Saturday, January 18, 2025

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN**


A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is a deeply frustrating biopic of Bob Dylan.  Rather than challenging his misogynistic bullshit, the film replicates it.  Director James Mangold (WALK THE LINE) is not interested in interrogating the complexity of Saint Bob. Rather, everything must be packaged neatly in a convenient narrative arc.

That arc is massaged to within an inch of its life. Young Bob - choirboy turned gravelly voiced folk-singer - makes a pilgrimage to New York to meet his chronically ill hero Woody Guthrie.  Scoot McNairy (IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS) stuns in an entirely wordless performance as Guthrie, struck mute with Hungtington's Disease, but still keen to be surrounded by music. Such is Bob's evident talent that he is taken in by a kindly, paternal Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) and his wife Toshi, a couple whose life was devoted to preserving the American folk music tradition.

Bob finds fame and massive music sales with his protest songs against a backdrop of the civil rights movement.  But this is the era of the Beatles and The Stones and The Kinks and he feels trapped in amber by the historicity of the folk movement.  He hires a blues rock band and records what will be his first electric rock album, Highway 61 Revisited.  

The narrative arc poses a big showdown at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Will Bob play nice and play folk? Or will he disappoint everyone around him and play electric rock?  We all know the answer. And we all know that what transpired afterwards didn't happen at Newport but in the Manchester Free Trade Hall a year later. But that doesn't fit Mangold's neat and claustrophobically American narrative. Nowhere do we see Bob travel to London and the influence the Swinging Sixties Carnaby Street vibe had on him. He just goes from one scene to the next transformed from shabby folk clothes to extra tight Carnaby Street suits and winkle pickers.  

The problem with the way this film is constructed is that most everyone is a single-dimension character, giving the excellent cast very little to do. Pretty much everyone just looks at Bob with an air of disappointment.  Elle Fanning (The Great) plays Sylvie Russo - a thinly veiled version of Bob's real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo - and just looks at Bob disappointed and heartbroken.  Monica Barbaro plays folk icon Joan Baez and just looks at Bob disappointed and contemptuous. Peter Seege looks disappointed and paternally heartbroken.  You get the picture.

And what of Bob himself? Timothee Chalamet (DUNE) plays Bob with pads in his cheeks to give him a boyish round-face, and has admirably mastered his growly deliberately ugly style of singing and playing. It's a great impersonation, but for my money, outclassed by Scoot McNairy in the acting department.  You get the ferocity of Bob, his uncompromising attitude toward music.  But the film skips so lightly over his way of mooching off women, or his initial passive-aggressive barb that Joan Baez sings too well.... Imagine a film with this cast that really wanted to get into the verbal attack on Joan in Like A Rolling Stone, or his womanising, or his fundamentally dishonest appropriation of a persona.  

But no, this is a film for fans that wants us to see (rightly) just how bloody brilliant his early music was. Where the film shines is in giving is so much music so brilliantly rendered. But by including so much music it squeezes out the time that could have been spent on personal relationships.  I feel like maybe this was a deliberate choice and a cowardly one too.

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is rated R and has a running time of 141 minutes.  It was released in the USA on December 14th and opens in the UK on January 17th 2025.

Sunday, January 12, 2025

Spoiler-filled thoughts on THE BRUTALIST*****


THE BRUTALIST is a masterpiece. It is a challenging, deeply felt, meticulously constructed, and largely superbly acted film that is thought-provoking in the best sense. After watching it I was filled with questions and emotions - I was buzzing - and the film resonated in the days following the screening. I could only be thankful that I had another screening lined up. This is a film that I needed to sit with, ruminate over, and rewatch.

Writer-director Brady Corbet (VOX LUX) and his co-writer Mona Fastvold have crafted a script that truly speaks to our times.  Issues raised include the brutal exercise of power by oligarchs - the othering and condescension toward immigrants - the violent insecurity of the intellectually inferior - the need for sanctuary in an anti-semitic world - the need for emotional and sexual connection in an atomised and traumatised world.  And then there is the perennial struggle of the artist versus the capitalist patrons and corporates who fund their work.

All of this intellectual complexity is brought to bear in the fictional figure of Laszlo Toth. He was a Brutalist architect in Hungary before World War Two, but expelled from his profession by the Nazis for his unGermanic work.  He was then separated from his equally talented, intellectually voracious wife Erzsebet, and both sent to concentration camps which they miraculously survive.  As the movie opens, Laszlo is in the belly of a ship about to land on Ellis Island. His wife and niece Zsofia remain in a bureaucratic hellscape, trapped in Europe.

The prologue of the film immediately upends our expectations with the upturned Statue of Liberty.  Laszlo (the magnificent Adrien Brody) is rendered impotent by his wartime experiences, and finds solace for his loneliness, trauma, poverty, alienation and physical pain in the heroin he was given for his broken face on board the ship.  He is welcomed by his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) who runs a furniture store in Philadelphia - then at the height of its industrial pomp. Attila offers one method for survival - complete assimilation and abnegation.  Atilla has married a gentile - nothing wrong with that - so did Laszlo - but Laszlo's wife converted.  Atilla has gentilised the name of his business and toadies to his rich customers.  The welcome that seems warm soon becomes one of rejection.  Atilla has no truck with Laszlo for losing him business and his blonde shrill wife accuses him of sexual assault - a classic anti-semitic trope to pull.

We then move into the meat of the first part of the film - the relationship between Laszlo and his patron - Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr - again magnificently rendered by Guy Pierce as a Kane-like figure.  He is vulgar and loud and ridiculously wealthy. But he is also intellectually insecure - a working class kid raised by a single mother who never went to university but surrounds himself with rare first editions.  He may be superior to Laszlo in every single materialistic way - but he can never be as cultured, nor have Laszlo's taste, nor destroy Laszlo's independence of mind. And for a man who covets and owns, and wants Laszlo as a vanity-pleasing prop, this drives Van Buren mad. I loved the purity of this first half.  The battle between the two men.  The beautiful breaking of ground and coming-to-reality of Laszlo's gigantic community centre and chapel. 

In the second half of the film, the narrative framing device of letters from Laszlo's wife becomes real, as both Erzsebet and Zsofia arrive in Pennsylvania after many years' separation. Here we see further physical and mental damage caused by the Holocaust.  Erzesebet (Felicity JoneS( is in a wheelchair because years of starvation have damaged her bones. Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) is so traumatised that she cannot speak. The arrival of Erzsebet if further proof to Harry of his intellectual inferiority.  She is an incredibly smart, perceptive, strong woman, who studied at Oxford and returned to Hungary as a journalist. It is no coincidence that Harry tries to find her work as a journalist not in Philadelphia but in New York. She is a threat to his jealously obsessive relationship with Laszlo.  

There is an inevitable argument over money and the project is paused. But Harry inevitably begs Laszlo to come back and the project recommences. We then move to Carrara, Italy for a bravura set-piece segment that seems infused with mystery, a dreamlike unreality, and emotional tension.  Laszlo is reunited with a marble cutter who might look like a dreamy artist but fought the fascists - exhibiting more manhood and courage and moral acuity than someone like Harry can conceive of.  We are now, for the first time in the film, completely in Laszlo's world and Harry has, metaphorically, the wrong shoes for the journey. Is it any surprise that it is here that Harry sexually violates Laszlo in an attempt to reassert the power dynamic, in a scene foreshadowed by his nephew violating Zsofia?

And how fitting it is that real loving sex will resolve this narrative. Laszlo has been impotent for much of the film, despite the inducements of sex workers and porn, and then the entreaties of his wife. They finally achieve climax under the influence of heroin, which he has administered to her for her pain in desperation.  It's an incredibly moving, intimate scene, and has a fever-dream aspect which we will only see the ramifications of when Erzsebet confronts Harry with his crime against Laszlo. For a man so wrapped in his self-perception and vanity, he cannot recover. And this is the end of the "American Dream" for Erzsebet too. She too will follow Zsofia and make aaliyah to Israel. 

We then move to the epilogue of the film where we learn that Laszlo is being feted at the Venice Biennale in 1980.  His commission was indeed finished and now its meaning is explained.  Laszlo was not just being stubborn about its proportions as any artist might.  He was stubborn because he designed it while still separated from his beloved wife, to represent their separation and internment in two different concentration camps.  And so we discover the true meaning of a Cross created by absence - the gap between two concrete cut out pillars - that cannot meet, but the buildings are united by the subterranean level of the complex. 

There is so much to love in this film - the audacity of its length, its thematic scope, its incredible performances....  On that last topic the only slightly false note for me was Felicity Jones somewhat inconsistent Hungarian accent as Erzsebet. I even wondered if they inserted the line about Erzsebet studying at Oxford to explain the occasional middle-class English lilt breaking through. Counter-balancing this we have the breakthrough performance of a lifetime by Joe Alwyn as Harry Jr and the deeply moving potrayal of Zsofia by Raffey Cassidy. 

Behind the lens, the production is flawless.  Cinematographer Lol Crawley (WHITE NOISE) films in close focus Vistavision, a technique contemporaneous to the story and worth seeking out in 70mm prints.  This gives the film a kind of visceral feel of intensity, with saturated colour.  I also cannot speak highly enough of Daniel Blumberg's stunning score, that goes from orchestral classical to jazz to electronica.  

Overall, I feel that what Brady Corbet has done in this film is of equal importance to what Paul Thomas Anderson did with THERE WILL BE BLOOD. It's a movie that does something that you have not seen before, that moves you, provokes you, envelopes you in a unique vision, aurally, visually. It's so far above the run of the mill film that if feels as though it's from another universe. 

THE BRUTALIST is rated R and has a running time of 215 minutes. It opened in the USA on December 20th 2024 and opens in the UK on January 24th 2025.

Thoughts on NOSFERATU (2024)***


Robert Eggers' version of FW Murnau's iconic 1922 NOSFERATU is an earnest reimagining that looks wonderful, but I found it to be a frustrating and problematic film. First the good stuff. The film looks beautiful.  Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke film in colour but desaturate the film to look like old black and white films with colour tints to delineate the different moods and time of day of each scene. The production and costume design are immaculate, particularly in the Central European scenes. We absolutely believe we are in this gothic, sinister world.  And the ultimate test - the depiction of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) - works - with one exception that I will mention in the negative column. I also really loved Robin Carolan's evocative score and some of the performances. Lily-Rose Depp is tremendous as Ellen Hutter, as is Simon McBurney as the vampire-enabling lawyer Herr Knock. 

Now to the negative column. This version of NOSFERATU is, to my mind, not scary. And to my surprise, apart from a few very well telegraphed jump scares, it's just cheap EXORCIST style body horror. 

Second, I found a lot of it unintentionally funny, and once you get into that mindset it's hard to come back. As someone who works with legal docs, seeing Orlok sensually finger a legal covenant was hilarious. The whole film is basically about not doing sufficient legal due diligence!  Moreover, Count Orlok’s camp moustache may well be historically accurate but it looks funny.  And I cannot but believe that Willem Dafoe's attenuated pipe was a deliberate attempt at humour.  

And then there's the bad acting. Nicholas Hoult is just mediocre as Thomas Hutter but Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s acting is literally laughable.  I know his character, Friedrich Harding, is meant to be a misogynistic dullard, but must every line be spoken at eleven?  And then the poor actor is saddled with a really pointless necrophilia subplot?  What?  Just trim that nonsense and get to a tight running time.

Third, the message of this film is really problematic. Horny lonely teenagers get what’s coming to them. And what’s coming to them is Orlok orgasm and intellectual superiority? I think if the message is that a misogynistic and sexually oppressive society forced Ellen to invite in Orlok as a means to sexual expression then the film could have done more work around that rather than her saying she was lonely twice. It was a two hour plus film - I would have spent more time on that and less on pointless (thematically) necrophilia.

Interesting sidenote for anyone who has watched The Idol - in both Lily Rose Depp plays a sexually commoditised woman who we think has fallen thrall to an exploitative man but in the final scenes we realise she actually has all the power.  Okay so she has the power, but she ends up dead in this. So yeah. Feminism!

Also my perennial minor issue with all sail-ship Nosefaratus.  Why is Orlok sailing from Central Europe to the German Baltic coast? Pack that shit up on a wagon or a canal barge. Especially when in a modern re-telling you have thankfully cast off the anti-semitic undercurrent of an "other"/migrant bringing plague with them.

NOSFERATU is rated R and has a running time of 135 minutes. It was released on Christmas Day 2024 in the USA and New Year's Day 2025 in the UK.

CHASING CHASING AMY***


CHASING CHASING AMY is a wonderful and raw and vulnerable documentary about what the 1990s Kevin Smith dramedy CHASING AMY meant to those making it and those who watched it.  

The film is one that I loved when it came out: I was a deep-cut Kevin Smith fan, and even loved his critically panned second film MALLRATS. CHASING AMY was a film that was meant to revive his career after that failure and it did. It starred Ben Affleck as an earnest but insecure comic book writer called Holden who falls in love with a fellow artist called Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams) who is both way more sexually experienced and bisexual. 

The narrative arc centres Holden and his journey to emotional maturity.  The comedy, as in all of Kevin Smith, is crude and blunt and politically incorrect and brilliant.  Both Holden's best friend Banky (Jason Lee) and Alyssa's gay friends find it hard to understand their sexual relationship.  There's a lot of casually homophobic and biphobic language.  And worst of all to modern sensibilities, the film was written and directed by a straight white man centring his own journey.  So as much as the film was loved at the time of its release, it has since been condemned as tone-deaf and problematic and largely forgotten.

That's when trans male film-maker Sav Rodgers entered the story.  He was a teenager being bullied in school for being queer. Watching CHASING AMY was a lifeline. He saw Alyssa and her friends - proudly out, incredibly smart, sex-positive - as role model.  Sav asserts that the film literally saved his life.  Fast forward through a virally popular Ted Talk on the subject and Sav connects with Kevin Smith, is welcomed into the director's home, and makes this documentary.

What we get is a strange but compelling doc with three strands. The first is Sav's own story as geeky bullied lesbian woman who finds the courage to become a married trans man and film director thanks to the love of his amazing wife Riley, his amazing mum, and maybe also the friendship and mentorship of Kevin Smith.  

The second is the story of Kevin Smith and his evident joy and finding someone who appreciates his art and is deeply moved by it.  

But it's the final strand that is the most compelling and it's the story of the women who have a far more complex relationship with the film. 

The first woman is Joey Lauren Adams, who never found the stardom she might have expected, maybe because Harvey Weinstein didn't like her and maybe because she was playing these unconventional roles.  The movie was based on her real-life relationship with Smith and while she's glad the movie exists, she finds it really difficult to see their two-year painful relationship relived on screen. That real life Kevin or fictional Holden emotionally grow is great, but it came at her real-life expense. She is also far more damning of the idea that you can enjoy the success of the film at Sundance when you now know what Harvey Weinstein was doing to Rose McGowan at that very festival. Smith mentions it and acknowledges it but it's Adams who really feels it.

The second woman who got ripped off is film writer, director and actor Guinevere Turner - the real-life lesbian who inspired Alyssa. She describes seeing her real conversations with Smith transcribed in CHASING AMY, and her horror as her own female-centred, lesbian-authored film GO FISH faded into the background as Smith's more mainstream appealing CHASING AMY got all the plaudits.

This is all really complicated stuff and it's not clear that the young film-maker Sav Rodgers has the emotional maturity or film-making maturity to deal with the issues he stirs up with his interviews.  He does not go back to Smith to try to hold him to account or to pierce his rather earnestly complacent attitude toward the film.  He does not know what to say to Adams when she lays the reality down on him. That's not Sav's fault - he's so young and dealing with his own stuff. But it makes for a frustrating viewing experience.

CHASING CHASING AMY played Tribeca and London 2023. It has a running time of 93 minutes and is available to rent and own.

THE BIBI FILES*****


Alexis Bloom (CATCHING FIRE: THE STORY OF ANITA PALLENBERG) returns to our screens with a meticulously constructed and excoriating documentary about Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.  The documentary accuses him and his wife of gross and long-standing corruption, grifting jewellery and other perks from donors eager for favours.  It further argues that once these accusations became a criminal investigation, and Bibi was seen as beyond the pale by the centre right parties in the country, that he had an incentive to go further and further to the right to keep his hands on power.  She argues that his ultra-right nationalism is not necessarily authentic but a cheap, insincere means to an end. Moreover, leaked interrogation tapes show that Bibi himself had a hand in keeping Hamas in power because he didn't want the two Palestinian territories - one under Hamas and one under Fateh - to link up.  The documentary argues that this strategy of enabling Hamas AND stoking up of religious hatred had a direct hand in the appalling October 7th terrorist attacks. And that once those attacks occurred, Bibi had a convenient reason to further cling to power.

The documentary excels in intercutting the interrogation tapes of Bibi and his wife.  Bibi is all charm and charisma and blustering persuasion. By contrast his wife is far more strident and entitled and off-putting.  Neither seems to have any shame or guilt.  They seem to think leading Israel is their right.  We also get the benefit of insight from a number of talking heads from the Israeli establishment, including most damningly the former head of the Israeli intelligence service, Shin Bet.  All are united in thinking Bibi a leader who is both criminal in the literal sense, but also the moral sense, of dragging Israel into an extreme right position that cannot result in a peaceful and thriving Israeli state. 

THE BIBI FILES has a running time of 115 minutes. It played Toronto 2024 and was released in the USA and UK last December.

Thursday, January 09, 2025

2073**


Just watched Asif Kapadia’s new film 2073. It’s an odd and not particularly successful mashup of 80pc contemporary political doc and 20pc dystopian fictional film. The doc is depressing but doesn’t have anything new to say about how Big Tech is subverting democracy. And even Samantha Morton can’t save the awkwardly morose 2073 sections set in a climate-ravaged world. I think the problem may be that in a week when Elon Musk is literally trying to subvert British democracy and Mark Zuckerberg decided to appease the Felon-In-Chief, we don't really need a nicely edited clip reel of how the world is going to hell in a hand basket. The issue isn't complacency. The issue is that we are all too well-informed and all too clueless as to how to stop it. (You notice here, that I assume no-one who like Musk and Trump are going to watch this, let alone be persuaded by it). So, in the final analysis, this is just a pointless but worthy agit-doc that is preaching to the converted.
 
2073 has a running time of 85 minutes. It played Venice, Sitges and London 2024. It opened in the USA on December 27th 2024 and in the UK on January 1st 2025.