SEPTEMBER 5*****

SEPTEMBER 5 is a stunning film depicting the horrific and murderous attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. Where Kevin Macdonald's superb and comprehensive documentary ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER gives us all the angles and the whole story, this new film tells the story from the perspective of the ABC sports journalists who were in the Olympic Village.  As it happened, this was the first Olympics that took advantage of satellite broadcasting to bring live coverage to the world.  As a result, this was the first terrorist attack broadcast live to the world - well before Mumbai or 9-11.  And it created both iconic images which are used as live in this film - but also deep moral questions about how far live coverage enables and recruits for terrorists.

As the film opens we are in the dark, claustrophobic ABC sports-room recreated by director Tim Fehlbaum in precise detail.  The journalists hear shots fired and suddenly realise they are in the midst of an attack.  They have to figure out how to wheel heavy camera equipment out to the village to shoot footage of the apartments where the Olympians are being held.  And they have to wrestle satellite slots to broadcast what they have.  In a powerful and pivotal performance, Leonie Benesch (THE WHITE RIBBON) plays a young German journalist who has to become an impromptu translator, listening in to police radio and local news reports.  Meanwhile, the always brilliant Peter Sarsgaard plays the Sports-journo boss who has to wrestle with his home news team who argue that mere sports reporters are out of their depth, and retain control of "his" story.  

There are two iconic and notorious moments. The first is when the journalists realise that the terrorists are actually watching their footage, and can see German cops attempting a rescue operation, because no-one switched off the TV feed to the apartment block. It's then that we get that iconic image of the hooded terrorist looking out of the apartment window and straight down the barrel of the TV camera.  The second iconic and notorious moment is when an ABC journalist (played brilliantly here by John Magaro) chooses to relay an unconfirmed report that all the sportsmen have been released alive and well. He wants the scoop. Simple as. 

Kudos to Fehlbaum, his production team and in particular his editor Hansjoerg Weissbrich, for creating a film of such taut, spare, suspense and high stakes.  The look and feel of it take you right into 1972 and into the fast-paced need for judgment.  It gives you sympathy for real people making tough choices in uncharted territory. Most of all, I loved the way in which the real footage of on-air broadcasts was seamlessly woven into the fictional recreation. So you can see Magaro's character speaking apparently to an on-air presenter and that presenter relaying the information he has been given. It's a masterclass of editorial brilliance.

SEPTEMBER 5 is rated R and has a running time of 95 minutes. It played Venice, Toronto and Telluride 2024. It was released in the USA on January 17th and in the UK on February 6th.

THE DIG

THE DIG is an incredibly earnest and prettily produced historical drama, but one that falls prey to lumpen dialogue, heavy-handed politics and cliched character development.  

It's a retelling of the discovery of an Anglo-Saxon burial boat and a cache of rare artefacts in an archaeological dig in Suffolk, in 1939.  The find is familiar to most British schoolchildren, especially if like me you grew up in the area, and many of us took school-trips to see the Sutton Hoo finds. They were revolutionary because of their rarity but also because of how they redefined how we considered the "dark ages".  Through the sophistication of the artefacts, historians could see that Anglo-Saxon culture was actually far more developed than had been presumed.  The film wants to tell us this too - and does so with Basil Exposition levels of clumsiness, usually taking the form of excited declamatory statements from Ken Stott's British Museum archaeologist. 

Archaeology being a fairly dull, painstaking exercise, the screenwriter Moira Buffini decides to add some excitement with a couple of action scenes and a hokey romance. The former take the form of a scene where the gifted amateur archaeologist Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) nearly suffocates when the dig collapses on him, as well as a scene where a RAF pilot crashes into a nearby river.  The latter takes the form of Lily James' archaeologist Peggy Preston realising her husband (Ben Chaplin) is probably gay and at the very least frigid resulting in her having sex with Johnny Flynn's amateur photographer, Stuart Piggott.

Are these spoilers? No, not really. Everything in this film is so clearly telegraphed you can see the character arcs and plot twists coming as soon as the characters are introduced. Lest you ever forget, war is imminent! So we get RAF planes flying overhead at every moment, and this underscores the DOOM that overhangs Carey Mulligan's sick landowner. The inevitable battle between the amateurs and the institutional control freaks at the British Museum is, well, inevitable. And as soon as Lily James turns up in her scantily clad holiday clothes with her frigid husband you can see the affair coming a mile off. 

The politics is heavy handed too. There's a running thread of the Establishment not valuing outsiders - whether it's Mrs Pretty not being allowed to go to university, or Mr Brown not being given credit for the dig, or Peggy Preston being patronised by pretty much everyone except Cousin Stuart. And yet this comes up against an almost Downton Abbey-esque doffing of the flat tweed cap with Mr Brown and his wife grateful for any crumbs of praise from Mrs Pretty. 

What's so annoying about all this is that the film, directed by Simon Stone, is actually well made insofar as it has lovely lush British golden hour country landscape cinematography; a lot of care has been taken over period costumes and art direction; and the cast is first-rate (even in Mulligan is way too young to play Mrs Pretty). It's just all so wasted on such a twee pointless script. I would much rather have watched a doc on Sutton Hoo instead. 

THE DIG is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 112 minutes. It will be released on January 29th 2021.

THE CHILDREN ACT - Crimbo Binge-watch #9

Celebrated theatre director Richard Eyre (the superb NOTES ON A SCANDAL) returns to our screens with his adaptation of Booker Prize winning author Ian McEwan's THE CHILDREN ACT. A stunningly good Emma Thompson plays a high court judge who has to rule on a case where parents are refusing their child a life-saving blood transfusion on account of their faith.  The ruling is made, and without spoiling it, the ramifications are emotionally intense, both for the teenager involved and for the judge.  The teenager is played by Fionn Whitehead, who starred in DUNKIRK, but has far more to do here, and is really quite impressive, holding his own against Emma Thompson in an intellectually complex role. Stanley Tucci has rather less to do in what is essentially a two-hander.  

At first I thought this was going to be a rather sterile intellectual film, and the first half hour does take place mostly in court.  But as with all McEwan there's deep passion and provocation underneath that.  The film questions the idea of faith, the rights of children, and the sacrifice of family for career. It even questions the idea of judicial intervention and apparent neutrality. I found it to be a deeply stimulating film, and in its final scenes, profoundly moving.  I have no idea why Emma Thompson didn't receive wider recognition for her part. 

THE CHILDREN ACT has a rating of R and a running time of 104 minutes. It was released in 2018.

ME AND ORSON WELLES - thin

British thespian Christian McKay is charismatic, enigmatic and pitch perfect in his portrayal of legendary theatre and film director, Orson Welles. He is all thick, creamy charm and wonderfully, audaciously, self-confident. You want to be in his presence, to be caught up in the excitement of pulling off a daring production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar against all the odds. McKay's Welles convinces us that art matters, and that excellence is possible, and that if the artist wants to charm a little radio secretary or two in the meantime, well, who is he to be pinned down by conventional bourgeois morality? All hail, the brilliant wunderkind Orson Welles, and woe betide you if you dare to question his ducal rights.

The tragedy of ME AND ORSON WELLES is that Richard Linklater has not fashioned a framing device interesting enough to hold our attention when Welles is off screen. Indeed, Welles must be turning in his grave to see his grand personality reduced to romantic-comedy fodder. For, in this ill-advised film, we are asked to see Welles through the eyes of a naive, romantic schoolboy (Zac Efron with his first decent haircut), who gets a bit-part in Welles' production. For much of the movie's runtime, the schoolkid follows Welles around, filching his best pick-up lines and moving in on his PA (Claire Danes) only to get ideas above himself and mess it all up. We are supposed to care about this young kid losing his illusions about what it takes to get ahead, and worse still, to care about his romance with a drippy wannabe writer (Zoe Kazan) with eyes so wide she could be a Disney heroine.

All of this is so much nonsense. What we really care about is Welles and his genius and his relationship with long-time collaborators - his producer John Houseman (Eddie Marsan) and his best friend, Joe Cotton. The movie sags when Welles is off-screen. Frankly, I would've put up with just seeing him schmooze chicks, but what would've been superb would've been a portrayal of how he worked. Sadly, other than one seen where he discusses The Magnificent Ambersons, we get precious little of that.

The resulting film is too frail a frame upon which to hang a biopic of such a great man. It is likely to disappoint all potential audiences. The HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL crowd will no doubt be annoyed to see their pet outshone by an older, less handsome man, and the cineastes will be teased but not satiated by McKay's performance. Little scene gems - a big band led by Jools Holland with Eddi Reader as the singer - are wasted on such a thin film.

ME AND ORSON WELLES played Toronto 2008 but has only just been released in the USA and the UK. Never a good sign.

DORIAN GRAY - a mess

In recent years, filmgoers have been treated to some rather lovely adaptations of Oscar Wilde's work, not least director Oliver Parker's AN IDEAL HUSBAND. Therefore, I was rather hopeful about Parker's adaptation of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. However, Dorian Gray is a very different beast to Wilde's society plays. They dealt with issues of contemporary morality, certainly, but in light atmosphere. By contrast, Dorian Gray is a pyschological novel, dealing with debauchery and corruption, using the genre tropes of gothic horror. The key question was whether Oliver Parker's directing style - high-gloss Merchant Ivory with whimsical modern touches - would be flexible enough to grapple with a meatier book.

The novel opens in late nineteenth century London. Talented artist Basil Hallward falls in love with handsome young Dorian Gray while painting his picture. Of course, there is no crude declaration of love given that homosexuality is taboo, but sublimated "ownership" of Gray's social life. This is put under threat when Dorian becomes fascinated with Basil's friend Lord Henry Wootton - a man who, while a member of the British establishment at the height of Victorian prudery, preaches a life of unrestrained sensuality. Encouraged by the man he admires, falling prey to narcissism seeing the finished portrait, Dorian starts to value beauty and art above all else, casually wishing that he could remain as young and beautiful as his portrait. He callously rejects his young lover Sibyl Vane when her talent fades and learns that his casual wish has been fulfilled: the wages of sin show on the portrait but he remains outwardly youthful and innocent.

With this apparent freedom, Dorian degenerates into a life of excess and cruelty - sexual encounters straight and gay, and eventually to blackmail and murder. It is here that Wilde most brilliantly takes aestheticism to its logical conclusion - positing that crime is merely, as art, "a means of procuring sensation". Eighteen years later, returned from his travels, Dorian tries to turn his life around, looking to his portrait as the ultimate barometer of authentic repentance. In this latter portion of the book, we are privy to some of the most high-stakes soul-searching in modern literature. Wilde, an artist who turned his life into art, simultaneously warns us of the dangers of so doing - themes he later explored in De Profundis. A the end of novel, order is restored: art is restored, in its frame, beautiful - life is separated from it, real, variegated.

The new movie of Dorian Gray is, essentially, a failure. Director Oliver Parker and debutant screenwriter Toby Finlay, fail to translate the feeling of menace and corruption to screen, condensing crucial episodes (Sibyl Vane) and introducing new material that amps up the Hollywood action and romance for crass commercial reasons. Ben Barnes is mis-cast as Dorian. He just doesn't have the acting chops to depict inward moral disintegration in the way that, say, Al Pacino did in the GODFATHER movies. Colin Firth is also mis-cast as the corrupting Sir Henry Wootton. He just can't play sinister. Imagine how much better this movie would have been with Eddie Redmayne and Jeremy Irons in the lead roles. In terms of execution, the movie features some of the most unsexy orgy scenes since EYES WIDE OPEN and some of the cheapest CGI. The only plus points are the lovely costunes, settings and the breath of fresh air that is Rebecca Hall's performance as the newly invented daughter of Sir Henry.

DORIAN GRAY is on release in the UK and played Toronto 2009. It will be released in Italy on October 23rd, in Australia on November 12th and in Finland on Christmas Day.

Martha Fiennes retrospective - CHROMOPHOBIA

"Well, I'm seeing a woman with a mustache about my parenting flaws and my residual bulimia. And I'm doing autogenic self-hypnosis to try to keep the low self esteem at bay. I'm getting back to work and - But anyway, it's just really exciting for me at the moment because I am beginning to find the real me."

Writer-director Martha Fiennes throws up a rich portrait of supremely successfully, but deceitful and narcissistic Londoners in her second feature film, CHROMOPHOBIA. Their vices vary from a sort of desperate, void-filling materialism to sexual exploitation of the worst kind. Perhaps their most over-riding flaw is their self-deception. No-one really thinks they're a bad person, do they? Their world of material ease but self-inflicted paranoia is exposed when a tabloid journalist exploits a drunken indiscretion by one of his best friends. Well, it's a savage world.

Martha Fiennes' film is beautifully rendered. The over-designed, polished interiors are spot on, as are the rather pathetic problems that obsess our protagonists. Kristin Scott Thomas is particularly good as a sexually frustrated, spend-a-holic wife. But I would have had more time for this film had it not tacked on a rather ludicrous fairy tale romance between a terminally ill "heart-of-gold" Spanish hooker (Penelope Cruz) and an earnest social worker (Rhys Ifans). These characters are cliches, although Ifans makes the best of it. I also rather disliked the final scenes. One of the key characters makes a life decision that belies their earlier moral cowardice and self-involvement. Maybe it could've happened that way. Maybe we can redeem ourselves in moments of crisis. But this turnaround rang false.

CHROMOPHOBIA closed Cannes 2005. It was released in Italy, France and Israel in 2006 and in Spain and the UK in 2007. It is available on DVD.

WATER HORSE - Free Nessie!

A perfectly charming and utterly enjoyable children's movie that combines a good old-fashioned story with some first-rate modern animation.

A timid young Scottish boy called Angus (Alex Etel) comes out of his shell by befriending a cute little beastie called Crusoe. The beastie soon outgrows the bathtub and Angus and the handyman (Ben Chaplin) transfer him to the Loch. All goes well until a smarmy Army captain (David Morrissey) orders his men to start shooting at the Loch in order to impress Angus' mum (Emily Watson.)

The movie is well-acted throughout, althought the Scottish accents do tend to come and go. The beastie is very cute and there are lots of good laughs all the way through. The CGI animation is handled well and doesn't obscure from the wonderful photography of the beautiful Scottish landscape. This movie could've been sponsored by the Scottish Tourism authority! The ending is suitably thrilling and emotional, although I did feel it had a slightly familiar Free Willy feel to it. Nonetheless, fans of the Dick King-Smith story won't feel let down, and I can attest that The Kid had a great time throughout.

WATER HORSE opened in the US, Canada and Mexico last year. It opened in January 2008 in Australia, Sweden and Belgium. It is currently playing in Brazil, Japan, Venezuela, Egypt, the UK, Germany and Argentina. It opens later in February in France, the Netherlands, China, Croatia and Iceland. It opens in March in Lebanon, Singapore, Kuwait, Spain, Turkey, Peru, Italy, Uruguay, South Korea, Colombia and Serbia and Montenegro. It opens in April in India and Hong Kong.