GOODBYE JUNE**

Kate Winslet has been evolving behind the camera, producing the biopic LEE and now making her directorial debut with this new mawkish family Christmas movie GOODBYE JUNE.  Helen Mirren plays the titular protagonist, dying of cancer in her most unglamorous role to date.  Her four children, husband and assorted grandkids gather around and try and sort through their various emotional issues before giving her a twee Christmas nativity play send-off. Winslet plays the financially successful, stoic elder sister.  The wonderful Andrea Riseborough plays her resentful younger sister.  Toni Colette plays a hippie dippie third sister who returns from Germany and apparently is desperate to be pregnant. And a dishevelled Johnny Flynn plays the sensitive son Connor.  Timothy Spall plays the rather loveable but apparently emotionally disengaged dad who deals with his forthcoming grief by, I kid you not, singing karaoke.  It's testament to Winslet's pull that she could assemble such a sterling cast, and as a result, this film could never be a total failure. But it's a shame that her son Joe Anders' script resorts to cheap devices to try and wring tears from our eyes. I cringed when Spall's dad began his karaoke act and the final nativity scene made me gag.  Your mileage may vary.

GOODBYE JUNE is rated R and has a running time of 114 minutes. It was released on Netflix earlier this month.

LEE**

Lee Miller was a supermodel and a surrealist muse before becoming a photographer in her own right.  When World War Two broke out began by photographing the home front for Vogue before lobbying to be sent to the front line. She captured images of the Allies using napalm in France, and then of the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau. Famously, she photographed herself in Hitler's bathtub, her muddied boots defiant in front of the tub.  She was tough, self-medicated with alcohol, "sex positive", and by all accounts a rather distant mother.  Her life is big enough for several films, or a miniseries. Sadly this film, produced by and starring Kate Winslet, can't seem to wrap its arms around its subject and wrestle it to the ground.

The first problem with LEE the film is its framing device. Winslet is aged up to be the seventy-year old Lee going through her old photos with a young interviewer (CHALLENGERS' Josh O'Connor).  The problem is that every time we get to a moment of dramatic tension and need to stay emotionally engaged we are ripped out into a different era.  The worst example of this is when we go from Dachau to Hitler's villa, now being used as a convivial officers' mess.  The contrast is sinister and surreal and Alexandre Desplat's score captures the weirdness of it. The problem is, the contrast is split by an interlude in the 1970s. I understand why Winslet the producer thought she had a duty to include this framing device - more of which in the spoiler section after the release info - but I think it was a distraction ad a mis-step.

The second problem with LEE is that the first act in St Malo is marred by the casting choice of Alexander Skarsgard as her lover Roger Penrose. Skarsgard simply can't do a convincing English accent and it's hugely distracting.  

The film is on firmer footing with the third and most impactful relationship that Miller had - her collaboration with the Life magazine photographer David Scherman. Andy Samberg is good in this role as far as it goes but the film isn't interested in exploring why this relationship worked when so many others didn't. And it criminally under explores his reaction to the camps. 

We are on firmer footing with Lee's female friendships.  Winslet is at her finest in scenes of tender intimacy, first with Noemie Merlant's surrealist artist Nusch - and most heartbreakingly with Marion Cotillard's Solange d'Ayen. This is not a convincing film but Cotillard's cameo is pure authentic tragic pain and deserves awards season recognition.  I also loved Andrea Riseborough (BRIGHTON ROCK) as the thoroughly decent and thoroughly straight-laced Vogue editor Audrey Withers.

The problem is that these moments of genuine heartbreak are scattered in a film that can't quite convince as a whole. I blame this mostly on the screenplay by Liz Hannah (THE POST), Marion Hume and John Collee (MASTER & COMMANDER).  I think the time spent in St Malo is good as a contrast to the wartime suffering, but I felt every moment spent with Roger or the interviewer was wasted. Most of all I just didn't feel that I ended the film understanding Lee more than at the start. The script felt reductive. Its Lee is a victim of abuse who protects the abused but cannot protect herself or her family from her alcoholism.  But is that the only explanation I am to have of why this beautiful privileged woman decided to go to Dachau? And was she an alcoholic before the war? Or just after Dachau?  And why don't we ever really see her suffer for that?  She is the most high-functioning alcoholic I have seen.

I also feel that the film is both dumbed down with exposition AND weirdly does not explain stuff I needed to know! There's lots of exposition - especially early on - but then no signposting that we are at Dachau, or really that we are in Hitler's actual house, or that the little girl in the camp was in a brothel. I only knew that because Kate Winslet referred to that scene in a Q&A. 

Is the film worth watching? Yes for the scenes with Riseborough and Cotillard and for Winslet's performance. But it remains a frustrating viewing experience.

LEE is rated R and has a running time of 116 minutes.  It played Toronto 2023. It opens in the UK on September 16th and in the USA on September 27th.

Spoilers follow:  Kate Winslet said in her Q&A that she felt a duty toward Lee's son to give him the conversation with his mother about her life that he never had in real life. This film was made in collaboration with the son and the Lee Miller estate. I feel that that sense of obligation was a burden for this film.  The lack of relationship between mother and son is only interesting if we really explore her post-war PTSD and as a reflection on what she saw. By wrapping the film up in it, and making it have a conversation with Lee's wartime experiences, it diminishes the power of the Holocaust scenes and adds little depth to our understanding of Lee.

AMMONITE - BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Closing Night Gala

AMMONITE suffers in my head from comparisons with the devastatingly brilliant PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE, which played at last year's festival and has a very similar story at its heart. In both cases a young girl trapped in either the reality or prospect of a loveless and controlling marriage meets a talented older working class woman with a professional skill.  In both cases, the meeting takes place in a geographically isolated and brutally beautiful place and the relationship that builds is a slow-burn to a physically passionate end.  But in the latter, I truly believed in the connection between the two women, and in the former I'm not sure I did.

Part of the reason for this is that it was 50 mins for the protagonists in AMMONITE to have an actual (if insubstantial) conversation and 1hr10m for them to have a kiss.  And the interest in the characters is deeply asymmetrical.  Kate Winslet's Mary Anning IS fascinating. She's so repressed and locked in - maybe as much by her consciousness of her poverty and working class status as by her homosexuality - and has a fierce pride that refuses to accept help.  By contrast, Saiorse Ronan's Charlotte is the typical silly Victorian woman, fit for nothing but to be admired for her beauty. This is not to victim-shame, but she is exactly the product of societal strictures and doesn't really display an inner life in the way that PORTRAIT's young woman does. There doesn't seem to be much under the surface.  I had the feeling in AMMONITE that I always get watching Brideshead Revisited. I can understand why Charles is fascinated by Sebastian but not why Sebastian wants to hang out with Charles!

So the relationship develops and is crystallised at a beautifully staged elegant supper party where Charlotte is immediately embraced by the ladies, and Mary is left sitting excluded at the back, full of jealousy and surprise at just how much she resents them taking *her* girl away from her. We then move to a hyper explicit sex scene.  Now, it's really great to see a no-nonsense depiction of lesbian sex on screen, but it did feel strange in a movie where so much is repressed and withheld. It just felt tonally jarring rather than a cathartic release and a meeting of bodies and souls.

On the positive side, this movie looks and sounds ravishing. The costumes and way in which Lyme Regis is depicted is as austere and fierce and unique as Mary, and the sound design batters our ears with gales and tides that hint at what Mary feels under her still surface.  The acting was also top notch as one might expect,  with Winslet giving a masterclass in facial acting where there is no dialogue.  I also loved the Fiona Shaw character Elizabeth and wanted to see more of her, because I feel so much of Mary's characters reticence is due to class rather than queer concerns and that plays into their former relationship. I also love that because Charlotte is so worldly she has only experienced love as a kind of material possession and so when she falls for Mary she also expresses that with a kind of material possession. Just as she, as a wife, was expected to be subsumed without objection into her husband's world, she now expects that of Mary.

I also love how male a space the British Museum is, and the power of these two women at the centre of it at the end - as though the director Francis Lee (GOD'S OWN COUNTRY) is finally re-centring women in British history. Here is a woman who's name is not mentioned on the fossil that's on display at the Museum, but she can reclaim it visually in this film. Truly, it has been a long time coming.

AMMONITE has a running time of 120 minutes and played Toronto and London 2020.  It opens in the USA on November 13th.

WONDER WHEEL

WONDER WHEEL is no BLUE JASMINE, but it's still far better than the mediocre rote films that we've come to expect from late era Woody Allen, elevated by a superb performance by Kate Winslet, in one of her now trademark performances as a disappointed weary middle-aged woman. She plays Ginny, wife of the man (Jim Belushi) who runs the Coney Island ferris or wonder wheel.  She has a mid-life crisis affair with a younger aspiring playwright and lifeguard called Mickey played by Justin Timberlake. This allows her to indulge her nostalgia for her aspirations to being an actress in her youth - but also self-consciously to act.  She rehearses telling him that she's older and married.  She claims that her real life as a waitress is performative. The meta-layers of performance - of being alienated from reality - are heart-breaking.  

The heart-break is compounded because we know that the affair means far less to Mickey than to Ginny, as is evident when he starts seeing Ginny's stepdaughter Carolina - a fragile and vulnerable girl played by a superb and much under-rated Juno Temple. Its here that the movie suffers - with the Pygmalion attempt at education of Carolina by the pretentious Mickey and the usual Allen moral lassitude for men who go with their dicks lead them.  But the film recovers remarkably in its final act - reminiscent of CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS - featuring a tour de force scene from a drunk and delusional Ginny as she is confronted by Mickey and then her husband. 

This film is worth watching for Vittorio Storaro's candy coloured, sunlit orange photography and the period costumes alone. Woody Allen's crowded claustrophobic Coney Island and the wonder wheel become oppressive despite their beauty.  Altogether there's something almost Sirkian and expressionist about the way this film is shot that matches Ginny's conception of herself as being in a melodrama. 

WONDER WHEEL is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 101 minutes. The film is on global release. 

STEVE JOBS - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Closing Night Gala

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here, or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

Danny Boyle (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE) is a great director with a kinetic visual style and a great use of dance music. He creates fast-paced films and all his best traits are evident in this new biopic of the iconic Apple founder, Steve Jobs.  But this is not so much a Danny Boyle film as an Aaron Sorkin creation. The screenwriter famous for The West Wing and THE SOCIAL NETWORK has an instantly recognisable style - heavy dialogue - often combative - delivered at fast pace while the characters are on the move.  On top of that style, Sorkin has also chosen a highly theatrical conceit for structuring this movie. Rather than a conventional biopic, he splits the film into three acts, each forty minutes long, and each taking place behind the scenes of one of Apple's iconic shareholder meeting. And in each segment, Steve Jobs, as played by Michael Fassbender (12 YEARS A SLAVE) confronts the same people.  

First up are the techies. We've got Seth Rogen (THE INTERVIEW) in an utterly straight role as Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder and genuine computer engineer.  He confronts Jobs about his desire to have everything frustratingly closed system and his unwillingness to credit the unsexy but cash-generative Apple II and its team.  We've also got the marvellous Michael Stuhlbarg as Andy Herzfeld, the engineer who we see as being serially bullied by Jobs.  

INSURGENT

You can listen to a podcast review of this film below:

INSURGENT is the second instalment of the Divergent series based on the popular young adult novels by Veronica Roth.  I didn't review the first film even though I did see it on DVD. The movie just struck me as so derivative and banal and mechanical that I just couldn't be bothered. There wasn't anything bad about it per se - it was slick and well-acted for the most part - but there wasn't anything to get me excited either.  Sadly, that characterisation applies to the sequel too. It's well-made, well-acted for the most part, and full of great CGI action set-pieces.  But it's so mechanical, so derivative and so predictable that I found myself watching it in a rather mechanical way - utterly detached from the emotional journey.

A LITTLE CHAOS - LFF14 - Day Ten

You can listen to a podcast review of A LITTLE CHAOS here or by subscribing to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

A LITTLE CHAOS is a charming amuse-bouche - a witty historical fantasy - gently telling us much about the perils of court life. It stars Kate Winslet as a gardener, Madame Sabine de Barra, in the court of Louis XIV.  We watch her charm Power by speaking Truth, triumph over court intrigue and create a little chaos in the carefully ordered gardens of the newly built Versailles. In all this she is aided by her frank and simple manner and the kindness of many aristos - not least the King’s brother and sister-n-law - a delightfully flamboyant and honestly dutiful couple played by Stanley Tucci and Paula Paul. Sabine also falls for the married Master of the gardens, André Le Nôtre (Matthias Schoenaerts), who throws off a typically cynical court marriage to pursue the affair. And what of the king himself? Alan Rickman plays Louis XIV as weary, conservative but willing to listen in a handful of charming cameo scenes.

The movie is so very dripping in charm and liveability that it’s easy to forget that the basic concept of a gauche outsider finding favour in surprising circumstances in lifted from many a genre movie. Alan Rickman’s direction is stylish, elegant and all elements combine so gracefully that it may seem a more frivolous thing than it really is. For behind the sumptuous clothes and reawakening of life are a handful of delicately played scenes about the reality of court life - trapped, bending to the will of the king, discarded as beauty fades, and unable to show public grief. I think the approach Rickman takes is superbly judged and best summed up in a brief scene where Sabine meets the discarded King’s mistress (Jennifer Ehle). It’s not the grandstanding scene with the king that I like, but rather the one that precedes it - as women of all ages meet in secret intimacy to discuss their figures, their loves and their children.

Praise then to Rickman, his cast and perhaps particularly to debut screenwriter Alison Deegan for giving herself the license to go off-piste with history. My only criticism, if criticism there must be, is that I was rather disappointed with just how formal and hard Sabine’s garden was. After all, having spent the opening scenes in debate with Le Nôtre about formalism vs organic beauty it might’ve been nice to see something of that in her final creation.

A LITTLE CHAOS has a running time of 116 minutes.  The movie played Toronto and London 2014 and will be released in the UK on February 6th and in Portugal on March 5th.

Random DVD Round-Up - DIVERGENT

DIVERGENT. Hmmm. What to say about this film, based on a wildly successful set of Young Adult books by Veronica Roth which I have not read, and which from the look of this film are unfortunate enough to sit in the shadow of THE HUNGER GAMES. To wit, we are in an American dystopian future with people oppressed by some kind of self-elected elite.  Our plucky heroine, Tris (Shailene Woodley - THE DESCENDANTS) is much like Katniss, someone of unusual talent and resourcefulness competing in a a kind of martial game to break through into some kind of better future.  In this case, the citizens of the world are categorised by their dominant personality trait. Tris, in true Harry Potter style, sits uneasily across the thresholds and opts to leave her parents 'house' Abnegation for Dauntless, while her brother opts for the Erudites. What follows are training challenges that play out much like Games, and a good dose of romance with the enigmatic but hot "Four" (Theo James).  Naturally, Tris hooks up with a bunch of the least promising trainees, and guess what, they eventually come out on top after banding together and being nice. Ultimately there is some kind of showdown in the first strike in a civil war between the factions.  There's meant to be a hugely emotional moment but at this point I was so numb to it, it floated right by me. I just didn't care about the people, the fight, and the whole movie felt like a pale shadow of HUNGER GAMES.  Maybe that's unfair - maybe if I'd seen or read Divergent first I wouldn't have felt so turned off. But it is what it is.  Shailene Woodley is a great actress but somehow a soupy romance with Four plays far more simplistically than the complex triangle comprised by political exigency in THE HUNGER GAMES.  Or maybe it's because THE HUNGER GAMES pushes the dystopian fantasy farther and crazier - Effie Trinket, I'm looking at you - or that it's satire on modern pop culture is more biting.  Whatever the reason, DIVERGENT feels very, very thin by comparison.  

DIVERGENT has a running time of 139 minutes and is rated PG-13. It is available to rent and own in most countries. It opens in China on September 8th.

Guest review by George Ghon - CONTAGION

A ghastly virus breaks out. It kills so fast that any hope to find a suitable remedy in time becomes elusive. A father, whose wife had died, tries to protect his daughter from the evil disease (Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Anna Jacoby-Heron respectively). The government official (Laurence Fishburne) with field experience shows his toughness and rigor to handle the nightmarish situation according to his professional standards. He cooperates with the World Health Organization, which in turn sends a cute epidemy specialist (Marion Cotillard) to analyse the trajectory of the virus and determine where it had come from, ending up on site in Hong Kong. The scientist in the laboratory (Jennifer Ehle) does what she can and all along the viewer waits for an unexpected turn in the plot. 

Is a James Bond villain behind all this? Does the CIA have secret intelligence? Can it be that a Swiss pharmaceuticals CEO has gone insane under the current economic pressure and a little experiment to boost the sales for Aspirin went way out of control? 

No, nothing, the story just continues and the source of the disease is backtracked to an obscure bat population in the Asian jungle. The whole trick box of elaborate Hollywood dramaturgy remains closed, giving preference to a Realistic account of a current-day bio-catastrophe. There is no evil scheme to be discovered. The guys in power are working hard, doing their job as best as they can. The alternative souls (Jude Law as Frisco-based wannabe journalist) are as corrupt and prone to sell their conscience to greedy hedge fund managers as every other human being could possibly be. And even the offices of high profile government organisations, and with them their functionaries, are suspiciously unattractive.

Steven Soderbergh, who wants to see this? Hollywood is the dream factory, not the documentary Mecca! It is easy to dismiss this film as unsuccessful try to wrap an action plot into some layers of the Real. Boring! On the other hand, do we need to see another hyper-stylized, action packed, fast cut, over-dramatized doomsday film? Isn’t Steven Soderbergh here discovering an interesting gap that uses all the tools Hollywood has on display, but does not heighten them to a flasher à la Michael Bay? 

The film is purely led by the prosaic unfolding of a story, which could happen any day, without any conspiracy scheming that goes unnoticed by the public. The lead characters are not immortal (Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise, watch out for Mr. Soderbergh’s casting director, he might eventually get you), nor are they overly beautified (ok, Gwyneth Paltrow looks sexy in a party scene, but no one else would show her deliberately with reddened skin irritations on the neck, I guess) or morally beyond (the people having privileged access to the vaccine that is eventually found gladly take it, without making too much fuss about their ius primae seri). Contagion doesn’t bother too much with aesthetic conventions or viewer’s expectations. It just tells it how it is. Hollywood for the quotidian.

CONTAGION played Venice 2011 and opened in September in Hong Kong, Singapore, Italy and the US. It opened in Hungary on October 13th; and in Finland, Ireland, Poland, Sweden and the UK on October 21st; in Norway on October 28th. It opens in Belgium and France on November 9th; in Spain on November 29th; in Australia on December 3rd and in Germany on December 24th.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 8 - CARNAGE

Roman Polanski is on top form with this whip-smart chamber comedy of manners based on the play by French playwright and documentarian of modern middle-class obsessions, Yasmina Reza.  The two have reworked her play into an English-language script of scabrous, raucous brilliance, and the four lead actors bring their best to it. This is hands down the best film of the festival to date for its jewel-like brilliance - its compact efficacy - the provocations it contains - the laugh-out-loud comedy. 

The movie opens with open credits played over the scene of some schoolboys rough-housing, culminating in one kid lashing out with a branch and, we later learn, knocking out the two front teeth of the other kids - an effervescent score by Alexandre Desplat (THE KING'S SPEECH) hinting at the mischief ahead. We then move to the meat of the film - a drama that will be contained in the superbly appointed Brooklyn apartment of the parents of the injured kid, Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C Reilly), as they attempt to reconcile with the parents of the branch-slinging kid, Nancy (Kate Winslet) and Alan (Christoph Waltz).

At first, the hosts, Penelope and Michael are all touchy-feely liberal graciousness - looking for reconciliation, lessons learned, and sympathy over coffee and cobbler. But already we can see the start of a monumental breakdown of civilisation.  Penelope has clearly already judged the evidently richer, businesswoman Nancy as a fake and distant mother, and both Penelope and Michael evidently think Alan - a lawyer - is a rapacious businessman.  All three become increasingly frustrated by Alan's incessant use of his blackberry, suppressing a nasty pharma scandal - a fact that begins to unearth Michael's resentment.  Still, so far so good, the aggressor will apologise to the victim.....let's all leave. 

But oh no!  There is no escape. Little disagreements must be rehashed over more coffee and eventually whiskey.  Each character picks up on the others' resentments and they all collectively keep picking at each other's scabs until the room descends into outright insults, shouting and projectile vomiting!  The liberals are exposed as judgemental interfering bigots - Nancy is exposed as deeply unhappy in her marriage - Mike is exposed as a boorish old-school disciplinarian!  And Alan? Well, Alan, as played by Christoph Waltz is the mischievous, self-confident man - the only one of the party who is unashamed to believe in the god of Carnage from the first - who refuses to buy into the touchy-feely reconciliation - and seems absolutely delighted by the caged anger escaping right up until the point his beloved Blackberry falls victim!  

Jodie Foster has never been so raw, so exposed, so prickly.  John C Reilly superbly plays the transition from quiet house-mouse to macho boozer. Kate Winslet quickly turns from demure, prim conciliator to aggressive child-defending mother. But it's Waltz who turns perhaps the least sympathetic character (in these greedy capitalist bastard -hating times) into the centre of the movie - the most charismatic, comedic and insightful character of the piece.  Behind the camera, kudos to production designer Dean Tavoularis in creating the well-appointed apartment that catches the characters with it's twisting halls and rooms; to Pawel Edelman for his superb framing; and above all to the master of the madness that claustrophobia can unleash - Roman Polanski.

CARNAGE played Venice 2011, where it won the Little Golden Lion; and opened earlier this year in Italy. It opens in Greece on November 4th; in Spain on November 18th and in Germany on November 24th. It opens in France on December 7th; in Russia on December 8th; in Turkey and the US on December 16th; and in Portugal on December 29th. It opens in the UK on February 2nd and in Sweden on February 24th.

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD - strong performances trump mannered direction

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is a beautifully scripted and performed tragedy about a failed marriage in 1950s American suburbia. Frank and April Wheeler believe in fictionalised versions of themselves - talented, bohemian, decidedly not second-rate. April says that callow, banal Frank is the most interesting person she's ever met. It's patently obvious to us that this reflects her day-dream rather than reality.  The reality is that, seven years later, Frank works a dull job in an office cubicle and April is a housewife in a banal town. April attempts to shake them out of the rut by persuading Frank to quit his job, sell the house, and take April and the kids to Paris. She'll work, he'll find himself, and they'll fix their marriage. The tragedy is that April really hates her life and wants to see the dream through. Frank discovers he actually rather likes being the high-earning paterfamilias. Or maybe he's just afraid that there's nothing to find?  April feels betrayed.

The movie is based on the superb novel by Richard Yates - a novel I only recently read and thoroughly enjoyed. Justin Haythe's script stays faithful to the content and style of the novel. His one key departure is to give the Wheeler's neighbours' son, John, more time. John, on a home visit from electro-shock treatments in an asylum, sees through all the pretense. He sees through the myth of suburban contentment but also through the Wheeler's attempt to portray himself as "special". His analysis is piercing and Michael Shannon truly steals every scene he's in with his powerful, menacing performance. He deserves his Oscar nom, if only as delayed recognition from his even better performance in Billy Friedkin's BUG.

What of the rest? Yes, Kate Winslet is superb as April Wheeler, with a raw and affecting performance that I think trumps her work in THE READER. I was also impressed by the maturity and nuance in Leonardo di Caprio's performance as Frank. Kathy Bates and Zoe Kazan (as Maureen) are particularly strong in support. And any movie photographed by Roger Deakins looks great. Where the movie falls down is in its direction. There was something rather obvious and lazy in Sam Mendes' concept for the movie: the perfectly pastel costumes and decor; the overly-insistent score; the obvious shot of Frank running near the end of the movie. I far preferred what Stephen Daldry did with the Mrs Brown segment in THE HOURS or what Todd Field did with LITTLE CHILDREN (though that was also a flawed film.)  There was nothing in this film that surprised me or shook me  or impressed me in the direction.

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is on release in the US, Germany, Austria, Norway, Belgium, Egypt, France, Australia, Croatia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Japan, Argentina, Chile, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Russia and Slovakia. It opens today in the UK, Brazil, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Italy, Mexico, Poland and Sweden. It opens on February 6th in Turkey; February 12th in South Korea and February 19th in Singapore.

THE READER - slippery, but not in the way it should've been

THE READER is a movie that wants you to take it seriously as a profound discussion about complicity and moral obligation. It has a cast that drips with quality, a director with form and a screen-writer famed for his intelligence and eloquence. The source novel by Bernhard Schlick was a critical and commercial success. In short, this movie so drips with earnest good intentions that the nobility of the exercise almost, but not quite, masks stink of desperation in its bid for Oscar glory.

The movie plays, like the novel, in three parts. The first takes place in West Germany in the 1950s. A sixteen-year old school boy (an impressive David Kross) has an affair with a woman twenty years his senior (a mannered performance from Kate Winslet). They enjoy each other physically but both are evasive. He tells her what she wants to hear - that he's not a star pupil. She tells him precisely nothing. She asks him to read aloud to her. He clearly enjoys the performance. And then, one day, she vanishes and he is devastated. 

The second act takes place in the 1960s. The boy is a law student, and is taught to carefully separate moral responsibility from a narrow definition of legal guilt. He is nauseated to discover that his old lover is on trial for murdering Jews during the Holocaust and that he has evidence that will mitigate her sentence. He has to reconcile the woman he knew with the unfeeling, narrowly obedient and unrepentant woman he sees in court. 

The third act takes place in the 1980s. The teenage boy has developed into a fastidious, emotionally repressed old man (Ralph Fiennes), with a failed marriage and an estranged daughter. For a complex set of reasons he begins to record audio books and send them to his old lover. Maybe he does this out of misplaced vanity, maybe guilt, maybe nostalgia, maybe boredom, maybe a desire to connect with anyone - Ralph Fiennes' opaque performance gives us no help in making his motives out.

In a coda, the man meets with a survivor of the specific horror that his lover perpetrated - a horror for which she has still not explicitly repented. The survivor - superbly played by Lena Olin - asks the questions I had longed to ask throughout the previous hour - the questions I thought this movie would have asked and explored.  Is the mitigation - note, not the elimination - of the woman's legal responsibility for murder "an explanation, or an excuse"? With a single line the Holocaust survivor condemns the entire point of this film, which has surreptitiously asked us to empathise with, even symapthise with this concentration camp guard as a victim. It is a slippery moral equivalence to hint at, and if that's what the film-makers were about I feel they should've tackled the question more honestly rather than tucking it into a coda, let alone double-ending the film in an insultingly sentimental manner.

THE READER is on release in the US and UK. It goes on release next week in Greece and will play Berlin 2009. It opens on February 6th in the Czech Republic, Singapore and Brazil. It opens on February 19th in Australia and Iceland, and on February 25th in Belgium and Germany. It opens on March 6th in Norway; on March 23rd in Poland; on April 2nd in the Netherlands and on April 25th in Japan.

ALL THE KING'S MEN - really not so bad as all that....

....but not so fantastic either. ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN attracted a lot of critical brick-bats when it was released last autumn and made no money at the box office either. So I was expecting a tedious over-blown movie. But, you know, it's not as bad as all that.

The movie is an adaptation of the famous political novel by Robert Penn Warren, which was in turn loosely based on the life of the Louisana Governor, US Senator and one-time potential presidential candidate, Huey Long. Long was a populist demagogue, who got elected on the 'hick vote' and proceeded to threaten the vested interests with a programme of wealth redistribution and massive infrastructure investment.

In the movie, the Governor is called Willie Stark, and is played by Sean Penn as a fire-brand orator of superb skill. He begins as a man of fierce integrity, who won't touch alcohol and stands on street corners warning the electorate of the corruption of their local officials. When he discovers that he's been put up as a Gubernatorial candidate to split the Hick vote - that he's a patsy - he starts campaigning for real and wins a landslide election to become Governor. Many critics have taken Penn to task for his exaggerated Southern accent and wild polemical style. But if you look at the most successful orators in history some have had exactly this kind of over-the-top style. This is precisely what translates to the gathered hordes at the back of the stadia. Frankly, I found his performance mesmerising.

Sadly, he is let down by poor casting of the other roles and a poor script. Penn's Governor Stark is propelled to power thanks partly to the help of a journalist played by Jude Law. This character should be one of the most intriguing in the movie. He is the son of a wealthy establishment family - precisely the kind that Stark's policies are aimed against. Indeed, when Stark needs to side-step an impeachment trial, he asks the journalist to investigate his own godfather - a man with whom he is incredibly close. The moral decision that the journalist makes: whether or not to dig dirt on his own surrogate father to further the career of a politician that he knows has become corrupt - should form the emotional and moral heart of the film. Instead, the viewer is constantly distracted by Jude Law's inability to consistently hold down any variant of a Southern accent. The same is also true (but with less serious damage inflicted because they have smaller parts) of Kate Winslet and Anthony Hopkins as the girlfriend and the godfather respectively.

The other big flaw is in the development of Sean Penn's character. Instead of sliding into the mire of corruption and compromise, he seems to go to sleep one night as candidate with integrity and wake up as a corrupt Governor. There is no middle ground. This makes the movie infinitely less interesting and once again focuses attention onto Jude Law's character as the centre of the moral drama - leading to the aforementioned frustrations.

Still, for all it's faults, I was never bored watching this lengthy political thriller and despite its manifest flaws, I enjoyed Sean Penn's performance and the handsome production (Pawel Edelman (DP) and Patrizia von Brandenstein). I even enjoyed James Horner's orchestral score, although I have heard it described as clumsy and over-worked.

ALL THE KING'S MEN was released last autumn and is now available on DVD.

THE HOLIDAY - much too much, much too long

THE HOLIDAY is billed as a romantic-comedy by the woman who brought us WHAT WOMEN WANT and SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE: Nancy Meyers. I rather liked the former and really enjoyed the latter. Sadly, THE HOLIDAY amps up the formula too far - and believe me, it ain't rocket science they're using. Instead of one star-crossed Hollywood-gorgeous couple, we have two! Ta-da!

Two girls are getting out of rubbish relationships. One is an English chick called Iris (Kate Winslet) and the other is a high-powered LA chick called Amanda (Cameron Diaz). They decide to swap houses for the Christmas vacation and lick their wounds in private. Diaz' character immediately gets her groove on with Iris' brother Graham (Jude Law). They have what they hope is a drunken fling before love and history complicate things. Despite the obligatory super-sweet ending (there ain't no plot to spoil in such a slavishly formulaic movie), Meyers never really resolves this story. She creates an obstacle so insuperable in their career and family commitments that I never really bought it. Meanwhile, in LA, Winslet's character is hanging out with her cool elderly neighbour - a retired famous screen-writer - and slowly falling for Jack Black's movie composer.

The first hour of this two hour movie really drags. It's not bad in itself: there's just too much of it. Too much time is taken in establishing why each girl is miserable and getting them to their respective romantic encounters. This just feels like bad editing, and I wonder if the reluctance to trim it down springs from pressure from the sponsors - a lot of the product placement is in this segment. Despite this weak beginning, the second hour of the movie is an enjoyable if completely unmemorable ride. Cameron Diaz' innate charm and her ability to carry ditzy humour compensates for the fairly lacklustre dialogue. And in the LA segment, it's great to see Jack Black playing a more buttoned down character - it makes you enjoy the occasional slice of craziness all the more. Eli Wallach is also really touching as the veteran screen-writer. However, Poor Jude Law and Kate Winslet are stuck with playing characters that are drawn as too good to be true. They have no dark side - no depth. They're just super-nice people who have been trampled on by life and who deserve a break. That's just not interesting to me.

One final note. I really enjoyed the character of the ageing Hollywood pro but I find it disingenuous to have a film that rages against modern Hollywood's obsession with opening weekends, product placement and special effects, and yet is itself a purveyor of crass commercialism. These guys are begging so badly for a big opening weekend that instead of casting one big-name leading couple, they cast two! You can just see the producers thinking - let's cast Jack Black - that'll open up the target demographic! Furthermore, with its intertwining romances set partly in the sort of England where it snows at Christmas and people say "shag" a lot, this feels like a shameless cash-in on the Richard Curtis oeuvre. Added to this, the product placement is so full-on in the first hour - especially in reference to a particularly nasty British newspaper - that it makes CASINO ROYALE look demure. And finally, before we rail against special effects, let's just take another look at all that CGI snow falling in Surrey!

Shameless.

THE HOLIDAY opens in Spain, Denmark, Iceland, the UK and the US this Friday. It opens in Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, Estonia, Norway and Sweden on December 15th. It opens in Belgium, Brazil, Finland and Mexico on the 22nd and in Australia, France and Turkey between Christmas and New Year. It opens in Argentina on January 11th, Bulgaria on January 19th, Italy on February 9th and Japan on March 10th.

FLUSHED AWAY - a very British comedy

For some strange reason, FLUSHED AWAY did terrible business in the US - at least relative to the huge budget. I say strange because Swedish Philip and I went to see it today and it was absolutely hysterical. I mean, laugh out loud funny throughout. I haven't had such a good time watching a comedy in ages, and it beats alleged adult fare like TENACIOUS D, and TALLADEGA NIGHTS hands down. That the movie is seriously funny comes as no surprise when you realise that, despite being CGI animated, it comes from the people who brought you WALLACE AND GROMIT: CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT. So you get the characteristic physical comedy, classic movie references and proper old-fashioned plotting and characterisation. The visual comedy is so rich that I suspect you’d have to watch FLUSHED AWAY a number of times before you’d even begun to recognise it all.

However, it has to be said that the movie has a peculiarly English feel, which may explain its comparative failure in the US. (The root cause of the English-ness is easy to identify - the movie was co-written by Dick Clement and Ian LeFrenais – veteran script-writers for classic British TV comedies, The Likely Lads and Porridge.) The iconography of Zone One London is used to full effect – it’s all Piccadilly Circus & London Bridge. The fish-out-of-water plot plays off Cor Blimey Guv’nor sewer rats with a pampered pet mouse from The Royal Borough of Kensington. The movie features the regulation Knight of the Realm (Sir Ian McKellan) camping it up luvvie-stylee. A good dollop of the jokes are made at the expense of the cheese-eating surrender-monkey French; vulgar American tourists; grannies who throw their knickers at Tom Jones and the English football team.

In short, if you think football is a game played with twenty-two men and a round ball in which England lose on penalties to Germany in the final, I can almost guarantee you’ll have a good time watching FLUSHED AWAY. What's more this movie has everything that a certain Bond film lacked: exhilerating chases; a smooth hero in a dinner jacket; wicked gadgets; cheesy pick-up lines; an evil megalomaniac threatening humanity; and a ticking clock counting down to devestation before the hero saves the day!

FLUSHED AWAY has already opened in Israel, Singapore, the US, Belgium, France and the Netherlands. It opens in Hong Kong, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Spain, Sweden and the UK next weekend. It opens in Germany, Bulgaria, Estonia and Norway on December 8th, in Brazil, Mexico and Turkey on the 15th, in Australia, Slovenia, Italy and Latvia on the 22nd. It opens in Argentina in January and in Japan in March.

LITTLE CHILDREN - four reasons why this film is a fiasco

Let me be clear that when I go into a movie I really do want to enjoy it, especially when it comes with cast credentials as high as this. I hear all the Oscar buzz for LITTLE CHILDREN but I have to say that I just don't get it. I sat through this film waiting for that light to turn on - for the insight, the originality, the flair of vision or the emotional epiphany to happen. It didn't. I feel like I am missing out on this amazing movie experience that everyone is having.

So for what it's worth, here's why I didn't like LITTLE CHILDREN. First off, the film is based on a novel and the screen-writer/director, Todd Field, has opted to keep an intrusive, fairy-tale type narration of the kind I saw deconstructed in STRANGER THAN FICTION. The narrator has a voice like something out of Doctor Seuss. It seemed grossly out of place for a purportedly adult movie about marital infidelity and the re-introduction of a convicted sex offender into a conservative suburban community.

Second, the primary plot strand is dull. The film is basically the story of a bored suburban house-wife (Kate Winslet) and a disillusioned house-husband (Patrick Wilson) who have an affair. She, like Madame Bovary (a painfully over-worked metaphor in this film) hopes he will leave with her. The adultery story is handled in a workmanlike manner. It features a fairly explicit and yet completely unerotic and rather, well, ungainly, sex scene. It also features Winslet's character defending Madame Bovary as a heroic proto-feminist with a hunger for "options". There is nothing heroic about Winslet's character's struggles.

Third, the other inter-secting plot strand is handled in a clumsy and exploitative manner. The strand has the unhappy couple living in a community in an uproar because a convicted child abuser has moved in. The theme of sexual predators in suburbia has been handled with credible emotional authenticity and sensitivity by Kevin Bacon in the astounding movie, THE WOODSMAN. Watching THE WOODSMAN you got the feeling that everyone involved in the movie took a genuine interest in the emotional life of the molester. In this movie, he just seems like a conveniently shocking and "interesting" plot strand. The film-makers are as brutalising as the people in the community they are depicting.

The fourth reason why I didn't like LITTLE CHILDREN is that the whole thing was drained of energy and interest by bland cinematography, pedestrian editing and an over-long run-time for the subject matter. The plot meandered, skirting around larger issues that it never quite got a handle on. The director lingered on scenes that propelled the action and the character development (such as it was) not one iota. Sometimes the director's choice of focus is just plain odd. For instance, the cuckolded wife (Jennifer Connolly) is a two-dimensional character. We never learn much about her and it is hard to empathise with her. But all of a sudden she does get a scene editing footage for a documentary she is making. The footage shows a small child - far too young to string together the pretentious sentences he is uttering about his father's death in the Iraqi war. Does the director think that just by placing a small child in front of a picture of a dead soldier and a flag he will strike a chord? A movie is not something wherein you pack in random references and hope a meaning will fall out.

As a result, the film runs for over two hours and you feel every minute. This could be the most badly directed film playing the London Film Festival.

LITTLE CHILDREN showed at Toronto and London 2006. It is already on limited release in the US and opens wide in the US and in the UK on November 3rd. It opens in Australia in December, Turkey, Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands in January 2007 and in Spain in February.

ROMANCE AND CIGARETTES - crazy beautiful

I have a feeling that ROMANCE AND CIGARETTES is one of those films that you either find pretentious and indulgent or love to pieces. I am firmly in the latter camp. Written and directed by John Turturro (the actor featured in many a Coen Brothers movie) we are firmly in that kind of weird and wonderful world, populated by odd-ball characters and capers.

The movie focuses on a family headed up by a fat fireman called Nick (James Gandolfini.) He is married to a wedding dress-maker called Kitty (Susan Sarandon) and has three daughters. His wife pines for a former lover and his daughters are obsessed with a hilarious wannabe rock-star called Fryburg (the brilliant Bobby Canavale.) To add to the complication, Nick is attracted to a dirty-talking red-head (Kate Winslett) and is being egged on by his lewd best mate Angelo (Steve Buscemi). The subject matter of the movie is therefore all the messy stuff that happens in life - mid-life crises, weary marriages, obnoxious teenagers, first love. And the down-and-dirty texture is built up with brilliant suburban locales, costumes and a whole cast of eccentric supporting characters - notably Christopher Walken as the Elvis-loving vengeful friend of Kitty.

I've seen the movie described as a musical, not least by the producers. But I think that's a bit misleading. It's not a full on musical where the action periodically stops and the movie breaks into a staged musical number. Rather, at certain points in the story, the characters sing along to kitschy songs of the '60s - Englebert Humperdinck, Tom Jones and the like. It's rather like the camera follows the characters into their little day-dreams before spinning back into the reality of the flick. I guess it really is a matter of taste, but I thought the music was used brilliantly to add to the sense of whimsy and wonder. Plus, any chance to see the crazy genius that is Christopher Walken doing his dance schtick is a bonus.

I can perfectly see how some will find the project indulgent or eccentric for the sake of it, but to my mind, ROMANCE AND CIGARETTES is one of the most touching, funny and genuinely crazy movies I have ever seen and I would strongly urge you to give it a try.

ROMANCE AND CIGARETTES showed at Venice 2005 and is now playing in the UK. I don't know if it will get a US release.