Victim of the Time

The Lady's Snake

2012-01-27T14:20:00.001Z

The Lady Eve Opening Credits by pezhammer

The delightful things about The Lady Eve are too numerous to count - it is one of cinema's most perfect films - and one of them comes at you straight away. Even in the days where credits came at the beginning of the film - yet were still only a couple of minutes long - it was still rare for filmmakers and studios to do much beyond an ornate border. The Lady Eve, though, employed Leon Schlesinger's studio, the masterminds behind the Looney Tunes cartoon, to craft this genius credit sequence starring the cheeriest snake you'll ever meet. Hell, the expressions on his face during this one and half minute bit make him a fully rounded character in himself - look at his pure joy in shaking that maraca, and his venomous indignity when he's hit on the head.
It's a superb example of the effort that makes the whole of The Lady Eve so magical - using even its credit sequence to play with the themes of duplicity and slippery feeling that play out across the film. And it sticks the grin on your face that will remain there for the whole hour and a half. Positively the same dame!

Queer Anglo Films, Take #1: Victim

2012-01-26T23:38:00.000Z

Welcome, readers, to a new ten-part blog series! I've never undertaken anything like this before, but collaborations are always an exciting way to expand and challenge your own views on something. With that in mind, when my good friend James at Rants of a Diva suggested we try out a series, I jumped at the chance. What we've come up with is a ten-part series focusing on fifty years of films that focus on queer experience within Britain. For me, that's a dive into my own country's past, my adolescence, and current existence; for James, it's a look at what might be different, and what might be similar, on the other side of the Atlantic.

Our final destination is last year's lauded Weekend; our starting line, though, comes exactly fifty years before. It's 1961, and Dirk Bogarde, matinee idol, took a risk and starred as Melville Farr, a barrister with a secret life that blackmailers are keen to expose. The time was dark, and the film was Victim...

David: I think audiences need to watch Victim today with at least a sliver of context, because otherwise it is a bit of a fusty old drama, although I still reckon there's some value in it as a cinematic product in its own right. But first of all, anyway, some factual stuff. In 1961, homosexuality was illegal - straight up, a crime, go to jail, do not pass the local pub, do not collect your belongings. Victim might have been a mainstream kick up the arse of the law, but it was still six years before the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 decriminalised homosexuality for consenting males over the age of 21. (It wasn't lowered to 18 until 1994, and equivalency with heterosexuality - age 16 - didn't come until 2000. That's, like, yesterday.) Critical literature seems to agree that Victim was the first mainstream British film focusing on a contemporary homosexual character - Serious Charge, a couple of years prior, dealt with accusations of pederasty by a vicar, but it was, unlike Victim, a fraudulent blackmail, and was also released under an X certificate. (And also shows its lack of historical importance by now being famous for Cliff Richard's first screen outing. Intentional pun.)

James: Context is crucial to understanding and evaluating Victim's impact on not only the representation of gays in cinema but also the gay rights movement in general. It's certainly tamer in comparison to modern gay films like Brokeback..., Milk or even crap like Eating Out, but people must understand that without Victim, many films, even ones we are discussing later on in this series, wouldn't have been possible. Victim, as best as it could in 1961, brought homosexuality out into the open and tackled it head on.

D: So then, being born out of this background, Victim is a landmark, a revolutionary statement, than merely a film. It had to make a point, and it had to be very careful about how it made it. So I think, with that it mind, that it's very hard to criticise the film, but at the same time, very hard to really appreciate it. It's so decidedly a product of its time that I can't really stick it with the kind of formal criticism I usually apply to films. Of course it can't really show us any sexual or romantic interactions between these characters; of course they all have to go around making their jittering their defining feature. Of course it has to - twice! - put heavy emphasis on heterosexual smooches, although I did read that more as an implicit criticism of being able to show that to such passionate extremes while the men can barely touch each other. (But then the ending comes and I have to wonder if I'm being too kind.)

"He hasn't got what you and I've got, Sylvie"

J: Actually, I was surprised looking at it again at just how open Victim is with the characters' homosexuality. Sure, modern audiences will notice how the film shies away in the beginning from referring to any of the characters as gay, merely hinting at how they are different from the others. But I saw this as a necessary function to the mystery that lies at the center of the film. Victim's hesitation about its homosexuality has more to do with setting up and discovering why Barrett is running from the cops and why Farr refuses to be in contact with him than because the film is nervous about labeling anyone as gay. While it's no "we're here, we're queer, get used to it," the rest of the film is almost shockingly (for its time, I must emphasise) transparent. The characters may be hiding from the law, but they are not hiding within the film. There are no shadows, no chiaroscuro, no film noir lighting and no blending in the mise-en-scene. I am especially intrigued by the way Victim shows how homosexuals are in every stratum of society. They are everywhere, rich and poor, high and low class. Your barber, your local shopkeeper, even your lawyer could be one.

Laura (Sylvia Syms) can't handle Farr's admissions

D: I did love the whip-crack of the line, "You know of course that he was a homosexual," spoken by the most senior policeman (John Barrie) - as you suggested, the film is surprisingly transparent, and this sudden exposure of the unspoken is very effective as an emotional rush. And Bogarde's admission of his sexual desire for Barrett (Peter McEnery) seems like an extreme the film didn't even need to go to, although of course I'm very glad it did. Victim doesn't suggest that homosexuality should be legalised and accepted by casting its gay characters as angelic, chaste people in love, but as humans who lust and desire just like heteros. Of course, it then turns around and places the sexless, platonic love between Bogarde and Sylvia Syms on a higher plane, but I really do sense the ending was a necessary evil, a measure that meant they could get away with actually speaking about actual homosex.

You say "no shadows, no chiaroscuro, no film noir lighting", but I think Victim definitely plays with these things, and it does so particularly strongly with Bogarde's character. He even seems to give himself dramatic chiaroscuro lighting in the climactic scene with Sylvia Syms, stepping nearer to the low lamps to cast shadows across his face, and as his temper builds, sweat combines with the lighting to bring out the stubble and dark recesses of his face. This plays out within the context of one particularly piqued scene, so it doesn't really apply to the grander depiction of repression across the whole film. But I would note a parallel visual play throughout - characters often seem to be framed as if they're trapped, caught, and this of course feeds back into the title. Whether within doorways, beneath ceilings or just closed onto by the frame of the camera itself - Bogarde is often captured in frozen, emotionally drawn close-ups - the gay characters aren't hiding because they keep getting found.

But we should definitely go into more detail with regards to Bogarde - I'd wager that his performance is the most successful aspect of the whole enterprise. Knowing how much of a fan you are, though, I'll let you take the floor...

Bogarde contorts his image

J: Not only its most successful, the most revolutionary aspect is the casting of Dirk Bogarde as the married barrister who risks his career and comfortable life by coming out of the closet and hunting down the blackmailers who drove his would-be lover to suicide. Although he would go on to become one of the most prominent English actors of the 60's, at that point in his career Dirk was merely a matinee idol known primarily for light comedies. Casting him as an admitted homosexual should have killed his career. Against all odds, however, it didn't and only adds to Victim's impact. Before this film, gay characters were always the limp-wristed fairies who bounced in and out of scenes with a thin moustache and a bitchy one-liner. But, in Victim, here comes this strong, attractive, heterosexual (or so we thought at the time) leading man playing a homosexual, shattering every stereotype and preconceived notion about gay men the movies had ever shown us. It was a bold move for both the film and Bogarde, and it pays off in aces for both. I make no mystery of my fondness for Mr. Bogarde, or Dirky as I affectionately refer to him, so it shouldn't be a surprise that I find him to be marvellous in Victim. It's not the bemused, smarmy Dirk we're used to in many of his best performances (The Servant, Darling, Our Mother's House). Instead, this is Dirk in full-on repression mode, scrambling to hide and push down every unwanted feeling and emotion that comes barrelling out of him. His voice and manner remain relatively steady throughout the film, but there are times when his face struggles to keep composure. I love the moments when you see the facade about to crack and his face twists and contorts itself to suppress any and every emotion spilling uncontrollably from him. It's like watching a sick person suppress the urge to vomit, or, even more uncomfortably, a drug addict resisting their drug of choice. Everything about this performance hints at what a great actor Dirky actually was, despite what his filmography to that point had suggested, and just how great he would become in the next couple decades.

There are two further points I am interested in discussing with you. First of all, what do you make of the title and its connotation with gay imagery in cinema up until that point (i.e. the gays as victims, whether of their own circumstance or as pariahs of society, and how, especially in American films, the gays must pay for their sins by dying)? Secondly, and you hinted at this before, what do you make of that final shot? It's an interesting way to end the film, particularly after Farr has supposedly "won" over the bad guys.

The final shot: memories of Barrett go up in flames

D: I think the title Victim is almost an early type of the linguistic reclamation that oppressed groups of society have undertaken in the years since. Obviously being a victim of any sort isn't a positive thing, but, with an immediate suggestion - even from the marquee outside the cinema - of gays as "victims", it can then set out a narrative for Bogarde's character that progresses from victim of blackmail and his private shame to a brazen declaration of his homosexual lust. The word "victim" doesn't only refer to their receipt of blackmail, or of the long arm of the law, but of their own shame as well - in Melville Farr, you have perhaps the first homosexual character in cinema who dared to risk everything and declare his sexuality. Obviously cases like Barrett's are tragic, but ultimately, what it took for homosexuality to be legalised was the courage of people like Farr to reject their inscribed status as victim.

It's interesting that you point out the tendency for gay characters to die "for their sins", because I wouldn't say Victim ever stoops to being that moralising - Barratt dies because he's terrified, but its at his own hands. The hairdresser's death isn't a tragic inevitability but a horrific abuse by a character who is villainized throughout. Victim actually seems to paint a society in which attitudes have already begun to change - the exchange between the police may be very blunt, but it also demonstrates a tolerance from within the legal system, years before the law itself followed suit. Perhaps that was a fantasy at the time, but I think the film could easily have been made with an unsympathetic policing force. Instead, Victim shows the way towards a better society from every side of the tracks.

Farr stands anxious, trapped, but strong

J: I absolutely agree with everything you said regarding the connotation of Victim's title. In a way, by portraying Farr as a strong individual risking everything to, as Oprah would put it, stand in his truth, the film takes back any negative association between being gay and their subsequent victimization. The title is almost ironic because by the time the blackmailers are captured, Farr, having given up everything for this moment, refuses to be a victim anymore.

But then the ending comes along and suggests that although he's perhaps not victimized by his homosexuality, Farr isn't ready to completely start his life over. He needs something, anything familiar as he faces a bleak and unpredictable future. And this is why he turns to his wife: she turned a blind eye to his homosexuality once and he assumes that she will do it again. I agree that this ending is probably a "necessary evil" for the time and place it was made, but I don't believe it's as cut and dry as many would interpret it. The dialogue suggests otherwise, but notice how neither of them look or sound particularly enthused about getting back together; it's as if they believe that that's what is expected of them. "I need you," Farr tells her. "Need is different from love," his wife responds. Even though the final image is of Farr burning the picture of him and Barrett, effectively destroying any remaining memory of that relationship, she realizes that they cannot go back as they once were. There will be another Barrett, as much as she and Farr will both try to deny it. As you mentioned, attitudes were changing and eventually there will be no reason to go on with the charade. Quite a sad realization for what is normally taken as an inevitable ending.

Sylvia Syms is not ready for her close-up

D: I suppose Sylvia Syms is featured so prominently as a palliative measure, to strengthen the audience interest, but as you intimate, that does come from a genuinely sociological place; she might be misguided in thinking she can change him, but society forced gays into those kind of relationships and the feelings of the women who are left behind and unhappy both because of the neglect during the marriage and the abandonment that will come as a result of legal changes are no less valid or tragic just because she's a heterosexual. And as you say, the ending speaks of a lingering sadness - Victim is trying to provoke changes, and the ending is one last motivation to get the audience mobilised in that direction.

If we haven't gone on long enough already, I'm intrigued to know your thoughts on the interactions and community of the various gay characters, including how Bogarde's character is forced to engage with it.

J: I was surprised by how abrupt and almost condescending Farr was towards the other homosexuals in the film. When he meets the barber, he gets straight to the point, acting like a macho hetero who only needs this puny little gay to get a lead on the case. And, later on, when he realizes that the three homosexual men live together, he gives his trademarked bemused grin and a sarcastic, "I see." He's not particularly harsh towards them, but he doesn't exactly act like they are on his level. In a way, he's a bit like Hugh Grant's character in Maurice. The idea of homosexuality makes perfect sense to him. But applying it to real life and living with one like man and wife is completely out of the question. It's beneath him, something only a boy with no class, like Rupert Graves' character, would consider. Farr thinks of himself as above these "common" homosexuals because he can control his impulses. It's an interesting choice for a character who is supposed to be the hero of the story, but it's easy to see why it was made in 1961. Victim was already revolutionary enough; there was no reason to push it beyond the point (straight) audiences would stop listening.

D: Your comparisons to Maurice are very apt, and perhaps a good way to end this entry - it may be set much earlier than Victim, but Maurice, made in 1987, chooses to focus away from this kind of tortured existence and instead creates a idyll where homosexuality can function. I'm sure it'll come up again during this series!

Speak up, readers; don't be a victim! What do you make of Victim's revolutionary attitudes?

Next take: Sunday Bloody Sunday

Oscar Season: Playing the Genuine Nostalgia

2012-01-26T17:43:00.000Z

Yesterday the background to my unimportant daily activities was a full listen to each of the newly Oscar-nominated scores. It was not as vast a journey as I expected. It's been said, many times, both by better and by worse men than I, that this year's nominations are dominated by nostalgia. So it shouldn't really be a surprise, then, that all of the nominees here come from films set in the past - the most recent being the 1970s gloom of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, while the remaining four, at best, cover a mere thirty year period from 1910 to 1939. (Tintin's setting is debatable, but would certainly seem to exist pre-WWII because of the clothing and technology on display.) Not only that, the settings of the films restricts the geographical trip to the most Western corner of Western Europe - the dank Britishness of Tinker, Tailor, leaping the channel within War Horse, stuck inside a Parisian train station for Hugo, and scurrying around with a Belgian in The Adventures of Tintin. Even The Artist takes as many cues from its native France as from the classic compositions of Hollywood's Golden Age.

The limited scope of these nominees - leaving aside questions of their quality for the moment - makes a far more critical suggestion of the Academy's blinkered taste than their selection of the films in the Best Picture category would seem to. Across the whole of a film, say The Artist, both nostalgia and prescience can be encompassed, with the finale allowing George Valentin a passage into a future as joyful as his past. But when we take these scores on their own - not necessarily the right approach towards lauding them, but stick with me - they seem to work solely as nostalgia pieces. There isn't a lack of joy in that - try listening to a piece like 'George Valentin' from Ludovico Bource's score to The Artist and not grin at the images of Dujardin and Uggie's slapstick routine that pop into your head - but, as an overview of a category, these accomplishments demonstrate exactly what the Academy has feared becoming: irrelevant.

You're Here - Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Perhaps awarding Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross the prize for their pulsating electronic work on The Social Network sated their contemporary needs for a couple of years. (You certainly imagine the three hour work the same pair did for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo may have been just too long for even the most open-minded of voters, even if it is among the best of the year.) The problem is, Iglesias' insidious, evocative work aside, these scores are some of the most uninventive scores of the year, their supposed 'originality' tempered by the overwhelming number of cultural and historical reference points they embody, and, as such, they seem to reflect the laziest choices this branch could have made - and next to the widely criticised Original Song category (which this year offered up a paltry two nominees), the music branch isn't looking in the best of shapes. It seems to speak of an outdated conception of what film scores should 'be' - vast orchestral compositions with smooth traditional melodies. 2011 was a strong year for music at the movies, but, though these scores are not without their strengths, the Academy's selection seems to counter Wesley Britton's assertion that "original orchestral scores are no longer the norm".

The Chase - Howard Shore, Hugo

Howard Shore's work on Hugo lazily matches the film's contorted nostalgic impulses, shoving accordion and trumpet into many of the melodies without the winsome invention of Yann Tiersen's memorable score for Amelie. As it progresses, the mischievous, winsome string flurries become tiresomely repetitive. John Williams' The Adventures of Tintin isn't dissimilar, though its use of brass, harpsichord and looping woodwind provides a much wider palette of melodies, and Williams, ever the class act, has great fun weaving these into an appropriately lively and flourishing accompaniment to the film's mix of mystery and slapstick action. It certainly mines the jazzy milieu of its unspecified Belgian setting as much as Shore lazes in 1920s Paris, but Williams' music is lithe enough to have darted out of your critical grasp before you can moan.

The Adventures of Tintin - John Williams, The Adventures of Tintin

George Valentin - Ludovic Bource, The Artist

The Artist's score, by Ludovic Bource, is undoubtedly the most integral to its film's success - quickstepping its way in to compensate for the unfamiliar lack of diegetic sound - and its engaging, sprightly warmth is indeed so wrapped up with the images that a listen apart from the film is enormously evocative of the pleasure of my two viewings. Bource has said he took his inspiration from music across cinematic history - music that "everyone has inscribed in their memory". Kim Novak's accusations aside, there is enough wit, piquancy and love in Bource's original compositions that The Artist's nomination in this category seemed essential.

Bringing Joey Home, and Bonding - John Williams, War Horse

War Horse strikes me as the laziest of the nominations here, though its blooming, passionate twinning of the string section and light woodwind works in the same sort of fashion as the production design I discussed last week - it's so overwhelming and blatant in its emotionality that it hits its cues even as you realise you're being so baldly manipulated. But in that way, it feels as informed by classic Hollywood scores as The Artist does, and there's less wit and more seriousness in this one. Finally, while Alberto Iglesias' nomination for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy feels like the most unlikely nomination, its moody, insidious use of low brass and inconsistent piano melodies also betrays a nostalgia for the gloomy thrillers of the 1970s. Still, it strikes a dissonant note in this roster - one for the pessimists, if you will.

Guillam - Alberto Iglesias, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Nostalgia doesn't explain everything. Both Cliff Martinez's Drive and Hans Zimmer's Rango mine similar wells, the former with a menacing morbidity similar to Tinker, Tailor, while the latter matches the joyful invention of Tintin in its playful spin on Ennio Morricone's famous Western refrains. Dario Marianelli's lush, intricate score for Jane Eyre is whole other centuries ago, possibly an even finer distillation of 'classic film score' than the nominees, yet even it couldn't muscle into their narrow window.

Underground - Hans Zimmer, Rango

Waiting for Mr. Rochester - Dario Marianelli, Jane Eyre

And I've not even mentioned the more bracing modern scores like The Chemical Brothers' eerie accompaniment to Hanna, Nico Muhly's arresting strings for Margaret, or Basement Jaxx's punchy score for Attack the Block. Those seem a step too far, but the fact that their omission (not to mention that only Drive errs onto the idea of an "Adapted Song Score" that Joe Reid preached only today) isn't the complaint here demonstrates the alarmingly tight insularity of this year's choices. To quote someone the Academy did once nominate: wise up.

Go on then...

2012-01-23T21:17:00.003Z

My first, and last, crack of the Oscar prognostication whip this season - the nominee announcement is always my favourite part of this whole process, while most of the winners already seem like a foregone conclusion. (I've noted my predictions for that with some stars. How glitz!) Where I am this season: most of the films in contention are okay, but just that. But I'm firmly behind the frontrunner, so now begins the worry that something is on its way to derail the train. Unless it's Anna Paquin looking for a cowboy hat, that will not be okay.

BEST PICTURE
The Artist*, The Descendants, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, The Tree of Life, War Horse
Alphabetically arranged, but the first five are nevertheless the films that'd be your five if the rules hadn't changed, twice, since 2008. So go ahead and try to do the maths to work out how many more we'll get - I'm counting on the overwhelming sentimentality of War Horse and a passionate fanbase behind The Tree of Life. Moneyball, as good as it is, doesn't seem like a #1 choice for many, and that's what these movies need to be.
In my dreams: Margaret argues her way into the headlines.

BEST DIRECTOR
Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris), Michael Hazanavicius (The Artist)*, Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life), Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive), Martin Scorsese (Hugo)
Almost certainly idiotic, but wouldn't the Directors branch, being made up of, well, directors, be more likely to acknowledge such vivid stylistic grasps as Refn's and Malick's were this year? Perhaps because to the overwhelming dislike for The Descendants among the blogging community, I'm risking a hunch that the film won't score as well as expected, and this is the most obvious nomination that'd be yanked in that case.

Plus, that line-up just looks better, doesn't it?
In my dreams: I just put two of them up there, didn't I? If I get another: Lars von Trier.

BEST ACTOR
George Clooney (The Descendents), Jean Dujardin (The Artist)*, Gary Oldman (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), Brad Pitt (Moneyball), Michael Shannon (Take Shelter)
Taking yet more risks on quality over tradition. But those two spots (beyond Clooney, Dujardin and Pitt) are up for grabs, and they like Shannon. As for Oldman - Dujardin aside, those other performances seem so tailored to a US audience that there's surely a push for the British bloc to be making here.
In my dreams: A Separation's sublime anchor Peyman Mooadi makes the papers.

BEST ACTRESS
Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs), Viola Davis (The Help)*, Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady), Tilda Swinton (We Need To Talk About Kevin), Michelle Williams (My Week With Marilyn)
The accepted line-up here. I just can't see this branch really pushing for any of the other contenders - Dunst is in too divisive a film, Theron's playing a bitch (no Thatcher jokes please), and Mara has hardly set the awards circuit alight. Saying that, she's the most likely to swoop if Albert Nobbs is just too rubbish to reward.
In my dreams: best of 2011 and 2005 Anna Paquin marches stridently into the fold.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Albert Brooks (Drive), Kenneth Branagh (My Week With Marilyn), Ben Kingsley (Hugo), Brad Pitt (The Tree of Life), Christopher Plummer (Beginners)*
Yet another acting category ripe for surprises beyond an agreed three. If they like Hugo - and even if they didn't - Kingsley seems like such an obvious nominee as soon as you see the film, and I was surprised he hasn't had more attention. And Pitt's another one for my surprising, probably misguided faith in the Academy's outre taste. (Hey, they are inviting more young faces into the fold.)
In my dreams: Tom Hardy's dark reveries from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy make an impact.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Bérénice Bejo (The Artist), Jessica Chastain (The Help), Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids), Janet McTeer (Albert Nobbs), Octavia Spencer (The Help)*
From what I hear, if you're going to nominate Close, you'll be jotting down McTeer's name at the same time. Woodley's the other woman in this race (barring a miracle for Carey Mulligan or Vanessa Redgrave), but I've already mentioned my hunch against The Descendants, although I imagine that'll be less virulent amongst the Actors. Still, she's on the edge. If Chastain somehow splits her vote and falls out, my wrath will be like nothing ever seen.
In my dreams: the haunting, scarred sister in Shame, Carey Mulligan, gets another moment in the spotlight.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
The Descendants (Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon & Jim Rash)*, The Help (Tate Taylor), The Ides of March (George Clooney & Grant Heslov), Moneyball (Aaron Sorkin & Steven Zaillian), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Bridget O'Connor & Peter Strong)
Hugo just doesn't seem like a writers' film - the enterprise is too juvenile and the MacGuffin is so poorly constructed. So I've put the denser political "thriller" The Ides of March in its place. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo seems informed as much by its cinematic predecessor as the source text, while War Horse might find an odd strength from being so episodic, but I imagine it's a film for the technicals. Those are your potential spoilers, though.
In my dreams: Hossein Amini gets his five minutes for shaping Drive into such a menacing thriller.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
The Artist (Michael Hazanavicius), Bridesmaids (Annie Mumulo & Kristin Wiig), Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen)*, A Separation (Asghar Farhadi), Young Adult (Diablo Cody)
A tough call, this category - a bunch of strong, distinctive contenders which are fighting out behind weaker but somehow locked-in leaders (Midnight in Paris, and, though I love it, The Artist). So, once again, I'm predicting a nice outcome - A Separation is masterfully constructed without ever subordinating character, while this is the most likely place for comedy to actually show up.
In my dreams: Andrew Haigh's political but intimate and witty script for Weekend puts its feet up as a nominee.

Action genre codes go Haywire

2012-01-23T18:26:00.001Z

Vague spoilers may follow.

Haywire is not the first film to present us with a female action heroine. You know that. Where it is different from the likes of Tomb Raider and Kill Bill is in the fact that it does not centre around an established female film star. Gina Carano may have a different glow of fame about her to a certain subset of the audience, but cinematically, she is unknown. She's given a character name - Mallory - but what Carano essentially represents is her own persona, the reality of Gina Carano, mixed martial arts and kickboxing champion.

What Haywire presents to Carano, and to us, is the thrill of a woman kicking the hell out of some of Hollywood's most masculine bodies. Channing Tatum's star persona is one of the robust, perhaps slightly dim, but idealised hunk, one whose experiences as a soldier (G.I. Joe, Dear John, Stop-Loss) and brawler (Fighting) feed easily into his role as Carano's colleague here. Shame's narrative may work to undermine the posturing masculinity of Michael Fassbender, but in a pop culture sense, it's the film where he shows off his penis, and that frivolous discussion - the most dominant kind these days - has focused mostly on its size seems to giving Fassbender a shine of intimidating maleness. Even if Shame shows the darker side of masculinity, it still constructs Fassbender as a very male figure - the blackest level of his humiliation being a same-sex encounter - and this cinematic persona is bolstered by his brooding role in Jane Eyre and the turn to villainy in X-Men: First Class. Ewan McGregor, though reedier in stature, has a similarly naked history, uncomfortably coupled with his most famous Hollywood exposure as a Jedi knight in the Star Wars prequels. Ultimately, what these men (Carano does not engage in combat with Michael Douglas or Antonio Banderas, though arguments for them would not be too dissimilar) share is a confrontational level of masculinity, whether they've achieved this through action roles or corporeal exposure.

So to sit down in front of Haywire and see these men get badly beaten up (to say the least) might seem to subvert that image. It doesn't, because what Haywire doesn't do is emasculate its characters, even when there's a woman smashing their face in. That's to the film's credit - it equalises gender during its showcases of physical combat, even if the basic pitch of the film highlights Carano's status as female. What it does point towards, however, is a critical conceptual failure of the film. What might be its greatest strength is also what undoes it.

Haywire's action scenes - which comprise the majority of the film - are filmed with a bare level of realism that's even more immediate than the celebrated intimacy of the Bourne series. The kicks, punches, throws, slams and twists aren't accompanied by any sort of music, nor the sort of frenzied editing that's become de rigueur for action films. Director Steven Soderbergh presents these scenes with a docile camera, remaining mostly in long shots in order to capture the entire physical spectacle. What makes the scenes tense are the continual physical impacts on each character, both seen and crisply heard. When the film opts for a chase scene instead, Carano doesn't have the seamless luck of Jason Bourne racing across Moroccan rooftops - she's no less clear-headed as she navigates the Dublin skyline, but we witness her decisions and mistakes as she eludes the swat team. What Haywire has in its favour is this very tangible sense of physicality.

Yet this is also what ultimately works against it. As hinted, the reason behind this is the casting. I don't mean Carano's limitations as an actress (not particularly natural when she's speaking, but also not without a quiet charisma), but the extra-filmic baggage the rest of the cast brings with them. As I said earlier, what Haywire essentially offers is the chance to see a woman kick the shit out of a handful of famous male stars. But in a film with such tactile, raw physicality, Haywire sets up an unresolvable tension between the glamorous stardom of its male cast and the realistic tableaux in which they perform. They're given character names, but beyond that, none of the men here are constructed as anything more than opponents or allies to Carano (with some, inevitably, shifting, as Carano discovers the level of duplicity occurring). So we automatically fill in these personality chasms with what we know of the actors themselves. The fiction falls apart, leaving the audience lost between the vivid intensity of the action set pieces and the floating spectre of Hollywood stardom.

Haywire can't present a viable alternative to the Hollywood action kickers, despite its roster of stars, because it exists outside of the usual parameters of implicit genre codes and the style they inform. The choreography of the fights is undeniably impressive, but the constant tension between the invader (Carano) and the natives (the men) means they play out with a trenchant inevitability that can never coalesce, because this is a reality beating up on a fiction. Certainly this speaks less of Haywire's quality as a film than of how years of convention have shaped expectations and responses, but it cannot be denied that there are critical fractures between Soderbergh's conception of this endeavour and how the disparate elements cohere on-screen. Haywire doesn't work as what it wants to be, nor as what it actually turns out to be.

Not Over the Hiller

2012-01-20T15:22:00.001Z

For an actress who was the pet of the densely linguistic George Bernard Shaw, Wendy Hiller was a remarkably physical actress. At least, that's what my notes are overflowing with - bullet points about how she holds herself, or moves, or doesn't. But this physicality is never at odds with Shaw's politically and socially pointed scripts, because Hiller's movements and vivid expressions are all in service of corroborating the words her character's speak, and how she delivers them. Throughout the highlights of Hiller's limited film career, this approach has its successes and it has its limitations. In the first two films that brought her Oscar nominations, separated by a clean twenty years, we can see a remarkable progression.

Pygmalion, the film that brought Hiller to global attention, casts her as Eliza Doolittle, a rather mangled posy seller who crouches on the streets and speaks out of the side of her mouth, missing out half of her letters. As becomes even clearer having watched the second Shaw-Hiller cinematic adaptation, Major Barbara, Hiller's natural mode is the creature Eliza is transformed into by Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard, whose brisk, emphatic style nails Higgins' scholarly fascination), rather than the bedraggled creature we meet initially. Indeed, the mode of Hiller's most famous characters is exactly this sort of poised but earthy character, one whose control is constantly poised, never quite a facade but certainly a conscious effort. When strong emotions really get to her, Hiller's change in body is always noticeable, even if her characters quickly gather themselves back to their smooth gait and implacable stare.

The clean structural arc familiar both in Pygmalion and its musical adaptation My Fair Lady, exposes Hiller's approach so thoroughly and openly that, to some extent, it gave away too much. Her Eliza Doolittle is a very accomplished technical accomplishment, carefully charting the physical education that less prolifically accompanies Higgins' vocal teachings. She progresses from a duckish walk and an unbecoming thrust forward when she speaks to a poised, straight posture and cleanly rounded vowels, taking in along the way a deliciously exaggerated sequence where Higgins takes her to tea with his mother. She performs her learning with robotic, stilted speech, sucking in her cheeks so the words seem to pop out of her mouth.

But Hiller rarely seems able to anchor this technique into a vibrant emotional experience of Eliza's journey (something Audrey Hepburn also suffered from years later), almost always seeming conscious of technique first and feeling second. To a certain extent, this makes narrative sense, reflecting Eliza's focus and dedication on improving herself. There is marvel in the scene where Eliza rails against Henry and comes to the realisation that her mode of expression has irrevocably changed - her "No! No. Thank you.", in one brief moment, charts this epiphany, a sharp rejection giving way to a sad, muted nicety, the choked sound of her "no"s one of the most peculiarly heartbreaking moments I've ever seen.

More often, sadly, Hiller gets trapped in theatric precision, the flight of any emotions betraying a long-limbed bodiliness that makes sense for neither cockney Eliza nor the newly cultured one, and her face restrained to a limited amount of expression that seem mostly to involve the shape of her eyebrows. These features hamper Major Barbara more (at least when her titular character is allowed control of the narrative, which wanders all over), where she's stuck in business mode, only occasionally pricking her smooth voicework despite different attitudes to the diverse characters around her, hitting emotional notes with completely inexplicable reactions, and seeming to forget to act at all when the camera isn't focusing on her.

Fastforward to 1958 and Hiller's victory in AMPAS' Best Supporting Actress category for her work as Bournemouth hotel owner Pat Cooper in Separate Tables. Though the film's split focus on a a sour David Niven being lusted after by a jittering Deborah Kerr, and a taunting Rita Hayworth bothering Burt Lancaster pays very few dividends, Hiller quietly brushes through the crowd to a worthy performance. Pat has Hiller's familiar smooth walk - carefully closing swinging doors behind her - and implacable orderliness, but it cracks sooner, and so Hiller can't try to build Pat through the same bag of techniques. And how, when it cracks! Taking aside John (Lancaster), it quickly becomes apparent that he and Pat are involved in a relationship, because Hiller suddenly gets to play sexy, and suddenly her sharp face softens in coy, cowed lust, her body undulating as she uncrosses her arms and leans towards him.

The mark of twenty years is remarkable - Hiller has moved forward with the shifting acting styles of the time, and none of her physicality is exaggerated as it once was. Pat's horniness burns off the screen, but rather than forced by sharp gestures, it exudes from Hiller's small adjustments - breasts sticking forward just a little, eyes fixed but slightly drawn back. The sex folds back into her as Pat recognises the boundaries of propriety, but Hiller makes it clear that Pat's reticence isn't due to any shame, but self-respect. Pat shifts from a surprisingly desperate plea to John into ordinary hotel business with natural ease, because Pat, and Hiller too, are experienced enough at this stage of their lives to understand the shape of their emotions. Her physicality separates the different parts of her life while seeming unconscious - her more controlled body while around the hotel guests speaks more of her general disinterest in them, not allowing them views of sadness that her body betrays when alone. You finally understand how she is the centre of a misshapen bunch of people when she gives a little worldly smile at Niven's dramatic suggestion of suicide - Pat's assessment of his situation takes on a kind, non-judgemental mood in Hiller's imploring reading. She convinces as caretaker and as woman without ever denigrating the other side of her character.

A third and final Oscar nomination followed for Hiller in 1966, with a supporting role as Thomas More's wife Alice in A Man For All Seasons - the period film a more traditional source of awards attention for British cinema than the contemporary films Hiller made her rare camera excursions for. Her tendency towards emotional compartmentalisation perhaps more sense in a historical context, and you certainly can't imagine Hiller being greatly successful in today's landscape, and not merely because roles relying so heavily on the face are so few and far between. But her linguistic alertness and her angular features make Hiller's legacy bigger than merely the first Elisa Doolittle of the silver screen. If nothing else, that surprising but deserved Oscar win will keep her as a stop on any obsessive's tour of the past, and maybe, like me, they'll stay longer than expected.

Oscar Season: The Visible Edges of Hollywood Reflexivity

2012-01-15T18:44:00.000Z

There is something disturbing about War Horse. Unsurprisingly, I find I was not the first to note the direct influence of John Ford's How Green Was My Valley; early on in the film, the village setting for an auction scene appears to be that monochrome Welsh mining town resurrected. The family home, meanwhile, seems to have reclaimed the hill Scarlett O'Hara was so fond of wandering over. Much of War Horse was filmed on location, and although I've no idea which locations are pre-existent and which studio, there's not really any excuse for the way the actors appear to pop off the backgrounds like cardboard cutouts. None of the locations in War Horse seem particularly real, and while this rankled with me in the early stages, by the end, having choked back some tears so ashamedly I ended up audibly gasping for emotionless air, I came to realise it didn't matter. Or I didn't care.

There often seems to be a critical tendency towards valuing realism in modern cinema above everything else. I would certainly admit that it's something I personally tend towards, although mainly because it's the most straightforward route towards delivering emotional truth (though the best two films from last year, Margaret and Melancholia, take diversely unreal structural and conceptual approaches towards a much greater clarity of emotional truth). At absolutely no point did I find realism or even emotional truth in War Horse, because it isn't there. By being so deliberately - and, though the mounting of it can be a bit shaky, I think it is deliberate - fantastical, War Horse delivers a different kind of cinematic emotionality, one hardly ever projected or indeed aimed at since Hollywood's Golden Age faded over half a century ago. The film gallops past even the most nostalgic of Spielberg's previous films, never achieving the warmth or upholstered buoyancy of his best work, but rolling in the green green grass of Hollywood's fetish for fake English hills and getting a bit of mud in my eye.

Joey (unconfirmed number of horses) races through No Man's Land

There's safety in those very visible edges to a world. It's a quality so obvious in the classics that its reemergence in War Horse is difficult to re-acclimatize yourself to, but the consistency in the empty or merely unseen boundaries of nearly every scene eventually catches the eye, so to contradict. The painted fakery of something like How Green Was My Valley is a past foible, but War Horse hermetically seals you off all the same, following the fabled journey of Joey through a variety of pastoral or desolate landscapes. In this, despite the obviousness of a cinematic inflection to such a large story, we can see the after-effects of War Horse's success as a play. Locations such as Niels Arestrup's farm play as disconnected locales, where invasions of army regiments suddenly wave through, and the war exists as sound not heard, but discussed. Even the wider, starker design of No Man's Land, which we travel through twice in very different moods, seem lost in a stagy mist beneath a black ceiling, reminiscent not of the startling realism of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, but the battlefield which the heroes of Blackadder memorably charged onto.

It never plays as particularly stagy - the camera gets too close, and the shifting connection to the horse as a character gives the whole thing an odd elasticity - and so instead this visible falseness feels antiquated even before Janusz Kaminski floods the final scene in vivid sunset orange. War Horse does explore the darkness of war, using the pressure of the unreal locations to bolster the emotions of particular scenes to the same kind of dramatic pitch of Hollywood's Golden Age - the acting style is larger, more direct (although it could have done without the alarming shots of Joey's bloodshot eye), and the narrative constructs itself in fragments that build up to a variety of dramatic climaxes, each of which sustain piquant emotional pitches.

Two stronger contenders this awards season appropriate similar styles. Hugo, Martin Scorsese's love letter to silent cinema, is compiled in a similar set of climaxing vignettes, although its clockwork MacGuffin and caricatured secondary characters are less supportable in terms of their contribution to any overall narrative thrust or emotional clarity. Like War Horse, Hugo's production design creates a sealed off world, though the snowy enchantment of the edges of this one are less John Ford than Robert Zemeckis. Hugo has to manifest the dreams of its titular character, as well as its farcical chases, inside this world, and combined with the 3D, it sets a flexibility to a world where the narrative is suggesting the problems of restriction for Hugo. Better, in every sense, are the scenes where we flashback to George Melies' studio - shot with less glow and mist, their isolated existence - nothing in the skylines beyond - quietly evokes the magic revolution going on inside the glass walls, without having to visibly romanticise them.

The Artist's Kinograph production studios are similarly shot - no industrialised skyscrapers surrounding the stage hangers and dressing rooms - and its public locales, like the cinemas and residential streets, echo the kind of recreations made for Singin' in the Rain. The most interesting scene from a production design standpoint, though, is the pivotal scene where Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo) and George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) physically enact the narrative trajectory of their characters - Peppy going upwards, George down. Most of this scene is shot in romantic mid-shot, but, after they part ways, director Michel Hazanavicius cuts to a square long shot of the entire staircase. It looks like an opened dollhouse, with such minute historical detail recreated for this one moment in order to visualise the largess of the movie business and the shifting power within it.

It seems, in a general sense, to be a year of looking back. The Help resurrects and somewhat updates the social issues pictures that were all the rage in the late 1950s and 1960s, while Midnight in Paris is besotted with the liberté and decadence of the Parisian past. War Horse seems to be less en vogue than these similarly nostalgic films because its animal hero is inconsistently characterised, the human surrogates are (excepting Jeremy Irvine, who induced my misty eyes) summarily dismissed with little feeling, and it never digs too deeply into anything. But, finally, I think that's what worked for me. What Spielberg gets right, and what perhaps awards voters want to firmly leave behind, is the rosy pastoral warmth of Hollywood's Golden Age. The free expression of the silent era mined by The Artist and Hugo, a skim away from the sexual liberté of 1920s Paris, mixes nostalgia with the modern relevance we suspect the Academy so desperately desires. War Horse brushes itself down to deliver a certain inescapable emotional claustrophobia, but the dust still lingers on the chisels and hammers the crew left behind, and I'm not sure dirt is in this season. (Except maybe Minny's.)

Prancer is this year's most valuable reindeer

2011-12-30T20:41:00.000Z

A trip home to the family for the holidays inevitably informs your holiday viewing. For me, it means a return to the tastes of my mother, as she dominates the music on the radio (always classical) and generally gets her way on the television as well. More than that, though, it returns me to the whim of the obsession of hers than heavily influenced my childhood - dance.

On Christmas Day, the BBC put out an hour and a half programme where Darcey Bussell, one of the most famous ballerinas of recent years, flexing her leg muscles again after a few years of retirement. But instead of ballet, she took on recreating four famous dance numbers from the glory days of the movie musical. Just days after the news that the National Film Registry's latest inductees include some "family home movies" of the Nicholas Brothers, tap dancing contemporaries of Fred Astaire, dance experts name-check them here. Bussell's first challenge - and ultimately her biggest - was reenacting Astaire's famous 'Puttin' on the Ritz' number from the otherwise obscure Blue Skies (1946). As the programme progressed, the documentary sections before each filmed performance shortened, so most of the technical issues of adaptating to a vastly different style of dance were included in this first passage. Where classical ballet requires clean, long lines and telegraphed positioning, tap required Bussell to loosen up and bring her body inwards - while redirecting her precision, because Astaire's performances were no less controlled and perfectly choreographed than Bussell's graceful ballet roles.

Bussell recreates Astaire's 'Puttin' on the Ritz'

This first number - pleasingly blasé about inverting the gender of the performer - turned out to be the highlight of the programme. Recreations of Top Hat's 'Cheek to Cheek' number and Singin' in the Rain's 'Good Mornin'' were appealingly staged and brightly performed, but, perhaps because she was returned to the female parts, where Ginger Rogers and Debbie Reynolds had been less technically adept than their male co-stars, they felt considerably less spirited. The fourth, meanwhile, was a curious reinvention of the famous 'Girl Hunt' number from The Band Wagon - always a highlight of the enormously talented Cyd Charisse's career. But here, its modern mishmash of a score and rather garish sets were the background to a mix of dancing styles that just didn't spark. Though Charisse herself came from a background in ballet, Bussell's lengthy background in ballet still seems to be what undid her here - her leg extensions and polished line finishes seemed uncomfortable in the louche jazz setting. But major points for trying.

Bussell stretches out for the Girl Hunt

So then, in those lingering days before the New Year in which no one is really sure what to do with themselves, I noticed that the house had acquired the new DVD issue of 1968's Isadora, for which Vanessa Redgrave was a somewhat forgotten Oscar nominee in the year of the infamous Hepburn-Streisand tie. With Redgrave back in Oscar circles this year for her fiery turn in Coriolanus, I realised I'm woefully uneducated on her career, so what an unexpected boon this was.

Isadora Duncan was a dance revolutionary. The film Isadora doesn't leave you without this knowledge, but ultimately it feels more like knowledge and not feeling - you know it because you have been told, but less because you've witnessed and experienced it. Isadora gets hijacked by Isadora's love life, and while that wouldn't necessarily be a detriment, the script quickly loses the connecting tissue between these romantic tangles and Isadora's dancing. It's there in the passionate encounters with her first lover, Edward Gordon Craig (James Fox), a theatre designer who declares "You see, I invented you". Isadora does dance in these passages, a sprightly expression of her youthful sexuality finally blossoming ("Why did nobody tell me how beautiful men are?"). A sex scene is evocatively intercut with Isadora seemingly dancing on the ceiling (left), an aerially filmed series of movements that vividly suggest the thrill, fear and lust in Isadora's physical reality.

But dance is soon relegated to merely Isadora's career, something she inconsistently maintains through her relationship with Paris Singer (Jason Robards), and away fall the intriguingly filmed dance sequences of the early passages of the film. Late in the film, as Isadora moves to Russia, dance's capacity as a political expression, and moreover a political tool, flares up as an intriguing theme, but still one which blanks on really evoking the feeling of movement. Lost too, is the briefly glimpsed Duncan rehearsing - a friction between the supposed loose heartfelt nature of her dancing style and the idea that she can still rehearse such a thing.

Isadora's vibrant Russian red confronts an American audience

Of course, a biopic has to tell the story of a person's life, and Isadora's love affairs were a huge part of her particular existence. But so, too, was dance, and her fame in this area is what makes her specifically interesting as a subject. The ultimate fustiness of Isadora leaves a lingering disappointment that the connections between life and art seemed to fall through the cracks here. Isadora Duncan herself would likely have felt better served by a filmic treatment than was less narrative and more by some sort of 'arty' evocation of the passion and feeling and torture behind her dancing.

Margaret, unthatched

2011-12-03T16:52:00.000Z

You can understand why Margaret has taken five years to make it to cinema screens, as few in number as those screens were. You can understand why it was the subject of editing headaches for director Kenneth Lonergan and his editor Anne McCabe. The film has been edited into as smooth a narrative curve as it sensibly could have been (apparently by Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker) , but, even though it is as close to a masterpiece as any film this year, you sense that there's a bigger, more amorphous, even more majestic film lying in pieces on the cutting room floor. Because Margaret is not about plot points or closure or linearity, not in a strict sense at least. Despite the clearly stringent editing process, Margaret still feels inescapably loose, a quietly ambitious collage of the human existence that barely makes the slightest pan or track without acutely demonstrating an astonishing understanding of the individual and their relationships.

Jean (J. Smith-Cameron) and Lisa (Anna Paquin)

Ostensibly the film follows the repercussions of a tragic road accident, partly caused by and witnessed by Lisa (Anna Paquin). Confused, petulant, argumentative and naive, Lisa is driven by guilt and self-righteously drives this into seeking legal action against the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) who was also partially at fault. As the film progresses, the legal processes Lisa undertakes with the deceased woman's best friend Emily (Jeannie Berlin) do dominate, but even they prove more symptomatic of the tangled trappings of modern society's convoluted, emotionless systems than of any sense of resolution or finality in any of the characters' lives.

At one point, the idea of Lisa as the centre of a narrative is explicitly disputed by one character, their mouth practically spitting with disgust at the idea of such a self-centred idea. Margaret's title seems to take issue with this too - Margaret is none of the characters, not even the dead one, but a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem read out by one of Lisa's teachers. There is a sense of latent resentment as the film aligns with Lisa; passages that spend time with her mother Joan (J. Smith-Cameron) vibrate with a peculiar jealousy, stemming from Joan being slowly pushed out of her daughter's worldview, while her father (Lonergan) exists only in phone calls to his daughter, sympathetic but disconnected, trapped in an airless Los Angeles beach house. Students who are forced to witness Lisa's circular political arguments with a Muslim classmate yell to reinstate themselves in Lisa's narrative. Characters who are at one moment integral to Lisa's narrative fall away, her life shifting in a different direction - youthful romantic possibilities shed for starker, more cynical sexual entanglements. Among many things, Margaret is a story of a girl struggling with adulthood, a question of how a confrontation with death might mature her, and twist her self-perception.

Lisa shrinks from the world around her

On more than one occasion Lonergan abandons identification altogether, instead observing crowded sidewalks, or gliding across the cityscape to Nico Muhly's delicately sad score. These moments never feel awkward or pontifical, but an expressively cinematic way of expressing the essence of the film: the world overwhelming the individual, the multitude of tangled stories of isolated human beings. It recalls something mentioned by Glenn Close in The Hollywood Reporter's recent Actress Roundtable - the concept of "mirror neurons" and acting being a "reflection" of a scene partner. "You can elicit an emotion in someone else by how you look into someone else's eyes." But Margaret is about averted eyes, missed glances, defiant avoidance of gaze. Lisa chooses to disconnect herself from Jean, who desperately tries to draw her daughter's gaze but in turn fails to really look at the new man (Jean Reno) in her life.

Lisa's gaze rests on sympathetic teacher Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon)

Its convoluted journey leaving it a strange window into the past, Margaret's foundations are closer to post-9/11 society than the present, something explicitly referenced in the debating scenes at Lisa's school. But these moments never feel as if they're trying to elicit a particular response to anything; they are simply a more verbal example of a friction between two human beings, with Lisa and Angie (Hina Abdullah) tellingly positioned on opposite sides of the room. Margaret at once feels timely and specific yet displaced, a strange window to a recent past where the ideas seem alternately innocent and prescient.

I left Margaret in a similar way to that in which I left Melancholia - my sense of the word around me felt irrevocably different. But where Melancholia's florid, epic ambition left me on some other plane of existence, Margaret thrust me back out into a world full of people, a fresh tactility and almost hyper-awareness of all the individual stories and issues brushing past me. Margaret's lack of grand scope is what makes it so ambitious, as if it's epic qualities have been turned in on themselves, expanding within character rather than in the form of a terrifying planet. It pinpoints, finally, the difficulties of living, and the precious moments we'd all do our best to ensure we actually look at. (A)

Margaret is playing three times at a day at the Odeon Panton St. in central London until next Thursday. If you can get there at all, run.

A Few Notes of a Tokyo Sonata

2011-11-17T18:53:00.000Z

Tokyo Sonata begins with the patriarch of a Japanese family being dismissed, in a roundabout way (basically he costs too much and the Chinese are younger and cheaper), from his job at some nameless company. Hardly what someone currently unemployed (like me) wants from their evening's entertainment, but Kiyoshi Kurosawa's film turns out to be a deft, freewheeling, surprising portrait of a nuclear family dissipating amidst the worsening economic depression.

The urban wasteland awaits Ryûhei

Japan has been stuck in an economic downturn longer than the rest of the world, so it's no surprise that when the patriarch, Ryûhei (Teruyuki Kagawa), puts his head down and visits the job centre that the queue spirals down the several levels of building and out the door. Ryûhei doesn't tell his wife or sons about being fired, but their lives spin out of normality too - oldest Takashi (Yû Konanagi) is disenchanted with his homeland and wants to help the world by enlisting in the U.S. military, youngest Kenji (Kai Inowaki) has to develop his prodigal talent for the piano behind his father's back ("How could our child be a prodigy?"), and wife Megumi (Kyôko Koizumi) lingers in the house, her food slowly losing its power to bring the family together.

Tokyo Sonata is about the broken communication in Japanese society, the stiff traditions of internalisation and secrecy combusting in the modernised world, though it's story of masculine pride and generational divides is not unlike American Beauty. It finds human counterparts for the family's problems - Kenji runs into a classmate who is (physically) running away from his father; Ryûhei meets an old friend who is also unemployed, and keeps up a facade that involves his phone automatically ringing five times an hour - to contextualise and strengthen the issue Kurosawa is broaching.

But in its singularly poignant moments, which often blossom from the odd plot turns, particularly in the last half hour, the film sources an involving personal affection. Take this scene, where Ryûhei returns home after dining with the friend he made in the unemployed queue. Megumi is lying on the sofa, exhausted. He wakes her, turns down her offer of tempura and disappears, but he's not out of earshot when she asks:

Unheard, her arms hang in mid-air, and she lifts them further, up towards the ceiling. Whether asking her husband or some higher power, or just anyone who'll listen, the emptiness in Megumi's life is evident in her hazy, bewildered eyes as they gaze upwards.

Ryûhei doesn't touch Megumi until the end of the film.

Tokyo Sonata seems to demonize the patriarch to excess, hating him as much as it pities him, and the way it deals with him in the final stretches, especially in comparison to the piquant sequences granted to Megumi, leaves doubtful questions hanging over the ending. But these questions linger, and perhaps they are intentional worries about how everything resolves itself. The final sequence of the film is remarkably evocative and enthralling, and the silent wondering over it only strengthens the experience of a pointed social critique. B+

McCabe, maybe, but definitely Mrs. Miller

2011-11-15T14:44:00.000Z

At points, McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a film that exists only through a fog. Director Robert Altman and his cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond purposefully 'flashed' the negative and several of the camera filters to irreparably distinctify the film style, but this eerie distance isn't merely achieved visually. Leonard Cohen's nostalgic compositions make moments feel consigned to myth as we watch them. The first half of the film is about McCabe's (Warren Beatty) efforts to build a new town, and so McCabe & Mrs. Miller itself builds reality out of the fog, slowly gathering an heavy earthiness as it progresses, eventually becoming overwhelmed by the elemental. It's an experience that makes the mundane disquieting, where Mrs. Miller's (Julie Christie) matter-of-fact business smarts slice through the muted atmosphere with startling bluntness.

So obtuse I had to add a white circle so you'd even notice.

Mrs. Miller's introduction is the briefest of glimpses - a purposefully obtuse concealment. It fits perfectly into Altman's filmmaking style but it's a tease. Julie Christie is a movie star and you're waiting for her. There she i- no. Not yet.

When she finally reappears, it's perched on a carriage pulled by a steam engine struggling up the hill, puffing deafeningly. An inconspicuous entrance into McCabe's life, but then she hops off and marches into the film without any nonsense. "You John McCabe? Mrs. Miller. I came up from Beatport to see ye'," she says, an astonishingly Cockney accent in the American Northwest. The accent is never discussed or disputed, and is merely an element of the difference of the character that hangs over proceedings. She and McCabe are the different, the focus, and though she's been absent for a quarter of the film already, Altman seems to inject her straight into the film's centre. As she pauses in the half-built saloon, the camera seems to take breathe with her, a short sharp shot of her at an angle 90° apart from the neighbouring frames:

When in the restaurant, the camera isolates the eponymous pair, the naturalist aesthetic retaining the sound of the community around them but this lofty angle setting them into a dark, reclusive corner, glowing in their own light. Christie's accent compounds the brisk, straightforward mundanity of what her entrance brings to the film - she yanks it back from the misty nostalgia, talks of the prostitutes' "monthlies" and greed for money and blows her nose like a foghorn. Unlike that which surrounds her, we know nothing about Mrs. Miller's past, her directness, and Christie's brusque, unfettered characterisation ensuring that her present is her sole existence for the majority of the film.

"You get out of my shot, you wanker."

McCabe & Mrs. Miller is about masculinity. It's about McCabe's bravado, his cowardice hiding behind a legend, and how Mrs. Miller cracks straight through it, leans him out of the frame and challenges his restricted dreams. She is the reality, the smart and the active; where he is the fool, the coward who has a distorted sense of the real world, of its currency and its death. It is also about modernity - the steam engine shuddering up the hill - and, as the economic crux of the film makes itself apparent in the suited agents, the film slowly gets heavier, earthier, more present. The romantic gauze of the early scenes seems to vanish, and the whistlingly nostalgic music fades away, lost and entwined in the howling wind. The physical reality of the town he built up ultimately surrounds McCabe and suffocates him.

Finally, lost in Mrs. Miller's observation too...

Mrs. Miller's own ending stares into the vibrant red and answers nothing about her feelings for McCabe. Altman frequently zooms breathlessly onto people merely observing, no answers to be found in their own face, nor any questions being asked. McCabe & Mrs. Miller is an escape into a nostalgic past where people are just as inert as they were in 1971, and as they are now. As colour and music drain from the film, it is not accidental that proceedings become more realistic. This is a life without colour, and possibly without love. But it is that possibility that lingers, and where the masterpiece might lie. A-

LFF Review: Martha Marcy May Marlene

2011-10-12T21:48:00.002Z

USA

written and directed by Sean Durkin; starring Elizabeth Olsen, Sarah Paulson, John Hawkes, Hugh Dancy, Brady Corbet, Louisa Krause

screens on Friday 21st, Saturday 22nd and Monday 24th October

A-

"I know who I am," proclaims Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) in rude defiance, decrying not only the concerned eye of her sister but the title of the film itself. Martha Marcy May Marlene is a sharp confusion of a title, one which compounds the collusion of identities that threads lucidly through the film. On first appearance, she is without a name, a silent figure setting a table which she must wait to eat at. Sexist oppression has tired for her, though, and just as quietly she slips out of the house in the dawning light, the camera ever so gradually receding backwards as she slips through the woods opposite. Then, snap; close, breathless, the camera runs with the terrified girl through the forest, wild hand held turns matching her panicked confusion. Martha, Marcy, May or Marlene: whoever she is, we're in this with her now.

Sean Durkin's debut feature is an striking combination of prickly panic and eerie calm. Once Martha escapes her overcrowded abode - which is soon confirmed to be the site of an earthy misogynistic cult headed by the frighteningly charismatic Patrick (John Hawkes) - the film establishes past and present not as distinctly separate narratives, but as inextricably entwined, constantly bleeding into one another. Echoes of one repeatedly appear in another, accomplished by quiet tricks of editing and photography. Often shocking but never cheaply utilized, this confusion craftily reflects Martha's damaged state of mind, unable to truly escape what she has run away from, and with a mind unconvinced that she even need leave it all behind.

No judgments are made on what possible benefits Martha might gain from either the cult - which, though a harrowing and abusive environment, seems at least to give Martha a steelier edge, a far cry from the naivety we glimpse of her before her move into the communal house - or the bourgeosie, consumerist lives of her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and her critical husband (Hugh Dancy). The continual suggestion is that Martha cannot reconcile herself to either world; though, since her personality before joining the cult is only briefly glimpsed, the audience can only guess whether her awkwardness in normal society was always an issue. The possibility that Lucy's way of a life is as damaging as the cult often seems overstated, particularly through Lucy's reactions to Martha's strange behaviour, which are often shaming, outraged chastisements rather than the bewildered concern Paulson otherwise emits so superbly. But fold these shifting reactions into the quiet discussions the sisters have about their pasts, and another layer of mystery is added - Lucy never really knew her sister, so she, like us, can't know how deeply rooted Martha's issues are. It's a clever, frustrating revelation that obscures Martha even further.

In Olsen, you can see the limpid ghost of her infamous elder sisters, her face a construction of ovals; eyes large pools that glass over, a face that sours and turns in on itself when Martha tries to shut her sister out, as if she's trying to remove herself from the room. It's a brave performance that interiorises the pain and confusion, which then bursts out into the film like shards of glass, thrusting into the narrative at awkward angles through the spurring of dark memories, and the shattering clarity of the sound design (a taunting phone, reverberating shrilly in the middle of the night). The teasing final shot essentially leaves Martha as a figurehead for any woman escaping an abusive environment, but due to Olsen's superb work, Martha has become sympathetic through her unknowability - the audience feels for her confusion, her instability, impressed and scared by her barbed tongue and her aloof naivety.

Durkin and his cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes develop a slow, observant style of shooting, using gradual zooms and curving pans to give illusions of perspective and shift the viewer's eye. As the film progresses, camera, edit and sound work with the script to ratchet the tension to a distressing pitch, their weaving of past and present pressurising Martha to unbearable effect. The palpable dread of Martha's situation, and of Lucy's inability to deal with it, becomes harder to watch, since we become increasingly less certain of the people we're watching. Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene - she is all of them, and she is none of them.

Woody's Witching Hour

2011-10-09T22:01:00.000Z

Colour me surprised that Midnight in Paris burst into UK cinemas a mere five months after its US release, but then you'll all have heard by now that this nostalgia piece by one of America's most prolific and speediest directors is his most financially successful film ever. Earlier this year, on the delayed release of You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, I wrote this piece on Allen's last two films, closing with the question, "... will he ever recover his talent for funny, perceptive human insights, or even the romantic visual sense that was once so palatable?"

You've been waiting with baited breath for the answer, and, since it was rather fittingly released into the darkening twinkle of autumn's beginning, you didn't have to hold your breath and go red and collapse with exhaustion in the meantime. Midnight in Paris is Woody's best film in years; certainly his most vibrant since Match Point, and unlike that arch and slightly morbid exercise, this feels like classic Woody. It isn't, don't get me wrong, because he's still lost his touch at writing personable, funny, truthful female characters and in the final event, Rachel McAdams' shrill fiance almost sinks the entire ship.

You'd never be able to tell they're not really in love.

But if we put that aside - and, after so many years experiencing the same (and probably worse) from him, I have to, or I'll never enjoy anything ever again - Midnight in Paris is a film that sparkles with the romance and spirit of the city its set in. Again, a revelation - Woody's managed to capture the essence of a city again, after so baldly missing anything special in Barcelona and consistently misrepresenting London. The bizarrely prolonged montage of shots around Paris that begins the film worried, then relieved me; it was as if Woody was exhausting himself and the audience of all these generic shots, before approaching his real depiction of the city through the nostalgia trip that is the basis of the narrative. The imitation of such major historical cultural figures is so daringly brash that he pulls it off, the clearly fictional imaginings lending a joyous vibrancy that reflects off the walls, the steps and the pavements. The restraint he shows in shying away from any of the iconic buildings means that, even though it's a city chased down a hazily nostalgic rabbit hole, it comes alive because the central character is so in love with the setting.

They're looking at each other. I'd say that's a good first step towards romance.

And in Owen Wilson, Woody's found a substitute for himself who really works (whatever works won't do after all), and ensures that this feels more like one of the classic Woody-starrers than the past fifteen years of his back catalogue have. He's aloof and slightly rude without being unsympathetic, his foppishness subbing well for Woody's reediness. As perhaps befits the plot, the modern day cast are of little interest (though Michael Sheen has predictable fun as a pretentious pedant), but the players of '20s Paris shine, particularly Corey Stoll as an uncompromising, darkly charismatic Ernest Hemingway. And Marion Cotillard is just a shimmer away from undoing the damage McAdams' character does - winsome, elusive, though ultimately just a little too idealised.

To return to my months-old question, I'd be hard-pressed to say that there are any particularly revelatory human insights to be had here. That's a shame, because once upon a time, Woody Allen was one of those writers who could start a scene with a joke and end it with a revelation. Woody the scribe is still stuck in convention, ending the film with a message that's far too bluntly delivered, and rather at odds with his entire career of late. Does Woody actually recognise his own situation - a writer in need of a Gertrude Stein - in Wilson's? Doubtful. But Woody the director has livened up again, and the final point is this. Midnight in Paris, for the first time since, oh, Everyone Says I Love You (just fifteen years ago! ...), is a Woody Allen film genuinely alive with the sense of its title. It might not be Woody back on his unchallenged classical form but it's a Woody who seems to have recovered a sense of the magic of cinema, of the discovery of a troubled character's ventures, and of a sense of romantic purpose. The clock has struck, and I can spy Manhattan down the street. (B-)

Freaks in Love

2011-06-04T17:01:00.000Z

Let's get this out of the way. There's only one reason people see Freaks these days. Here it is.

Scientists and I are still baffled as to how this is realistically possible, but look at that jacket! Quite swank for a duck-lady, I think you'll agree.

I'd seen Freaks a few years ago and somehow managed to forget this deliciously insane revelation, so I do admit, I rolled up for a packed screening in the centre of London with slightly embarrassed anticipation at the madness I'd blanked on. What I recalled from my first viewing was a rather frightening climax where the freaks move like terminators through sticky midnight mud, preceded by the most boring and stilted machinations concerning circus freaks that had ever been filmed.

But lo! What I found on second viewing were the most stilted machinations concerning circus freaks ever filmed, that somehow had a tragic romance at its heart. Real-life husband and wife Harry and Daisy Earles bagged the plum roles here, as Hans, the rich midget taken in by eventual duck-lady Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), and his girlfriend Freida, powerless to prevent that gold-digging whore!! from stealing her man. Despite the awkward, halting manner in which the pair deliver their dialogue, there is something affecting in their performances, particularly Daisy's. As Freida becomes increasingly forgotten by Hans, the faltering speech even adds to the devastation she feels and that we feel for her.

Mostly, though, it's in the facial expressions. Harry Earles is certainly expressive - watch as he mimicks Cleopatra's sycophantic pretence - but the emotional power of Freaks is almost entirely in Daisy Earles' melancholy faces. Observe.

I think this unexpectedly beautiful shot telegraphs the tenderly tragic, and surprisingly straight, romance at the film's core, though.

Although if you've not seen the film, that probably just looks like two people facing away from the camera. AMATEURS.

P.S. Of course, none of this is as wonderfully 'hilare' as the scene where the suitors of the Siamese twins discuss how they should visit each other sometime. Just imagine the sexual intercourse.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Curtain Rouge

2011-06-01T19:37:00.000Z

This post is a contribution to the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series at The Film Experience.

Another mindless crime... behind the curtain...

Part of Baz Lurhmann's 'Red Curtain' trilogy (the effervescent Strictly Ballroom and the searing William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet precede it), Moulin Rouge! is like the mama's boy to its director parent, the teacher's pet - it opens with a red curtain. And there are red curtains behind the red curtain. The film's melee and mishmash of songs, styles and the sheer speed of the editing make Moulin Rouge! such a dazzling spectacle that it's hard to know where, if anywhere, the show stops. But just as freedom, beauty, truth, and of course love are layered into the range of pop songs interpolated and performed, they are similarly hot-wired into every shaking skirt and wavering note.

The Red Curtain throughout: as Christian walks out on the
tango, the curtains separate that performance space.

Trying to take shortcuts (I'm pressed for time, and I watched the film not a month ago just because I wanted to), I did some quick thinking about the scenes that stick out in my memory, and this sequence is one of them. It's filmed with what seems like a hand-held camera, generally used these days to signify a greater 'realism', but here it seems to add instead the frisson of danger that proves to be a valuable warning: Zidler (Jim Broadbent) spots the careless lovers, Satine (Nicole Kidman) and Christian (Ewan McGregor), on the walkway above.

I love the empty, clean lines on each side of this composition, framing the frantic, lusty mess of Kidman and McGregor in the centre.

Or this, focusing in on the beauty of the messy kiss (if you don't love this pair, you don't believe in love at all!) with the block of light grey in the centre separating them from the mess of the main auditorium.

My pick for best shot.

Perhaps Satine's final moment of happiness; this is just before Zidler appears, spooking her and telling her it has to end. Here, he's already metaphorically creeping up on her, the bottom left of the frame filled with darkness, a gilded kind of black; but she's lost in the stars in the red canopy above. They meet in the centre and on the diagonal, a singular moment where the rosy happiness and desire of the red crosses diagonally and horizontally with the black. And they meet on Satine, too: her dress is intoxicatingly dark to conflict with the thorough red of Kidman's hair (a key focus of the photography throughout). It's a darker colour scheme than is often typical of the movie, but a perfect reflection of Moulin Rouge!'s dark drama and its vibrant infatuations.

Last Tango in Youth, with Death

2011-05-14T14:52:00.000Z

Major spoilers included.

Infamous butter fingers precede Last Tango in Paris. I was hardly expecting the screen to be slathered in it, of course, but such cultural definitions of a film inevitably colours expectations of it as a whole: not narratively, but emotionally, certainly. So anticipating a dark erotic thriller, instead unfolded a funny, melancholy, farcical tragedy. Bernardo Bertolucci's film is that occasional piece of cinema that manufactures its situations in such a completely barefaced manner that you have to allow for the unreality of the formation to comprehend the emotional truths that are revealed as it progresses.

Last Tango... has many obvious dichotomies - male and female, youth and death, America and France - but it never feels like these are being forcefully played against each other, despite the chemistry and friction between the central characters. Marlon Brando forces Maria Schneider into his life, and though the initial bizarreities of their meeting seem completely foreign to my own sensibilities, the whole project of the film is really occupying some kind of gulf between frankness and mystery. Schneider might lie there, her bare breast filling half the screen, a carefree smile on her face, but the question lying (metaphorically) next to her is whether Brando's insistence on their not sharing names could ever actually mean that they don't know each other as well as Schneider and her fiancee Jean-Pierre Leaud do.

It's hard, in a way, to take thoughtful resolutions as any kind of truth in a film where Brando monologues about climbing up the "ass of death". But personally, the fact that Last Tango in Paris has such an absurdist, ridiculous way about its characterization makes it a fresher pill to swallow. Sobering conclusions feel more organic when the film doesn't expunge the unbalanced possibilities for lunacy and laughter and sexual abandon that might come from dealing with a great tragedy.

Perhaps it's because, as I become older - now, almost 23, I can certainly be classed as an adult - I don't feel "grown up" in the way I think children expect they eventually will. When you're a child, adulthood feels like an entirely separate plane of existence. It might be something you look forward to or something you want to keep away from as long as possible (I'm afraid the time period is pretty much set, kids), but the world of responsibility is a foreign one to the majority of children. So you expect some sort of switch to flick in your head at some point, and so suddenly you're an "adult", capable of coping with managing money and maintaining relationships and facing the long walk towards death. Alright, so I must have realised at some point in my teenage years that it was hardly going to be that simple, but I still didn't come to the obvious conclusions that I'd have to actively learn and struggle to do these things, and that childish impulses don't just get washed out of your brain, and that you have to figure out whether any of that attitude can be integrated into your existence as a functioning adult.

The point in relation to Last Tango in Paris is that it understands this crisis. Provoked by his wife's suicide, Marlon Brando spins into a head-space where he wants to abandon responsibility. Adult virility mixes irrepressibly with his infantile spirit and he throws himself without warning at Maria Schneider - who, for her own reasons, cannot resist, and seems to engage just as wilfully as he does. Brando's insistence that they not use their names, or indeed discuss their lives outside of the apartment, suggests his longing for a childhood where freedom reigns, where friendships are pure enjoyment, not emotionally demanding. Names, other people, locations - they're all restrictions of the world of responsibility.

Maria Schneider happily engages in all this, because, so close to her own childhood, she can still sense it and recall what it was like; but her sexual encounters with Brando also have the allure of the freedom from childhood, from the restrictions imposed on her - restrictions that Brando's nostalgia seems to have forgotten. And the whole apartment block seems to be a place free of rules. The landlady, a manically cackling black woman, has no idea when people move out and in; and rats run free, Brando morbidly teasing Schneider when she finds a dead rodent lying on their mattress.

Reality is inescapable, of course. Ironically, the freedom of their sexual relationship must be contained if it wants to be free - within the apartment, still surrounded by the city, still bound by their lives outside so that maybe, when they arrive, the other isn't there to be free with them. And though they are happier together, they are ultimately not entirely free while together; and Brando realises that he doesn't want to be free, but wants to be with Schneider, to know her name and everything about her.

So the ending. Brando's foetal body, dead on the balcony, is the infantile frozen in immobility. For Schneider, it is her enjoyment of freedom simultaneously crystallized and consigned to the past. Brando will always be her reminder of the childish freedom she enjoyed, hence why he dies in that particular position. But dead, and, as she deliriously rationalizes, without name and identity to her, Schneider can 'forget' him, can proceed to adulthood and responsibility without guilt, for all she did was shoot a stranger intruding into her private adult space.

The film itself almost sees the linear regression of Brando, indulging in ever-more vulgar infantile behaviour and language, with big boy words like "pig-fucking" and smirking puns like "my hap-penis". By the time of the titular scenes in the dancehall, his relationship to Schneider has shifted to a maternal one: "I get to milk you twice a day. How about that?" His final desperation to live with her, then, is not wanting to love and care for her, but to be loved and cared for by her, his attachment relentless in the same way a baby craves for its mother's breast.

Schneider's inconsistent attitude towards Brando starts going batshit in the final part of the film, but it's not bad direction or Schneider losing grip of her performance. Her dilemma is exactly that of the young adult, stranded between looking over their shoulder at the irresponsibility of childhood and looking forward to the allure of adulthood's new adventures. While she's happy with Brando, it's because he is giving her a glimpse of both at once - childish games and newfound sexual liberation. But then she becomes engaged to Leaud and faces the responsibility of marriage, and is simultaneously confronted by Brando's growing attachment to her, which is in itself both a reflection of Leaud's demands and the allusion to the further responsibility of motherhood.

Our last moments with her are her disorientated rationalizations, and so we are left with the question of how she'll function now, free of the man whose name she may not know, but will perhaps be forever tied to all the stronger for that mystery. Their last tango fittingly ends in a sharp shock of tragedy, characters frozen in separation, but forever transformed by their dance.

Source Code is...

2011-05-06T14:08:00.005Z

... 30% bullshit. Let's face it. All the explanations we get in Source Code are completely fanciful claptrap that don't really make sense if you think about them for more than five seconds. And that's completely fine and dandy until it starts taking everything so seriously in the final act, and pulls some sort of magic time-bending trick out of thin air that exists on the exact basis that it can't really be explained. It's a bit like in Duncan Jones' previous feature, Moon, when the fun sci-fi concept got all heavy and serious and drained all the life out of Sam Rockwell. It's harder to suck the life out of Jake Gyllenhaal here, since that's already kinda happened, but it's essentially the same situation. I don't mind a dramatic conclusion. But try not to craft it at the expense of the fun you've already been having. It depresses me.

... 20% Jake Gyllenhaal. 2010 was the year when Jake finally got thrust into the carrying a mainstream movie ballpark, with the highest-grossing video-game adaptation EVER in Prince of Persia, and the quite-frankly execrable "romantic" "comedy" "drama" Love and Other Drugs. But Source Code feels like the first time he's really holding a feature by himself, being responsible for the entire mood of the thing, convincing us of its scientific and romantic leanings - basically, he's the one selling the thing. And he does a rather good job. It helps to be so swoon-fully good-looking, of course, but we already knew, too, that he has charisma in abundance, and most crucially he sells the difficult mental journey Colter Stevens is forced to take, constantly thrust back into the same section of time over and over again while simultaneously learning, or remembering, his own reality. The "bullshit" takes over in the end, but it's Jake's sympathetic smarts you'll remember.

... 17% Quantum Leap. I did a sad little squeal of geeky delight when I spotted Scott Bakula's name at the end of the cast list as the credits rolled up. In a delicious little nod, he supplied the voice of Colter's father. My mother was a massive Quantum Leap fan, so while I couldn't name you the episode Jennifer Aniston guest-starred in, I still hold a certain fondness for the show. Of course, the constant jumping back in time to another person's body is basically stolen from Quantum Leap, and, like Dr. Sam Beckett, Colter's task is to "put right what once went wrong". Not a plagiarist, Colter actually says this line, and Bakula's cameo is begun with the show's other trademark line, "ohhh boy". Source Code isn't nearly as good as Quantum Leap, but it's a lot shinier.

... 13% The War. Bombings ---> terrorism ---> wars of the Bush regime. It's a simple, inevitable chain, and though the actual bomber doesn't fit into this pattern, he might as well do. Point is, Colter is haunted by his war experiences, and as such, reacts to the idea of a bomb, the suspects on the train, and the actual bomber, in the mindset of a soldier. Again, before it becomes all heavy-handed, this approach is quite cleverly used, a sharply realistic view of how both soldier and public function in this post-9/11 society, yet still in the guise of a pulpy thriller. After, it feels like you've been smacked in the face with a wet chain of bullets.

... 10% North by Northwest. Those credits, gliding diagrammatically over Chicago's streets, remind of the angular credits of Hitchcock's famous thriller. The music, by Chris Bacon, is very menacing bombast, with the low, growling horns and panicked flourishes of strings, and percussion generally going a bit bananas. And quite a bit of both takes place on a train. I mean, it's basically the same film.

... 5% completely obvious clues that probably don't even matter. You might not have seen Source Code yet, so I won't spoil it... but I figured out who the bomber was from the moment (s)he did that possibly-inconsequential-but-really-quite-important-if-the-identity-of-the-bomber-is-even-important-which-I'm-not-sure-it-is thing that (s)he does.

But like I said, I doubt it matters.

... 3% Vera Farmiga. From the moment she first announced herself in 2004's Down to the Bone, Ms. Farmiga immediately established herself as the best thing in any film she deigns to appear in, and it would be the same here if she had just a smidgen to work with. Throughout, she supplies an unsuffocating melancholy to her role as the Air Force Captain instructing and advising Colter through his mission, but what really gains her points is how she almost manages to sell that unfortunate final act of the film. Gyllenhaal is largely incapacitated and the burden of the film's emotional thrust, inevitably stepped up, falls to Farmiga, and though she could do it in her sleep, she makes the dilemma at the core of the film's conclusion seem painfully uncomfortable. Give her your best salute.

... 2% slow-motion explosions. I mean, what is this? A Zach Snyder film?

(C+)

Thor is...

2011-05-03T23:40:00.000Z

... 35% Chris Hemsworth. I doubted. I narrowed my eyes and I didn't believe that this hunk- no, this slab of a human being could possibly have the charismatic smarts to pull off this role. If I'd been paying attention, I'd have remembered that he impressed with hardly any time at all at the beginning of Star Trek, but I don't get paid to write these things, and until I do my attention will be vague and inconsistent. (I'll just wait here for the offers to come flooding in.) But not only does Hemsworth prove to have a superb sense of comic timing, a surprisingly sparky chemistry with Natalie Portman and a fist that could knock a hole through walls if it wasn't so busy swinging that bloody hammer, but he manages to be that self-important Norse god without condescending to the fanciful folktales (... oh; forgive me, great King Odin! I did not mean to anger you. But these mere mortals... they do not understand...) that the script revels so gamely in, and playing obnoxious without obscuring why he's the hero here. Basically, he's pretty much perfect here. Go figure.

... 20% complex villainy. What seems to give Thor a slightly distinctive edge in the somewhat overstuffed superhero sub-genre is its central villain, Loki (Tom Hiddleston). Loki is Thor's brother, and from the very beginning, Loki's unbrotherly attitude to Thor is pretty much signalled with flashing neon warning signs. But that's just it: we're meant to be suspicious of Loki, but the nature of that suspicion shifts constantly throughout the film, and the film's often awkward movement between the Earth that Thor is banished to, and the Asgard that Loki remains on, means that Loki is as focused on as Thor is. Being family, of course, the deepest depths of Loki's villainy are suspect to the idea that maybe, possibly, they're not as dastardly as they might seem. Even the reasons for his darkness are toyed with to confuse us - oh so that's wh- oh no, he's just evi- oh, wait, maybe not... Hiddleston sometimes hits discordant notes in his performance (and his haircut wasn't going to fool anyone), but as a character concept, at least, it is finely realised.

... 16% phallic symbols. Men playing with their swords. (Thor has a hammer, of course, but we'll get to that.) It's a long-accepted metaphor for men comparing penis size (or something like that), and even when they don't have swords, they can freeze thin air and stab you with their ice penis. Idris Elba's gatekeeper might have the mightiest penis - I mean, er, sword, of all, since he can plunge it into the middle of a big hole and open a gateway to other worlds. And if that's not a metaphor for an orgasm I don't know what it is.

Asgard is also pretty much built out of giant phallic buildings, although, to be fair, buildings mimicking vaginas are probably better for some kind of underground society.

... 15% The Avengers. "Thor will return in The Avengers." So we were told at the end of the credits, and though I'm surprised they had the restraint to leave it until most people had long left the cinema, I am quite excited about it. The whole series of Marvel films have shown a superb knack for casting - Robert Downey Jr. stands imposingly in a dapper suit above everyone, but Chris Evans is always charming, Mark Ruffalo is a daring choice for the third Hulk in ten years, and I personally liked Scarlett Johansson in Iron Man 2, so shut up. Thor doesn't hammer (sorry, that was inevitable) the franchise idea too hard into your face, but there are moments like a wink to Tony Stark and the slightly shoehorned inclusion of Jeremy Renner's (future?) Hawkeye to back up the deadening line when Thor promises Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) that even though he might be off to a battle he can't return from, he'll definitely be part of the S.H.I.E.L.D. team from now on! Gee whiz. (Oh, and then that's whole bit at the end of the credits. So maybe ignore the lights flaring up and the cleaners staring impatiently at you, and stay seated.)

... 6% hammer. If I had a hammer, I'd a-hammer in the morning... Only Thor's hammer isn't for hammering out love. It is, as you might expect, a mighty hammer, Thor's calling card, and it is he - and only he - and only he when he deserves it - who swings it and throws it and bashes it through mens' abdomens like they're not even there. (Except it makes quite a noise, so they probably are there.) The sword-in-the-stone moment is quite a hilarious one, although my personal favourite hammer-related moment in the film was the beautifully blunt thwack it made against the high-pitched clank of Loki's shining spear. Yeah, 'cause there might be all of those phallic symbols, but all that masculine insecurity exists for a reason - Thor's the man. He's got the hammer.

... 5% eyes. Anthony Hopkins, bearable for the first time in years thanks to the similarly scenery-chewing Kenneth Branagh being the director in charge here, has a strapless eye-patch, which is really quite cool, and I'm even considering gouging one of my eyes out so I can have one too. But eyes aren't just a cool accessory to lose in battle - they function as somewhat of a metaphor. Odin (Hopkins) loses one in a fierce battle where he gains a son - and it is his sons, intentionally or not, who weaken him. And then there's Elba's eyes - that glowing orange sign of life, sign of hope.

And then there's Hemsworth's eyes, which are terribly blue. Terribly.

... 2% crop circles. Or at least that's what the markings that the arrival of Asgard residents upon Earth landings looked like to me. Natalie Portman agrees; forget the man she just hit with her car, she needs to draw that bloody marking!

I'm not sure Thor really makes the most of the human reaction to conspicuous alien landings, but this type of film is often overstuffed. If this was a stand-alone film, without the necessary basics for connecting itself to The Avengers, it might be able to feel a bit more fleshed-out - the Asgard sequences feel more fully realised, although slightly less sharply directed - but something had to give, and Thor plays a good enough hand in this area with Stellan Skarsgard and...

... 1% Kat Dennings. I can't deny my Kat at least one hundredth of this post. She's in the film less than I'd like, and gets saddled with a few lines that make her character sound like an idiotic twat, but she's still funny and I love her. The end.

(B-)

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Beauty's In The Eyes

2011-04-13T21:00:00.000Z

This post is a contribution to the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series at The Film Experience.

Before I sat down and watched Beauty and the Beast for this entry, I managed to stumble, completely by accident, on an essay that discussed how the film might function as an allegory for the AIDS crisis and how it plays with ideas of gay male types. These ideas had never occurred to me, but they make complete sense - note particularly how the screenwriters have changed the attack on the Beast to be motivated by the general threat to the townspeople and the children he might snatch, whereas the original story is a much more enclosed, personal battle between the lead characters.

But, watching the film again, this wasn't the only suggestion that Beauty and the Beast subverts the traditional, conservative ideals that are generally attributed to Disney's empire. It's very easy to dismiss the film's ending as throwing its laudable moral - love is more than skin-deep - out the window as the Beast transforms back into a handsome white prince, but this ignores not only the groundwork the film has continually laid out, but the very expressive work we can see in the scene of the transformation itself.

On Belle's forbidden visit to the West Wing, the film establishes the key trope of eyes. In contrast to Gaston, who is constantly being distracted by his own reflection, you sense Belle has never really looked in a mirror. Here, she does, and in the cracked glass, she's confronted with about a dozen of her eyes looking back at her. While Gaston, and indeed the rest of the town, conceive of Belle as the 'Beauty' of the title, this shot, early in her time at the castle, sidelines that idea. As the Beast learns to love, Belle learns to see the value in the reality of the world around her. Here, she seems shocked to realise that she even exists, and the multiplicity of eyes reminds her of the value of looking.

It also makes for an intriguing visual correlation with this shot, just moments later. The Beast has ripped apart his portrait, reflecting the mangling of his own beauty by destroying its painted image, but crucially, the eyes remain in-tact. Belle goes to lift the hanging scrap, but she doesn't complete it, suggesting that complete physical beauty is always an afterthought for her.

My pick for best shot.

Which we see in these scenes, essentially of the Beast's 'death'. I'm not sure what it says about my state of mind that my favourite shots from Beauty and the Beast were of characters dying or crying, but it's rather apt and helpful that I really found the beauty in the beast in this shot. I don't think it's accidental - it's designed as a picturesque portraiture, Belle caressing the side of his face delicately. Moreover, it centres the eyes as the bright focal point - so much expression through drawing, a wistful love in the blue. As a frame, it's as carefully designed as the following one of Belle, looking down at him:

If anything, Belle, the supposed 'Beauty' who Gaston basically wanted to frame and preserve rather than love, has less of a portrait than the Beast, though the caressing hand is a poignant visual match to the previous shot. By having Belle looking straight at the 'camera', it positions this shot as a point-of-view shot, as opposed to the portrait of the previous image. But above all, once again, it's the eyes that are the key to the image - bigger pools on Belle's face than the slits on the Beast's, they seem to shine with concern. It's the character design of the entire faces that does the work for both characters, of course, but the images draw focus to the eyes, connecting the couple in what they think are their last moments together.

Finally, crucially, after the Beast has transformed back into the Prince, Belle doesn't care about the handsome new figure in front of her - she finds the answer, that he's still the same being, in his eyes.

Bonus: the geometrical matching of eyes to bodies in this shot of Cogsworth and Lumiere always tickles me.

Romance Isn't Sacred

2011-04-07T18:53:00.000Z

Nothing Sacred is an odd film. Although it's not particularly unusual for a pre-1940s film to be as short as this - a spry 77 minutes - there's a strong feeling that things have been cut out here, whether that's actually the case or not. It's more a satire than a screwball, and the odd moments don't feel intentionally kooky and offbeat, merely mysterious, like a character used as a plot device at the film's start suddenly reappearing to be a plot device in a completely different place. Strangely, given the script by Ben Hecht, one of Hollywood's great screenwriters, and the charismatic leads Carole Lombard and Fredric March, it takes until the final scenes to reach the expected plane of hilarity, though it's never less than watch-able thanks to the mere presence of Lombard and March, sparkling individually as ever even as their pairing seems underdeveloped. Similarly, there's some punch in the idea of the city taking in the fradulent Lombard as their dying heroine, but it never lands the blow. As it is, this all feels a little rough around the edges, but it makes for an interesting curio rather than something that might just have faded into obscurity. In particular, there's a few strikingly diffident shot choices.

As March's Wally Cook invites Lombard's Hazel Flagg to New York, making her keep the truth about her (lack of) illness a secret, they walk under a tree and proceed to have a large part of their conversation hidden by a branch. It's so outrageously noticeable, and director William A. Wellman even emphasizes it by giving them a mere one second on the other side of the branch.

Later, Wellman makes a similar, and more crucial, choice. This is the scene of Wally and Hazel's first kiss, in most movies, the 'money shot' of sorts, but here it's hidden inside a wooden crate! The expected, if sudden moment of only hearing the kiss keeps the scene in the realms of humour rather than straight romance, as we imagine what Lombard's shocked little noise might look like. It makes it a little more erotic, illicit, but also more sardonic - tradition romantic union is eschewed by covering both possible directions.

The camera then pans around the box, with the expectation that we'll land on the traditional mid-shot of the clandestine pair. Only we get there, and there are planks in our way. Their conversation, and their kisses, are still hidden in shadow. Throughout, Nothing Sacred deliberately shys away from indulging in a properly romantic plot, from the possibility of a delirious reunion kiss in the frenetic boxing climax - the scene cuts instead - to the coda, where the plot necessitates them being hidden by both costume and shadow. And even then, with the pair alone, together, in love, romance capitulates to a completely bizarre comedic ending. Is nothing sacred?

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Cinematic Creatures

2011-04-06T17:37:00.001Z

This post is a contribution to the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series at The Film Experience.

"I don't care what you do. Paul and I are going to Hollywood. They're desperately keen to sign us up. We're going to be film stars."

The girls of Heavenly Creatures lose themselves in fantasies of murder, of emigration, and of magical castles, but, particularly because this series focuses on cinematography, it's the cinematic inflection to it all that really sparked my interest.

"Absolutely not! Ugh, Orson Welles! The most hideous man alive!"

Juliet (Kate Winslet) and Pauline's (Melanie Lynskey) deification of various male filmstars is fascinating on various levels, not least in how it plays with the film's navigation of the girls' sexual desires and fantasies. What particularly struck me about this moment, though, was the position of power within their friendship - Pauline is constantly looking with worshipping eyes at Juliet, evidently deifying her friend more than any of the stars in the photos. When Pauline finally suggests her own heterosexual desire, Juliet - seemingly unaware, and certainly uninterested, in Pauline's feelings towards her at this point - isn't just disapproving, she's horrified.

Orson is easily thrown away and quickly consumed by the waterfall. Crucially, the ease and cruelty of this action by Juliet suggests to Pauline that people who are not approved of, or who disrupt their lives, can be simply, cleanly disposed of.

Naturally, it turns out Orson isn't that easy to get rid of.

"I never have never in my life seen anything in the same category of hideousness...
but I adore him!"

Actor Jean Guérin, as Orson Welles, is inserted into scenes from The Third Man, alongside Joseph Cotten and Trevor Howard, so that when he haunts the girls on their trip home from the theatre, the connection is easy to make. In a perverse way, folding into the domination of the girls' fantasy worlds, Welles acts as a foreshadowing of Pauline's mother - showing the girls how killing someone does not mean you can so easily escape them.

Picking up where he fell off the waterfall, Orson continues interjecting into the power Juliet holds over Pauline. Pauline's voiceover, taken directly from her real diaries, demonstrates her heterosexual desire peeking through the repression she has undertaken at Juliet's distaste, and further, assuming the cinematic realisation of fantasies are attributed to Pauline, this subordination to Juliet bleeds over here. Exhausted, delirious from the fright and thrill that Orson's chase gave them, Pauline kisses Juliet - but then she changes into Orson, and creates my favourite image of the film.

So many of the film's themes seem to come together in this one peculiar image. Juliet's immersion in worlds of imagination. The increasingly present blue chill of the image, making Juliet seem the more unreal of the pair. Sexuality as distorted by cinema's presentation of movie stars. The erotic element of death. The scene, like the film, treads a careful line between hilarity and morbidity, encapsulating both the pleasures and dangers of losing yourself inside invented worlds.

Two runner-up shots, presented without comment:

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Psychotic Breaks

2011-03-30T17:56:00.001Z

This post is a contribution to the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series at The Film Experience. This post, inevitably, spoils the whole film.

Psycho is so commonly, and easily, reduced to the "shower scene", with perhaps a mention that she wouldn't hurt a fly. It's hard to forget, for anyone, that it's actually one of the almighty Alfred Hitchcock's most masterful pieces, so finely constructed that I still won't accept the final rambling 'explanation' as a mistake so much as something I still don't understand the function of. Legend dulls the shock of the shower scene, but it still has a tensing effect, a supremely nervy quality, that will surely last forever. But the film as a whole, too, is decidedly not one of sustained menace, but continues to play with genre after its sudden switch from following a woman on the run to a horror film. Sam (John Gavin) and Lila (Vera Miles) hanging around waiting for Arboghast (Martin Balsam) appears remarkably film noir.

What I loved this time around about Psycho - this must be at least my fifth viewing, and one of my earliest cinema memories is naughtily stumbling upon the spectre of the looming Bates' house on late-night TV - were the little flourishes of unexpected emotions that are slipped into otherwise tense, straightforward scenes.

Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is generally skittish and tense during her impromptu flight with $40,000, and in this scene, as she drives along the highway in the darkness, imagined voice-overs of the people she's running from - police, her employer, her sister - play on the soundtrack. Hitchcock hands the reigns to Leigh, the camera still on her face. Her lips purse, her brow furrows - and then, unexpectedly, her lips curl up into a perverse, proud little smile. Leigh finally gives a possible hint for why Marion's seemingly uncharacteristic move to steal the money might have happened - maybe she just is a little bad.

Another weird little smile, a similar concoction of perversity and pride. Arboghast has been digging into Norman (Anthony Perkins), taking his story apart, and, though it nearly undoes him right there and then, something in Norman - or in his 'mother' - can't resist a wicked little joke.

"Let's put it this way - she might have fooled me... but she didn't fool my mother."

Well I laughed, Norman. I laughed.

Let's go a little gay for a moment. Another little flash of unusual emotion that's more amusing than anything else:

Sometimes, when she talks to me like that, I feel I'd like to go up there... and curse her, and... and leave her forever!

The queer coding in Norman is, of course, blindingly obvious, but this little moment seems more pronounced in how it isn't feminine but queer. Notably, it's Norman separating himself from his 'mother', whether that means her when she was actually alive or merely the part of his brain that operates as 'mother' - this is a Norman identifying as a separate person, not a transvestite but a gay male. Maybe a lot to read into one small moment, but the nuances in Perkins' performance are so complex it more than allows it.

My favourite shot, though, is emotionally extreme for a slightly different reason.

Arboghast examines the guest book and Norman leans over from the end of the counter to look closer, the desperation and panic that's setting in reflected in the extreme angles the camera ends up seeing him from. The camera tracks the movement of Perkins' head but doesn't tilt from its horizontal axis - an ingenious interplay between actor and director to emphasize the escalating emotion of the scene. And the shadows created by the lighting look so gorgeous in black-and-white - the last film Hitchcock made in black-and-white, and probably his final masterpiece.

The Woody Allen Conjecture

2011-03-28T18:10:00.000Z

You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger limped into British theatres just over a week ago, seven months after a not-particularly-illustrious release in the US, and no one really cared. Commercially, Woody Allen has recovered somewhat in recent years - both Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Match Point cleared $23 million in the US, and I bet you'd be surprised to learn that Scoop scooped $10 million - but critically he seems to be stuck in stagnation, beyond those two $23 million-ers, which undoubtably benefited from the "Woody Allen's made a good movie again!" cries (however true you may find them). Still, he attracts fine rosters of acting talent, but he's been managing that for so long while still releasing excreable products that he manages to make the union of five A-listers an exercise for trepidation rather than joyful hand-clapping. And yet, his next film, Midnight in Paris, is the opening night at Cannes - so a sense of excitement remains somewhere.

And I, too, can't really let go of all hope that it won't finally be a return to form for the workaholic filmmaker - even if, by my measure, the last time he made a film really worth anyone's time and thoughts was 1994's Bullets Over Broadway. Is the percipacity and wit that he used to display so gloriously really gone from the man? Not content to rest my current feelings toward the man on one film alone, I finally screened Whatever Works (which took over a year after its UK release to appear on UK screens) and found a little more to laugh at, but an equal amount to not be impressed by. These films are lazy. These films are thin. These films are full of caricatures - not necessarily a problem, but they do not exist beyond the kind of motifs that have been wrung out years ago. Allen sets up relationships between characters and then reduces key scenes to voiceover sentences, as if he just can't be bothered to script and shoot a scene of such emotional import. He wants these things over just as much as you do.

Larry David doesn't understand why his character marries Evan's. Neither do we.

Whatever Works preaches as its title suggests - no prejudices, just live your life according to whatever works for you. But if you expect me to believe that you're completely accepting of homosexuals, you might want to throw in more than one scene where a man suddenly, quite easily, bursts forth from years of repression. Or perhaps show a little physical affection between the young woman and crusty older man if you want me to believe she's so in love with him. Somewhere along the line, Woody has lost his belief in relationships. He's lost his understanding of how people interact, how they love and fall out of love and merely co-exist. Even New York doesn't seem like New York...

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger opens with a line from Shakespeare, excusing itself as "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". By now, that reads as an astonishingly honest cue to get the fuck out of the theatre. I stayed, though, and what played out was one of Allen's very worst films. One of his worst tendencies lately is the use of a novelistic narrator, a disconnected, monotone figure who fills in the gaps in the narrative - and, more criminally, fills in the gaps in the characters. Motivation, feeling, decision - the narrator tells us them all. One of the film's few moments of emotional clarity is gifted to bit-part player Anna Friel - while scene partner Naomi Watts, the film's most central character, watches with probable envy, remembering that all she gets to do is shout and fail at a convincing British accent.

Gemma Jones and Naomi Watts look for direction...

The problem, it strikes me, is this: Woody doesn't want to invest in his characters as more than caricatures or pawns for his vague thematic threads. You can still sense his personality behind Larry David's character in Whatever Works, but it's a bitter, ruder character than Woody himself (which is likely why he doesn't appear in his own films of late), or at least the Woody we knew. Even if you'd never been to New York, Allen's films used to be pregnant with a vibrant sense of the city, and, even watching his classics now, they're alive with the period and the culture and the people of the time. Whatever Works was first written over thirty years before it was made into a film, and the May-December romance at its centre is reminiscent of that in Manhattan, but the attitude shift between the two really demonstrates how badly Allen has changed. The tenderness and difficulty between Allen and the poignant Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan is worlds away from Larry David's apathy and physical disinterest towards Evan Rachel Wood. You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger is edited so scattishly that believability in supposed familial and spousal relationships is destroyed - it feels more like a collage than a coherent narrative.

Allen's incredible work rate - since Bananas, in 1971, there have been a grand total of 3 years where he hasn't made a film, two of which were in the 1970s - only seemed to be flagged up as a problem since the returns have become so diminishing. The break from New York isn't simultaneous with the decline, since his current nadir, Anything Else, likely (or should have) caused the geographical shift. But will he ever lose that cinematic cache, that "legend" status, that keeps attracting the stars to subpar material and Cannes to invite him to lead their red carpet? Or, more importantly, will he ever recover his talent for funny, perceptive human insights, or even the romantic visual sense that was once so palatable? We can only wait and see.

Whatever Works: C-; You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger: D

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Desolate Desire

2011-03-23T15:55:00.002Z

This post is a contribution to the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series at The Film Experience.

It feels a bit treacherous to Tennessee Williams in his centennial week, or even to the great Elia Kazan (this is surely his finest hour), but I browse the catalogue of screenshots I gathered while watching A Streetcar Named Desire and they're all about the actors - their expressions, their interactions, or merely their physicality. And I don't mean Marlon Brando with half his shirt ripped off, although I don't think anyone would disagree with that.

But what really makes Streetcar spark is the conflict between Blanche and Stanley that's embedded in the acting styles of Brando and Vivien Leigh, and how that complicates, deepens and enriches the relationship Williams created between the two. Stanley is the brute, the primitive man - but Brando's method acting is the new, modern way of performing. Leigh's heightened, classical style make sense of Blanche's wild, unbalanced existence. Streetcar is, finally, a film about two characters who cannot co-exist, and how two disparate acting styles shouldn't either - yet what the combination produces is inflammatory and magnetic while it lasts.

How to choose, though? How to choose between the animalistic intimidation of Stanley, the sensual intoxication of Stella (Kim Hunter), the sudden harsh fierceness of Leigh's face, the gothic spectacle of a limp Blanche, female heads bowed in some sort of fearful prayer, or this perfect encapsulation of the three central characters? My ultimate choice is one disconnected from the film itself - as I write this, somewhat stream of consciousness, I couldn't tell you what happens before or after this shot; I choose it purely for how it looks.

There's something so simple and bare here that kept pulling me back to this shot, over some of the more detailed compositions I mentioned above. Generally, Kazan's framing inside the apartment is quite tight - if a gap in the frame opens up, it's either filled by someone else, or the camera zooms to keep the image packed and claustrophobic. So the space here - the open window, the grey sheet - is unusual. Indeed, as Stanley's words echo eerily through Blanche's head - "Said you were married once, weren't ya?" - the camera zooms quite quickly onto Leigh's face.

But it does linger at this distance first, with a cowed Blanche feeling her first intimidation by the cool, unimpressed Stanley. The shadows (a constant contributor to fascinating shots throughout) creep slightly over her face, and the gossamer fabric makes her both vulnerable, by its slightness, and enveloped by its layers and its darkness. In this frame, Blanche is not trapped or intimidated by the world, the apartment or even Stanley - she's overwhelmed by her very self, closing her finery in on herself so she's suffocated by the very thing she holds highest. The space around her is empty, available, but she doesn't understand how to exist within it. It's the first vibrant indication we get of Blanche's troubled inner self, and it's a desolate one.

Elizabeth Taylor, 1932 - 2011

2011-03-23T14:42:00.000Z

As the ball clunks into the pocket, Stevens finally cuts to Taylor, her mouth slightly open, her eyes strangely transfixed, and she lets out a single, breathless word: "Wow."

- from a longer piece on a superb Liz moment in A Place in the Sun

I Sense Tennessee

2011-03-20T21:27:00.001Z

It's the centennial of Tennessee Williams in just under a week (March 26th) and I'll try and at the very least join in with Nathaniel's 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot' series this Wednesday - with a timely honouring of A Streetcar Named Desire this week - if nothing else. But, for today, I couldn't resist sharing a fascinating little titbit stolen from my university course and the one comment I found strewn in a dark corner of the web.

Farley Granger and Alida Valli in Senso...
Please, feel free to make funny in the comments.

Senso was screened in Italian, which shouldn't be particularly odd given that it's an Italian film made in Italy by Italian director Luchino Visconti (moving decidedly away from neo-realism) with Italian star Alida Valli in the leading role. But as my eyes split between reading the subtitles and scanning the screen, it became apparent that this had been filmed in English. (Well, did you really expect Farley Granger to learn Italian?) It obviously wasn't Farley Granger letting loose that frankly demented laughter, but Alida Valli's brief foray into Hollywood is familiar enough that I could tell she'd dubbed herself back into Italian. All very oddball, and rather distracting. Even weirder, when Senso finally surfaced in America fourteen years after it was made and released in Italy, it was dubbed into English.

But anyway. The point is, Tennessee Williams gets a screenwriting credit here, along with Paul Bowles, because he was hired by Visconti to work on the English-language version - indeed, likely the words that I could see but not hear being said. The helpful David Ehrenstein explains how this came about:

Because they just happened to be in Rome at the time. Libby Holman had run off with Bowles's Arab boyfriend and he got word that they were in Rome. So Tennessee joined him on his quest to get the boyfriend back. While trying to figure out what to do about Libby, Visconti hired them for Senso.

All that, plus the drama of art director Franco Zefferelli jealous because he though his ex-boyfriend Visconti was eyeing up Farley Granger. Cinema used to be the most fascinatingly gay place, didn't it? I sigh.

Stone the crows

2011-02-27T01:00:00.000Z

This blog hasn't been as busy as I'd like it to be, for however many reasons you'd like me to give, but intermittent silence doesn't mean I haven't been doing anything at all. If you follow me on Twitter (which if you're reading this you probably do), you'll hopefully already know about this, but I was waiting until I'd filled it out to a certain level of value before I made this 'official' post declaring it to all and sundry. Recently, I redesigned my sister blog, which is basically just an archive of every single movie I've ever seen, graded and categorized by year - it looks a lot cleaner and more streamlined now, don't you think?

Glad you approve, Emma!

In the process- inspired, as I often am, by Nick of Nick's Flick Picks, I took advantage of Blogger's new Page feature to add a little spice to that collection of lists: a 'Best Actress' page. Despite the proximity of me rambling on about all this so close to this year's Oscar ceremony - down with The King's Speech!, etc. - this page has nothing to do with the Oscars. What it is, simply, is my own personal picks for the best lead actress performance of each year. What you'll see currently goes back to 1990, with my top pick for each year and other must-see performances in parentheses beneath those. What you'll also see is write-ups of some of those. Today, on the eve of Oscar, and with my 2010 viewings slowly drawing to a close, I sealed the deal on that year and scrawled some thoughts on the marvellous Emma Stone.

Stone has a physicality seemingly designed for comedy - she provokes laughs from her wide-eyed cartoonish expressions to the smallest raise of an eyebrow, the lowest enunciations into Melanie Bostic's ear to a short, regretful reverie about Judy Bloom. The sheer scope of her comic arsenal is exercised throughout Easy A, because she recognises where the scrappy script needs a lift, or where she needs to give her scene partner room to have their moment, or where she can grab at some of the sharp one-liners and make them even funnier than they read.

It's no surprise that Emma didn't get a foot in the door with the Academy - she was lucky to land that seat at the Globes, what with Angelina Jolie hanging around - but her performance, to be slightly cliched here, is its own reward. As are all my chosen performances, recognised or not. So go forth, and read about Laura Linney's effeverscent warmth in You Can Count On Me, Hilary Swank's sympathetic, foolish innocence in Boys Don't Cry, Emma Thompson's perpetually generous work in Howards End, and Kate Winslet's unpredictable vibrancy in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And if you like what you see, bookmark it, because, as an on-going project, you might find an update at any moment.

Old At Heart

2011-02-22T22:57:00.000Z

The two youngest Academy Award nominees this year are two of the youngest in the Academy’s history in their respective categories. Fourteen year-old Hailee Steinfeld is incredibly only the ninth youngest nominee in the Best Supporting Actress category – in the past five years alone, Abigail Breslin and Saoirse Ronan best her for youth. Jennifer Lawrence, though, is, at twenty, the second youngest Best Actress nominee in history, following Keisha Castle Hughes’ appearance back in 2004. The occasional tendency for these fresh-faced nominees in the Best Supporting Actress category isn’t explained by cute kiddish innocence, but more often than not a hefty dose of precociousness – to land amongst all these adults, they generally have to act like adults. Tatum O’Neal – like Steinfeld, actually a lead in her film – is the youngest winner in Oscar history, and in Paper Moon, she’s daddy conman Ryan O’Neal’s crafty equal.

Comparison #1: they both wear hats. Carry on reading for more golden observations.

Steinfeld’s Mattie Ross in True Grit is a slightly different case – she acts like an adult, but no one will treat her like one, and ultimately she’s returned to childhood, where it’s been made evident she should belong. But regardless. This article isn’t about the roles, but the performances - a comparison of Steinfeld’s work to Jennifer Lawrence’s seems surprisingly valuable. Both Mattie and Lawrence’s Ree Dolly are teenagers who have grown up before their years, alone in a male-dominated world, and both betraying, at their respective story’s most dramatic points, the scared child within the tough nut they put out to the world. Not to mention the barren landscapes of Southern America we’re hanging around in both films, even if True Grit’s hills are rich and golden and Winter’s Bone’s are frosty, grey and barren. Ree’s fight against her community suggests that the area hasn’t really progressed very far from the treatment of women in Mattie’s old west.

I find myself one of the few with a thoroughly negative opinion of True Grit, and a large part of the blame has to fall onto Steinfeld – not because she is outrageously terrible, but the film’s narrative is so firmly glued to and channelled through her that subpar work isn’t going to hold the film up. Steinfeld has proved herself a charmer on the red carpet, and she’s certainly not a charmless screen presence either – I concede that with a colder teenage actress in the role, the film might have been actively unwatchable. But she’s simply not accomplished enough to overcome the huge stumbling block of the mannered dialogue – where seasoned pro Jeff Bridges runs with it, makes it unintelligible and thrusts his character’s existence into his physicality, Steinfeld can only recite it, and clearly has to think it through before she says it. There’s an already famous scene early in the film, where Mattie barters with a horse salesman – it’s funny, yes, but it feels entirely too rehearsed, an impossible premeditation that Steinfeld’s lack of vocal fluidity pokes holes in. It’s a performance of a performance. That’s altogether too many layers to deal with. It might make sense on the page, but in a world next to Bridges’ Rooster Cogburn, Mattie’s precocity needed to extend to her body, and it sticks in her throat – or, really, further back, in Steinfeld’s mind.

If only she actually rode the horse this
would be another thing to point out.

Compare this to Jennifer Lawrence. An older actress, yes, with a bit more experience, but we are talking about acting awards here; Steinfeld is a pleasing presence who will hopefully hone her craft and return with some great work. Lawrence’s Ree Dolly is an impressively full performance. Lawrence lets tiny little flashes of emotion glint through her downbeat, practical attitude, which work in tandem with the narrative to slowly but surely deepen Ree, simultaneously embedding her in the landscape and estranging her from the people around her. Winter’s Bone is a muscular, harshly cold film, and this tangibility extends to Lawrence, who thrusts meaning into her small movements, by turns purposeful and tentative, where the reticence of speech leaves an empty space. At key moments, Ree’s emotions turn in a direction that you wouldn’t expect from most people – notably, her lack of distress at learning her father is probably dead; instead, a fierce loyalty to recover his body flares up. These don’t read as incongruous or forced, perhaps because Lawrence contains Ree so carefully, precisely modulating the natural moments where events scrape the shields Ree has to draw around herself. The script does overstate this at one point, though Lawrence’s playing in the scene where Ree pleads with her spaced-out mother is still deeply felt. Here, Ree lets everything fall away, not so much becoming a child again but wanting to be one again, and as she looks down there’s a hint of shame in her eyes. She is performing being an adult to an extent, but what we see in Ree’s more private moments is the weight of realisation that adulthood is becoming more real, more entrenched, and more inescapable.

Helpfully, they once stood next to each other...

True, Ree is much closer to being a physical adult than Mattie Ross, but it’s clear from the script that Ree was thrust into this role several years ago. And here we see the key difference not only in the performances of Lawrence and Steinfeld, or even their characters, but the films themselves. There’s a reality to Ree Dolly beyond the one we see onscreen – her growth into the girl we see now, her possibilities for her future, relationships (with her parents, for one) that are now ghostly and membranous – that owes a great deal to Lawrence’s subtle, restrained playing. But in the heightened farcicality of True Grit, do we ever feel like we’d recognise Mattie’s family if they suddenly wandered into the narrative? Do we understand why Mattie acts in the way she does? Can we make a plausible guess at what happened to Mattie between the final two sequences of the film? These failures aren’t entirely Steinfeld’s fault, but a good performance would at least make sketchy attempts at them – see, for instance, Natalie Portman’s attempts to sketch beyond the lines of insanity in Black Swan. Mattie Ross ultimately comes to little more than a plaited haircut and an oversized hat, and those don’t belong in the Kodak theatre, unless they've invited Lady GaGa this year.

If you're after more similarities between Winter's Bone and True Grit, check out this MTV Movies article.

Who's Stunting Johnny Depp?

2011-02-16T17:43:00.000Z

You don’t need me to tell you that Johnny Depp’s career has gone downhill. Oh, sure, he might’ve just been nominated for not one Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical award at the Golden Globes, but TWO – but no one, surely not even the HFPA, is pretending those performances are any good. Sure, in my review of Alice in Wonderland that’s not as deeply hidden in my archives as it should be, I said that the strange damaged persona that Tim Burton thrust onto the Mad Hatter was actually carried off fairly well by Depp, but when the last memory of that turn was that dance, any crumbs of respect are being brushed out into the street. And I didn’t even see The Tourist. (Don’t make me.)

But you know all this. You know the despair that’s slowly spreading through more and more people about how Johnny has descended into a rut where all he plays is gothic weirdos for Tim Burton or increasingly embarrassing repetitions of a screen persona that was so giddily enjoyable that first time out. Oh yeah, Captain Jack’s back this summer, but excuse me if I checked out of that cruise four years ago. I’m not here to moan. I’m here to mourn. I know Depp’s only 47 – a spring-chicken for an actor really – but given the corner he’s boxed himself into I find it hard to see if people are ever going to let him play different (or should I say normal) again. Perhaps if he takes an extended break, he can come back refreshed, rejuvenated, and free. Because at the moment, even when he gets roles outside of the box, they’re either well-played, but still oddball (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus), haunted by Jack or the Mad Hatter or Willy fucking Wonka, or they’re devoid of life, like the only way Depp knows how to play a character is through a bundle of tics and whoops and gurns and when he can’t do that he shuts down (step forward, Public Enemies).

Sad Hatter

I am moaning. Forgive me. Why am I even chatting this stuff, when you’ve heard it dozens of times, or even thought it yourself? Answer: the other night saw my first encounter with What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, a distant memory from almost twenty years ago. Watch some films from that era and it’s like a gallery of faded stars, actors who’ve slipped out of memory; this, though, is a veritable feast of people who’ve remained firmly in the public eye. It can only really function as an intriguing comparison point for Depp, though; Leonardo DiCaprio’s developmentally disabled Arnie is likely to be a singular character in any career, and the necessary playing of the interior life on the exterior existence is a far-cry from DiCaprio’s emotionally-stunted leading men of late. Juliette Lewis, meanwhile, has practically abandoned acting altogether, save for pay-day supporting roles and the odd Whip It; watching her generous, vivacious Becky here, it’s hard not to start mourning her too.

I digress. Gilbert Grape isn’t one of Depp’s crowning achievements, but what I want to celebrate is less the performance than what the choice of role allows for Depp’s performance. There’s an emotional perspicacity to Gilbert’s often trite ‘coming of age’ narrative, looseness to the character interactions that, somewhat ironically, means less movement – no tics or freewheeling exhibitionism, but a subtlety. Depp’s success here lies in the eyes, be it a momentary sexual spark with Mary Steenburgen’s Betty Carver or a mixture of rebellion and shame in his confrontations with the police. His vulnerability feels keen and real – the lack of confidence he has, which his enormous mother blasts into comparison when she hobbles into the police station to retrieve Arnie, resonates strongly as the sort of real outsiderness that Depp has lost the sense of in the past decade (which peaked, most beautifully, in Edward Scissorhands).

But there’s one thing in particular that I wanted to point out. What really typifies Tim Burton’s recent work (not to mention the mechanical Pirates trilogy) is how cold it feels – there is, if any, the barest connection to a recognisable human feeling. Depp’s Gilbert Grape is never effusively warm, but this reticence only makes the fraternal bond with Arnie, or the refreshed love for his mother, feel more honest, and more powerful, when they're foregrounded. Depp has lost himself in caricatures of emotions, and seems to have lost consciousness of the idea that a fantastical character doesn’t have to have to play emotions through unrecognisable expressions. I guess as long as the public repay him for these diminishing returns, we’re destined to lose sight of even more of Depp’s humanity, but Gilbert Grape reminds me that it existed, and I still see hints of it now and then. But what we need is them back in force.

Miles of Cyrus

2011-01-24T03:48:00.002Z

These days, it is a sad fact of life that John C. Reilly only stars in comedies, despite the facts of his not being funny and his being very good at soulful dramatic acting. But whatever. If that’s what he wants to do with his career, so be it. Cyrus is a comedy – the quote from Peter Travers on the poster tells us so, because that man knows everything. Oh, one problem here: Cyrus isn’t funny. I suppose I should’ve guessed that the poster might be telling porkies, since it expects us to swallow the idea that Marisa Tomei somehow managed to give birth to Jonah Hill, but you trust a movie poster, don’t you? Hanging there innocuously in the cinema hallway, battling for attention with all its comrades. You swallow what it tells you. If you like what it tells you, you go and see it. Cyrus tells me “Marisa Tomei”, so I see it.

Not only is Cyrus not funny in the slightest – to be fair, I’m unsure precisely how funny it’s intended to be; just because Peter Travers found your film hilarious doesn’t mean he intended it kindly – it’s also one of the strangest films I’ve seen in the last year. Not in terms of the plot, which unfolds in exactly the distressingly obvious way you’d expect it to, or even in terms of the acting, which, to give these people their due, is perfectly acceptable, because these are perfectly acceptable thespians (even Jonah Hill, who might be picking projects that suggest he’s a horrendous human being, but who I actually quite like in his strangely mumbling way). No, all this is fine, in its completely boring way, but it’s all filtered through the most excruciatingly long style you’ll ever encounter.

It’s hard to explain what I mean, because I’m not even talking about the dreadful camerawork, which wants Cyrus to be a handheld indie film even though it’s as glossy as anything and the script and acting is all pitched at Mainstream Hollywood Movie level. The best way to capture what I'm trying to say might be to borrow Nick Davis’ use of the phrase “dead air” – Cyrus, basically, is dead air. Almost every scene feels stretched to infinity, but not even because nothing happens – they’re talking, always talking, but what they’re saying, they’ve said before, or even if they haven’t said it before, you’ve heard it before in another movie. Cyrus is one of those films that mistakes uncomfortable situations for humour, instead of actually making them funny, and so when we’re clearly supposed to be rolling in the aisles at the wide-eyed looks Jonah Hill gives to John C. Reilly behind Marisa Tomei’s back, we are in fact pulling our own eyes out of their sockets.

Makin' music - NOT Whoopee

As such, it’s actually quite an interesting – in theory only; the film is abominable, in case I haven’t made that clear yet – move for Reilly and Hill to have made. From the outside, I figured it for another Apatowian (it’s 3am, I am allowed to invent adjectives) fratpack movie, since both actors have made that sort their bag of late. But there aren’t any fart jokes, or sexual innuendos (beyond an intentionally woeful dinner table scene, and those are decidedly nuendos), because, well, there aren’t any jokes in Cyrus. But this is actually supposed to be a “mumblecore” movie, which rather makes sense, because despite all the talking there’s so little to the script here I have to wonder if one ever existed at all. It's hard to develop any kind of intelligent critique on a film that isn't merely without intelligence, but seemingly even without a brain, which might explain this flippant piece that I've garbled out in the middle of the night. But I could just as easily call Cyrus a Greek tragedy, and if I was as famous and respected as Peter Travers I’d probably land that quote on the poster, because Cyrus is, in its own excruciating way, a bit like a piece of true modern art: it can mean whatever you want it to mean.

"Did I just get saved?"

2011-01-14T00:03:00.002Z

[If you’re unlucky enough to follow me on Twitter, you may have been irritated recently by my occasional quoting of Easy A, a film that I’d watched and enjoyed – mostly, as you may have heard from everyone who’s seen it, for Emma Stone’s star performance at the centre – a few months ago, but which has been on my mind lately because it was one of the set of ‘contemporary teen films’ I’d chosen to write an essay on. The following thoughts are an aspect that didn’t make the cut of my essay, but I thought them intriguing to note nonetheless. Spoilers for Easy A and Saved! follow.]

Easy A draws many inevitable comparisons to Mean Girls – teenage girl who wants to be popular spins some yarns to make herself the hit of the school, realises she’s become horrid person in the process – but one way in which they are practically identical is the parental figures within them. Easy A has more fun with Olive’s (Emma Stone) parents than Mean Girls did with Cady’s (Lindsay Lohan), but that’s probably due in large part to having landed actors with the wit and loose charm of Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson - although that’s not to slight Neil Flynn and Ana Gasteyer, who certainly have their moments of fun rapport alongside Lohan (“What are my tribal vases doing under the sink?”). But the point here is that both sets of parents are supportive, understanding ones – and that’s the thing about the teen film in recent years. The parents aren’t the enemy anymore. No longer are they ignoring Molly Ringwald’s birthday or telling Winona Ryder to take the Volkswagen or just generally being repressive, old, MEAN old windbags who you’re better off only seeing at holiday gatherings.

"Spell it with your peas!"

But if the parents have turned into funny free spirits (“Spell it with your peas!”), we need to find a new enemy, or the poor teenage heroine (they’re usually girls these days) will have no one to beat down in moral victory. So while the enemy in Mean Girls is fairly self-evident – it’s, well, the mean girls – Easy A tackles a new villain: religion. Seemingly so characterised to ape the self-righteous Puritans of Hester Prynne’s world in the very self-consciously referenced The Scarlet Letter, Marianne (Amanda Bynes) and her conservative church group are the type who smile and pray for those they burn with hatred for.

Olive (Emma Stone), the besmirched

The film’s approach to this all doesn’t seem particularly well thought-out – Marianne thaws towards Olive, and then freezes again, all within about ten minutes of the film – and it rather half-heartedly throws in a sequence that is nevertheless useful to make clear what exactly might be going on here. Olive, overwhelmed with others’ ideas of her as a “slut” and a “whore” and her own knowledge that she made up the lies that provoked them, suddenly decides she needs religious guidance. She may end up pouring her heart out to a non-existent priest, and then happening upon a pastor who turns out to be Marianne’s father, but the fact is, spirituality exists as a valid concern for Olive, who might otherwise have seemed to be from a bohemian, agnostic family.

For a similar, if much more thorough, example of this, we can look back to 2004’s overlooked Saved!, with Jena Malone battling against her religious high school when she gets pregnant as a result of trying to ‘save’ her possibly-gay boyfriend. Interestingly, the main adversary here is, like Bynes, a former good-girl teen star, although Mandy Moore thankfully looks slightly less inflated than her contemporary. Moore’s Hilary Faye is a more foregrounded, and so much more vital, counterpoint to the struggling heroine than Marianne, and, while Easy A understandably casts Marianne aside, Hilary is central to the climax of Saved! and the nub of the point it rather bluntly makes.

Praise her. Praise Mandy.

The reason for this intriguing new choice of conflict in films concerning today’s youth isn’t merely that social mores have progressed so that challenging these things is only now okay. Films have been there, done that, somewhere around the 1990s. Both Easy A and Saved!, in their rather awkward ways, push a mediation – religion is fine, and a belief in God is good, just as long as you aren’t so extreme about it. And there’s the word – extreme. It seems fair to argue that post-9/11, people weren’t sure where to tread. Roger Rosenblatt famously declared that it was “the end of the age of irony,” but no one was ever going to be so backward as to go back to a sheltered, conservative world where no one questioned anything. (Well, not in the film industry.) 9/11’s innate connection to extremist religion provoked two simultaneous, divergent reactions. One: against religion, taking this as another example of the kind of horrors organized religion can provoke. Two: against other religions, taking this as an example of what the “wrong” religion can do. Either way, religion was back at the forefront of discussion, and a viable source of everyday conflict.

The latter reaction would be the viewpoint of many of the characters in Saved!, and likely of Marianne too, but these films both seem to reflect the ultimate point of Rosenblatt’s declaration: “In short, people may at last be ready to say what they wholeheartedly believe. The kindness of people toward others in distress is real. There is nothing to see through in that.” Of course, we’re not dealing in death and terrorism here, but both Saved! and Easy A reflect that kind of proclamation of equality and generosity of spirit. Easy A’s Brandon (Dan Byrd) has an effective dramatic scene that showcases a kind of oppression that isn’t often depicted anymore (Nick’s gay bandmates in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist have a more functional love life than he does), but it seems rather befitting given the Prop 8 struggle in California over the past few years – being gay still isn’t okay for everyone. Saved!, of course, lives in an even more repressive locale than this, where most things aren’t okay for anyone. But Brandon does a Huck Finn, and the gay teens of Saved! who’ve been sent away crash their prom to protest their right to be treated equally.

Look who crashed the weddi- I mean, prom

And in this inclusive spirit, of course, neither Marianne nor Hilary are beaten down by Olive or Mary (Malone). That’d just be mean. Instead, Marianne’s grievances are replaced with simple anger that Olive “slept with” her boyfriend Micah (a blank Cam Gigandet) (which, we can only assume, evaporates when she sees Olive’s webcast, though the film eschews any kind of “realisation” moment), and Hilary Faye is subject to a slightly pathetic end where she crashes into a giant statue of Jesus and asks her brother (Macaulay Culkin) if Jesus still loves her. Neither a happy ending, neither included in the heroine’s picturesque endings, but they’re not demeaned, and they seem to realise their mistakes.

The age of irony didn’t end, but the age where irony defined everything did. Our world has become so entrenched with cycles of cultural referencing that this type of teen film, a smarter subset than the more juvenile Hollywood blockbuster comedy, has to employ a certain amount of irony simply in order not to look naïve. But there’s nothing ironic about their romantic finales, nor about their sweet messages of equality. Perhaps you wish they didn’t have to tread so carefully, but there’s a certain amount of respect to be had for films that don’t so much want you to like them, but want you to like each other.

LFF Review: Black Swan

2010-11-07T17:10:00.004Z

USA

directed by Darren Aronofsky; written by Andres Heinz, Mark Heyman & John McLaughlin; starring Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey

screened as the Jameson Gala on September 22nd; also screened 24th and 25th

B-

The enduring effectiveness of Swan Lake suggests some intrinsic value in a story consisting of simplistic oppositions, even if it’s richer than it outwardly appears. The black and white colour scheme of the tale does not merely restrict itself to the decoration, of course, but inhabits the story itself: white is good and black is evil, and so on. By adding a splash of devilish red, Darren Aronofsky risks collapsing the delicately conflicting balance, but there has always been a more complex element to the fairy tale that is potentially much more damaging to fiddle with. The prince may fall prey to the vampish sexuality of the black swan, but the pure white swan he falls in love with in the first place is a damaged, sad, doomed woman rather than a purely innocent figure. By piling the complications of this story into one character, Nina (Natalie Portman), Black Swan risks cracking under the intensity of such psychological proximity. Though it theoretically, and increasingly formally, mimics the style of a ballet, Black Swan has to at least loosely tie itself to a sense of reality so we can make sense of it, and so the interiorized psychological approach it takes is somewhat inevitable.

Writers Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin are understandably wary of the complexity of mapping out the tale of Nina’s incoherent collapse as being inside her own damaged mind, but their lamentable approach is basically to divert in the opposite direction. Nina is less a protagonist than a victim, not someone who motivates the downward thrust of the script but is instead trapped in its clichéd ideas of familial oppression, realisation of sexuality and the mixture of physicality and psychology demands from her work. She is never defined apart from the darkness, from the moment she first glances at her reflection in the eerily depicted subway window, and is less of a character for it; only a headcase, not really a woman. This is not Portman’s fault, and you do see her working valiantly to deepen Nina’s narrative, to inflect a sense of independence into the part, but Aronofsky mostly directs her merely to react, not act, to gasp and widen her eyes and flinch and shout. There is fragility to Nina’s physicality that is all Portman’s, and without this the film might collapse completely, but there is so much possibility in the strained expression and nervous walk and their accoutrements that no one but Portman is interested in.

The necessarily telegraphed emotional style of ballet seems to recall Aronofsky’s own The Fountain, which channelled such primordial, florid emotions through its wild, impossible imagery. This makes it more difficult to comprehend why Black Swan fails at such a similar task. It isn’t the emulation of ballet’s narrative or formalistic aspects, because the delicious absurdities that Nina’s nightmarish imaginings (or are they?) reach follow through Aronofsky’s fantastically dark impulses to such effect that the film almost takes flight through style alone, rooted in a vague kind of connective tissue through the few successes Portman makes of understanding Nina. It seems, rather, that where The Fountain’s indulgent psychologies reached for a kind of transcendence, Black Swan seems content to nestle its mad flourishes in unilluminating, clichéd arcs. Vincent Cassel’s ballet master would make the same accusations of Black Swan as he does of Nina: it can’t let go, it can’t stop focusing on the technique of its performance. It can’t lose itself in an overwhelming, emotional story because someone hasn’t built one.

The script is too concerned with modulating between Nina’s mind and the reality of the world around her – something it makes a hash of anyway – and this becomes obvious in the ending, where Nina’s acceptance of her fate loosens the film’s grip and lets the blurred line between interiority and reality become unimportant, or even celebrated. There are scattered moments where it does this – Nina’s childish attitude towards sexuality bursting through as she bites Cassel’s character through a kiss, the manic horror of a visit to Winona Ryder’s hospitalized ballerina, and a key moment where Nina questions her psychology most vividly – but mostly it focuses on this divide to the detriment of any intriguing sense of character. Mila Kunis’ spry, sexy doppelganger walks this divide – necessarily defined through Nina’s psychology, she nonetheless comes to define a large part of Nina (through what Nina isn’t, and what she becomes) because Nina’s own characteristics are so thin and undefined. Ultimately, Black Swan is less the story of a ballerina’s descent into madness than the portrait of a woman who happens to be mad – the barest shadow of Nina exists before her freefall, and Portman can’t even pretend to invent one because the production affords nothing beyond giant stuffed animals and music boxes in her bedroom.

When a film like Black Swan comes along, a whole congregation of people breathless in anticipation over it, any disappointments you find with it are hard to ignore. In fact, despite the catalogue of narrative problems, the aesthetic and thematic elements of Black Swan pack quite a ferocious punch, even if they’re often too slavishly exacerbating the film’s problems. There was never any doubt that Aronofsky had set himself a difficult task trying to get his style and this story to actually spark into the remarkable kind of experience they seem designed to make, but for every decadent flourish that burns onto the eyeballs there’s a tired cliché rolling out of someone’s mouth, and Aronofsky clings just a little too tightly to a normalizing narrative that immersion in the style proves an elusive quality. Lose yourself, Darren. You’ve done it before.

LFF Review: Patagonia

2010-10-25T23:01:00.003Z

UK

directed by Marc Evans; written by Laurence Coriat and Marc Evans; starring Matthew Rhys, Nia Roberts, Marta Lubos, Nahuel Perez Biscayart, Matthew Gravelle, Duffy

screened on September 21st, 22nd and 23rd

C-
A truck rolls by, a faded name on its side. ‘Patagonia’. Perhaps once a tourist spot, but the guide driving his rusting truck only has these two visitors to look after, so it seems business is as faded as the emblazoned word and the dusty desert plains they wander around. This could, quite easily, simply be Argentina, though perhaps that lack of distinction is the implication in the barely-there advertisement. But it’s unlikely, no, that a film would name itself after something so intriguing and then barely engage with it? For the soap-opera dynamics of the half of Patagonia that actually takes place in Patagonia don’t have any need to be there at all, although I doubt they’d be much more engaging in California or Siberia than they are here. Rhys’ (Matthew Gravelle) actual interest in the architecture of the churches he’s been assigned to photograph is part and parcel of why his girlfriend Gwen (Nia Roberts) engages far too deeply in her flirtation with their guide (Matthew Rhys, not very rugged at all). Gwen is never at home here, and, despite the mistakes she makes, the film never suggests a disagreement with this. Wales is, as for Gwen, where Cerys (Marta Lubos) feels she should be as her life nears its end – so Patagonia, then, is for all not somewhere they are truly happy.

Rather curiously sheathed in half, with two plots that are cleanly unrelated, the film swerves between Patagonia and Wales without much rhyme or reason. The more dominant – and naturally, less interesting – half is drawn rather tiredly in Babel-like colours, from the dusty golden glow of the cinematography to the august plucking of the score, and there isn’t much sense of Patagonia as a place distinct from any of the rest of South America, except that the characters – two of whom are visitors – speak in Welsh. Showing the disconnect that should likely be the point of the film, the characters in Wales speak in Spanish, though this plot is played much more heavily for the cultural tension. Though she provides the inevitably poignant climax, Cerys is mostly an excuse for the coming-of-age arc given to Alejandro (Nahuel Perez Biscayart), though his encounters with European tourists, loutish locals and a sweet Welsh student (Duffy) are hardly the most narratively sharp of experiences.

The film seems to be commenting on Patagonia’s status as more a beautiful artefact than a country in the way it interpolates the flashes and exposures of Rhys’ camera, and its emulation of his painterly shots. But as the soap-opera dynamics crowd the film and Wales is inevitably depicted as a rosy, pastoral landscape, any deeper angles that have been vaguely suggested are shunted aside. By reducing its characters to such familiar arcs, the film can’t give them any more than a superficial depth, and generally isn’t interested in engaging them with the histories of the foreign worlds they engage with. The brief hints of something more specific that we are given make the film’s overall disinterest even more maddening – there are stories here being ignored, snubbed for ones that have probably been written during a deep sleep. Often a failure is more catastrophic when the target aimed at was never high enough in the first place.

LFF Review: Les amours imaginaires

2010-10-21T18:53:00.005Z

Canada

written and directed by Xavier Dolan; starring Xavier Dolan, Monia Chokri, Niels Schneider

screened on October 21^st, 22^nd and 24^th

I confess. I have a weakness for young, attractive French people giving themselves over entirely to their lustful urges. Xavier Dolan himself is a young and attractive Canadian person, but he’s from Quebec, and I do believe that’s included in Subsection 1B of my confession. After his vaunted J’ai tue ma mere, Dolan again directs himself in Les amours imaginaires (feel free to explain the disastrous English title, Heartbeats), though he can of course hardly cast himself as the object of everyone’s affection. The dark energy of his filmmaking refracts the few moments of possible sexualisation of Dolan himself as instead slightly self-critical, an awkward physicality we don’t see in Marie (Monia Chokri), or the friend both she and Dolan’s Francis fall for, Nicolas (Niels Schneider).

Dolan achieves these moments through techniques he’s rather boldly cribbed from Wong Kar-wai – it may not be accompanied by In the Mood for Love’s striking musical theme, but you can almost see a pot of noodles swinging from Marie’s hand. Yet there’s something strangely effective about these almost exhausting stylisations, particularly a slow-motion entrance to a party matched to House of Pain’s ‘Jump Around’, that undercuts the imagery so hugely that it almost brought me to tears. Unlike Tom Ford’s imitations in A Single Man, Dolan doesn’t merely copy but adapts these techniques, acknowledging his influences but using an undeniably powerful technique in a different way. These moments in Heartbeats aren’t melancholy, and in their proliferation they shift away from being ellipses – they seem at once ironic and directly devastating, emphasising the sexual dimensions so exaggeratedly that it falls somewhere between mocking and pitying the characters they depict. At no point is this attitude clearer than a purposefully prolonged, simply shot scene where Francis, left alone in Nicolas’ house, furiously masturbates over some discarded clothing.

On the other side of this coin, while Francis and Marie are ironically sexualised and depicted as desperate, Nicolas is removed from most senses of the ‘real’. Inevitably slightly human through the mere existence of the dilemma as to just how much aware he is of his friends’ infatuation, he is nonetheless constructed more as an object, a pretty face and a mop of hair. The epileptic lights of a party emphasize his separation from his admirers: while they are grounded in the space, a continuously moving, unbroken image, he exists only in between the flashes of the lights, his movements frozen images. To Francis and Marie, and ultimately to us, he is simply the physical. Dolan’s script affords him only basic characteristics – and hints that these are mostly unattractive ones – and, though a thankless task for the actor, it needs no more than this from him.

When you finally realise how incidentally the collapse of Francis and Marie’s friendship is treated, the film’s odd rhythms begin to make sense. Interspersed sex scenes show Francis or Marie with unnamed partners soaked in one particular colour of light, a kind of sexuality that is so baldly expressionistic that it is more image than reality, a more mystical eroticism. Dolan consumes you in sensuality and focuses you on the mistrustful dynamics of love, so that while you might not match the lust for Nicolas, you lust for this mood in general; you are reduced to the carnal, the basic desire. It isn’t about liking these characters – the sneering ending makes that clear – but about identifying with how low these familiar feelings have made them, and can, have, and will make you.

LFF Review: Meek's Cutoff

2010-10-18T16:31:00.002Z

USA

directed by Kelly Reichardt; written by Jonathan Raymond; starring Michelle Williams, Will Patton, Bruce Greenwood, Rod Rondeaux, Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Shirley Henderson, Neal Huff, Tommy Nelson

screened on October 18th and 19th

A-

Early in Meek’s Cutoff, we watch a carriage rattle out of frame, and see a man on horseback appear on the hill behind it. Except we don’t, because that man is on a different hill, ahead of the carriage, and this is two shots gradually dissolving between each other. For brief moments, the landscapes merge. They are, of course, the same landscape, the same rising terrain that the travellers we follow have to contend with. Seemingly an echo of this comes later: “About the same as the rest of us, I’d say,” Emily Tetherowe (Michelle Williams) utters, about the native man (Ron Rondeaux) the troupe have captured. Meek’s Cutoff isn’t exclusively about Emily, but her fiercely-thought views sparking against those of others in the camp are an integral motivation within the story. This is the mid-1800s, and not only is someone insisting that this unknown native is their equal, but a woman is doing so.

In the hands of the subdued yet purposeful style of Kelly Reichardt (the mysterious Old Joy, the melancholy Wendy and Lucy), Meek’s Cutoff is never in danger of overemphasising these social dynamics, instead playing them out with careful framing and a gradual increase in tension, cleverly achieved through the diversity of acting styles rubbing against each other. Williams as ever plays things with inward subtlety, while Paul Dano ropes Zoe Kazan into his wide-eyed hysterical dramatics and Shirley Henderson frets quietly on the edges. As the film progresses and the situation becomes ever more fractious, Reichardt directs her actors to reveal the delicate imbalances within the group, each character slowly becoming trapped in their own combustible eccentricities.

Meek’s Cutoff feels like the natural evolution of Reichardt’s attitude towards her filmmaking – it is broader than but not indistinct from her previous films, an experiment in how starkly different elements (of plot, of acting, of character) can be understood in the low-key shooting style many admire her for. Instead of simply aligning with the type of character that typifies her film, Reichardt’s approach extends the ambiguity to every character, never answering any questions we have about them and which they have about each other, and even ending at a completely unexpected, yet reflectively perfect, moment.

As she extends her canvas, her style adapts – framing things in such a way that while the sound focalises attention on one area, our eyes are, perhaps, supposed to drift to another occurrence. She rests shots and carefully manoeuvres the characters to form a sense of being inescapably in someone else’s presence, even in this vast wilderness – the travellers need each other, but simultaneously the antagonism grows. The discordant cello notes of the soundtrack accentuate all these tensions – suggesting menace, or melancholy, or merely despair, or perhaps all of these and yet more. Beyond steady, naturally evolving arcs, not least Emily’s growth into a woman who’ll tote a gun at a man, Reichardt’s project is to suggest and not explain, to craft a small world of these travellers, as fascinated and traumatised by the landscapes as the viewer becomes. Meek’s Cutoff is less a Western than a film set in the locale of a Western; it digs into the typicalities of the genre, but its digging seems natural, to unfold from the dilemmas of the characters. The cutoff of the title, if it alludes to anything beyond the obvious, is the disconnect between the characters, separating even as what happens to them necessitates tightening their pack.

LFF Review: Never Let Me Go

2010-10-15T20:51:00.004Z

UK/USA

directed by Mark Romanek; written by Alex Garland; starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley, Charlotte Rampling

screened as the Opening Night Gala on October 13th; also screened on October 15th and 17th

C+

Never Let Me Go. The words float from the cassette recording, an unknowing request through a romantic gift. That the cassette has shifted from being a melancholy emblem in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel to something fleetingly included here seems at odds with the change of project the film seems to pursue. But this short shrift isn’t exactly representative of a film that could be simply described as diluting its source. It seems instead to refocus it, keeping Kathy H’s voiceover merely as a bare framework as opposed to its overwhelming first person presence in the novel, and explaining the secret of these characters’ existence almost immediately, to channel the involvement into the love triangle instead. Perhaps a slight trivialisation of an intriguing topic, but Ishiguro’s novel hardly delved deeply into the wider repercussions of this alternate past either, blocked by the particulars of Kathy H’s ‘human’ experience.

So maybe Alex Garland’s script makes for a more honest approach to Ishiguro’s obtuse disguise by shifting focus, but new weaknesses crack through; Ruth (Keira Knightley), always the least explored and probably least interesting point of the triangle, is almost demonized, hovering menacingly behind doorframes and giving cruel looks to Kathy (Carey Mulligan), a girl who is supposed – and the paucity of conviction in this is the film’s weakest aspect of all – to be her best friend. None of the characters are helped by the child actors who play out the difficult dynamics in the first section – not exactly aided by a script that seems too keen to truncate the school experience (seen most baldly in the terribly expositional role Sally Hawkins is given), but too studied and brash to work against the harsh angles of these early scenes. Ironically, it ends up being Knightley’s late scenes as Ruth that are the most striking, with a heavy weight to her words and physicality that seem entirely unfamiliar from the lithe actress, but by then Ruth has been and has herself let go.

Yet somehow, despite the strength of Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield, the stronger leaning towards character over moral dilemma does not change the approach the story takes in trying to move us. Without really exploring how these ‘clones’ function in this universe – two frissons with strangers they watch during a trip to a seaside town hint at this wider idea – we can only accept them as closed off from the world, and so Garland’s favouring of characters makes sense. But at these same moments, the imagery (a ball, lost over a fence; a panorama of the broken toys the students joyfully ‘buy’) and the ending try to open the film up to the moral dilemmas. It’s something the film can’t let go of, because it singularises it, but it can’t find a way to properly modulate between the two different angles.

It has to, by design, mark out our focus within the segregation – so while they’re all “students of Hailsham”, Tommy wears blue to the white of the others, or Kathy sits outside, disinterested in the excitement of the sale. Naturally, while our characters might be clones, they’re less clones than those around them, and this niggles as an excuse to merely scratch the idea of this society and not investigate it. If I keep repeating this point, it’s only because it seems to be an impossible situation – perhaps it’s the necessary truncation into a manageable length that was never going to be able to finely contain the details of the novel, no matter how much the cinematic treatment might help the story by packing pages of Kathy’s observation into single images. The specificity both gains and loses something. Like the clones, perhaps, the film isn’t inferior; it’s just troublesome in a rather different way.

The Evolution of Susannah York

2010-08-09T01:36:00.000Z

Over three years ago, I wrote a piece about one of the most singularly striking cinematic moments I'd ever experienced - Jodhi May's startling look to camera in The Last of the Mohicans. I've not revisited the film since, and naturally the moment isn't as sharp in my memory as it was then, but the feeling it invoked - akin to being electrified - is still an unforgettable one. If you're reading this, you're probably a cinephile, and you've probably had a few of those moments yourself - they're rare, and of course all the more special for that; their singularity, their shock factor if you will.

What this is obviously leading up to is the arrival of another one of these moments in my film-viewing life. The contrast was perhaps less stark than it was with Jodhi May - They Shoot Horses, Don't They? had already stirred up a mixture of despair and horror in me - but it perhaps says more about the craft on show here that it still felt like I'd stuck my fingers into a plug hole. Unsurprisingly, there are major spoilers ahead.

Alice (Susannah York) is introduced as an immaculate contrast to all the worn down, dowdy women who are queuing up for the marathon dance contest with her; her on-the-spot rendition of Shakespeare exudes an air of superiority in her Britishness, her clean dress, her sparkling coiffure. Like all those who surround her, though, Alice is pummelled by the physical demands of the contest, and her decline is all the more dramatic for the heights at which she begins. After Sailor (Red Buttons), a victim of a second ten-minute sprint around the dancehall, collapses stiffly onto her dress, Alice cracks. Tainted, she thinks, by death, she flees to cleanse herself.

There is something about me, evidently, that has a mind that responds so much more heavily to physical acting - Susannah York barely utters a word in this scene, yet it was, for me, the most arresting, stunning scene of a film that is hardly short on the despair (it is, of course, heavily rivalled by the climax, but that's a discussion for another time). Like Jodhi May, here an immensely dramatic confusion can only make itself known through physical expression. The collection of York's faces I've catalogued here might seem a bit pantomime - it's hard for me to judge, so fresh from experiencing it in motion - but if York's performance is the most overt in the film, the character does not suffer for it.

This isn't just Alice's breakdown - it acts as the film's, the awaited implosion of physical and mental torture that all the characters are enduring. Alice, with the most fragile personality of them all, is the obvious choice for this all to collapse onto. We've seen her freak as she manically pushes Sailor's body off here, but here the full schizophrenia of her breakdown makes itself apparent as she gives the showerhead a deranged smile - a clever opening to the scene, handily reflecting her mind's distortion in a single image before letting York's face do the legwork.

She doesn't know where to scrub herself - her hands concentrate on her midriff, where her dress still remains, but she paws wildly at her arms, her legs, her back, as if she's lost all sense of her body. Because, of course, it's her mind that has been tainted, not her body. She glares at her fellow competitors, who are standing back in bewilderment, disgust and alienation, but jerks in fear at the matron's appearance, giving a triumphant, manic smile when she fends her off.

The contest's compere, Rocky (Gig Young), is a different matter. There's no glare here, more an inquisitive, wary stare; a summation of Rocky's presence as a character, then, as throughout the film he is caring towards the competitors, yet always views them as competitors, as attractions, as numbers. Alice's smile here might signify the boost she gets from male attention; or simply relief that he has sent the others away, that for a second she believes he can actually help her, free her from death's taint. But he tries to get near. The smile flips back to fear.

He moves to turn off the water. She's not clean. She can't possibly let him; the eyes widen. But his gentle, careful voice cuts through her madness a little - disappointment in herself dawns and she moves away. The movements on York's face are sudden and sharp, yet there's a perfect, simple logic to them: she's not clean and she needs to be. "He... touched me," she says, bewildered - death is active, something to be feared. "Is he dead?" If he's not, she can relent, she can survive.

Rocky assures her - falsely, we sense (Sailor looked pretty dead) - that he's going to be fine. Relief - perhaps - rushes through her and he can move, slowly, towards her, through the falling wall of water, the divide broken. But then the alarm shrieks, it's time to go back to dancing, and she screams.

"Someone screamed." "That was you, Alice."

With that last line reading, Susannah York sounds as though she's stepped out of a ghost picture - and, with the shells that the characters have become, she has done. The title - uttered glibly at the film's tragic end - suggests that the Depression has made people into lame, vague approximations of humans, ones that, if they were horses, would be shot, because they're no use to anyone any more. Gloria (Jane Fonda) chooses death, though she is even too lame to do it to herself. Robert (Michael Sarrazin) chooses imprisonment, where he will likely waste away. And Alice escapes into madness. It's a stark message from a stark film that says as much about the Great Depression as it does about the darkening mood of the late 1960s that was the overwhelming mood of 1970s American cinema. But starkness sometimes makes for the very best, the most human, of cinema. A

Ode to Smiley Face

2010-08-06T18:56:00.001Z

That is where laughs come from. Hmm... maybe ol' Gregg Araki is onto something. He probably really loves pot. And all pot-related confections! I mean, isn't that what you're supposed to put in a frame? Things you love? I'm gonna do that. When I get home, I'm gonna frame a bunch of stuff I love. Like Anna Faris. I love Anna Faris. She's SO good. And funny. You know what else Anna Faris was in? Scary Movie. Man, she really was in a lot of those movies. Maybe I should put a picture of Ghostface in a frame. You know, as a kind of shorthand way of saying 'I love Anna Faris'. That would be so fucking inside. Or how 'bout a photo of Billy Loomis from Scream? Oh shit, that would be totally meta! People would be all like: "David, why do you have a photo of Skeet Ulrich on your mantle"? And I'd be like: "because I like Anna Faris, of course".

(B+)

Wonder-par

2010-03-08T18:25:00.006Z

Alice in Wonderland is somewhat of a misnomer. Oh, Alice is here, alright, although older and possibly a bit wiser than you’d expect; she’s not in Wonderland, though. Apparently she misheard - it’s “Underland”. A joke that suits Tim Burton’s gothic sensibility, maybe, but it also reveals that Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s book and the director aren’t really the perfect fit they initially might seem. Fact is, Burton’s a far cry from his Edward Scissorhands days - for my money, far and away the finest film he’s ever made - and critical favour towards his watered-down black magic has been waning, even as box office figures balloon in the opposite direction. Underland is less delightfully insane than Wonderland ever was, and the fantastic dress-up Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter do is more pantomime than anything else. Tim Burton doesn’t celebrate and cherish the odd anymore; he was thrust into the mainstream and the only thing they do with weirdness there is laugh at it.

You only need remind yourself of the tiresome addition of a humanizing father flashback for Willy Wonka in Burton’s adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to see that Burton is afraid to let weirdness stand tall and proud these days, and it’s much the same here. Lunatic supreme the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp, but of course) isn’t the incomprehensible oddball of the novel but someone haunted by the past, and while Depp carries this damaged persona off surprisingly well it can’t help but jar, not least because it thrusts him so far into the forefront of the story they might as well add him to the title. I’ve yet to hear any good reasoning behind Burton’s invention of this whole additional story - the original story’s immense charm and appeal was in its freewheeling, loose nature, and that’s something you feel Burton of old could have carried off. This new story arc is yawningly traditional, and the darkness of feeling the added years (Alice has returned to Underland now a young adult) drags the charm down into the mud.

I’ll take the good points where I can get them, though. While a story focused on Alice would have been preferable - that is, one that doesn’t cut away from her entirely as this does - Mia Wasikowska isn’t really a strong-enough screen presence to maintain that sort of thing. She’s pleasant, but slightly innocuous. So despite the mangling of source material, one queen becoming two provides more queen for your dollar, and both Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway deliver. It may be becoming a bit boring to see Bonham Carter in every film her partner makes, but she was always the perfect fit for this role - a screaming, impulsive, big-headed (literally) tyrant. Better, though, is Hathaway, whose White Queen floats around airily and angelically whispers her commands, but Hathaway strikes the ironic notes of someone who’s clearly not that perfect, who may be better than her sister but knows it, relishes it, enjoys their childish animosity.

In the end, it’s all about expectations. I long gave up expecting Tim Burton to impress me. Maybe sticking to the original story would’ve brought out the spark in him again, but he didn’t do that and instead he just poured drab darkness over it. His regular collaborators feel a bit freer here than they have done previously, but one senses Burton and co have fallen into a routine they could walk in their sleep. And Alice in Wonderland might be a dream (or is it?), but it’s a fantastical one, a bizarre one; not one with such inevitability to its tread. It feels less like something Burton would want to make than something concocted in a clinical studio boardroom, and he was just the weird director for hire. C-

P.S. I hope to be around a bit more from now on. This was my first 2010 film, so think of this a New Year's Resolution.

Supporting Actress Blog-A-Thon, Class of 2009: Leslie Mann in 17 Again and Funny People

2010-01-17T20:12:00.004Z

I'm going to be honest with you right from the start: I don't like either of the films that are listed in the title. 17 Again is a rotten example of the complete lack of invention in both comedies and teen films Hollywood shows these days, and, while I'll give Funny People credit for making an effort, it just didn't come off very well. The actress I'm going to talk about is a bit trapped in the system, really, what with being married to the director of many of the wave of 'bromance' comedies that dominated the second half of the 2000s, but, nepotism or not, Leslie Mann has slowly been becoming more and more of a shining light in Hollywood. And she was the silver lining in these two films.

Scarlett O'Donnell in 17 Again and Laura in Funny People

As almost the only adult female of any depth in either film - as already noted, Judd Apatow films are dominated by men - Miss Mann (no jokes please) is saddled with more dramatic arcs than any comedic moments, although this is by no means supposed to suggest that she isn't funny. Her understably confused attraction to Mike (Zac Efron), her ex-husband back in younger form (although of course she doesn't know that), takes on a more dramatic bent but the first moments of it are pure comedy, and well played by Mann. It's very cartoonish - Efron's face is surprisingly doughy - but as ever with Mann, there's more to this. She's transfixed by him, as if some part of her brain registers that this IS her ex-husband, though of course common sense can't let her admit that. Her line readings are slowed, as if her brain is too busy trying to figure out what's going on to let her speak properly. "You wait here, I'm gonna go smell him," she says to her friend, her matter-of-fact pointing emphasizing how she currently finds that a completely normal thing to do. Scarlett is the audience surrogate - the stable character who has to make sense of being thrown the same person in two different forms. She is the heart of a movie that's rotten on the outside with idiotic comedy and lame slapstick, but there's her light flickering at the centre.

In Funny People, she's again positioned as one of the film's more dramatic parts, and, while her most notable 'comic' moment (aping Eric Bana's Australian accent) doesn't work at all, it's another of her scenes that's stuck in my head. George (Adam Sandler), her childhood sweetheart, has come back into her life and confessed his love for her - and Laura's reaction is heartbreaking. It's a moment that feels genuinely sad after all of George's rather pitiful gloom and askings of people to kill him. She doesn't lie, like you might expect her to; she freely, tearfully admits that yes, she still loves him, and yes, he fucked it up and now she's married and she can't do anything about it. (And she doesn't care, ultimately.) Her antagonistic - but complicated - relationship with her husband (Bana) is the most deeply felt and real aspect to an otherwise bloated movie, and, previously mentioned accent-shenanigans aside, the pair work in tandem to provide both believable family drama and comic lightness.

Leslie Mann is the star of neither 17 Again or Funny People, but she makes herself the star, and not through any selfish scene-hogging. She's a generous actress, a real member of any ensemble she finds herself in, yet by her very nature she marks herself out, by her warmth, her comedic skills, and her empathy. She received notice back in 2007 for Knocked Up, but she knocked her game up even more notches in 2009 and I hope she is given more chances to impress - maybe even gets a vehicle of her own.

Beware the ideas of Orson.

2009-12-05T13:04:00.003Z

Written in the style, or at the least in the attitude, of Orson Welles.

YOU THERE! Yes, you! Don't think I can't see you, I've got eyes in the back of my head. Come and sit down. Be quiet! What I've got to say to you is much more important than whatever you've got to do. It always will be. How can I respect you if you're not fully committed to this thing? Good. That's better. Now pay attention. I'm only going to say this once.

You must see Me and Orson Welles. No, no, it's no masterpiece - I can easily admit when things aren't perfect, you know, for often it's the imperfections that make things so palatable to the human emotions. It was always going to be the way with Richard Linklater, anyway - the man's style is too loose, too free to ever let a tightly contained masterpiece out of his soul, and here that's even tempered by the rather obvious structuring of the piece. You can't blame him for that, though. He had to work with the sub-par writing he was given - the man's a director, a visionary, and it's a shame he has such amateurs around him. I'd never let such things pass, naturally.

It feels a little under-budgeted, a little too enclosed to really engage on a sensory level, but we've all had to work with money constraints, haven't we. It all works with the theme of creating a masterwork out of rag-tag bits and disasters. At least it looks good - that Dick Pope's been around for a while, always making things look stripped-back in an attractive sort of way (the best way to be, really, don't you agree?), and he never gets enough credit. Give those costumers, credit, too, especially for undermining Zac Efron's naive cockiness by putting him in dungarees (good lord) and shirts that are miles too big for him. Nice details, but they don't go unnoticed by my keen eye. Nothing ever does. (Stop fidgeting.)

Then there's that Zac Efron. Too pretty for his own good, that boy is. He usurps the whole thing, almost, just by existing. I'm not denying I'd like a thing with him on the side, really, although no one of us has got into his pants yet so I wouldn't bother trying. (Plus if you do I'll make sure you never work in this town again. SIT DOWN.) He's good, though; he cleverly uses the arrogance it's easy to see in him to deepen the character's youthful, misguided arrogance. And really, Christian McKay is so strong, so unmatched in magnificence that even Zac's face can't run away with the picture. And I've not even mentioned that Claire Danes commits her easiest, most engaging performance in several years to her part, or that the ensemble cast makes the film feel even more alive. I see a lot of myself in McKay, actually - the fearlessness, the passion, the raw magnetism. He even manages to make the obligatory "see, this guy isn't a monster really!" moments work by carving them from the exact same piece as the rest of his performance, and muddies whether this moment is really you seeing Welles' soul or merely another manipulation. Without him, the film would be severely lacking; it'd simply be called Me, and that's a ridiculous title. Who's so self-obsessed they'd see a film called Me?

WHAT DO YOU MEAN "I WOULD"? You're fired. Never show your face around here again. I don't have time for amateurs like you.

(B-)

Chloe, (A Lady) in the Night

2009-10-22T23:57:00.000Z

Cold. Julianne Moore is cold. Not just in the physical sense - I mean, it is pretty chilly in Toronto, but she's also cold in the more figurative sense. She's cold like the smooth white surfaces of her doctor's office, like the spotless glass walls of her house, like the frosty, uncommunicative marriage she's in. A-ha! The crux of the matter. Catherine doesn't trust her husband David (Liam Neeson), what with him being the tall, handsome, smooth-talking lecturer he is, so she hires a glamourous prostitute she's noticed to test his fidelity for good. But Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) gives Catherine more than she'd planned to pay for.

A vague plot synopsis, like the one found in the film festival's literature, makes Chloe's icy erotica seem coyly alluring. A full plot synopsis might reveal the more tawdry aspects of the film, but what delight there is within Atom Egoyan's latest may well remain within the unfolding, so I'll keep as mum as I can manage. But something doesn't feel right from the start. You can film a cold place but it takes something more to make the film cold itself - and Chloe is too heavily photographed, too close to really appropriate that at all. There's no law that says a film set in Canadian winter has to send chills down the back of your spine, but what Chloe's atmosphere is instead is just a bit vulgar and melodramatic. The music is all swelling piano dramatics, the generic atmosphere a stilted, canned laughter type of place... it's a good thing we've got some nudity to spice things up, really.

No, but Moore and Seyfried aren't bad, exactly - a shame in a way, since this has the elements to make it a fantastically bad picture, but it settles for being merely 'not very good' - and the way events play out between them is certainly the most intriguing and interesting aspect of the film. Moore has never been afraid of exploring aspects of a woman's sexuality - despite continually swearing she'll never do it again, she insisted at the press conference - and here she nicely plays the arc of a woman fighting growing older and rediscovering the sensuality that had been buried beneath routine and disconnection. Seyfried is the bigger revelation, though, with a performance that, before the film takes a strong turn for the brainless, is intriguingly coy about who this woman is and what she wants, and more than anything proves that this is a young woman with incredible charisma. The film is, in as much as its psychological aspects end up making any sense at all, about figurative visibility - Catherine feels like she's faded with age, her husband 'doesn't see her'. More interesting is Chloe - does her profession give people licence to view her as a sexual object, or a purchase?

It's a great shame that Chloe, while certainly no masterpiece before it slides into tawdry thriller territory (an aspect not present in the French film, Nathalie..., on which the film is based, and apparently something we can blame producer Ivan Reitman for), throws these promises of psychological insight down the drain. Perhaps it was inevitable - it is, potentially, Chloe's 'performance' that keeps us intrigued, wandering as she does between frankly sexual and coyly childlike, and the stripping back of all this leads to some ludicrous overdrama. Atom Egoyan can wax for as long as he wants about how this is an adult, complex psychological drama about 'human interaction' and 'mature relationships', but the truth will out - it's an erotic thriller with remnants of French intrigue that can't help overloading on inexplicable obsessive madness, blowing all subtle humanity to the wind. Or out the window. C-

Alas, Sweet Hair

2009-10-13T22:00:00.005Z

I've not mentioned it here on the blog, since I'm figuring that any readers here that aren't covered by my Twitter and Facebook friend roll are likely already readers of The Film Experience, but just in case you're not, I'm covering the London Film Festival for that most wonderful of blogs for the next couple of weeks, and you can already catch a few mini-review round-ups over there. Nathaniel is kindly allowing me to post any full-length reviews on this here blog, though, which might be just as well with the drought that's preceded them. There's also, you might notice, a continually updated list of screenings at the top of that there sidebar, so you're not missing a thing.

First off, here are my extended thoughts on the ever-cited (and ever-loved) Glenn's favourite Samson and Delilah.

Samson and Delilah has just one connection to the biblical parable with which it shares it's name - the chopping off of hair. But in Warwick Thornton's stunning film, the action is not a vengeful one, but one of grief. At different points in the film, both of the titular characters hack at their long locks with a serrated knife as a mark of a death, an act filmed each time with a painfully close intensity. Frequently the film reaches emotional spikes like these, but it's the strength of the film throughout that makes them so powerful.

Samson (Rowan MacNamara) and Delilah (Marisa Gibson) live in a half-heartedly Westernized, run-down Aboriginal town, with a phone that rings but is never answered. She cares for her grandmother (Mitjili Gibson), who makes her living painting intricate dot paintings, and Nana is all too amused by the antagonistic relationship burgeoning between her grandchild and the lonely Samson, who can't get his brother to move beyond the same repetitive tune he plays all day outside their house, and so spends his time playing in a wheelchair and sniff petrol. The early sequences of the drama are tinged with humour, but also a highly authentic feel of the place, not overemphasizing the barren existance with constant shots of it, but letting sound, image and character draw out a keenly felt depiction. Gibson and MacNamara somehow forge an entirely plausible, and certainly fascinating duo as they silently squabble, observe, intrigue each other. Thornton only occasional uses cinematic tricks, like aural identification (as Samson puts his hands over his ears) or distorted edits (as his petrol addiction worsens), to emphasize our identification with these characters, so it's to the actors immense credit that they not only carry the film but involve you so deeply in the tragic unfolding, while still being detached, volatile and unpredictable.

It's to Thornton's credit, meanwhile, that the film manages to be about so much, and be so insightful about these things, while retaining a disengaged air of mystery and apathy that bespeaks the character's attitudes. Moments like Delilah being beaten by those we assume are her family (and who are otherwise absent from her and her grandmother's life) leave us wondering whether this is some vestige of Aboriginal custom, or merely a similar angry violence that Samson is prey to. The film doesn't explain the Aboriginal place in modern day Australia, merely depicts it - Delilah sees her grandmother's dot paintings selling for high prices in a city art gallery, but they won't give her's a second glance. Is it about love? What exactly does Samson want from Delilah? Their relationship grows into some form of love, but does so without seemingly betraying those aspects of their characters that have defined them to us. If Samson and Delilah is a parable, it disguises it well. This is a powerful journey, a detached yet involving story about a pair you might not understand if you dissect their depiction, but gradually do on some basic human level. A-

What Disney Does To You (And Me)

2009-07-20T20:00:00.001Z

I am a child of Disney. Actually, wait. Change that. I am a half-child of Disney. Call me a step-child of Disney if you want, which helps with the familiar characterization (which ironically enough is of course endorsed by Disney in Cinderella) of the step-parent (which here is Disney, keep up) as an outwardly lovely but privately absolutely evil taskmaster. Anyway, I call myself a half-child of Disney because while, like all other children in the Western world, me and my siblings were raised on Disney movies- Beauty and the Beast and Fantasia remain to this day two of my all-time favourites- but we weren't, unlike almost everyone of my age I've since encountered, raised on all of them. We may have practically worn out those videotapes of Bambi and Sleeping Beauty, but I didn't see The Lion King or Aladdin until I was sixteen (at the imploring of a schoolfriend), and I have somehow managed to live thus far without ever setting my eyes on Pinocchio.

To get more sharply to my point, the other night I finally got around to filling another gaping hole in my Disney checklist, the vaunted 1989 film The Little Mermaid. Disney, as you might expect, removes all the rough edges from Hans Christian Andersen's dark fairy tale, and changes the original spiritual ending for their traditional romantic one of prince and princess living happily ever after. Still, it's a pleasant concoction, buoyed by a fantastically ripe villain in Ursula the Sea-Witch and, of course, the bizarrely (but wonderfully) Jamaican crab Sebastian, who provides the film's highlight in the sensuous 'Kiss the Girl'. Indeed, if I'd seen all this as a child, I'd most likely have fallen head over heels in love with it, have watched it countless times, and been able to recount it all to you now- as I probably could right now with Beauty and the Beast, with which all the aforementioned things did happen. As I've just turned twenty-one, things aren't quite the same. Which makes it more apparent than ever that what these Disney films rely on, deeply, is nostalgia. The youthful mind is probably unlikely to question the idea of sixteen-year-old marrying... well, simply marrying, really, or make the eyes roll at the alarming superiority shot through in Ariel's wistful song about wanting to be human. I could probably go and pick holes in Beauty and the Beast in a similar manner, but I don't want to. If I watched it now, I wouldn't question it at all. But I can't help doing it when coming fresh to The Little Mermaid. My analytical thought processes can't resist it.

It's interesting to look at Disney now. Their traditional hand-drawn animations lost their lustre when compared to Pixar's cleverer animation and conceptualizations of the various worlds they set their stories in. They left their princess stories behind- Pocahontas is probably the last one that could fit that mold- and inspiration, as well as monetary success, tailed off. So what of this December's The Princess and the Frog, the studio's first 2D-animated theatrical release in five years? The title obviously gives away that this is indeed a return to their princess mold, and the trailer promises that it will be "in the tradition of Walt Disney's most beloved classics". I could pick holes in that (the unusually arrogant nature of the prince, which must surely be changed over the narrative; the New Orleans setting, probably ripe for more caricature than ever if they're not careful), but I'm wondering who the audience for this is. Do today's kids (I'm so old...) still grow up on Disney's "beloved classics"? Or is it their parents- some of whom, though it's frightening to think it, are my age- that will be dragging their kids along, eager for a fresh burst of childhood nostalgia? Will the "tradition" of Disney's formulas be as successful today as it was back then, or have things- technically, moralistically, socially, whateverly- changed too much? Can 2D-animation measure up to Pixar, and who are Disney hoping this will appeal to? Is this project simply chasing a ghost?

Treading Gingerly

2009-07-11T14:20:00.006Z

It's perhaps fitting that when I eventually saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' final film together, The Barkleys of Broadway, it was separated from my viewings of their previous films by at least two years, since in a vague way that apes the ten-year gap there was between 1939's The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle and this final pairing, which occured when Judy Garland (who had already partnered Astaire in Easter Parade) had to drop out (though she apparently showed up on set repeatedly to make things difficult for Rogers). It's somehow not really a surprise that this is one of the weakest offerings from the legendary partnership- the most magical moment comes in a retread of Shall We Dance's 'They Can't Take That Away From Me', where everyone involved seems to acknowledge that Barkleys is a film clutching hopelessly to an unreachable past. There is no new ground to tread here, simply a brief reunion of faded magic.

I'm always someone who's been far more interested in actresses than actors, and even if Fred Astaire is a rather brilliant man, I'm concerned about the treatment of Ginger Rogers in these movies. The plot of The Barkleys of Broadway is, rather obviously, referencing the desire Ginger had to be a 'serious actress', which one suspects is partly what lead to the break-up of their partnership at the end of 1930s. The cycle of their movies in the 1930s sees a gradual move towards more equality in the partnership, and with that more weight, more drama in the romantic plotlines. Swing Time marked the first time their love wasn't sealed with a romantic dance- 'Waltz in Swing Time' ends with Ginger spinning off and Fred gesturing sadly after her, and the reunion is instead sealed afterwards, proving Ginger can no longer be so easily won. As the partnership wound down, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle had them already married, already stable, already equal.

Ginger doubtful; Ginger convinced

The Barkleys of Broadway, though, undoes the good work that the previous film did in sending Astaire and Rogers off in a pleasant fashion. For whatever reason, Ginger seems all too happy to mock her former serious self, and finally to accept the idea that Astaire really is her "Svengali". She is the one who has to be dragged onto the stage for the estranged pairing's reunion dance at a charity event- and is visually convinced during said dance to 'They Can't Take That Away From Me', even if she still leaves afterward. It is still Ginger who must realise her mistake and come back to Astaire, back to musical comedy, and leave her own aspirations behind, by convincing herself that those no longer are her aspirations. She cannot even be an actress without her "Svengali"- who pretends to be her French director (Jacques Francois) in order to boost her confidence and perform well.

In essence, during The Barkleys of Broadway, Ginger comes to believe that she is nothing without Fred, that it is to him she owes her career. While it's true that her post-Fred career never really took off, despite winning the Oscar for Kitty Foyle in 1940, is it not a bit much to say that Fred could have stood without Ginger? Who can say if he would have become the star he did without Ginger as his partner? There's no question he was the better dancer, but would their films have been as good an escape from the Great Depression if Ginger hadn't been there as a tough cookie counterpart, a twirling dervish of a dress-wearer? Astaire stayed where he knew he could succeed. But Ginger tried. Trying to be a 'serious' actress isn't necessarily better than being a dancer or a comedienne, but she stretched her legs, she ventured into the unknown, she had a go. And it's a shame she's not more celebrated for it.

Picture This

2009-06-11T23:23:00.000Z

Tarsem (who formerly came with a surname, Singh) proved last year with The Fall that he holds a unique flair both for truly cinematic imagery and for storytelling that folds this into narratives that reflect on the human mind, its intricacies and dazzlingly imaginative capacity. Of course, I wouldn't have been surprised by this had I already seen his 2000 debut The Cell, but I've only just now caught up with it. Though in a completely different category from The Fall- an 18 certificate to The Fall's PG- they are in fact remarkably similar, entwining 'real' and invented, unreal worlds together to demonstrate how distorted they can become.

The Cell is rather marvellous, in case you didn't know- haven't you been reading Nick Davis?- and I encourage you to seek it out if you haven't already (as long as you can handle such disturbing sights as a man with rings all over his back suspended painfully in mid-air, and a horse diagrammatically dissected into slices), but instead of harping on about it all, I've instead capped some tempting pictures of the sort of delights on offer. No, no horse insides- I'm not really a costume nut but Tarsem's costume designers really have the flamboyant, extravagent flair in their costuming that makes me sit up and open my mouth in astonishment. And how can you resist a film in which Jennifer Lopez (who's rather good by the way) dresses up like a nun? Sorta.

Un quartetto di emozioni

2009-05-09T12:48:00.000Z

While everyone's going nuts over Star Trek (which I will be seeing, so let's just see if I can be bothered to write anything about that), last night I decided to be all weird and different and I went to see Il divo. Thankfully I refer not to Simon Cowell's pop-opera quartet, but instead to Paulo Sorrentino's lauded film about former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti. However, inspired by the pop-opera quartet and my easily divisible reactions to the film, I'm crossing those caterwauling men (I wish I could use their faces in this post, but they just look like smug, self-satisfied bastards in every photo) with the Seven Dwarfs and bringing you my review in the form of four emotional subheadings. Confused? Yes, you're right! That's the first one. (DoyouseewhatIdidthere, etc.)

Confusion. It may as well be admitted immediately: I went into this film knowing nothing more about it than the couplet "Italian politics" (which is hardly a thrilling advertisement, but anyway). I didn't know who Guilio Andreotti was, I had no cognisance of the events that unfolded before me. I've never been a political person and I'm certainly not an Italian political person (hey, if I don't even care about my own country's politics, I can hardly be expected to care about Italy's). So, for much of the film, I was a bit confused as to who all these people were, what they were doing and why they were doing it. It'd all been jazzed up a bit, probably for people exactly like me, but we'll get to that in a second.

Amusement. Forgive me. But as Guilio Andreotti, Toni Servillo walked like a camp Nosferatu and looked like a cross between David Frost and Milton from Office Space. Servillo's performance isn't by any means bad, but, at least initially, Sorrentino seems all too intent on mining the caricature for laughs, positioning Andreotti's immobile face and hunched body against "hilarious" oppositions like a lost cat. I wasn't amused by the attempts to amuse me, but more the ludicrousness of it all, as well as the time I spent trying to figure out exactly who Servillo resembled. Did I get the perfect description? (Vote now!)

Annoyance. I haven't seen Gomorrah yet, but from what I've heard it fits the same mould as Il divo does- visceral, hyper camerawork, a style aping classic Martin Scorsese; basically, jazzing the dull story up by quick editing, shocking sonoral moments and camera placement that shoves half the frame up to your nose and the other half so far away you need to squint. Il divo adds to the sleek post-modern feel by sticking every character's name, rank and nickname on-screen when we meet them, these labels sliding behind objects and twisting around things and generally making themselves hard to read. You want to make politics more exciting, I get it. But to be honest, the only reason I didn't fall asleep was because you threw in a gunshot or someone yelling every so often so I was jolted out of my slumber.

Melancholy. Alright. So the film didn't work for me on an intellectual level, and that's probably my fault. And it didn't work for me on an aesthetic level, and that's definitely their fault. But there were a couple of moments that cut right through all the bullshit and genuinely moved me. Andreotti and his wife are watching television, and she reaches for his hand, which he coolly gives to her. As they sit there holding hands, staring at the TV, she turns to look at him, and here, for once, the camerawork hits the bullseye. The point-of-view shots linger over the side of his face, desperately trying to penetrate his hard outer shell, and you realise that his wife has lost him completely, no matter how hard she tries, and as she tries again to talk, to break through to him, it's a devastating moment. And then there's the secretary, crying on the bus- a singular moment of unfettered melancholy. Il divo doesn't get much right, because there's so much bullshit, both on the level of plot and of film aesthetics, but when it reveals the deep sadness at its core, it's undeniably powerful. C

Victim's Gold Stars: Les Autres

2009-05-07T23:23:00.003Z

What's this? The second (and last) of my awards posts within a week of the first? Have we entered an alternate universe?

Anyway, now these things are all done and dusted I can get back to posting very occasionally and possibly producing something people might actually be interested in reading. No, I'm not pessimistic, what makes you say that?

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Laurent Cantet, Robin Campillo & François Bégaudeau, The Class
Inevitably loses the trajectory of the passing months in its more selective, freewheeling approach, but maybe that's a good thing; school life becomes as homogenously existant as you remember it. There's so much wit here, but not arch or fake; there's a reason why this all feels so real, and much of it surely grew, at least, from the page.

Mark O'Rowe, Boy A
Uncompromising, really, in the harshness with which it depicts the world and the difficult re-entry of our central character back into it, but also humanizes each character with the painful truth of someone who recognises the ultimate tragic simplicity of our lifes and the inability to deal with such unfamiliar events.

John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let The Right One In
Deliciously unpredictable, slightly impenetrable; spinning mysteries so barefaced that their unsolved nature is perversely delightful, while crafting characters that challenge the genre conventions without being ludicrously self-referential or self-aware in their difference.

Howard A. Rodman, Savage Grace
An arch, savvy screenplay befitting the material; laced with ripe dialogue and absurd moments, but these work with the mood of the direction and the acting, and the moments of shock, sensuality and harsh wit only add to the sumptously uncomfortable experience.

Lorene Scafaria, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
It was inevitable, really, that I'd be caught by the youthful hipsterism or whatever label you want to slap on this film, but Nick and Norah is so effervescent, so witty, so generous in how it sets out the various characters that its easy to forgive the tiny slip-ups it makes just because it's so warm, inventive and open.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Fatih Akin, The Edge of Heaven
One of those multi-strand, coincidental narratives which isn't done with quite enough panache that you don't notice the interlocking, overlapping nature of it all, but all the same, these coincidences seem less the point than the emotional reflections they provoke. Still schematic, but makes up for it in character, unusual trajectories and knowing when to quit.

Arnaud Desplechin & Emmanuel Bourdieu, A Christmas Tale
Fat and complex, like a Russian novel. It really does seem to encompass everything, and yet it doesn't feel exhaustive or, indeed, exhausting: it barely seems to scratch the surface, in the end, shuttling characters around and off and on and in and out. And as a portrait of a family, it's disarmingly truthful and uncomfortable, but engagingly so.

Jenny Lumet, Rachel Getting Married
Another difficult family gathering here, with an even tighter focus; Lumet, befitting the camerawork, shoots straight for the dark centre of things instead, obviously peeling back layers but never making it seem like she was holding anything back, even if she has been. Raw, slightly indulgent, but marvellous.

Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg & Judd Apatow, Pineapple Express
Now, I know what you're thinking, I don't normally go for this sort of boy's club juvenile humour stuff. But, simply put, Pineapple Express was hilarious. There's a slightly menacing morbidity here which is never removed as I expected it to be; the threat, the villains, are truly dangerous. But what's most important is that the film knows its way around jokes, lunacy and a boy's club that's actually quite sweet.

Joachim Trier & Eskil Vogt, Reprise
All loopy, self-referencial and with fascinating ways of approaching things; playing with the literary theme, obviously, and as such reflects the variety of ways to write a book, while never seeming to loose the coherence of the story of the friendship at its heart.

BEST DOCUMENTARY
(excluding any Best Picture citations)

Taxi to the Dark Side
Precise and detailed, superbly presented, consistently engrossing. Never afraid to follow the little threads but keeps them revelant and always returns to the intimate topic at hand. Bonus points for looking fantastic, because so often they don't deem it important.

Up the Yangtze
A story of change; never judgmental, simply observant, watching an old tradition fade as the youth try and make their own way into the world. Again, not afraid to follow tangents but keeps them impactful and doesn't overplay the emotions it could easily ladel on.

We Are Together
Heart-warming; not a documentary with a "mission" beyond exposing these kids to a wider fame than they'd already achieved. There's less objectivity and more intimate involvement, here, but you really feel connected to these kids by the end, impressed not just by what they've done but by their spirit, their feeling.

BEST NON-ENGLISH LANGUAGE FILM
(excluding any Best Picture citations)

The Chaser (Chugyeogja)
A breathless, shocking thriller; approaches a familiar plot almost from the opposite end, subverting expectation immediately and continually surprising, but never skimping on either character or excitement.

A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noel)
Desplechin's trademark tangential plotting, his rich characterizations, his superbly awkward human interactions, laid all across a two-and-a-half-hour mini-saga of a family's Christmastime. Impeccably acted, intimately detailed, and effortlessly engaging.

Don't Touch The Axe (Ne touchez pas la hache)
Its strict focus works surprising wonders for it; through the intimate detailing of the Duchess and her relationship with the General, we slowly become engrossed, fascinated as much by the small details as the wider canvas of French society and forbidden passions that's painted.

The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite)
Once again mining his German-Turk heritage, but taking a less direct approach than he did with previous film Head-On, Fatih Akin takes on a wider canvas this time, but keeps the style intimate and focused. Some superb performances increase the rich experience.

Love Songs (Les chansons d'amour)
My 'pet' of the year, really: not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but extraordinarily easy to love. It feels fresh and personal, the slightly twee songs given weight by the emotional (if unstable) characters singing them, played by such charismatic, beautiful people it's hard not to want to get sucked into this world and have sex with them all (hey, that's what they're doing).

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Mathieu Almaric, A Christmas Tale
The 'rogue' son; Almaric doesn't put up any difficulties towards understanding why he's an outcast, but you can also understand why his girlfriend is so fascinated, yet weary, of him. A Christmas Tale is an ensemble performance, really, and Almaric is just part of the superbly created family dynamic, but what marks him is his strange ability to be world-weary and childish all at once.

Emile Hirsch, Milk
I stand by my belief that Emile will one day be a movie star; here, he provides his best work yet by bringing joyful energy and passionate support to another ensemble. His Cleve Jones is a dedicated, individualistic character who is never given 'big' moments by the script, but his humanizing, cheerful work is all the more laudable for that.

Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
You're shocked, I can tell. There's really not much to add to this discussion, but Ledger's frightening, magnetic, witty, manic performance is something completely unexpected, already a timeless reconception of a famous role and certainly the performance people will remember from 2008.

Eddie Marsan, Happy-Go-Lucky
In part, impressive merely for the fact that it seems such a change of pace for Marsan; but that aside, Scott is a bulldog of a character, perhaps too over-egged as an emblem of the British negativity Poppy faces everyday, but that doesn't stop Marsan's work from being exciting, funny, and often slightly terrifying.

Brad Pitt, Burn After Reading
The diamond in the rough; where exactly Pitt got this from, both in the context of the film and his previous career, is a mystery, but he gets the yuppie consumerist insufferablity with such delicious irony. It's a pleasure to watch him hit the comedy mark so perfectly throughout.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
(with sincere apologies to Rosemarie DeWitt, ousted at the last minute)

Hiam Abbass, The Visitor
A performance best described as tender; Abbass turns up and turns what could have been a stock figure into a heartbreaking, beautiful character, infecting the film with warmth even as she's attempting to be as frosty as possible, because there's something affecting about her innate privacy, which makes breaking through that so much more intense.

Patricia Clarkson, Elegy
Sweeps in, sharp and sexy, to provide insight and wisdom to the narrower main characters. Clarkson is always superb value, and here she also provides a wisp of sadness as her character recognises she's being cast aside; there is pain in her eyes, but strength too, and Clarkson is as magnetic and clever as always with her limited screentime.

Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
An absolute whirlwind; Cruz storms in and lights up the film, making everything immediately revolve around her, and providing justification, in her rich line readings and wild, empassioned gestures, as to why it should. Film-saving, career-making, utterly delectable work.

Ari Graynor, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
Just hilarious. Graynor is abandoned for much of the film yet makes those stretches almost the best of the film, spinning a new classic 'drunk' character with her speech and expressions, calibrated to maximise hilarity from something that's not too unfamiliar from your own experiences.

Rachel Regulier, The Class
The best of a superb bunch of new faces in the film, Regulier is both a magnetic presence and a generous ensemble player, working excellently with her classmates while providing a singular characterization that almost unbalances things. Keyword almost: Khoumba's confrontational, disengaged front is tempered by hints of her smarts, both street and intellectual, though Regulier, similarly smart, leaves room for ambiguity, slightly mystery.

BEST DIRECTOR

Laurent Cantet, The Class
Coping with this class, even though I'm sure the actors were less troublesome that their screen counterparts, can't have been easy, but the seamless naturalism would reflect no troubles at all; add to that the liveliness, the freshness of the whole project and this is a superb achievement.

John Crowley, Boy A
Again, working specific wonders with the cast, drawing superbly sensitive performances; but also has a terrific sense of place, a measured, precise feeling about proceedings, and an eye for unusually acute moments.

Tom Kalin, Savage Grace
Over a decade since his last film but still sharply attuned to the specific style he wants, matching sets and acting with the dialogue to provide a stylized, rich experience. Again, a great sense of place, too, capturing various moods without needlessly expanding the camera's viewpoints.

Mike Leigh, Happy-Go-Lucky
Working his improvisational magic once more; Leigh's process seems a truly collaborative one, but someone has to take the reigns and he's as finely observant and tactful as ever, pulling focus onto our heroine to just the right amounts. (And we'll forgive that one slip-up with the homeless man, because nobody's perfect.)

Tarsem, The Fall
Such richness of vision, in everything from the storyline to the costumes, but never loses the heart of the piece either, and does wonders with young Catinca Untaru. Alright, so slightly indulgent, but as with the best auteurs, that just makes everything more wonderful.

BEST ACTOR

James Franco, Pineapple Express
The lovable stoner; Franco mines so much comedy from what might have been a stale stereotype, spinning endless riffs with his vocals, expressions, gestures... Franco finally 'arrived' last year, and on the basis of this clever, charismatic turn, it's not hard to see why.

Andrew Garfield, Boy A
An astonishing breakthrough; Garfield is painfully raw as the imprisoned boy who is released back into society as a man. The secret weight on his character's shoulders never far from his or our mind, Garfield's sympathetic, unmawkish performance reveals the sheer difficulty of simply being a human.

Ben Kingsley, Elegy
I have never been a fan of (Sir) Ben Kingsley, so I was taken aback to find his performance in Elegy as affecting as it was. It's all part of the film's real 'adult' (in the emotional rather than explicit sense) that his character is so complex, so intellectual yet basely sexual, and Kingsley navigates these contradictions very adeptly.

Sean Penn, Milk
Possibly the most exciting performance Penn's ever given. By turns playful and sober, romantic and focused, sensual and political, it's never not a biopic performance but it doesn't feel like an imitation, it feels like an essence has been captured, and then set free. The thrilling centre of the film.

Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
The performance is a bridge between actor and character, but that doesn't diminish the raw power of the performance, the commitment to the possibly-familiar story arc, the humour he brings to the film as well as the tears.

BEST ACTRESS

Anna Faris, The House Bunny
And Miss Faris continues to outshine her material (which isn't actually that bad here but anyway...). The script does, admittedly, give the film to her on a silver platter, but that doesn't stop her comic timing, her clever characterization, her perfect vocalizations, her inspired expressions... Yeah. She's brilliantly funny, basically.

Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
Using her movie star charisma to the good of the character; Kym's focus-pulling dramatics make Hathaway's status a sore character point, and she embraces it all, shining harsh lights on Kym's multitude of failings while providing witty moments and emotional asides. Hard to watch, sometimes, but truthful in that pain, and delightful out of it.

Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky
Works, across the arc of the film, on turning the audience fully around; initially ingratiating, Hawkins does not compromise Poppy's relentlessly cheerful attitude whatsoever, but shades it with reasoning, hidden moments of a darker complexion, and completely turns you around to how you percieve her- without changing in the slightest.

Julianne Moore, Savage Grace
Moore has been lost in the mainstream for long enough for it to be evident that she needs the freedom, the looser boundaries, the adventure of smaller, more independent filmmaking to really grasp a character. And grasp she does; Barbara is a fierce, vibrant woman, and Moore bites down on her prentiousness, her frailties, her distorted perceptions to fashion a performance that is frighteningly magnetic.

Michelle Williams, Wendy and Lucy
The quiet, unassuming centre of the film, Williams does nothing flashy with the part, instead letting us grow accustomed to her with time, letting our involvement rest on both virtue and fault, quietly carving a subtle, affecting performance that rests within the quiet beauty of the film.

BEST PICTURE
(see the full top ten)

Boy A
A difficult subject handled with delicacy, subtlety and humanism; answers are not to be found within, simply the moving story of society's failings, both in the cause of the tragedy and the difficulty of Jack's reintroduction. Low-key but devastatingly effective.

The Class
Surely familiar to anyone who's ever attended a public school; I, for one, recognised the genial arguments and the bitter, difficult debates, the difficulty of positioning yourself between your own intellectual progression and how others percieve you. The Class gets all the little details right, and is so deftly executed, so unassumingly witty and poignant, that it really is an unexpected masterwork.

The Fall
An astonishing piece of work; such glorious imagination, rendered on-screen so with such aplomb, such a stunning sense of style. A singular piece of work, yet one that is eminently connectable, appealing as it does to both the audience's childhoods and their adult perceptions of a world gone wrong.

Reprise
The difficulties of a friendship, the difficulties of writing, the difficulties of adulthood; life is difficult all over, really, but rarely has that difficulty been rendered so exactly and through such insightful, clever cinematic techniques.

Trouble the Water
An exemplary documentary; the large part of the film is dominated by Kimberley Rivers' astonishing home video footage of Hurricane Katrina, which would probably be worthy enough in itself, but directors Carl Dean and Tia Lessin not only manage this footage, they track Rivers and her family after the hurricane, providing an intimate portrait of the results of the devastation, while also widening out to larger issues that Rivers, intentionally or not, raises. A striking, moving, engrossing watch.