FERRARI* - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 5

Michael Mann (HEAT, THE INSIDER) returns to our screens with an execrable biopic of the iconic Enzo Ferrari.  It is a film that pays no respect to history, cultural specificity or the ethics of what one chooses to show on-screen of real-life horrific crashes.

In Mann's version of Ferrari's story, as written by Troy Kennedy Martin (THE ITALIAN JOB!) we focus on the year 1957. Mann and Kennedy choose to make this a make or break year for the company, whose road car sales are insufficient to subsidise the racing.  The notoriously paranoid, selfish, dictatorial Enzo Ferrari needs to bring in outside financing and give up control in order to compete with the advances being made in England and Germany. Films need stakes, so Mann/Martin argue that Ferrari must win the Mille Miglia road-race to attract investors. Yeah I guess.... But Ferrari was constantly in trouble and flirting with investors. 

Similarly, while Enzo may have transferred some assets to his wife's name for tax and political reasons, I cannot imagine he was walking around like a proto-feminist claiming they built the company together, and the book does NOT suggest that she was the business strategist behind the throne. This all sounds like modern retconning to give Penelope Cruz something to do other than scream hysterically.  Enzo WAS in fact a notorious womaniser and misogynist. The film only hints at how horrific he was. 

The truth of the film lies in how devastated both parents were at the death of Ferrari's only legitimate son Dino, and how Enzo kept the existence of his illegitimate son secret from his wife for many years.  It is not known how Laura finally learned about Enzo's mistress Lina Lardi, or of the existence of Piero, but it is true that Piero was only legitimised after Laura died. This was not, as the film implies, because of some cash-for-bungs bribe that Laura paid Enzo, but because of the constraints of the Italian legal system.

Now to move from history to drama. Is the film emotionally involving? No. Because the acting is terrible. Adam Driver is miscast as Ferrari. He is way too young. The Commendatore was 59 in 1957.  Driver is not yet 40.  He looks not yet 40 with a fake belly and a bad hair dye job. He looks nothing like Enzo - fine - Enzo has a very specific face. But he doesn't move or walk or talk like a c60 year old provincial Italian. Would it have killed them to either a) cast an Italian or b) someone who could do a passable Italian accent?

But this problem of bad acting is way worse when we consider Shailene Woodley's attempt at Lina Lardi.  Her accent is so appalling it isn't even Italian-adjacent. I was reminded of Jodie Comer's note perfect accent-work in THE BIKERIDERS and left with the cruel realisation that Woodley is simply a YA film actress over-promoted and best-forgotten.

Finally, we have Penelope Cruz - the only decent performance in the film but one that is for sure Spanish not Italian, and so at odds with the real woman as to be laughable. It's as if there is nothing of merit or interest in Laura's betrayal and pain unless she's a porto-modern boss bitch.

All of this I could have forgiven had the racing been good. And to be fair, most of the footage of the testing at Monza, and the road racing in the Mille Miglia is really well done with great recreations of the historic vehicles rebuilt with the help of the Ferrari factory. Kudos to Mann and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (MANK) for that. My only issue here is the very distinct choice Michael Mann has made to show very graphic crash footage, not just of Castelotti but also of Guidizzolo.  As one of the few audience members who knew exactly what was coming, I was in fear once I saw the Monza crash.  It's strange to say but in the history of motorsport films we have rarely if ever seen a frame by frame replay of an horrific crash, especially one involving civilians. Think of FORD VS FERRARI where Christian Bale simply disappears over a hill. Or even the way in which Asif Kapadia handles the crash in SENNA. But Mann shows no such finesse here. He does not leave anything to our imaginations. I found it pretty exploitative. I might have forgiven the choice, or understood it better, in a better film. But in such a trashy, melodramatic, soapy film, it felt cheap, and frankly disgusting.

FERRARI has a running time of 130 minutes. It played Venice and the BFI London Film Festival 2023. It will be released on December 25th in the USA and December 26th in the UK.

This is not a review of WHITE NOISE - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 2

Noah Baumbach's adaptation of the Don DeLillo academic / western proseperity satire is mystifyingly opaque and uninvolving. We are presented with a central couple that are spoiled, self-involved and unlikeable. The dad is an ego-driven college professor who teaches Hitler studies but can't speak German. He's married to a woman, Babette, who is numbing herself to the inevitability of death with pills. They have a gaggle of precocious kids who all seem to be obsessed with death and calamity while all the while being surrounded by the detritus of American consumerism and endless layers of meaningless conversation and noise. There's no-one to like. That's probably the point. But then it makes it harder to care about their reactions to the Airborne Toxic Event that happens when a lorry crashes near their home town.  They're evacuated. The dad is exposed to toxins. Or is he? Is the evacuation real or a simulation or a simulation that takes advantage of real events?

It's all very clever but I feel reality has moved beyond what this movie was satirising in the mid 80s.  Academia is now so far up its meta-textual Critical Theorised arse that the de-contextualised lecture duel between Driver's Hitler professor and Don Cheadle's Elvis obsessive seems pale meat compared to the BS that actually takes place now. (I should explain I am academe-adjacent IRL).  

And yes, the film is making a point about late-stage capitalism and misinformation and misdirection but I feel that in a post-Trump world this is all stuff we a) know and b) get bigger darker laughs from on the Colbert Late Show each night.

So I walked out after an hour.

WHITE NOISE has a running time of 137 minutes. It played the Venice and BFI London Film Festivals and will be released on Netflix on December 30th.

STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER (spoilers)

Some context.....STAR WARS has been the world of my imagination since before I can remember. I spent my childhood playing in the original trilogy and my university years lamenting the CGI-soullessness of the prequels. (See my essay on why they sucked here.) To add insult to injury it was the very creator who was destroying his legacy, and in doing so, shitting on the amazing contributions of the skilled creators who made the original effects. Selah!  It was his right. And then came the joyous news of the final trilogy and the initial joy at the THE FORCE AWAKENS, reviewed here.  Yes it was fanservicey, but it was also absolutely STAR WARS, and after those awful prequels they had to earn our trust back. And so we voyaged hopefully into the gigantic fuck you that was THE LAST JEDI (review here). I don't want to relitigate that film, suffice to say it was a relief that JJ Abrams was back for the finale.  I was nervous though - was he really going to be able to write the narrative and character-development wrongs of TLJ *AND* provide fans with a satisfying conclusion all in under three hours. Was he gonna tack back to fan service for safety?  And all of this was even more frustrating because with THE MANDALORIAN we now know for sure that Disney *CAN* create material that both feels like STAR WARS but does something new.

What's the verdict?  THE RISE OF SKYWALKER starts off slow, with another pointless McGuffin-led chase around a metaphorical Canto Bight. The widget Rey and her merry band of rebels have to find is a galactic satnav that will lead them to the Emperor and his new fleet of starkiller star destroyers.  Yes, that's right, the Emperor is back - in an audacious retcon that clearly spoiled the answer to the mystery of Rey's lineage in the film's trailer.   This sets us up nicely for the final half of the film - which sits in parallel to RETURN OF THE JEDI.  In that film Luke redeemed his father. In this film, with an act of mercy (hey LORD OF THE RINGS!), Rey (with a side-order of Leia's martyrdom and a fan-service memory of Han) redeems Ben Solo.  They unite to finally off the Emperor for realz this time, trust me. And then Rey adopts the name of Skywalker because why not.

Along the way there's a lot of implied apology from JJ on behalf of himself and Rian Johnson.  Chewie gets a proper scene of mourning when he finds out Leia is dead.  Ghost Luke tells Rey that a lightsaber deserves to be treated with respect. And yes, there's a lot of fan service. The entire existence of Lando in this film is fun but unnecessary as is the return to both Endor and Tatooine, complete with twin suns.  We even see Wedge Antilles return! I mean, don't get me wrong. I am a fan! I was served! There's even fan service of Chris Nolan's DUNKIRK in how the final flotilla of small boats conquers the baddies! 

But not everything's rehashed - some stuff is wonderfully new - most of all in the final celebration at the rebel base, where we clearly get a lovely lesbian kiss.

Where does the film fail?  It contains a lot of characters with nowhere to go.  Poor Kelly Marie Tran has fuck all to do as Rose Tico.  Any hints in TLJ of her being a love interest for Finn is thrown aside. He kinda has a thing with a new character who's also an ex-Stormtrooper and are they really setting her up for another spin off with Lando?  Evil First Order dude Hux has a literally incredible character arc, although I did rather enjoy Richard E Grant as his successor, General Pryde.  Finally, Oscar Issac's Poe doesn't seem to garner any gravitas or wisdom from all the sacrifices made on his behalf in TLJ.  But he does have some nice bants with Keri Russell's Zorii Biss. 

Still for all that, and the slow start, I really did enjoy the final half of this film, and I felt emotionally satisfied by the ending.  None of it beats the feels from the original, but I felt this was as good as we were going to feasibly get. ROGUE ONE remains the best film of the new era.  One can only imagine how good this trilogy might have been had JJ Abrams directed them all.

STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER is rated PG-13, has a running time of 141 minutes and is on global release.

MARRIAGE STORY - BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Day Six

Writer-director Noah Baumbach has created, in MARRIAGE STORY, the best Woody Allen film since the late 1980s. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about a director so closely replicating the technique of another even if it's a technique I so admire and it's done so well.  But if I push that slight queasiness to one side, I have to admit that MARRIAGE STORY is one of the most authentic, heartfelt and beautifully acted relationship dramas I've seen in some time, and I hope that Baumbach, Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver and Laura Dern are duly reward with award nominations.

The story is a deeply personal and relatable one.  It's based on Noah Baumbach's own divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh, and acted by Scarlett Johansson in the midst of her own divorce.  Two fundamentally decent good people find they cannot live together anymore.  The husband - a theatre director - feels that his wife, his star actress - has cooled sexually, resents her for his having been married and faithful in his prime, and so has an affair.  The wife resents the fact that her career has been subsumed into his, that he so steadfastly considers them a New York family when she wants to go back to LA, that she's never given the chance to direct.  In the most trenchant line of the film, her lawyer points out that when he wants something it's a debate, but when she wants something it's just a discussion.

They begin the divorce process hoping not to involve lawyers. They have precious little money to split - the only real contention is custody and specifically where their primary home will be - are they a New York or LA family. But as she files for divorce when shooting a pilot in LA, as her kid was born in LA, he's in school there while she shoots the pilot, it all seems to go in her favour. Moreover, she hires a no-nonsense cut-throat lawyer played by Laura Dern, while he hires a decent lawyer played by Alan Alda. This all winds through - we get an absolutely superb, unrelenting, vicious, heart-wrenching, set piece argument - and the case is settled. The irony being that if he'd agree to just spend a year in LA in the first place they might never have gotten divorced in the first place.

I really love this film. There's something so honest about their mutual resentments, about her need to break free, about his complete lack of awareness.... There's also something so tragically well-observed in how the expensive lawyers think it's all about victory, and are actually social friends outside of the courtroom, and don't really care about the clients at all. There's a wonderful moment of subtle acting near the end when her lawyer has managed to squeeze out another concession from him, but a concession she even wanted, and when the lawyer says "you won!" you can see her wince.  

This is Scarlett Johansson operating at a level we haven't seen before - establishing herself as a truly gifted and mature actress. And in combination with her surprisingly tragicomic, charismatic performance in JOJO RABBIT - this truly is her year.  And I guess I'm overall pleased that someone is giving us complicated adult dramas of the calibre of late 80s Woody Allen, even if it isn't Woody himself. 

MARRIAGE STORY has a running time of 136 minutes and is rated R. The film played Venice, Telluride, Toronto and London. It will get a limited theatrical release in November before being released on Netflix on December 6th.

THE DEAD DON'T DIE

THE DEAD DON'T DIE is an unashamedly indulgent movie who's success relies on the audience wanting to be in on the joke.  I went along for the ride and found it to be uproariously funny, silly, shaggy and joyful - and hands down one of my favourite films of 2019.  This isn't a film for those over-obsessed with tight-plotting, consistent pace or an aversion to jump the shark moments. But as I said, if you go with the silliness, there's a lot of fun to be had.

The film opens in small town USA, reminiscent of original Twin Peaks. There are some slow-witted nice cops, played by Bull Murray, Adam Driver and Chloe Sevigny. And there's policing a dispute between Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) and MAGA-supporter Farmer Frank (Steve Buscemi).  There's pace is lackadaisical and their hearts decent.  It soon becomes apparent that polar fracking has caused the earth to move off its axis resulting in whacky daylight hours and a zombie apocalypse. The rest of the film sees how our heroes cope with the impending doom ("kill the head") - not to mention the newly arrived Scottish mortician with hardcore Samurai skills (Tilda Swinton). 

We get lots of references to George Romero, including an update on his consumerist satire, as zombies wonder round in desperate search of wifi.  We also get a hopeful message about how "the children are our future". But mostly this is a film of supreme visual comedy - a shot of Adam Driver pulling into a diner parkway in a tiny red convertible Smart car - a shot of Tilda Swinton applying 1980s New Romantic makeup to a corpse - or a re-animated Iggy Pop hunting for coffee.  

Any film is worth watching that gives us even one of those things. So yes, I get all the critics and I see the film's weaknesses but I just dont' care, because when it delivers it's absolutely hilarious!

THE DEAD DON'T DIE is rated R and has a running time of 104 minutes. The film played Cannes 2019 and was released in the USA in June. It opens in the UK on Friday.

BLACKKKLANSMAN

BLACKKKLANSMAN is a superb, searing, angry film from a very angry film-maker. The astonishing thing is that the film-maker - Spike Lee - manages to command such self-discipline despite his anger, and manages to fashion a film that is both brutal and funny. How many film-makers could straddle that line so expertly? How many could command such a knowledge of film history as to weave classic depictions of racism in a film that feels so authentically of the 1970s, and yet so seamlessly builds to Charlottesville and contemporary racial violence?   To say BLACKKKLANSMAN is a tour de force is an under-statement.  It is provocative, goofy, feel-good, feel-distraught, bloodied but unbowed.  This is cinema at its most heightened, powerful and disturbing.  

The movie opens with a provocation that may have passed some viewers by. Spike Lee spends much of this film both indicting and redeeming mainstream Hollywood films from their role in normalising racism. He opens with GONE WITH THE WIND - a film that depicts subservient slaves oh-so-happy to be taken care off by their paternalistic owners, and actually has a couple of them saye a white girl from rape.  He then has one of Hollywood's most famous black activists - the magnificent Harry Belafonte - indict THE BIRTH OF A NATION for resuscitating the popularity of the KKK. Belafonte shows how the film inspired a lynching, and was praised by then President Woodrow Wilson as "history written in lightning".  Belafonte/Lee show us explicit photographs of what happened to the victim.  Lee  then intercuts this with footage of the KKK recruits being inducted, complete with white hoods, in the 1970s of the main action of the film.  Finally, Lee takes his fictional film and directly connects its subject matter to contemporary America, showing footage of the racial violence in Charlottesville and Trump's mealy-mouthed false equivalence between the white supremacists and those opposing them. It's as if he's saying to us - remember that one president who said how the KKK looked amazing in that super popular film. Well, now I'm taking back your cinema screens and showing you another president, a hundred years later, being similarly racist, and you WILL watch and be shocked and provoked. And boy was it shocking.  Even when you see this footage on twitter videos, or on the news on TV, it's just different - visceral - seeing it on the big screen, especially after the two hours of build up that Spike gives it.

So back to the plot. The film is based on the almost absurd true story of a black cop who infiltrated the Klan back in the 1970s. He did this by ringing them up and asking for info and pretending to want to join.  He even got so far as to speak to David Duke! Of course, when he needed to actually attend those meetings and get enough evidence to arrest people he had to send in someone who was actually white - in this case an actually Jewish cop. So the Klan was doubly fooled.  John David Washington (son of Denzel) gives a quietly powerful portrait of the black cop - Ron Stallworth - and it's actually worth noting his defense of being a cop in the first place to his radical girlfriend. It's a message many in contemporary America need to hear.  There's something noble in being a cop - not all cops have to be racists. Adam Driver is similarly impressive as the Jewish cop who has never particularly felt the power of his race or religion and is forced to address his "passing" when he hears explicit anti-semitism of the first time. 

As the film progresses we see the imposter inducting into the Klan - a Klan that is planning bomb attacks against its enemies. The superficial tension comes from whether our cops will be exposed, and whether the attack will go ahead. And it works. But the real tension comes from Lee taking us right up against the most horrid racism, and keeping us there for 2 hours, and seeing if we will flinch from seeing it play out to its contemporary climax. When it comes it feels earned, brave and bold.  

BLACKKKLANSMAN played Cannes 2018 where it won the Grand Prix. It was released in cinemas this summer and is now available to rent and own. The film is rated R and has a running time of 135 minutes. 

THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Day Eight

That Terry Gilliam finally managed to make his accursed Don Quixote film is a thing of joy - and how wonderful to watch it and realise that it is truly joyful of itself! I came out of the film beaming - having seen some wonderful verbal humour, some insane slapstick, some superb LOST IN LA MANCHA in-jokes, Adam Driver doing a zany Eddie Cantor song-and-dance routine, and a truly moving story about romantic delusion!

The film works as a film within a film.  As we open, Adam Driver's cynical, selfish ad director Toby is on a shoot in Spain featuring the picaresque medieval character Don Quixote - the old dusty man convinced that he is knight, who travels aimlessly with his sidekick Sancho Panza, tilting at windmills that he thinks are giants, and risking all to win the love of his beloved Dulcinea. Within the "real world" framing device, Toby is tupping the wife of his boss, who's simultaneously cosying up to a Russian oligarch who's just bought a castle. In scenes that satirise spoiled wannabe Hollywood directors we see a frustrated man reminisce about a student film he made about Don Quixote and venture back to that village to relive his youth.

What I love about the film is that it works on many levels. On one hand, it's a warning about how Hollywood can corrupt and distort. The man who played Toby's Don Quixote (Jonathan Pryce) has now gone mad and believes he IS Don Quixote and that Toby is his Sancho. And the girl that Toby fell for and told she could become a star ended up chasing that dream, failing and becoming a prostitute in Marseilles. So within this madcap comedy, Gilliam feels comfortable showing us some dark material, referencing Brexit, Syrian refugees, prejudice against gypsies, Russian corruption. And of course, we can draw our parallels to the prejudices of Quixote's time.

If the first act of the film is all about Toby's current world, the second act sees him on the road with Quixote, getting into scrapes. This is the section of the film I most enjoyed pretty much entirely because Adam Driver - freed from the shackles of a multi-billion dollar franchise - is clearly having the time of his life. The third act sees the medieval delusion rub back up against the real world in a kind of nightmarish frenzy that actually reminded me a bit of the end of THE PRINCESS BRIDE - people chasing round castles after damsels in distress on horseback...

Overall, THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE is the most joyous, and certainly the most coherent of Gilliam's recent films.  I had predicted before watching it that a 2hr 15 min running time meant it was bound to be a bit shambolic and have about 25 mins too much content. But I was wrong - this is actually a pretty tightly written film, and despite its many layers, it holds itself together well.  

THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE has a running time of 132 minutes. The film played Cannes 2018 and has opened in many European countries since. It has yet to be released in the USA or UK.

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI (Spoilers)

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI is the second instalment in the new trilogy of films, that sees the aftermath of the Rebellion's defeat of The Empire in the original trilogy.  In THE FORCE AWAKENS we saw a weakened Republic under attack by the newly resurgent remains of the old Empire, named The First Order.   The Emperor was replaced by Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis), with General Hux (Domnhall Gleeson) as his military leader, Starkiller Base as his Death Star, Coruscant as its target, and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) aka Ben Solo as his Vader.  

In response, Republican Senator Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) was running a covert militarised Resistance starring a dashing pilot called Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and his droid BB8.  The droid happened upon a young girl called Rey (Daisy Ridley), abandoned on the desert planet Jakku, waiting for her parents, and an instinctive force user. They in turn happened upon a stormtrooper defector called Finn (John Boyega) who seemed to exist mostly for comic effect, but also to have an antagonistic relationship with his former boss Captain Phasma (Gwendoline Christie). A largely redundant but popular side character was cantina owner Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyongo) who served to give Rey Luke Skywalker's old lightsaber.

The main questions set up by the film were whether Ben Solo would or could be turned by Rey to the Light Side of the Force having killed his father Han (Harrison Ford) in a test of loyalty to Snoke; who Rey's parents were, thus explaining her exceptional Force strength; and whether Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), living as a hermit, would be willing to train Rey to that task having failed in training Ben. Ancillary questions were how the First Order has amassed such tech and power so quickly (largely answered in the EU); and who Snoke was (which wasn't.)

And so we get to The Last Jedi, familiar with the grammar of Star Wars movies and the role of the middle chapter in a trilogy as a bridge of sorts, and eager to see if director Rian Johnson (BRICK, LOOPER) could move beyond the excessive fan service that was the only serious flaw that JJ Abrams (STAR TREK) made in his otherwise flawless and joyous The Force Awakens. Additionally, if we read the EU, we might have thought we would see some serious character development for Phasma (given the standalone book).

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED) - Day 4 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

In a London Film Festival where the prevailing tone has been one of a wake, in the words of Meester Phil, "Thank god for some wit and arseholery." The arsehole in question is paterfamilias Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman with a raffish beard), a retired sculptor full of passive aggressive nastiness and jealousy. On the last of many marriages, Harold lives an indulgent life bitter that his supposedly less talented peers have achieved more commercial success, and demanding that his three children dance to his needs. The eldest is his son Danny (Adam Sandler) - an utterly charming but insecure man who has been constantly overlooked in favour of Harold's younger son Matthew (Ben Stiller), who is far more successfully financially and seems to have discovered a better way of dealing with his father. And then poor Jean (Elizabeth Marvel) is so overlooked that her grievances with her dad taking a back seat and comically inserted in parenthesis. 

The film is, then, a very darkly comic one.  There are properly laugh out loud moments to be sure - but the tone is bitter and tragic. And this is where the casting is absolutely spot on. I love it when Stiller and Sandler play straight roles because there's a certain manic comic energy underlying it. And when they ARE called upon for their slapstick chops, the payoff is all the better for the surrounding dark context. If I have any criticism to make, it's that the film felt over-long and occasionally lost momentum.  I felt that this was particularly the case in the scenes involving Harold's fourth wife Maureen (Emma Thompson).  Nothing wrong with her performance at all, it just felt a bit redundant. Otherwise this was a truly superb film as one would expect from a Noah Baumbach picture. 

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES has a running time of 110 minutes and will be released on Netflix on October 13th. 

PATERSON - BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Day 7

Move over LA LA LAND. Lovers of romance have a new movie to watch - the quietly beautiful and unassuming love-letter, PATERSON.  Directed by Jim Jarmusch, the film stars Adam Driver (THE FORCE AWAKENS) as a mild-mannered bus driver called Paterson, who also happens to live in Paterson, New Jersey.  As he drives the morning shift, he smiles wistfully to himself as he listens to the funny conversations of his passengers.  Some of things he notices and sees find their way into his poetry (written by real-life poet Ron Padgett), much of which is addressed to his girlfriend Laura (Golshifteh Farahani).  She is a creative soul too - decorating their house, her clothes and cupcakes in abstract black and white patterns.  She utterly supports her boyfriend in his poetry and he her wide-eyed dreams of success.   At first they seem somewhat naive, but this is a loving relationship played without irony.  I suddenly realised how rare this is to see on screen - a couple quite simply in love - accommodating of each other's foibles - supportive.  

MIDNIGHT SPECIAL

Writer-director Jeff Nichols (TAKE SHELTER, MUD) is the purveyor of deeply felt, beautifully acted low budget independent films. He returns to our screens with MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, a similarly lo-fi sci-fi flick.  The movie starts off strong - perhaps the strongest opening of a movie I've seen this year. It's dark, a weird kid wearing swimming goggles in abducted by two men and hidden in the back of an old battered car. The TV news flashes images of the kidnapper.  We realise its a father (Michael Shannon) and his son (Jaeden Lieberher), who's reading superhero comics by torchlight.  But the other guy (Joel Edgerton) is freaking us out. He asks the dad to reach into the glove compartment. Is it for a gun? No, night vision goggles. He's going to drive at high speed through the night to get this kid to wherever he needs to be.   Meanwhile, a local bunch of religious nutters led by Sam Shepard are being interrogated by the Feds and NSA analyst Kylo Ren.  The cult think he's going to lead them to paradise when the apocalypse comes in three days time.  The army thinks he can be weaponised. But we still don't know what he is.

WHILE WE'RE YOUNG

You can listen to a podcast review of the film here.

WHILE WE'RE YOUNG is a funny, acutely observed and sometimes profound comedy from Noah Baumbach - the director behind FRANCES HA and, more happily, GREENBERG.  Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts play a forty-something couple alienated from their baby-obsessed peer group who meet and become fascinated by a twenty-something couple played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. Hanging out with the seemingly-authentic fun-loving hipsters reinvigorates the older couple even as it further drives them from their old friends.  But soon the honeymoon is over as we learn that the gap between Gen X and Gen Y is wider than their years - it's the gap between a generation who learned about digital media as it occurred versus the digital natives - and this has a profound impact on every kind of basic world view and value that the two generations have.

THS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU

THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU is a brutally unfunny and deadly dull dramedy from director Shawn Levy (DATE NIGHT) and writer-novelist Jonathan Tropper (BANSHEE). The high concept is that four adult siblings are forced by their mother to sit shiva for their recently deceased father, and that in the course of those seven days of mourning they will explore their relationships.

The movie stars and is told from the perspective of Jason Bateman's character Judd. His secret is that his wife has left him and over the course of the week he's going to have a kind of mid-life crisis and resolution with the help of the conveniently available and understanding hometown girl (Rose Byrne.)  Next up is his sister Wendy (Tina Fey) trapped in an unhappy marriage. Then comes Judd's brother Paul (Corey Stoll - HOUSE OF CARDS) who's wife is struggling to get pregnant, raising tensions with Judd who is her ex.  Finally we have youngest brother Phillip (Adam Driver - GIRLS) who's widely regarded by the rest of the family as feckless and irresponsible but who actually turns out to be the most grounded and self-aware, even in his relationship with a much older women (Connie Britton - NASHVILLE).  

This is that kind of gentle middle-class dramedy in which all problems involve marriage and can be fixed with a simple bonding session over a mildly subversive drug and tied together with a politically correct bow at the end.  There's no deep emotional truth here, only an attempt at pretending to be interested in it.  The acting is fine, the lens-work workmanlike, and the characters utterly unmemorable. I imagine this film might appeal to the kind of people who enjoyed EAT, PRAY, LOVE.

THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU has a running time of 103 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Toronto 2014 and was released earlier this year in the USA, UAE, Slovenia, Chile, Singapore, Bahamas, Canada, Mexico, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago, Aruba, Switzerland, Colombia, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, Austria, Panama, Paraguay, Spain, Finland and South Africa. It opened this weekend in the UK, Ireland, Latvia, Turkey, Australia, Croatia, Israel and New Zealand. It opens in November in India, Czech Republic, Portugal, Brazil and Italy; in December in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine, Cyprus, Poland, Romania, Argentina, Uruguay, Bulgaria, Philippines, Peru and Serbia; in January 2015 in Denmark, Norway and Belgium.

HUNGRY HEARTS - LFF14 - Day Seven

HUNGRY HEARTS makes a superb companion piece to Susanne Bier’s A SECOND CHANCE. Both films are concerned with presenting mothers that challenge our prejudices of good parenting and both contain a slow build of frustration and pent up emotion that prompt ordinary people to take extreme steps. Moreover, both films are exceptionally well made and acted - provocative and insightful.

In HUNGRY HEARTS the focus is on a young couple played by Alba Rohrwacher and Adam Driver (GIRLS). They meet cute - I mean - it’s the ultimately nauseating cute way to meet - and proceed quickly through a picture-perfect marriage to pregnancy. And here the cracks appear. The wife becomes intensely phobic of doctors, refuses to eat enough to nourish the baby, and almost sabotages the birth. And then, once the baby is born, she becomes so overprotective against the apparent menaces of processed food and germs that the baby barely gains weight. An increasingly frustrated husband is caught between concern for his son and his enduring love for his wife, and ultimately the film resolves itself in how which way he eventually jumps on that question and the social context of judgment around both sides.

What is impressive about this film is just how sinister the apparently waif-like wife becomes and how claustrophobic the apartment is - aided by sparing but powerful use of a fish-eye lens. Both actors do a great job but I have particular respect for Adam Driver who manages to credibly appear concerned for both parties when many people in the audience, myself included, would have gladly slapped the mother, stolen the child and headed for the hills. Of course, as the movie goes on we realise that she is genuinely mentally ill and so some sympathy returns. But it’s fascinating how an arthourse audience - usually very willing to say the grey shades of morality - found it hard to sympathise with her even at the end. Mistreating a baby is apparently the moral top trumps.

This may or may not be a problem for the film. Is it possible to enjoy a film when you spend most of its runtime wanting to commit a violent act against its central character and increasingly disliking its other lead character for enabling her? I noticed a handful of people walk out and I suspect that may have been the problem. In a sense, the director Saverio Constanzo (IN MEMORY OF ME) is a victim of his own success - creating an atmosphere so toxic it’s almost unbearable. For those reasons I suspect this film will be a tough sell, which is a shame. Moreover, it’s fantastic to see Adam Driver given the range to be very impressive indeed.

HUNGRY HEARTS has a running time of 109 minutes.  The movie played Venice, where the lead actors well-deservedly won the Volpi Cup for Best Acting, London and Toronto 2014. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

TRACKS - LFF 2013 - Day Eight

TRACKS is a rather lovely, beautifully shot movie depicting the true life journey of an Australian woman called Robyn Davidson who walked 2000 miles from Alice Springs to the western Australian coast.  She did this with three camels that she'd wrangled and trained, her pet dog, and occasionally the company of an aboriginal elder and a National Geographic photographer.  One might ask why and there are lots of hints at explanations on this film.  Maybe it was something to do with her own father's safari in Africa, or her innate loneliness, or of her bored dissatisfaction with life in the 70s.  Either way, I like that director John Curran doesn't feel the need to make everything obvious and easy, but allows us to see some of her charisma and mystery.

The film is beautifully made, and it serves as a hymn to he harsh beauty of the Aussie outback.  That said, any nature lovers should be cautioned that this isn't a movie that shies away from the harsh reality of nature, and animal lovers probably should give this film a wide berth.  In front of the camera, Mia Wasikowska carries the film as Robyn, and does a good job in making quite a prickly character interesting and sympathetic. Adam Driver, who seems to be popping up everywhere at the moment, is also highly enjoyable as Robyn's photographer cum suitor - the guy who has to reconcile, as we do, Robyn's need for solitude and her intense loneliness.  Ultimately, though, this isn't any actor's film.  It belongs to the cinematographer Mandy Walker who captures the stunning landscapes and people of the outback.  

TRACKS has a running time of 110 minutes. 

TRACKS played Venice, Toronto and London 2013 and does not yet have a commercial release date. 

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS - LFF 2013 - Day Seven

Oh man.  So here's the thing with the Coen Brothers.  Sometimes they write goofball comedies.  Sometimes they write movies that take you into dark existential angst. Sometimes they write movies that just take a decent guy and have the world beat up on him unrelentingly.  The last time they did that was in A SERIOUS MAN, which was perhaps the biggest downer of the London Film Festival that year, but was still, in its own way, a movie with a compelling narrative.  With INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, I'm not sure they've even given us that.  Nope.  INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS is a fantastic soundtrack album masquerading as a deep and earnest film.  It's meant to be making the point that talent doesn't rise to the surface, that inane nonsense is popular, and that sometimes good people are so beaten down by life they become their own worst enemy out of frustration.  All that might have made a compelling film, but INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS isn't it.  It's just a dull grey-green dirge - the colour of bruised skin - paced so slowly as to be funereal, in which we watch a man freeze and starve and struggle into submission, giving up on his career as a folk singer on the very night that Bob Dylan's career is about to take off.  Honestly, there's not much to like here other than the music.  They let John Goodman have a comedic cameo at around the half-way market to jolt us awake again, but other than that it's just a plain-chant dirge.  There's not even the characteristic fantastic cinematography, unless you count a moodily lit Llewyn singing on stage.  Just move along here, there's nothing to see.

The plot? Such as it is.  Oscar Isaac plays a folk singer called Llewyn Davis who lives on people's couches and can't quite seem to catch a break.  Everything he does turns to ashes.  He travels to Chicago in desperation, looking for an audition that bombs. He comes back to New York and decides to give it all up to become a merchant seaman again. But even that doesn't go well. And he ends up literally beaten up. That's honestly it - just spiced up by the John Goodman cameo and Adam Driver in an even smaller cameo as a nonsensical backing singer on an absurd song.  

Maybe you think I've spoiled the movie for you? I promise you I haven't.  When you see Davis refuse royalties on the banal record for cash up front, we know it'll be a hit.  When you see him angrily tell his sister to throw out his stuff, we know it'll contain something he really needs.  It's just that kind of film.  This isn't the "sweet sad funny" picture I've heard described, but cinematic sadism.  It wasn't the best movie I saw that day, let alone the best movie at Cannes. 

You can listen to a podcast review of this movie below or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS has a running time of 105 minutes.  

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS played Cannes 2013 where it won the Grand Prize and London 2013.  It opens in France on November 6th; in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the USA on December 6th; in Portugal on December 26th; in Mexico and Spain on January 3rd; on Greece on January 9th; in Italy on January 16th; in the UK and Ireland on January 24th; and on February 6th in Argentina and Denmark.