going to be ‘Disney chicks go Russ Meyer’. But although that is a useful starting point in some ways to this story of four college girls getting up to no good in Florida, it doesn’t quite get the essence of the movie. Spring Breakers conjures up lots of other films, but two for starters are Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey – his homage to time-fractured late 1960s cinema – for some parts of the style, and Quadrophenia, for the regret at the passing of youth’s most magical moment even while the moment is still occurring. And the scooters, obviously.

There are three potential notes of interest here. The first, the main commercial selling point, is that it stars two Disney child stars of recent vintage - Vanessa Hudgens from High School Musical and Selena Gomez from the long-running TV show The Wizards Of Waverley Place – as girls gone wild. Indeed, one of them plays a character who not only gets involved with guns, violent crime, multi-player sex and drugs, but assorted complicated combinations thereof. She is involved in the only scene in the movie that actually manages to be halfway disturbing. But the idea of Disney starlets getting dirty is hardly a novel one – something the film acknowledges with several references to Britney Spears. As such, this angle is presumably mostly of concern to a) the kids slightly younger than them who grew up watching Gomez and Hudgens and might actually find their actions here either brain-scrambling or liberating and b) one or two grizzled gentlemen of my acquaintance who turn out to have suspiciously deep knowledge of Hannah Montana back episodes.

Secondly, Spring Breakers is written and directed by Harmony Korine, who was once considered a shocking youth himself. Harmony is a venerable 40 now, but I guess his 26-year-old wife Rachel, one of quartet of bikini-clad women here, keeps him in touch with what the younger folk are up to. In his prime – the late ’90s – Harmony was something of a cult, a cause for several critics I knew and respected. Not just for his script for Kids or his debut Gummo* and Dogme 95 entry Julien Donkey-Boy, but his novel A Crack Up At The Race Riots, his collaborations with David Blaine and assorted other artistic projects/wind-ups. I didn’t buy into it all – I assumed Kids was a joke Harmony played on prurient older people including the film’s director, Larry Clark, all pervily interested in the supposed amorality of youth. I quite enjoyed Julien Donkey-Boy, but that might just be because I find Werner Herzog talking in English one of the greatest treats cinema has to offer. But I wasn’t moved enough to catch Harmony’s most recent films – Mister Lonely or Trash Humpers.

The third element is James Franco, actor/writer/performance artist/etc, who has pursued a similar path of provocation to Korine, most famously appearing as a mysterious artist on the daytime soap General Hospital while making a film about this experience that showed at the same gallery his characters was ‘showing’ at. Time describes him as ‘the 21st Century’s first great public intellectual’. I haven’t seen enough of the stuff he has done outside movies to know if it is interesting, but he can come across as a bit of a try-hard, studiedly weird. I have no problem with his film work. Here he is gangsta rapper Alien (with the stress on the first word), with braided hair and platinum grills. It’s all a bit obvious. In any case, if you are a fan, be warned that Franco doesn’t turn up until halfway into the film.

Before that, three amoral girls (Hudgens, Mrs Korine and Ashley Benson) and their God-fearing chum Faith (Gomez) find themselves short of cash to get out of their college town and off to spring break – leaving Faith behind, the others rectify the situation by holding up a diner. All four head for Florida, and join in the general business of getting beer poured on them, smoking, snorting, flashing and cavorting. Then it goes a little wrong, and Alien comes to their rescue, in return for…

As its 18 certificate suggests, Korine isn’t about to short-change his audience when it comes to tits and guns, gear and beer in paper cups, not to mention sizeable quantities of truly terrible dance music. But anyone coming to see the film for cheap thrills would probably swiftly run out of patience due to the way that shots, sequences and voice-over fragments of dialogue and phone calls home are looped and half-looped, so that moments are both foreshadowed and revisited, or repeated just because Harmony feels like it. Sometimes it is dizzying, sometimes it attains the poignancy that Korine seems to be reaching for, sometimes it’s just tiresome. It’s often beautifully shot (with a colour palette and sensibility that is often distinctly ’90s, it should be said), and when it’s not – the grotesque opening sequence of spring breakers doing their thing on the beach – that is clearly on purpose. The girls look alternately flawlessly beautiful and convincingly pale and blotchy. There is stunning scene of a darkened lecture theatre lit by the glow of a hundred laptops.

There are moments that I suspect Harmony thinks are just genius that instead remind me of what I found off-putting about his early work, like when Alien is sitting at a white grand piano by the water surrounded by the girls wearing pink balaclavas and they all sing Britney’s Everytime. Incongruous isn’t the same as intriguing.

The actresses are good, better than the script deserves, blank and moody and excitable and out of their depth. And fairly heroic considering the amount of time they have to spend in bikinis. This is not a bad film – it’s entertaining and sporadically clever and sometimes funny and it looks good. What it doesn’t do is get me any closer to understanding spring break, other than what I know already, which is that contrary to what was commonly believed at the time of Kids (and many determined moral panickers insist on clinging pn to in face of the evidence), young people in the US have mostly become steadily better behaved. Spring break seems to truly work as a carnival in the sociological sense of the word – these kids go absolutely sex & drink & drugs bonkers for one week at a time, four years running, and live the rest of their lives as model citizens. Go figure.

* One of the rare amusing moments in the wearying history of The X Factor occurred when during movie week, when Simon Cowell gave a contestant Roy Orbison’s Crying on the grounds that it was used in Gummo. Louis Walsh went apeshit, claiming this was a cheat because he, Louis, had never heard of the film. I rather suspect Cowell hadn’t seen it either, but that wasn’t the point. A cultural world limited by the staggeringly tiny amount that Louis Walsh knows would be a particularly bleak place.

Silver Linings Playbook Director David O Russell Stars Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De...

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 05:43:43 -0400

Silver Linings Playbook

Director David O Russell Stars Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Jackie Weaver USA 2012 Language English 2hr 2mins Colour

Rom (non com) with dubious mental health angle

Crazy guy meets crazy girl, bonds over the horrors of meds, eventually – it’s not easy! These are wounded people! – they creep towards love. Aw. Or something like that.

Except… here are some of my problems. My first is simple: SLP has been referred to as a twist on the romantic comedy – the primary twist being that there precious few laughs.

The second is with Bradley Cooper’s character, Pat. Pat is an asshole, quite apart from his mental health issues. This seems reasonable, to some extent, considering his upbringing as we can judge it from what we see of his parents (Robert De Niro, as a sports obsessive*, and Jackie Weaver, both pretty good). He’s been in psychiatric care after committing a crime that, although not acceptable, seems understandable to me**. And that’s fine for the first half of the film, or so, until the tone shifts and Pat’s redemption approaches. I don’t believe in Pat’s redemption. I think he would still be a jerk. That’s not a product of an unhappy time in his life – that’s the core of his character. His tedious belief in the power of positivity seems (to me) to proof of how far from having a grip he is. We’re meant to forget this because he is played by Bradley Cooper, I guess. But I have no investment in Bradley Cooper – by accident, as much as anything else, I’ve never seen The Hangover. The only thing I remember seeing him in was the quite atrocious A-Team movie, in which he was probably annoying but who could tell in the shadow of Liam Neeson giving what may well have been the most anti-charismatic performance ever given by someone who is purportedly a major film star, a black hole into which the rest of that misbegotten movie tumbled.

The third, which follows on from that, is that this isn’t about two equally damaged people at all. Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) has been acting out after her husband died. The movie wants it both ways, using her account of her behaviour then for titillation (the diner scene that was used as one of the promo clips for the film) and yet equating it with Pat’s capacity for sudden violence. But during the actual course of the movie, there is nothing wrong with Tiffany at all. He’s smashing things up, disturbing the neighbourhood – and her sole misstep during the running time of the film is to send one foolish text message. She is, in fact, one of those wise, nurturing, beautiful young women on hand in Hollywood movies to redeem immature pricks like Pat – I was very much reminded of Mila Kunis in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.***

And that brings us to the tonal problem – a movie that starts off with a downbeat indie vibe takes an ungainly lurch into Hollywood romance with one of those big showstopper endings that you really have to earn, which I don’t this manages. Lawrence tries, she really does, but she can’t haul this poorly written movie by herself. As in David O Russell’s previous film, The Fighter, years of accumulated family pain and complexes seem to be fixed by one or two soul-bearing conversations. Really?

A few of small points – some of the same kind of British critics who kick up a fuss if a Scottish film is subtitled in the US were stumped by the American sports references, including the title (google it, you lazy bastards)… they’re really not a big deal: there is one scene where some of what Tiffany says might be confusing, but the meaning of the scene itself is clear. On the other hand, the film’s treatment of the Indian characters left me really uncomfortable. And Julie Stiles – how did she end up with sister-of-the-star roles? What did she do to deserve that?

*As an account of the intertwining of obsession with American Football and family dysfunction, this doesn’t begin to match up with Buffalo 66.

**[SPOILER ALERT] There’s a subtext that says, no wonder Pat is so wound up – it’s not just that his wife was cheating on him, she was cheating on him with a bald, middle-aged bloke. The horror!

***SLP could also be seen as a version of Punch-Drunk Love with all the interesting stuff taken out.

Was it the beard wot won it? So the 2013 movie awards season is over and within weeks I will have...

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:36:00 -0400

Was it the beard wot won it?

So the 2013 movie awards season is over and within weeks I will have completely forgotten who won what. But shortly before I do, I would like to pay tribute to a major player in Argo’s eventual triumph, Ben Affleck’s (now departed) facial hair.

As beards go, Affleck’s was unremarkable. In Argo, it was period appropriate (even if the real Tony Mendez was a tache man). Off screen, it was at one with current fashion: beards haven’t been so common in the West since the 1970s.* Ben’s chum George sports one, as do the Bloomsbury-styled fops of Dalston and Williamsburg and so do many men of Affleck’s age, often to compensate for the dwindling hair on top of their heads.

Even so, Ben Affleck’s beard did an important job. It was a physical way of symbolising of the break with his unpopular past.** He had, of course, already surprised a lot of people by directing two terrific films, but he still looked like Ben Affleck. Tall, good cheekbones, thick hair, slightly plasticky skin, dimpled chin*** – Affleck has the kind of Action Man look that lazy people imagine makes a Hollywood leading man but actually more often characterises no marks like Chris O’Donnell or guys like poor George Peppard, who have to age into some personality. There is also something cruel about Affleck’s face – you’d cast him as a Nazi officer in a second, and he’s been well used as bullies in Dazed And Confused and Mallrats, a murderous outcast angel in Dogma and arrogant lawyer in Changing Lanes. Widowed dad you want see seduced back to happiness by Liv Tyler in Jersey Girl? Not so much. Let’s not even talk about Pearl Harbor…

The beard, then, helped in a simple way to say, I’m not quite the same guy who annoyed you any more. But as a trio of relevant precedents suggests, he might need to put on weight to continue the current goodwill if he wants to continue to act as well as direct.

Affleck and Vince Vaughn must surely have been up for the same parts more than once in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Vaughn arrived being funny in Swingers, but the fact that he was tall, thin and good-looking led to the mistaken notion he might be a dramatic leading man, and his appearance in a lot of forgotten late ’90s thrillers along with Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake. It was only when he got heavier that everyone remembered that being funny is what he did best. He’s now never short of work, if not necessarily good work.

Jason Lee, Affleck’s co-star in a number of Kevin Smith, was funny from the start, but also kind of creepy and sly. To play the endearingly haphazard eponymous pilgrim in the excellent sitcom My Name Is Earl, he needed a gut and a walrus moustache, which rendered him barely recognisable. These days, he looks rather weird - I think he needs to get back to the Earl look and grow comfortably old styled like Jimmy Greaves/David Crosby.

But most of all, there is the man who was Ben Affleck before Ben Affleck, a slim leading man with good teeth, siblings in the business, annoyingly vocal liberal politics and a relationship with a huge female star of the day that ended up clobbering his reputation. They (despite their political leanings) even both played charmless right-wing action hero Jack Ryan. Redemption for Alec Baldwin came when he reemerged as a big man, full of menace that could be played straight, as in The Cooler or, in the mighty 30 Rock, for laughs.

Bon apetit, M Affleck.

*One of the many unexpected developments post 9/11 has been the return to favour of the beard in fashionable circles.

**In retrospect, Ben Affleck’s sins - the pre-dues-paid Good Will Hunting Oscar, a few of lousy movies, a few months of tabloid overexposure - seem remarkably slight.

***Only acceptable for members of the Douglas family.

The Ghost of Jimmy Stewart weighs in on the digital v film debate This week’s episode of...

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 13:13:03 -0500

The Ghost of Jimmy Stewart weighs in on the digital v film debate

This week’s episode of Talking Pictures – the BBC’s dig into their vault of interviews with the great Hollywood stars – featured James Stewart. There were the inevitable appearances on Parky and Wogan, but also an interview in front of an NFT audience conducted by Joan Bakewell (wearing a strange tepee-like dress – this was 1972). During it, Stewart discusses his long-held theory was that what audiences take from movies are moments, rather than whole performances or even stories. This notion, he implied, came from encounters with fans who would rarely mention the name of film or even a co-star, but would describe their favourite bits, usually starting ‘You were in a room…’

My reading of what he was saying was that these moments can’t be forced, but film-makers and actors can stay alert to when they occur. He told a story about director William Wyler (who made Roman Holiday and the 1959 Ben-Hur, among many other films), and was notorious for insisting on lots of takes. On set one day, after the director had shot the same scene again and again, someone finally got up the courage to ask Wyler if they were doing anything wrong.

‘It’s all fine,’ he said.

‘Then why, Mr Wyler, are we doing so many takes?’

‘I’m waiting for something to happen.’*

Which brings us the long-running film vs digital debate among movie makers, critics and fans, one that’s even had its own cinema-released documentary, with interviews conducted by Keanu Reeves, no less. It’s an argument will eventually be settled not by aesthetics but by economics. I can see both sides of the argument: digital cameras have come an awful long way in a short period of time, but I’m still inclined to believe that they can’t match film in the hands of really gifted people, and I mourn the near-extinction of Super 16. On the other hand, it’s far easier now to make a decent-looking very cheap film.**

And although I suspect Mr Stewart would have been firmly in the celluloid camp, creating space for moments to happen has to be easier with digital, which has few limits (technical or economic) on the number or length of takes you can shoot, giving you so many more chances to stumble across the magic. Chalk up an unexpected spectral vote for digital?

Well, maybe. Because then again, the magic in those moments that Stewart was talking about is created by the interaction of acting, story, direction, light and whatever medium you are shooting in – it’s a mysterious process. And what you can’t measure is how important film itself was to that alchemy…

*This is a paraphrase of the anecdote – my ancient Mac is incompatible with the BBC iPlayer.

**Perhaps weirdly, movies shot on digital that look fine on the big screen – I’m thinking of Michael Mann’s recent work in particular – look awful on TV.

Duel In The Sun Director King Vidor (officially – unofficially, half a dozen others had a go,...

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 07:41:23 -0500

Duel In The Sun

Director King Vidor (officially – unofficially, half a dozen others had a go, including Josef von Sternberg) Stars Jennifer Jones, Gregory Peck, Joseph Cotten, Lillian Gish, Lionel Barrymore USA 1946 Language English 2hrs 24mins Colour

Quite delirious attempt at star-making

Don’t be fooled: Duel In The Sun may look like a Western – it has lots of cowboys, the coming of the railroad, a gunfight in a saloon, a big ranch and some very charismatic cattle – but it isn’t one. It’s a melodrama, the great big unhinged tale of a girl whose terrible upbringing means that she ends up loving a man she also hates. It’s in a film in which our heroine screams ‘I’m trash, I tell ya, trash!’ and a preacher sums her up thus: ‘Call her a child? Under that heathen blanket there’s full-blossomed woman built by the devil to drive men crazy.’ It’s a film with what look to modern eyes like serious problems with race. It’s nonsense – but by god it’s beautiful (there’s one scene with lighting nicked straight from Caravaggio) and weirdly fascinating at times.

It goes like this: after her long-suffering father has gunned down her slutty mother and faces the hangman, wild-eyed Pearl Chavez (Jennifer Jones in terrible brown-skin make-up) is packed off to the care of Laura Belle McCanles (Lillian Gish), who lives on a huge Texas ranch with her bitter, wheelchair-bound husband, the Senator, and their two adult sons. Jesse (Joseph Cotton) is college-educated, kind, forward-thinking; he falls in love with Pearl instantly. Lewton (Gregory Peck) is useful for breaking wild horses, but otherwise he’s a gambling, guitar-playing wastrel; he quickly lures Pearl down to the local swimming hole…

The man responsible for the on and off-screen madness of Duel In The Sun was legendary producer David O. Selznick. It was Selznick who let the film spiral wildly over-budget, drove the original director (King Vidor) past the point of tolerance, hired and fired a series of replacements – and reportedly personally added extra fake blood to the climatic scene that gives the film its title. Two things spurred him on: the first was that he had behaved in exactly the same way during the making of Gone With The Wind, and that had become the biggest hit Hollywood had ever known. The second has that he was hopelessly in love with Jones (who was 17 years younger than him, which isn’t extreme by movie-world standards) and would do anything to make her a star.

She was miscast – her accent is all over the place, and she couldn’t nail the part of the elemental but contradictory Pearl. Of course, it didn’t help that she was buried in make-up that might just have worked in a black-and-white movie, but has a strange greenish tinge in super-vibrant Technicolor. Cotten is faultless as the worthy but dull Jesse. I’m not sure about Peck – it might just be that roles he took later on make him seem an improbable rogue. Gregory Peck was an excellent Gregory Peck, but he was no Clark Gable.

Pearl is at the centre of the story, but she doesn’t drive it on – until towards the end, things happen to her. The clash between the brothers, too, is often indirect. The result is that the film doesn’t really have enough energy to compensate for how daft it often is. Still, if you like drawn-out death scenes and out-of-control dancing girls and families at war and the movies at their vastest, it’s all here.

Lore Director Cate Shortland Stars Saskia Rosendahl, Kai Malina, Nele Trebs, André Frid...

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 03:46:39 -0500

Lore

Director Cate Shortland Stars Saskia Rosendahl, Kai Malina, Nele Trebs, André Frid Germany/Australia 2011 Language German (with English subtitles) 1hr 48 mins Colour

Growing up is tough when the Thousand Year Reich turns out to have been a big con

What kind of kind of film is Lore? It’s a teenage girl-struggles-to-come-to-grips-with-her-world indie movie, told in saturated colours, lots of close-ups, bursts of sound, taking time to follow sparks leaping from a fire or a snail crawling along a branch, all reflecting the intensity of the lead character’s feelings and largely set in deeply lush forests in spring and early summer whose burgeoning life echoes (but not in a clanging way) the girl’s budding sexuality. Roughly speaking, that puts it in a genre that takes in Sofia Coppola’s films, the terrific Swedish film Fucking Amal (aka Show Me Love), My Summer Of Love and director Cate Shortland’s excellent debut, Somersault.

It also belongs to the overlapping collection of films about young women who find themselves in extremely difficult circumstances, which includes Wendy And Lucy, festival circuit fave Martha Marcy May Marlene, Lilya-4-Ever and the brilliant Winter’s Bone, which Lore resembles at some of its best points.

Lastly, it’s a survivors’ road movie, one of those films about a group of people heading through a wrecked landscape looking for safety and civilization. Many of those are post-apocalyptic, and that’s how this film often feels, although it’s set in May 1945, and the disaster that befalls Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) and her family is the defeat of Hitler’s Germany. Because these aren’t victims of the Nazis, they are Nazis (granted, we can probably let the baby off the hook) – blonde, blue-eyed true believers. With their parents swept up by the Americans, teenage Lore is left in charge of her younger sister, twin brothers and the baby, trying to guide them across a country not only devastated by war but arbitrarily divided into four zones by the occupying powers, making the most straightforward routes from one place to another impossible. Along the way, they keep bumping into concentration camp survivor Thomas, and eventually have to accept this resourceful young man’s help.

Their journey (along with a lot of other things) is a metaphor for German’s eventual de-Nazification process, but far from a crude, unnuanced one. It’s probably best embodied in the younger sister, Liesel (Nele Trebs), who at the start seems a more perfect product of the system than Lore but turns out to be repeatedly adaptable. Saski Rosendahl is good, too, as Lore, not especially likable, nor that heroic, just dealing as best she can (and sometimes failing) with the difficult circumstances thrown at her.

There are moments that can seem fairly familiar – the begging, bargaining, stealing; the first encounter with a dead body – and it isn’t entirely free of clichés. But it is a film that gives us characters with vile worldviews that aren’t their faults, and doesn’t crudely manipulate our attitude towards them. Nor for a minute does it feel worthy or like it is try to teach us a lesson. It’s a film that is often uncomfortable to watch but never feels like it is revelling in the grimness. But again, the setting, the history, is only ever part of what makes a film, and whatever this movie is trying to say is mostly conveyed by colour, by noise, by where the camera lingers, and it does all of that extremely well.

So far in the awards season there has been a clear winner in the battle the two based-on-real...

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 08:53:06 -0500

So far in the awards season there has been a clear winner in the battle the two based-on-real events movies involving the CIA versus Islamic extremism. It’s Argo all the way.  Now, that neither proves that Argo is a better film than Zero Dark Thirty nor guarantees it a win at the Oscars. Its edge over Kathryn Bigelow’s hunt for Bin Laden movie is almost certainly due in part to factors unrelated to the quality of the work.

ZDT may have been hampered by Bigelow’s comparatively recent Oscars triumph with The Hurt Locker, while Argo seems to have benefitted from the Ben Affleck Redemption Narrative, something he hasn’t shied away from. Argo also has a splendid double act from old troupers Alan Arkin and John Goodman, which will probably go down well with the large senior contingent of the Academy (and it’s a partially a Hollywood on Hollywood movie, which always goes down well in the industry). ZDT, on the other hand, has an attention-grabbing star in Jessica Chastain, a little bit of Tony Soprano in a wig and the now obligatory rag-bag of Aussies and Brits.

 ZDT has definitely been hurt, to some degree unfairly, by the torture controversy.It’s also been damaged by the film-makers’ early claims of accuracy and authenticity. As the awards season has gone on, the ZDT team have talked more about the small number of characters standing for the many CIA agents, informants, prisoners and so on that involved in the real messy nine-year quest. But that all came too late, and clashes with the texture of the film, designed to give you the sense that you are really there in Pakistan or Afghanistan. It’s not aiming for Lawrence Of Arabia mythic or Three Kings satirical, more ripped from the headlines, and that makes you vulnerable when you stray (as the film often does) from the established facts*.

Then there is the Barack Obama dimension. The release of Zero Dark Thirty was reportedly delayed until after the election in case this account of the president’s highest-profile foreign affairs achievement gave him an unfair advantage. Ironically, when the film actually did emerge, it turned out that Obama’s by almost-all-accounts very hands-on involvement in the final stages of the search for Bin Laden is nowhere in sight. While you can see why Bigelow and writer Mark Boal may have wanted to avoid accusations of being party political, by choosing to deal with such recent events they put themselves in a difficult position. In the end, they have dodged bias only by leaving a massive hole in the climax of the story.

Argo has been attacked for its inaccuracies as well. The film libels the foreign services of New Zealand and the United Kingdom, although it does so in one line that I would be surprised if one in a hundred audience actually noticed. But although they are both stem broadly from things that really occurred, Argo and Zero Dark Thirty invite different standards by which they will be judged. Argo’s story seems so delightfully improbable that even if only a quarter of it happened that way, that would be insanely great. ZDT demands to be taken seriously, so that those scenes that jar (and there are a number), really jar and undermine the whole exercise.

The final one of the external factors is that Argo takes what was the lowest point in America’s self-esteem - the Tehran embassy hostage crisis - and finds something positive that happened during it. ZDT gives you the pay-off of having UBL dispatched by the US special forces, but only after reminding you that the search for him was a seemingly never-ending shambles. Indeed, like a lot of recent films, Zero Dark Thirty is long and feels longer. The charitable explanation is this is deliberate, that Bigelow wants you to identify with the characters’ frustrations, that this maybe is the trace of the potentially more interesting film that Zero Dark Thirty was meant to have been, before the CIA unexpectedly stumbled across their long-lost target in Pakistan.

But none of that matters as much as the fact that Argo is a much better film, or if that sounds too subjective, at the very least one that completely succeeds on its own terms. It manages to be both efficient and charming, a masterful piece of economical storytelling and very funny. It’s not a short movie, clocking it at two hours flat, but it has a good use for almost every one of those minutes (the Affleck-kid scenes excepted), and that’s a horribly rare thing in mainstream American movies these days. As many critics have pointed out, Ben Affleck pulls off something technically impressive here, getting the balance right between the Hollywood satire and the hostage drama, the laughs and the tension. So many films try it, so many get it horribly, horribly wrong.

Part of my problem with Zero Dark Thirty is that ultimately I’m not convinced that in the end Bigelow and Boal were that interested in the search for Osama Bin Laden. As the poster above suggests, what they, and producer Megan Ellison, have done is to make a major historical event matter less than a bratty young woman getting her way. Bigelow and her collaborators seem transfixed by their own creation, allowing her to repeatedly pop at the centre of the story in ways that veer from the improbable to the impossible, not to mention committing at least five sackable offences. Rather than the 17,000-staffed CIA versus one man, this is the story of one tiny woman taking on her employers** and only as an afterthought Al-Qaeda. Sometimes it reminded me of Buffy The Vampire Slayer drained of humour, crossed with Zelig. Is she worth it, Jessica Chastain’s Maya? Is she a character needing over two and a half hours of your time, one of cinema’s greats? She is not. She is a solipsistic crashing bore. That’s probably true to life of course, truer than Claire Danes’ equally obsessive but fascinating CIA analyst in Homeland. But if you’re going to have the joyless truth, then you need the full joyless truth. You have to show the dozens, if not hundreds, of equally obsessed male and female Mayas there were, the Tora Bora clique and the ‘he’s dead already’ brigade just as driven and bright and full of theories as the ones finally proved right, all with coffee-stained teeth and terrible personal hygiene.

But Bigelow lacked the inclination, the chops or, most likely, the resources to tell a big story on the scale it deserved. The better option might have been to bite off a smaller chunk of it - for instance, there is surely a whole movie to be had in the raid (and it’s build-up) alone. Which brings us back to Argo, which focuses in on a tiny sub plot of a larger story (the main hostage crisis) that itself is brief moment in the history of the US and Iran… Affleck is aware the bigger picture, and the prologue montage even mentions that the CIA organised coup in 1953 that robbed Iran of any chance of secular democracy, but sticks to telling its characters’ story. The result is a rare thing, a totally satisfying modern movie. I am sure it cheats all over the place, but nothing about it made me want or need to turn fact-checker. It’s simply too entertaining.

*For instance, the film clashes with every account I have read by suggesting that rushed by Pakistan jets (which didn’t actually get airborne till later), the Navy SEALS were forced to leave potential evidence behind. In fact the took their time collecting everything they could see - the results provided a pragmatic as well as revenge-driven rationale for the operation, apparently showing that Bin Laden still had an active role in terrorism. Of course, the film has no need of documentary proof, because Maya knows it in her gut.

**The way things are going, I think what we need urgently in 2013 are pro-bureaucracy movies. But if you do want a bureaucrat-versus-their-own organisation film, go for the great Ikiru, which made me weep buckets.

Did we get it right? Neon magazine’s films of 1998 (Part 1) Reading (and writing) end-of-year lists...

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 17:40:32 -0500

Did we get it right? Neon magazine’s films of 1998 (Part 1)

Reading (and writing) end-of-year lists has got me thinking once again about the creation of these top 10s, 20s, 50s… It’s such an arbitrary, often panicky process, full of instant regret and shaded (when you taking part in a collective vote) with lots of calculation. Did you get it right at the time, and more contentiously, from the perspective of years later?

The test of time is a slippery notion, one beloved of batshit politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair in their final terms as they determinedly ignore those who disagree with them. But at least until we reach the Day of Judgement, history doesn’t have one point of view, it has multiple, ever-changing perceptions. For instance, the crucial question of how to react to the economic crisis since 2007 tends to be have been answered by experts according to their differing opinions on the causes and resolution of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a question very much unresolved 80 years on. And just because something was well thought of 100 years and is well thought of now tells you little about how it was thought 50 years ago and how it will be regarded in 50 years time.

With that somewhat pompous reservation noted, we come to the list. Neon was an excellent/crisis-ridden/very funny/short-lived monthly movie magazine published by EMAP from late 1996 to early 1999. I contributed to all but two issues and for final nine months was the reviews editor. The electorate for the 1998 poll was the magazine’s small staff - a few regular freelancers may also have got a say. To be eligible for selection, the films had to have been released for the first time in UK cinemas in 1998.

Here are the movies [click on titles to get the IMDB]:

16. In The Company Of Men

15. Carne Trémula (Live Flesh)

14. The Last Days Of Disco

13. The Big Lebowski

12. The Daytrippers

11. The Truman Show

10. Hana-bi (Fireworks)

9. The Wedding Singer

8. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

7. Saving Private Ryan

6. Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels

5. Velvet Goldmine

4. There’s Something About Mary

3. Starship Troopers

2. Buffalo 66

1. Boogie Nights

First impressions from a 2013 perspective:

a) 1998 was a terrific year for films. But also, as an electorate, we may have voted for films that (mostly) big news within the confines of of our office, but were far from consensus choices from a lot of other critics (Fear And Loathing, Velvet Goldmine, even, absurdly, Starship Troopers).

b) Perhaps surprisingly, there are no films on the list about which my opinion has changed completely in the 14 years that followed, none that I loved then and now hate, hated then and now love. At 28 I was probably more excited by Fear And Loathing that I would have been at much older – my interest in Hunter Thompson has dimmed considerably since then, so that’s not really a judgement on the movie itself. And I don’t think we foresaw how tiresome (and unappealingly skinny) Christina Ricci would grow up to be.

c) Two of these films star Jennifer Lopez, then a neo-noir fave after her attention-grabbing turn in Bob Rafelson’s Blood And Wine. I think she could have had a very different movie career if she had wanted to (and funnily enough, she’s returned to roughly that kind of territory in her next film).

d) Maybe some evidence of the test of time is that I feel a few of these films may need an introduction (then again, some of them probably needed one then). U-Turn is small-town crime thriller that, rather surprisingly, was directed by Oliver Stone and starred Sean Penn and Ms Lopez. The Castle is an Australian comedy. The Daytrippers is an almost archetypal US indie of the era, a talky comedy about a woman convinced her husband is cheating on her who goes from Long island to Manhattan to find out - accompanied in a crammed car by her squabbling family. Stars Hope Davis, Stanley Tucci and - yes! - Parker Posey. Hana-bi (Fireworks) is a rather moving Japanese crime drama from director-star Takeshi Kitano. Buffalo 66 is somewhat uncategorisable film written/directed by and starring Vincent Gallo as a bloke who gets out of jail and, on his way to a meal with his hated parents, kidnaps a young woman (Christina Ricci) to pose as his wife. Gallo had been a Neon obsession from the start and was by a distance the least famous person we ever had on the cover. It must have taken a hell of a sales job to convince the people upstairs he was going to be the new Tarantino and Pacino all rolled into one. He wasn’t.

e) The most surprising placings, it seems to me now, are the subsequently much-loved Out Of Sight, down at 19, and Lebowski at 13. We had had Out Of Sight on the cover, so it wasn’t like it wasn’t a big deal, It may have split votes with the other Elmore Leonard adaptation, Jackie Brown, also lower than you might expect. Lebowski was a classic slow-burner.

f). The Castle? I’ve never seen it and have only the faintest notion of what it was about. Every time I think I remember, I realise I am thinking of The Dish. Then again, with such a small staff two people amounted to a powerful block vote.

g) I loathed The Truman Show then, and still do. It has an entirely unjustified reputation for being prophetic. In fact, the mass projection of love and hope on an unknowing Truman couldn’t be further from our collective relationship with Kim Kardashian. In any case, it’s actually about the death of God. And excessively tedious.

h) Lock Stock provoked some heated discussion. Associate editor Damon Wise argued (correctly) that the film was a huge deal with the punters and the sneery British film magazines had all missed the boat on it. He was right. I still think Guy Ritchie’s public persona is risible and his early films unwatchable, but he’s clearly done OK for himself, as have some of the cast.

i) Velvet Goldmine, American director Todd Haynes’ film about the very British glam rock phenomenon, got a tough ride from critics and public, stumped by characters who were sort of Bowie and Iggy but also not. Damon (again) prepped us by playing the soundtrack endlessly in the office and insisting we had to see the film twice (He was right: it was better the second time).

j) There are three films on this list I will always watch (and always enjoy) at least a few scenes of every time they are on TV: The Big Lebowski, Out Of The Sight and Starship Troopers.

k) So, my instinctive feeling is this: time (so far) has been actively kind to Out Of Sight, which in many ways created George Clooney the movie star, The Big Lebowksi and Starship Troopers, which after the George W Bush years looked every bit as prophetic as The Truman Show isn’t. Pedro Almodovar’s Live Flesh and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown are probably the lowest-key films made by famously unrestrained, high-profile directors. Hana-bi? Takeshi was considered ridiculously cool at the time, maybe less so now? It’s a terrific film. U-Turn (despite all the big names involved), The Daytrippers and The Last Days Of Disco (Kate Beckinsale’s only decent American film?) have all been somewhat forgotten, unfairly in the latter two cases. In The Company Of Men is an odd one – it still gets shown on TV, but I think writer-director Neil LaBute’s very random film career matters a lot less than his status as an important playwright. My family, at least, still loves The Wedding Singer. Fear And Loathing is an interesting, watchable mess that will never escape the shadow of the book. Velvet Goldmine got at least discussed again when Haynes’ even more unconventional Bob Dylan film, I’m Not There, came out. There’s Something About Mary never needed critics’ lists anyway. Saving Private Ryan was hailed as an instant classic, but as time went on the reputation of the beach scene (high) and the rest of it (not so) have separated out. Purely anecdotally, people seem to talk a lot more about Band Of Brothers. We put a lot of effort into making Buffalo ‘66 at least a cult movie (I was allowed to place it as The Observer film & TV supplement’s sixth best film of the 1990s) – but has it made it?

In Part 2: What else was out in 1998? And we look at some crude statistics…

Punch-Drunk Love Director Paul Thomas Anderson Stars Adam Sandler, Emily Watson USA 2002 Language...

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 15:58:52 -0500

Punch-Drunk Love

Director Paul Thomas Anderson Stars Adam Sandler, Emily Watson USA 2002 Language English 1 hr 35 mins Colour

Eccentric love story with astonishing sound design

Maybe I’m wrong, but I suspect that most people who have an opinion on the matter consider Punch-Drunk Love to be the runt in Paul Thomas Anderson’s litter. Unlike The Master or Magnolia, it’s not obviously about big themes. Unlike Boogie Nights, it didn’t have a cast packed with once and future stars. Unlike There Will Be Blood, it easn’t a showcase for the work of the endlessly admired Daniel Day-Lewis. Instead, it’s a romance starring Adam Sandler. And therein may lie the problem.

Sandler is enormously popular, and for a long time was the best-value-for-money leading man in Hollywood, but respected (other than by studio accountants)? Not so much. Unlike, say, Daniel Day-Lewis, at whom awards are freely flung.

But I’ve never really got the Day-Lewis thing – his total immersion business creating (in the relatively few films I have seen of his, which doesn’t admittedly include My Left Foot) mannered performances that make me think of a joyless version of Johnny Depp. Adam Sandler, on the other hand, made a string of films I enjoyed: The Waterboy, Happy Gilmore and, most of all The Wedding Singer. I remember seeing it with my whole family in the much-missed Riviera Cinema in Teignmouth and we all loved it. He has, admittedly, made a considerable number of truly terrible films since.

There’s a subtle difference between the way Anderson uses Sandler Punch Drunk Love and what he did with Tom Cruise in Magnolia. In both cases, the director knows he has hired a film star rather than a character actor. But with Cruise he pushes further – it’s a brilliant, revelatory performance in which the star seems to finally acknowledge the creepiness inherent in his normal screen persona, but which is usually ignored because he is a mainstream leading man. What if we agree that his character in Top Gun manages to be both a narcissist and a stalker, that there is always something wholly unnerving about that grin and that strange stare, that inability ever to look relaxed?*

Sandler’s Barry Egan in Punch Drunk Love, immature, socially inept and given to moments of explosive violent rage, is in many ways close to the characters he plays in the (unapologetically crude) comedies that made his name. What’s different is the context. It’s very simple story, in a way: lovely Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), grown-up, smart, but apparently lonely, sees a picture of Barry and decides he’s for her. This is more good luck that Barry deserves, but he proceeds to do his best to sabotage things.

But none of that explains the texture of this film. First and foremost is the extraordinary sound design. Some noises have been heightened, sometimes it goes silent, but there is always something happening. It’s something you might expect from a short, or a film shown in a art gallery, but not a whole feature. You could regard it as a gimmick, but it works, and reminds you that it’s normally only horror movies (and David Lynch, if you choose to regard him as outside the horror genre) that seem interested in the considerable possibilities of non-musical noise. And of course, standard ‘realistic’ film noise, like camera focus, is unnaturally flat: our perception of sound volumes in our surroundings is subjective and ever-changing – just think of what happens when you’ve been reading something in the office and are interrupted, or the shock silence of power cut when you realise how fucking loud the fridge is the rest of the time.

In the best possible way, Punch-Drunk Love feels like an experiment: it’s Anderson saying, what if I shoot it this way? What if there is a lense flare** everywhere? What if you make an odd little indie love story and have Adam Sandler in the middle of it? What if the lead character spends a lot of time try to explain a great air miles offer on packs of pudding and no one listens to him? What if Philip Seymour Hoffman gives one of the less satisfying performances of his character because actor and director have agreed to try something, just to see whether it works? What if you stick a harmonium in the middle of an office and let the audience search for the meaning in that?

In terms of Paul Thomas Anderson’s career, it’s an interesting moment. It seemed like something of a sidestep, away from the huge ensemble casts of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, away from the shadows of Scorsese and Altman (although there is something Altmanesque about the one scene with Barry’s seven sisters). It’s uncharacteristically short, and uncharacteristically sweet.

But if The Master is a synthesis of everything that Anderson has done so far, and I very much think it is, then Punch-Drunk Love is surprisingly high in the mix. The sound design is one obvious legacy, but Barry’s destructiveness, loneliness, violence, improvisational skills, sense of being at odds with the world, he shares with The Master’s Freddie Quell as played by Joaquin Phoenix.

Beyond that, though, Punch-Drunk Love is a film I’m very fond of in its own right. The sensory overload of the visuals and sound (do see it in a cinema, if you ever get the chance), Emily Watson’s eyes, the way that it draws us into this improbable romance… It’s a film a lot of people struggled with at the time, and for many Sandler is an impossible barrier to enjoyment, but I think it deserves a chance.

*Maybe the best use of that Cruiseness in a mainstream film is A Few Good Men, where is his character’s pure will-to-win, rather than any sense of compassion or sense of right, that leads to justice in the end.

**Before it became JJ Abrams’ annoying trademark

My favourite films of 2012 Simple rules: these are the movies I enjoyed most (or otherwise got...

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 09:30:00 -0500

My favourite films of 2012

Simple rules: these are the movies I enjoyed most (or otherwise got something out of) out of those that had a British cinema release for the first time in 2012 – so no re-releases, no festival films, no award-season bait that won’t be in our cinemas until some time in 2013. I make no claims that this list is any way comprehensive. There were a lot of films I didn’t make it to by choice or by circumstance - for instance, I made a number of ill-fated attempts to see Berberian Sound Studio. Incidentally, the worst film I saw, by some considerable distance, was the Colin Farrell/Kate Beckinsale remake of Total Recall…

1. 2 Days in New York

Mildly smug couple get invaded by relentlessly crass in-laws from out-of-town (in this case, France). That’s often been the stuff of sitcoms and bad farces, but this is touching and funny and has lots of good jokes at the expense of both the French and the Americans. Julie Delpy (still hated by many for playing the singularly most irritating character in the 15-year run of ER) directed and stars with Chris Rock, as her long-suffering partner, Mingus. This is by a long chalk his best film outing (admittedly, no great claim) – his beard alone is a thing of joy. Daft and a bit self-indulgent but ultimately properly endearing.

2. Damsels in Distress

The best surprise of the year – Last Days Of Disco director Whit Stillman returned with his first movie since 1998, an unlikely campus comedy starring the brilliant Greta Gerwig. It’s infused with the spirit of Fred Astaire yet laced with sneakily filthy jokes. A lot more about it here…

3. Shame

On all the serious critics’ lists for 2011, but director Steve McQueen’s unblinking portrait of sex addiction wasn’t unleashed on the paying punters until January. You’ve got to respect at film that can literally silence a bunch of kids in south London. They should show it on the No3 bus. No one’s idea of fun, exactly, but contains some astonishing moments of cinema.

4. Moonrise Kingdom

I have little truck with the notion that something that is highly stylised can’t also be moving, which seems to the main charge laid against director Wes Anderson. On the surface, Moonrise Kingdom is a (clever, amusing, derivative, unabashedly twee) film about a couple of precocious kids running away on a quaint New England island. But it seemed to me much more about the adults caught up in it all. The sadness lingered with me for days – Bruce Willis is heart-breaking. I kid you not.

5. Avengers Assemble (aka The Avengers aka Marvel Avengers Assemble)

It could have been a horrible mess – a film cramming together a sackful of superheroes. But in the hands of Buffy creator Joss Whedon, Avengers Assemble was the perfect balance – fan-friendly but uncluttered by backstory, funny and with the right amount of people/ancient deities getting clobbered. Top marks for the casting of Mark Ruffalo as The Hulk.

6. The Master

There is no film this year I am looking forward to seeing again as much as The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s account of the strange pupil-guru relationship between a damaged WWII veteran (Joaquin Phoenix) and a charismatic cult leader (Philip Seymour Hoffman). It’s a movie full of incredible stuff – not just the two-handers with Phoenix and Hoffman, but also the department store scenes early on, and every second Amy Adams has on screen. And yet, it can also feel like a big beautiful film with not a lot in it. There is an argument that Anderson covered much of the same ground more economically and with more heart in his debut film Hard Eight (aka Sydney), and I have some sympathy with that* Consider this a provisional judgement.

*The counter-argument to that is that The Master takes the best bits from all of Anderson’s previous movies and creates something even better.

7. Argo

Ben Affleck’s retelling of a little-known incident during the 1980 Iran US hostage crisis is just a really satisfying film, managing a difficult balance between comedy and a sombre thriller about a group of trapped, terrified people. Credit to the costume and make-up department – a couple of high-profile critics assumed total unknowns had been used to play the hostages.

8. The Muppets

There are basically two halves of the plot – the first concerns Jason Segel and his muppet brother(?!?), who gets all jealous when Jason hooks up with Amy Adams, and I wasn’t too fussed about that. The second bit, your basic let’s-get-the-gang-back-together to put on a show to save the theatre, was terrific. But then, I love the Muppets.

9/10: Tiny Furniture/Blank City

Post-college meltdown and the lives of second-generation Manhattan loft-dwellers are lovingly depicted in Lena Dunham’s autobiographical comedy, a calling card that led to her HBO series, Girls. An earlier bunch of no-budget filmmakers living in the smack-ridden, rat-infested, crime-plagued downtown of old are celebrated in the entertaining, if outrageously lax with the facts, documentary Blank City.

11. End Of Watch

It has its limitations as a cop movie, but as a portrait of male friendship, this is tough to beat. More here…

12. Sightseers

A caravan holiday around Northern tourist attractions (a tram museum, a pencil museum) turns into a killing spree in this Mike Leigh-ish comedy by Ben Wheatley, who a lot of sensible people reckon is the most interesting young director in Britain. I’m not 100 per cent sold on that notion, but this turned out to be the perfect thing to watch after a day’s Christmas shopping.

13. Skyfall

What has been underdiscussed is how dim Daniel Craig’s Bond is. I can only assume this is deliberate and possibly intended as slightly subversive. Craig is a clever bloke who normally plays fairly clever blokes, but his Bond is far thicker than any previous incarnation, and hopeless at his job when you think about it.

14. Le Havre

Aki Kaurismaki decamped from Helsinki to the tough French port to make this sweet, sad film, an improbable mixture of 1950s melodrama, 1970s French crime flick and social realist examination of the refugee crisis. I’m not sure it added up but it was touching and surprising.

15/16. Bombay Beach/Beasts Of The Southern Wild

Two films digging around America’s rusty margins, looking for unlikely beauty. Bombay Beach, filmed on the shores of the Salton Sea in California, is a documentary of sorts, but contains sequences of dancing interrupting ordinary life choreographed by the director. Beasts… explores a similarly resourceful community on Louisiana’s easily flooded edge, and can seem like a bit of factual film, at least when rampaging prehistoric creatures aren’t around. Both movies have mesmerising moments - both also have times that could be accused of fetishising poverty. Bombay Beach is the more easily defensible - with Beasts I felt I completely understood both what its supporters and critics felt about the film.

Plus…

My favourite films from the past that I saw the big screen and for the first time

Quai Des Brumes (1938)

The BFI is always great, but there is usually one season there a year that in particularly excited about. This it was there retrospective of films starring Jean Gabin, the broken-nosed anti-hero of French cinema. Quai Des Brumes is one of the early ones, just pre-World War II, when he was rough-edged romantic lead. It’s on Le Havre’s seafront, among the desperate, would-be dangerous and on the run. It’s all atmosphere and moodiness, and stays just on the right side of cliché. There’s a terrific dog in it, too.

Maigret Tend Un Piege (1958)

I love George Simenon’s Maigret novels, and Jean Gabin (older now) is in his element as the unruffled inspector slowly nailing a serial killer who’s been terrorising young women in the centre of Paris.

Melodie En Sous Sol (1962)

This Riviera heist movie is a sort of passing-of-the-baton moment in terms of classic French crime cinema, with veteran mastermind Jean Gabin teaching pretty-boy newcomer Alain Delon the tricks of the trade (in some ways, in fact, it’s reminiscent of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight).

Something Wild (1962)

This year’s big bit of London Film Festival vault-digging, a restored version of Jack Garfein and Carroll Baker’s bold film about a rape survivor. More on it here…

Submarine Director Richard Ayoade Stars Craig Roberts, Yasmin Paige, Sally Hawkins, Noah Taylor ...

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 17:11:00 -0500

Submarine

Director Richard Ayoade Stars Craig Roberts, Yasmin Paige, Sally Hawkins, Noah Taylor UK 2010 Language English 1hr 37mins Colour

A coming of age in South Wales through a nouvelle vague filter

Youth In Revolt

Director Miguel Arteta Stars Michael Cera, Portia Doubleday, Jean Smart, Ray Liotta USA 2009 Language English/French 1hr 30mins Colour

A would-be adolescent cult falls someway short

When I was 15 years old, Paris topped one of the many lists I kept in my mind. It shared with Houston and Cambridge the No1 spot of places I never wanted to visit again. To me, it was cold, wind-swept and rain-drenched, unfriendly, snobbish, deluded, food mostly terrible. The pavements were strewn with dogshit, the shop windows packed with bloody carcasses. To make it worse, after years of unhappy study, I could barely speak of a word of the language. Paris was a hell whose cinemas, I was sure, showed terrible films in which people wouldn’t shut up, pictures I had no intention of ever seeing.

This was a little inconvenient, because my parents had lived there in the 1960s and loved the place. We even had French relatives. So, on our way between great cities – London and Rome, London and Barcelona, we would stop off in the French capital, and I would manage to be even more titanically grumpy than I normally was in those days.

But my parents weren’t the only people who loved France. On the contrary, many, if not most, bookish middle and upper-middle class kids in Britain seemed to look across the Channel with envy. Camus! Gauloises! Runny cheese, which everyone knows is just so much more sophisticated than solid cheese! The dream of a tiny, endearingly squalid flat on the Left Bank, and endless erudite chat in cafés! Underlying all this was a conviction that over there lay an unashamed love of thinking and books and films and musicians unappreciated in the lands of their birth, not to mention both a greater instinct for the romantic and a refreshingly pragmatic approach to sex. Over here, so the claim went, the native population is clumsy and dull and uptight, while there they are chic and suave and have élan.

There were a few things from France I liked a lot – the books of Alexandre Dumas. And Asterix (of course). A little later on, Françoise Hardy. And I liked Paris in American books and movies. But that wasn’t enough to moderate my fear of a country that apparently believed philosophy is fun, and yet whose kids – as encountered during holidays – seemed as ignorant and gawky and clueless as any other countries.

[Early 1990s, a road on the outskirts of Leeds. The car owned by my flatmate Jon has been stopped by the police. The officer wanted to know where we were coming from. The multiplex cinema, we explained. What had we been to see? With reckless honesty, somebody announced, ‘Cyrano de Bergerac.’ The policeman, who may or may not have had a deadpan sense of irony, said, ‘Cyrano de Bergerac? Was he some kind of poof?’]

Later on, when I was doing my MA, I hated the cultural cringe exhibited by British film critics of the 1960s, who sneered at films like A Taste Of Honey as inferior copies of the nouvelle vague, while their academic counterparts were adopting a cravenly unquestioning approach to the deluge of theory that poured out of France from 1960s onwards, swathes of which seemed to me utter toss. By that time, I had seen some films that confirmed my worst suspicions about Gallic film-making. Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray and André Techiné’s J’embrasse Pas, for instance, are not only terrible, but terrible in a way only the French can manage.

On the other hand, by then I had also discovered there are also endless terrific French movies*, just as there was a lot of other great 1960s and ’70s music beyond Hardy. Some of which is on the soundtrack to the American teen movie Youth In Revolt, including Jacques Dutronc’s awesome stomper Les Cactus. The hero of Youth In Revolt, Nick Twisp (Michael Cera) isn’t that keen on French things either until he meets Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), who has pictures of Jean-Paul Belmondo all over her room. In his attempt to find a way to be in the same zipcode as Sheeni, Nick surrenders his decision-making to his alter ego François Dillinger, who has a pencil moustache, a white belt that is barely wider and the recklessness of Belmondo in A Bout De Souffle and Pierrot Le Fou. Playing both Twisp and Dillinger is a chance for Michael Cera to show off his comedy skills, but like a much of this film, it never quite hits the target. Certainly Cera never gets near the greatness of his George-Michael Bluth in Arrested Development, and while the film has occasional smart moments, it’s nowhere near smart enough.

In Submarine, set in (unexpectedly cinematic) Swansea, it is Belmondo’s great rival and sometime co-star Alain Delon who stares down from the walls in a poster for his finest hour, Le Samourai. The film borrows the trademark typography and urgent blues, reds and yellows of Jean-Luc Godard’s early colour films, with a generous helping of both the mood and certain shots from François Truffaut’s first flicks, although those retro leanings also bring to mind the movies of Wes Anderson.

Once again, a precocious boy is stirred into action by a girl with trouble-making instincts. Yasmin Paige, who plays the pyromanical Jordana, is one of the two terrific things about this film, along with the cinematography, which makes South Wales look beautiful and mysterious.

The adults are well-cast, too, with Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor as Oliver’s unhappy parents and Paddy Considine as the new age charlatan threatening to pull the family apart (not exactly his finest hour, for reasons I can’t quite pin down).

But, although it is an admirable and technically impressive debut from Richard Ayoade**, it never really got under my skin. I didn’t care at all about the central character, Oliver. Maybe the problem is that Ayoade has learned too well from his heroes – Submarine has a little too much of the sullenness that lurks in Truffaut’s films. For teen Francophilia in the movies, I think you’re better off with Carey Mulligan in An Education or Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. Better yet, for once skip the movies entirely and read Julian Barnes’ excellent Metroland.

These days, I’ve mostly made my peace with the French. I even have fond memories of my last couple of visits to Paris, even though it’s still not really my kind of town, and I’m pretty sure the food*** and the language will always be beyond me. I don’t think that worries the Parisians greatly, somehow.

*Written about extensively elsewhere in this blog.

**Aka, ‘You know, the bloke from The IT Crowd, big hair, not the Irish one.’

***Although I assume you can get decent falafel there these days.

[NB: this is a rewritten and much-expanded version of a review that appeared during the London Film...

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 17:47:00 -0500

[NB: this is a rewritten and much-expanded version of a review that appeared during the London Film Festival]

End Of Watch

Director David Ayer

Stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Peña, Anna Kendrick, Natalie Martinez

USA 2012

1hr 49 mins

Language English

Colour

Perceptive study of male friendship hidden inside a cop-movie wrapper

Of all the genres of film, it’s hard to think of one that has been eclipsed by the current golden age of television as much as the cop movie. There’s something about police work, its procedures, its different-but-similar incidents, the chat between two people stuck together in a car when nothing is happening, that seems to fit 13 or 24 hours better than two. That’s true whether you are following one big case or many smaller ones, going for downbeat realism or high gothic, and the setting is Malmo, the Paris suburbs or Baltimore.

End Of Watch goes chasing down the same kind of low-rent LA streets and alleys between one-story clapboard houses and chain-link yards* as (the impossibly great) The Shield** and, more recently, (the excellent) Southland, which is currently showing on More 4. It’s close in feel to the latter, especially to those bits involving the bloke from The OC. We’re riding with uniforms rather than detectives, and so meant to be dealing with the daily grind, not extended cases. Until…

But that TV comparison is not meant to belittle End Of Watch, just to say that bar has been set extremely high. This is a terrific buddy movie about two good, if slightly cocky, cops making a sincere attempt to do a tough job well. What Jake Gyllenhaal (unexpectedly big and bald) and Michael Peña manage here ranks up there with the finest attempts to capture the essence of male friendship on film, from the steady barrage of (quality, perfectly timed) taking the piss to the brief moments of total honesty. These are characters who, to paraphrase Vincent Gallo, have spanned some time together.

This is a very funny movie, with a bunch of good jokes at the expense of white people. There’s a great soundtrack. It’s also somewhat anxiety-inducing, and occasionally horrifying. Some of the plot developments are a bit obvious, the bad guys absurdly over the top and too clichéd and the device of having the characters filming themselves a bit tired. But I liked it a lot, and loved the ending.

*LA’s refusal to build large-scale public housing projects has been an inadvertent gift to directors.

**Chris Petit on why The Shield is better than The Wire – it’s a tough call: season four of The Wire is an astonishing exposé of how big cities and schools in low income areas really work that will also make you weep buckets, but Vendrell’s storyline in the closing weeks of The Shield could be the best argument for long-running TV, seven seasons to get you to a point where behaviour that most of us regard as sickening and incomprehensible suddenly seems logical…

Watching reasonably disturbing movies in the South London suburbs 1. Early in the year, I wrote...

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 06:57:00 -0400

Watching reasonably disturbing movies in the South London suburbs

1. Early in the year, I wrote about seeing Shame in an ordinary suburban cinema. It turned out to be a much stranger, more interesting experience than if we had watched the same film in central London, in a room full of people who knew exactly what they were getting and had already discounted some of the shock in their mind.

It might seem kind of unusual catching a film that is yes, critically acclaimed but potentially upsetting in both its subject matter and its approach, out in a chain cinema in a dozy, distant South London suburb that clings stubbornly to the belief it is in Kent, despite being administratively swallowed up by the capital almost half a century ago (and in practical terms long before than). It’s a correspondingly odd place, equal parts tea-in-a-china cup gentility and ‘are you looking at my pint?’ hostility. Going to the cinema in Beckenham requires a degree of tolerance for chat during the film, both between people in the cinema and on their phones, extravagant food munching, hair-pulling, the occasional scuffle – not to mention being impervious to extreme heat and cold, an unfortunate by-product of the building’s Grade II listing. Yet for all that, it’s a cinema where I’ve enjoyed seeing films from The Incredibles to Mean Girl to The Aviator.

And watching Shame in Beckenham had me flashing back to 25 years earlier, when – even younger than the kids so disturbed by that film – I saw Blue Velvet several miles to the south-west, in Purley. Purley is arguably a suburb squared, being a satellite of legendary 1960s town-planning catastrophe Croydon, which – depending on how you see it – is either part of the endless London sprawl or a thrusting neighbouring metropolis in its own right, Jersey City to London’s NYC*. Purley was then and is now a place of well-tended lawns and garages housing sizeable motors. Its main claim to fame in those days was that it was the home of the key members of Status Quo. Anyway, it was in Purley that I first watched David Lynch’s head-screwing masterpiece with its severed ears, queasy voyeurism, ghostly Roy Orbison songs and all the rest of it lurking just beyond the white picket fence. I wanted very much to believe in those days that similarly noirish possibilities lurked in Purley, but I couldn’t. I think now that more a failure of my imagination than any true comment on the place.

2. Film-going in London happens in three broad and slightly ill-defined zones. The first is the centre of town. Despite the continuing disappearance of cinemas**, central London retains a great number and wide variety. They range from in quality from the Cineworld in the Trocadero, a many-floored hellhole that has lingering traces of most unpleasant odours ever encountered, to the friendly elegance of the Curzon Mayfair, where it is possible to imagine it is 1939 and you’ve popped in to see Le Regle De Jeu. There are monster screens for blockbusters like The Empire, and official dispensers of cinematic nutrition in the British Film Institute at the Southbank*** and the Institute Of Contemporary Arts.

The ICA: Conveniently sited so the Queen can pop along to see the latest Bela Tarr

Forming a ring beyond the centre are the art houses, most of which have moved away from the homemade carrot cake of the old days to Konditor & Cook-level high-end snacks. To the west, you have the Riverside in Hammersmith and the Electric (at least before its accident), the Coronet and the Gate in Notting Hill; to the north, the Tricycle in Kilburn, the Everyman in Hampstead and the Screen on the Green in Islington; to the East, Richmix in Shoreditch and the Rio in Dalston; to the south, the Ritzy in Britxon and the Clapham Picture House.

And beyond them, the chain multiplexes of the suburbs. Not that boundaries are clear – heading west, you reach the Odeon Whiteleys, resolutely suburban (despite its recently acquired and slightly bizarre aspirations to be a place of fine dining), before you get to the Gate, and a rather more depressing mall multiplex, the Vue Islington, lies a few hundred yards to the south of the rightly much-loved The Screen on the Green.

3. There’s no doubt that, say, the Ritzy and Streatham Odeon offer manifestly different experiences, something than only increases with the passing of time. Although it would be excitingly contrary to claim otherwise, the food is better at the art houses. And at the Ritzy, for instance, you might expect a staff of more than two people on duty at any one time. You would also expect them to be able to give a pretty fair assessment about the movies showing – they actively want to work in a cinema (OK, they would prefer to making the films, but you’ve got start somewhere…) The running times are scrawled on a blackboard, which is meant to feel friendly and homemade and make you forget that the Ritzy is owned by what’s now a chain of 20 sites.

But when it comes to what’s on screen, the gulf isn’t always as wide as you might expect. I’m not sure the Ritzy would show many of the flicks starring local action hero Jason Statham, but next week it will be showing Skyfall and Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted as well as Palestinian documentary 5 Broken Cameras and bleak European thriller Barbara.

Meanwhile, there are surprises lurking in sleepy Vues and Cineworlds. And this has been the case as long as I can remember. As well as Blue Velvet in Purley, I am pretty sure I saw the hilarious, anarchic, brain-scrambling Repo Man at what is now the Beckenham Odeon (either a Cannon or an ABC at that stage). I definitely saw Spike Lee’s debut She’s Got To Have It at the dusty old cinema on Queensway, in the building that later became a T.G.I. Friday’s and was empty last time I checked.

In recent times, I saw bonkers but engaging faux-exploitation movie Black Snake Moan (the one in which Samuel L Jackson chains Christina Ricci to a radiator in attempt to induce cold turkey for her nymphomania) late night at the Streatham Odeon, a big old place on what some reckon is London’s grottiest shopping street^‡.

And I watched the sly, appealingly daft Norwegian horror satire Troll Hunter at the Cineworld in Wandsworth’s Southside (né Arndale) shopping centre, an unlovely place that has layers accruing the worst in architecture and consumerism of the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s, ’00s… While I saw No Country For Old Men at the Ritzy, I caught the Coens’ True Grit in Streatham.

And fittingly, we saw Drive on the Purley Way, a stab at American-style edge city that is home to not just the usual range of major out-of-town outlets, but also Europe’s largest pan-Asian restaurant. Sharing its car park is a multiplex with a post-apocalyptic atmosphere. The ticket booths once filled with living beings are long empty – the few survivors of the disaster have been left incapable of responding to simple requests. My friend Steve and I saw Zombieland here late one night (having seen Up earlier in the evening), and would have been unsurprised if we had been savaged by the undead on the way out. And rolling out of the car park and accelerating onto wide, ghostly streets was much more appropriate way to keep the mood of Drive in your minds than it would have been catching a tube. For a couple of hundred yards, at least, you can squint and believe you’re in the Valley…

The Vue Purley Way: Useful if you want to pick up a bed to take home

*This is actually the comparison Croydon’s elected politicians promote.

**The Lumiere in St Martins Lane and the Metro/Other Cinema in Rupert Street were particular favourites of mine. On the other hand, at least I’ll never have to go the cinema in the Swiss Centre again.

***Still the NFT as far as I’m concerned.

^‡Homeland’s David Harewood makes the case for Streatham.

LFF#9: The Dead Man And Being Happy Most years at the LFF I end up seeing something that is broadly...

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 17:57:32 -0400

LFF#9: The Dead Man And Being Happy

Most years at the LFF I end up seeing something that is broadly like the work of Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismaki, including some of favourite festival entries like Lake Tahoe and J’ai Toujours Rêvé d’Etre Un Gangster*. This, I think, fits squarely in that tradition. Every scene of the film is narrated by a measured female voice, sometimes describing exactly what we are seeing, sometimes providing a bit of background information or an ironic spin. At the end of some sections, she is joined by a male voice. It’s a conceit that I think only hardened viewers of art house films would tolerate.

Anyway, the person whose actions she is filling us in on is Santos, an ageing Spaniard living, or rather dying, in Buenos Aires. He’s a hitman who has lost his taste for the job. Taking a small icebox of morphine with him, he hits the road* in his beloved ’70s station wagon. Heading deep into the country, he comes across strange places and lost people. The most significant of these is Erika, his travelling companion for the final days of his life.

It’s a short but sedately paced film of small incidents. There are good moments - the faux-Alpine spa town for the last geriatric Nazis left in Argentina, the bribing of a traffic cop with a figurine of the Virgin Mary and a comedy tape. But we also see Santos struggling to find a part of his body to inject himself, which is (rightly) tough going.

It’s not a film I would recommend freely, but if meandering and curious are good things as far as you are concerned, there is something here.

*A lovely film that I don’t think ever got a UK release

LFF#8: Compliance Compliance wants to be a talking point, have audiences emerging debating...

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 17:45:53 -0400

LFF#8: Compliance

Compliance wants to be a talking point, have audiences emerging debating ‘what would you have done?’ or ‘They say it is based on real story, but seriously?’
During one busy day at a typical mid-American fast food joint, something strange happens. The exact what and just how I’ll leave out, but I think the title gives a chunky clue. The moral of the story might be the Stanford Prison Experiment revisited. Maybe it is trying to explain Abu Ghraib or maybe it’s just a film that wants us to believe that 95 per cent of Americans are really, really dumb, and the other five per cent know how to exploit this fact.

So it doesn’t have anything original to say, and it goes well past gratuitous at some points, but it’s slickly made – the storytelling is spare and rhythmical and it gets on with it, the performances good in underwritten roles, particularly Pat Healy. If you see it, you might have trouble relaxing through another episode of the rather funny Don’t Trust The B•••• In Apartment 23, because you’ll associate Dreama Walker (the relentlessly perky blonde one) with trauma.

I’m still not sure about this one – it kept me totally focussed for the entire running time, but I still think it doesn’t stand up.