Complicated thoughts on ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER*****

Paul Thomas Anderson - PUNCH DRUNK LOVE, THERE WILL BE BLOOD, THE MASTER, INHERENT VICE..... a master film-maker whose film I admire and adore. But ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER was a painful watch, impacted by who I am and the times we live in. As a woman of colour and second generation immigrant living in a place where lampposts are papered with St George's flags, I could not reconcile enjoying a comedy caper juxtaposed with a hyper-real depiction of undocumented migrants fearing for their lives in a sanctuary city.  In the end, I spent much of the film wondering why all of the uniformly gushing reviews had not commented on this, or found it problematic. I felt sad about racism as depicted in this film and found in my daily life. And sad that every single mainstream film reviewer in the UK is white. Maybe in a decade, if liberal democracy wins, I will be able to watch this film on its own terms. But right now, it just feels like a white guy making a funny film using immigrant pain as a backdrop. Even worse, a hispanic saviour bailing out a white fuckwit.  No. Just no.

The film is about an ex radical left terrorist (Leonardo Di Caprio) who, fifteen years later, is a stoner dad living under an alias with his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti). His old white supremacist antagonist (Sean Penn) is trying to gain access to an elite group of racist vigilantes. In order to join he has to clean up his past, not least his sexual infatuation with the teenager's mother, a black terrorist called Perfidia Beverly Hills.  So the racist kidnaps the daughter. There are a bunch of car chases and shoot outs. The end.

On a technical level, this is, of course, a superb film, and maybe even the film of the year. PTA and his DP Michael Bauman shoot the film in Vistavision, so it looks fantastic and deserves to be seen on the best screen you can find. PTA crafts not one but two truly unique and tense car chases - the first in a prologue that has a getaway car scythe through traffic centrally rather than going around the side onto pavements - the second using a rolling hilly landscape to obscure and reveal the cars chasing each other.   And no-one unfurls his camera through an ever deeper set like PTA. There's a bravura set piece where we move from a storefront in a sanctuary city through a house and into an underground hideout where migrants are having to escape through a tunnel to a church. Impeccable film-making.

And then there's Jonny Greenwood's stunning score that moves from genre to genre, Greenwood often playing his own wide set of obscure musical instruments. At times I felt like the score was the only thing holding the film together. Kudos also to the production and costume designers who manage to deliberately confuse the viewer as to when the film is set.  Are we in the 70s, when US domestic terrorism from anti-capitalist militants was at its height? Or is this film contemporary? The answer is both, and that's handled very elegantly.

The performances are more complex to review. Sean Penn is mesmerising as a white supremacist police officer but it's a performance that is deliberately cartoonish. I actually found his sidekick, played straight, far more terrifying. Leonardo Di Caprio is funny, but derivative, playing his character as Lebowski. Or maybe it's just lazy writing. Benicio Del Toro plays himself - affable, cool, lowkey hilarious.  Regina Hall is stunning as an ex terrorist now trying to help out Di Caprio's teenage daughter. But it's like she's in a totally different film.

And this brings us into the inherent incoherence of the film. Half of it is played deadly straight and completely terrifies us.  That's the film containing Regina Hall and the migrants and the military sidekick interrogating high school kids. That's a great film. That's the film I wanted. And then there's a comedy caper full of cartoonish characters that I ultimately did not give a shit about. Leonardo Di Caprio's character is caught in the middle of this incoherence. Funny yes. But do I care about him as a father?  Do I invest in his relationship with daughter? No.  Because genre is working to undermine him.

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER has a running time of 166 minutes and is rated R. It is on global release.

INHERENT VICE

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



I am super excited to talk to you about INHERENT VICE, the new movie from Paul Thomas Anderson and the first time a Thomas Pynchon novel has been filmed, because they're these complex genre-defying novels that talk about everything and nothing and are kind of unfilmable. The resulting film is one of the weirdest, bizarrest films of the year, and I can quite see why you would be totally weirded out by it. But to me this film is the bastard love child of Lebowski and LA Confidential with a strange warm fuzzy heart.  It may not be as austere and brilliant as THERE WILL BE BLOOD or THE MASTER but is it's own crazy beautiful mess and well worth watching.

So what is the film about? It's a kind of film noir, with all the strangeness that goes along with that genre. It has a mood of craziness, corruption and seediness.  There are rich men, damsels in distress, a maze of plot and you never quite know if you're going to make it out in one piece.  Sometimes you don't know if the author or the director have a clue what's going on, and then the film just sort of ends. That's a little bit the case with INHERENT VICE. The first hour has momentum and drive and hilarity, and then it kind of drifts, but I think that's intentional. And then it goes dark and subversive and there's a very weird sex scene, and then it finishes up in a warm and happy place, sort of....

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

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



GUARDIAN OF THE GALAXY is hands-down the most fun I've had in a cinema over the past year. It's goofy, funny, smart, touching and at times plain balls-out crazy.  But when the lights came up I could have happily sat down to watch the movie all over again, and I can't wait for the sequel.  It reminded me of all the reasons we loved cinema as kids - of all those Saturday morning serial inspired movies like STAR WARS and INDIANA JONES with their epic quests and buddy comedy relationships. But even better, it reminded me of the richly imagined almost gothic worlds of Guillermo del Toro movies - worlds where people (and raccoons!) look battered and beaten rather than shiny and new.  There was something nostalgic about the very concept of the movie - a throwback to the great eighties action comedies - that went beyond its hokey mix-tape seventies sound-track.  I mean, I CARED about the talking tree and the psycho-raccoon, god help me. And I want to know what happens next!

SAVAGES

THE SAVAGES is a day-glo bright, tawdry, energetic mess. Aaron Johnson and Taylor Kitsch play unlikely friends and wholesale drug manufacturers - the former an earnest hippie who has perfected killer strength drugs, the latter a war vet who cares more about money and getting the job done. The two share a ditzy blonde chick played by Blake Lively. The plot, such as it is, sees the trio under threat from a Mexican drug cartel (Salma Hayek and enforcer Benicio del Toro) and entrapped by a corrupt narc (John Travolta).

The lurid colours and kinetic force of the film are attractive but are not enough to compensate for the alienating characters.  Ultimately, it's hard to care about the fate of Lively's character in the movie's more serious second act, when her persecutor is playing a drug baroness a la Cruella deVil. Moreover, the satisfyingly tricksy plot is ultimately undone by an entirely fatuous epilogue. 

SAVAGES opened earlier this year in Canada, the USA, Colombia, Mexico, Turkey, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Portugal. It opens this week in Argentina, New Zealand, Russia and Vietnam. It opens on September 20th in Singapore, Ireland and the UK and on September 26th in France, Chile, Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Iceland, Poland and Spain. It opens on October 3rd in Belgium, Hungary, Brazil and Lithuania. It opens on October 12th in Denmark, Germany, Finland, Norway and Sweden. It opens on October 18th in Australia and on October 25th in Greece and Italy.

THE WOLFMAN - anaemic

Joe Johnston, hack director of such memorable fare as HIDALGO, JURASSIC PARK III and THE ROCKETEER (oh yes!) creates another cine-clunker with his ill-conceived remake of the Curt Siodomak classic, THE WOLF MAN.

The story is simple. Innocent Lawrence Talbot is bitten by a werewolf on Blackmoor while investigating his brother's savage death. He has to fight to stop the beast, while battling with his own lycophagia, all the time being hounded by the police and the psychiatrists, and with the help of his brother's attractive fiancée, Gwen.

Neither gory enough to be convincing as horror, nor well-acted enough to be convincing as familial drama, the movie occasionally plays as a campy spoof. It's surprising to me that the production design is so hi-rent - with richly textured costumes, and decadent gothic sets. And yet, the make-up design for The Wolfman is distinctly unconvincing, running a close second to Ang Lee's bouncing luminous green HULK as the most implausible filmic creation. You watch the sub-par transformation scenes, and the Teen-Wolf-laughable Wolfman bounding across London and you're taken out of the movie immediately. And as for the acting, despite the high quality cast (Anthony Hopkins, Geraldine Chaplin, Benicio del Toro, Emily Blunt, Antony Sher), the performances seem flat and uninspired. Only Hugo Weaving, as a mis-placed Inspector Abberline, looks like he's having any fun at all.

What a waste of a fine cast. What a waste of the beautifully decorated sets, period costumes, and lush Danny Elfman score. What a waste of my time and money.

Additional tags: Joe Johnston

THE WOLF MAN is on global release in all bar Russia, Australia and Poland where it opens next weekend, Israel where it opens on April 1st and Japan where it opens on April 23rd.

Some thoughts on THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS is a beautiful, dark, wondrous, mischevious film. Every scene is full of visual delights and rich metaphors. PARNASSUS is film as spectacle - taking us back to the earliest tradition of cinema. But perhaps the most spectacular fact about PARNASSUS is that is was made at all, given the death of its star, Heath Ledger, half way through filming, a fact that evidently floored Terry Gilliam, and had the money-men, always troublesome in a Gilliam production, running for the exits. If the PR surrounding "Ledger's Last Film" gets Gilliam better distribution and audiences than he typically attracts, it's a poor motive, but a good result. Because people should see this film. And not just Gilliam fans, or fantasy fans, or fans of Dickens and Inkheart and the Brothers Grimm. THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS pleases and works on many levels.

Before I get to how it pleases, let's dwell a moment on the fact that it really does work. People who love Gilliam tend to start with an apology for the baggy structure of his films and the crazy, too large worlds he creates. It's as thought they love what he's doing but wish he'd find a stronger producer and editor, and someone to just package him up neatly like a Tim Burton film. Surprisingly, I've even read some reviews of PARNASSUS alleging the same thing - the movie is, to these critics, hard to follow, rambling, jam-packed and simply strange. Well, I have to say, I found it one of the most tightly structured and dramatically satisfying of Gilliam's films. Each episode propels us from the opening conceit to the final showdown. Each is necessary. And each character develops upon the journey. So don't let the patronising apologists fool you - PARNASSUS is a great film because of its rich visual style and wide-ranging scope, but it's also easy to enjoy because it's structurally tight.

As the film opens, an antiquated travelling troupe of players is pitching its stall in the modern-day City of London. Well, modern, yes, with its drunken chavs, but timeless too, with its Dickensian grimy pavements and desolate vacant lots. The troupe is led by Doctor Parnassus - a thousand year-old mystic, devoted to telling the truths of life through stories. Centuries ago, he gained immortality in a wager with the Devil. (Just how his side-kick, Percy, gained immortality is unexplained). When passers-by go through his looking-glass they enter a world of their imagination, where Parnassus and the Devil battle for their souls. If Parnassus loses, his daughter Valentina will be forfeit. Around this larger story of life and death is wrapped a smaller tale of love. Parnassus' has raised his daughter in an atmosphere of magic and wonder, but what she really wants is a normal life in consumer Britain. A young boy called Anton, who has been taken in by Parnassus, wants to run away with Valentina, but she is more attracted to the mysterious Tony - an amnesiac in a white suit who promises to modernise the Imaginarium and make them all more money. But who is Tony? And why did they find him hanging by a noose underneath Blackfriars Bridge?

PARNASSUS works as a touching love story - where the girl is too dazzled by the handsome stranger to notice the honest, simple man who loves her. It works as a moving coming of age drama in which a young girl rebelling against her father discovers that she loves him; and the father who cosseted his daughter learns to let her go. PARNASSUS works as dark and brooding cautionary tale about the inability of escaping the consequences of one's actions. In the world of the film, imagination is not an escape but being brought to account. PARNASSUS works as a memorial to Heath Ledger, and all stars who became icons by dieing young. PARNASSUS works as a sad comment on the Death of Narrative Cinema, insofar as Parnassus stands up for stories, and the modern world has no time to hear them. Perhaps most cheekily, PARNASSUS works as a critique of Tony Blair's Britain - the pre-Credit Crunch Britain of housing market bubbles and conspicuous consumption and relentless "modernisation" - Ikea catalogues and "Norm-porn" - of eroding civil liberties in the name of greater security - of policeman clubbing G-20 protesters - of politicians with genuinely good intentions somehow messing up.

On the most basic level, PARNASSUS works as an old-fashioned fair-ground attraction. It's just delightful to look act, and when the actors are playing their characters as performers in the show, they are simply wonderful. All the big-name actors, from Christopher Plummer as Parnassus, to Ledger, Depp, Farrell and Law as Tony, to Verne Troyer as Percy, are just fine, and Lily Cole holds her own as Valentina. Tom Waits is brilliantly cast as the rogue and charmer, Old Nick. But the person who absolutely steals the movie is the young British actor Andrew Garfield (LIONS FOR LAMBS, THE RED RIDING TRILOGY). Garfield as Anton, the poor boy in love with Valentina, but also the fairground entertainer, is an absolute revelation - and worth the price of entry alone.

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS played Toronto 2009 and opens next week in Bulgaria and the UK. It opens on October 23rd in Spain; on October 29th in Australia, the Czech Republic, Italy and Vietnam; on November 5th in Argentina, and New Zealand; on November 11th in France; on November 19th in Portugal; on November 20th in Iceland; on December 3rd in Slovakia; Switzerland; Norway and Sweden; on December 25th in Canada and the US' on January 7th in Germany and Poland; on January 28th in Russia and Japan; on February 5th in Estonia; on February 11th and on March 12th in Turkey.

Eventual tags: terry gilliam, charles mckeown, fantasy, johnny depp, heath ledger, jude law, colin farrell, christopher plummer, lily cole, verne troyer, tom waits, andrew garfield, jeff danna, mychael danna, nicola pecorini,

Bryan Singer retrospective - THE USUAL SUSPECTS (1994)

Bryan Singer's latest movie - VALKYRIE - will be released in the UK next month - an opportune moment to review his previous movies. I haven't written about any of Singer's movies before despite the fact that his 1994 flick THE USUAL SUSPECTS is one of my favourite films of all time and one of the few movies that I own on DVD. I love THE USUAL SUSPECTS because it proved that it was still possible to make slippery, haunting thrillers in the manner of those 1940s classics - full of real men, complex heists, bent cops and ambiguous loyalties. The script was intelligent and gripping, with just enough allusion to the supernatural to be frightening but still credible. The visual style was bold and captivating. The acting was superlative - and better still for introducing us to the soon to be iconic Benicio del Toro and reintroducing us to great character actors such as Gabriel Byrne and Chazz Palminteri. What was even more astounding was that the movie had been directed and written by a team of relative unknowns - Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie - collaborating again on their second flick - both still in their twenties.

The movie grips you from the opening scene - a harbour at night - a match flares showing the face of a battered, dying man, who voices enmity for a man with the unusual name of Keyser. The gasoline barrels on the ship catch fire - dramatically silhouetted against the sky. The central mystery has been established with admirable efficiency and style - who is Keyser - and what crime has been perpetrated here?

We cut to contemporary New York. "Verbal" Kint (Kevin Spacey) begins his voice-over. He will be our narrator - fashioning our understanding of this tale. But we know he's a con-man - and that colours our belief in what he is saying. We see our group of suspects rounded up by New York's finest and interrogated, but it's clear they're innocent of this particular crime. Nonetheless, the personalities and the pecking order are established. Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne) - the man we have just seen dying - is the alpha male. He's suave - he's was evidently trying to charm himself into a new legitimate life as a restauranteur. Trying and failing in the great tradition of movie mafiosi. Next comes Kevin Pollack as Todd Hockney - foul-mouthed, angry, clearly good at what he does and under no illusions about it. Then we have Stephen Baldwin - an unpredictable live-wire - as Michael McManus, clearly a partner in many senses of Fred Fenster (Benicio del Toro stealing every scene with his unintelligible accent.) All four have professional respect for each other as crims. Verbal Kint is the patsy - frightened - out of his depth.

Again, with remarkable economy we switch to intensive care where a cop is interrogating the survivor of the explosion on the ship - he's petrified and screams the name "Keyser Soze" again and again in heavily accented English. It's a truly frightening moment thanks partly to the exotic name, partly to the bandages. Either way, the film-makers have established a true sense of urgency and that the stakes are high.

And now we're into the meat of the story and we're hooked. Chazz Palminteri plays cocksure Officer Kujan, throwing every form of intimidation at Verbal Kint as he tries to work out what went down. In flashbacks, Kint tells his side of the story. It's a battle of wits - but three-way - between Kujon, Kint and the audience. Kint's telling us a tale of a heist gone wrong, a mysterious man named Kobayashi, murder and deceit. He's mixing it up with seemingly absurd details about barber shops quartets and suchlike. And he alternates between fear and arrogance. It's a bravura performance from Kevin Spacey, who won an Oscar for it.

Verbal: Where's your head, Agent Kujan? Where do you think the pressure's coming from? Keyser Soze - or whatever you want to call him - knows where I am right now. He's got the front burner under' your ass to let me go so he can scoop me up ten minutes later. Immunity was just to deal with you assholes. I got a whole new problem when I post bail.

Dave Kujan: So why play into his hands? We can protect you.

Verbal: Gee, thanks, Dave. Bang-up job so far. Extortion, coercion. You'll pardon me if I ask you to kiss my pucker. The same fuckers that rounded us up and sank us into this mess are telling me They'll bail me out? Fuck you. You think you can catch Keyser Soze? You think a guy like that comes this close to getting fingered and sticks his head out? If he comes up for anything, it will be to get rid of me. After that, my guess is you'll never hear from him again.

Kint's story ends without resolution for Kujan, who later discovers the true identity of Keyser Soze - surely one of the best twist endings in cinema. The brilliance of the script is that once you know the ending you can see the clues - it's not just willfully obscure. Moreover, my enjoyment of the film has not been diminished by knowing the twist at the end. Rather, every time I watch it I marvel at the ingenuity of the plot and I revel in the genuine feeling of menace and peril. To that end, THE USUAL SUSPECTS is the perfect marriage of style and substance. The movie looks great and feels eerie and has a cool ending but underneath all that it has a logical and whip-tight structure and fascinating power relationships - between the members of the gang and between the gang and the rozzers. All in all, a modern classic.

THE USUAL SUSPECTS played Sundance and premiered Cannes 1995. It opened in 1995 and 1996. Christopher McQuarrie won Best Original Screenplay and Kevin Spacey won Best Supporting Actor at the 1996 Academy Awards,

London Film Festival Day 11 - CHE Parts 1 and 2

"I was sitting in first class with a hot towel on my face when I realised I was the right person to direct this film." Steven Soderbegh, introducing his 4 hour, 2 part biopic of revolutionary Marxist Ernesto "Che" Guevera at the London Film Festival.

"Maybe they didn't have a Q&A because they were so embarassed at how at how bad the film was?" Our Gmunden correspondent, leaving the cinema, 4 hours later.

CHE (THE ARGENTINE & GUERILLA) is an interminable, unedifying vanity project from director Steven Soderbergh, producer and lead actor Benicio del Toro and newbie writer Peter Buchman. It's a film that gives us no real insight into Che's politics or personality - indeed it perversely holds us at a distance to him. It's a film that gives us no real feel for his revolutionary career - perversely leaving Cuba before he has even entered Havana. It's a film that tells us nothing about his charisma or passion - nowhere in this film do I get a feel for why people would have put themselves in mortal danger to follow him.

Do we blame Soderbergh for having no over-arching vision for this story? Do we blame del Toro for his walking zombie performance? Do we blame the screen-writers for taking a decade of radical action and boiling it down to a series of monotonous, unexciting marches? Whatever the reason, CHE is quite frankly a disaster.

The movie is divided into two parts: THE ARGENTINE and THE GUERILLA. Producer Laura Bickman told us that they were to be released as two separate films rather than playing as a double bill, so that's how I'll review them here.

THE ARGENTINE opens with a patronising shot showing a map of Cuba, highlighting the name of each region and the position of the major cities. It's like Geography 101. It's a clumsy way to convey information and has zero artistic content. Perhaps the film-makers should realise that anyone who comits 4 hours to a Che biopic probably knows where Cuba is. We then enter into the main body of the film, which is framed by a scene in Mexico City where Fidel Castro (Demián Bichir) outlines his plan to invade Cuba, and persuades Che (del Toro) to go with him. In the final scene of the film, Che will agree, only if he can leave Cuba when the invasion is over and spread the revolutionary message to the rest of Latin America. The intervening two hours inter-cut the story of the invasion of 1956 with scenes of Che confronting the United Nations in New York in 1964.

The footage of the Cuban revolution is pretty monotonous. We see revolutionaries march through long grass a lot. Occasionally, Castro hurts Che by refusing to let him take command of troops. Che is, after all, an outsider, an intellectual, and better suited to training, inspiring, and treating illness, than strategic thinking. We also see flashes of Che's purist ethics. He wants his men to be educated, moral, above petty corruption. All these themes are fascinating, and a film pursuing them would've given real insight to Che's politics and personality. Sadly, these moments of clarity are only ever brief flashes. Other than that, we learn that war is quite boring. The footage from New York is similarly frustrating insofar as Soderbergh could've really investigated the reactions to the revolution from US politicians and other Latin American countries. After all, Che is preaching world revolution - how threatening was that to the US and Latin American establishment? But once again, we get quick-cut, impressionistic scenes that only make sense if you come into the movie with a lot of prior knowledge.

CHE: THE ARGENTINE ends with Che on the road from Santa Clara to Havana. We never see him arrive. It's an odd ending - leaving the audience with little sense of closure. The movie finishes abruptly. This may work in a double-bill, but I doubt that anyone would give GUERILLA a chance after this dull, unenlightening, strangely neutered work. I learned nothing about Che that I didn't already know, and it's interesting to note that in the US, this first film is not being released at all (acc to IMDB).

CHE: GUERILLA is modestly more successful that CHE: THE ARGENTINE, but the benchmark is low. The first thing to say is that it looks like a completely different film. The shooting style and editing style are much more languid and patient - the narrative is linear - we are allowed a little closer, though still not close enough - to our hero.

The movie skips Che's entry to Havana and his period serving in the Cuban governemnt. It skips his failed attempt to start a revolution in the Congo and rolls right into his radical activities in Bolivia in 66/67. The revolution is hopeless and the film a monotonous and depressing inch by inch movement toward the inevitable execution. The Bolivian government is aided by the US, so instead of hapless Cuban troops who surrender at the first sign of violence, Che is facing crack special ops. The Cuban peasants were ready for revolution but the Bolivian peasants are unconvinced by his arguments. (Heck, so are we - we never see him as a charismatic Marxist evangelical). Worse still, the local Communists want nothing to do with him; he loses contact with Havana; and his foreign aides stupidly lead the Bolivians right to him. So what you get is a film about isolation and failure. A random bunch of men wander round the Bolivian countryside until finally they are cornered and shot. Portraits of failure and disillusionment can be captivating. Look at the brilliant, mournful THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD. But GUERILLA is just dull. We are never allowed to empathise with Che in the way that we entered the emotional drama betwee James and Ford.

If CHE: GUERILLA is better than THE ARGENTINE it's because there are odd moments of visual flair. The scene where some of the guerilla are gunned down in a river is beautifully done. And there is a scene where Che is injured and on the run on the slope of a ridge. At the top, silhouetted against the horizon we see a handful of special ops soldier. And then, in a flash of pure menace, these men are joined by tens of other until the horizon is filled with men bearing down on our hero. These moments are to be expected from a man with Soderbergh's experience and technical skill. They are, however, too few.

Soderbergh began the LIFF screening with a joke - that a man who flies first class is the wrong man to make CHE. That's too reductive. But still, it contains a grain of truth. Walter Salles made a brilliant film about CHE because he was passionate about the content, could relate to it and had something to say about it. Salles was, like Che, born into privilege in Latin America but has chosen to turn his back on the establishment (in this case, being the scion of a banking family) in order to make politically and socially aware films about the poor. I would love to know why Soderbergh came to this project and whether, in all honesty, he felt any real emotional attachment to it. Because there is little evidence of any love for the project in the final films.

CHE / THE ARGENTINE & GUERILLA played Cannes where Benicio del Toro won Best Actor, Toronto and London 2008. THE ARGENTINE went on release in Spain in September, opens in Mexico on December 26th; opens in the UK on January 2nd; in France on January 7th and in Argentina on January 29th. GUERILLA opens in Argtnina on November 13th; in Greece on November 27th; in the US on December 12th; in France on January 28th; in the UK on February 20th and in Japan in March.

Guy Ritchie retrospective - SNATCH

SNATCH follows the exact-same formula as LOCK, STOCK except that this time, the world of underground gambling and narcotics has been replaced with diamond-smuggling and under-ground boxing. The visual style is similar - flashy editing, video-game manipulation of action and the all-knowing mockney voice-over, this time from our protagonist Turkish (Jason Statham). To that extent, SNATCH is doomed to be less satisfying than LOCK, STOCK because it's less of a surprise.

On the other hand, I do really like SNATCH because it's even less compromising than LOCK, STOCK. Accents are thicker, and in the case of Brad Pitt's charver, deliberately impenetrable. The violence is harsher - including an arson attack and a particularly nasty form of dispatching errant crooks. The humour is darker, the double-crossing is nastier, the sets are grimier and the language is filthier. Despite the Tarantino-like comedy anecdotes, Alan Ford is genuinely menacing as the evil gangster Brick Top, and unlike LOCK, STOCK, there are several scenes of genuine peril. The most memorable of these is a scene where footage of hare-coursing is inter-cut with footage of a small-time burglar getting nabbed by Brick-top's men. It's outstandingly well put-together. Similarly, the boxing scenes are really well shot, even if they take heavy inspiration from RAGING BULL.

My over-riding feeling after watching SNATCH was that this was a holding picture. Ritchie was still in his comfort zone regarding characters and settings but had become a lot more accomplished technically. He was set up nicely for a third film. That was until he took a left-turn into Kabbalah and up himself with SWEPT AWAY and REVOLVER.

SNATCH was released in 2000 and is available on DVD.

London Film Fest Day 8 - THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE

THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE is directed by the Danish helmer who gave us AFTER THE WEDDING, one of the most powerful movies that I've seen this year. AFTER THE WEDDING is a film about a charity worker who returns to Denmark apparently to negotiate a grant for an Indian orphanage. But he is ambushed by a series of revelations and thrown into an affluent world that changes his life. It is a quiet movie based on powerful performances, realistic dialogue and beautiful photography that often uses extreme close-ups to create a sense of intimacy.

On the face of it, Susanne Bier’s first English-language project shares much of the same emotional and narrative territory with AFTER THE WEDDING. Both concern the mourning process and what happens when people from very different social strata form relationships. They are also both films whose plot hinges on a major and unlikely turn of events.

Just as Mads Mikkelsen's former drug-addict was at the heart of AFTER THE WEDDING, the heart of THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE is a warm-hearted recovering heroin-addict called Jerry (Benicio del Toro). His best friend is an affluent property developer called Steven (David Duchovny). Steven is married to Audrey (Halle Berry) and has two cute kids and a solid successful friend called Howard (John Carroll Lynch). Although Steven's wife and friends are suspicious of Jerry - seeing him as a parasitic bum - when Steven is tragically killed they propel him into the centre of their world. Audrey takes Jerry into her house despite the fact that he's a recovering, then relapsing addict. Howard arranges for him to qualify as a mortgage broker. Jerry's good and frank nature helps them all and they in turn get him clean. It's a story of redemption and rebuilding a life in much the same way as AFTER THE WEDDING was. It's also well acted, with Benicio del Toro and John Carroll Lynch the stand-out cast members.

The problem is that THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE is a far less original and haunting drama than AFTER THE WEDDING. The shooting style is a watered down version of what we saw in AFTER THE WEDDING. None of the performances ever touch the raw emotion of Mads Mikkelsen in AFTER THE WEDDING. And even the zig-zagging time line seems derivative of other ponderous, self-important flicks like CRASH and BABEL. Overall, I came away unimpressed. It's all well done but slightly derivative. It never grabbed me by the gut and wrenched me out of my seat in the way that AFTER THE WEDDING did. And that is a great disappointment.

THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE played London 2007 and is on release in the US. It goes on release in Mexico on December 28th 2007 and in Belgium, France, Argentina, the UK, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands in January 2008. It opens in Finland, Iceland, Australia, Sweden and Turkey in February and in Norway in March.