BATTLE OF THE SEXES - Day 4 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

Co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE) and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE) have created an immensely likeable and uplifting movie in BATTLE OF THE SEXES. It's the story of an infamous exhibition tennis match played in the mid-70s between one of the all time greats of women's tennis - Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) and an ageing former Grand Slam winner Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell).  Both are absolutely fascinating characters.  Riggs is a paunchy fifty year old on a second marriage to a rich woman (Elisabeth Shue).  He has a gambling habit and a love of the limelight, and while earning a pittance on the seniors tour become irked that the women are demanding more money.  Those women are led by Billie Jean King - who in a no-nonsense straightforward way asks why, if the women sell as many tickets as the men, they don't get paid as much? What's more, King is willing to back herself - setting up a rival women's tour with tennis promoter Gladys Heldman (Sarah Silverman). In doing so, she goes head to head with the misogynistic head of the USLTA Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman). The set up of the film is thus an exhibition match between Riggs and King where she has to win to rescue the reputation of women's tennis and indeed make a point about equality to the millions of people watching on TV.  But as she rightly points out, the real point to be made is against Kramer and his ilk rather than the buffoon-like Riggs. 

Behind the scenes we also have intense emotional battles. As the world now knows, King, though married to the deeply supportive and remarkably accommodating Larry, is equally gay. In the course of the film she begins a passionate affair with the tour hairdresser Marilyn (Andrea Riseborough), something that Larry tacitly condones, but that is hidden from the press and King's parents.  The more fascinating reaction is that of King's rival Margaret Court, who is a wife, mother and apparent homophobe. Having done a quick bit of internet research about her, I can't help but think that it let Court off very lightly.  Arguably the more fascinating relationship, because it's less well-known, is that of Riggs and his wife.  She is evidently a strong woman, and analyses their relationship very clearly.  She loves his humour and large personality, but hates his gambling and general unreliability.  Although one of the smaller roles in the film, Elisabeth Shue imbues it with such humanity and compassion that it really was the stand out part of the film.  

As for the rest, well it's all very well done. And Stone absolutely gets some of the physical mannerisms of King and Carell is almost spookily similar to the real-life Riggs. Is the direction pioneering or meaningfully interesting? No not really. But that's what this film is.  To quote Meester Phil, this is the two hour and one minute version of the one minute forty second trailer. This is a movie that really just tells a good story well - it doesn't over-complicate it, and it's a good time. 

BATTLE OF THE SEXES has a running time of 121 minutes and is rated PG-13.  BATTLE OF THE SEXES played London and Toronto 2017 and is already on release in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It opens in Brazil on October 19th, in Hong Kong on November 2nd, in Spain on November 10th, in Germany on November 16th, in France, the Netherlands, Singapore and the UK on November 24th, in Argentina on November 30th, in Colombia on December 7th and in Poland on December 8th.

AMERICAN ULTRA

AMERICAN ULTRA is a really fantastic film with a unique premise, a great score and visual style and the ability to both capture a darkly comedic tone but also be a genuinely tense action thriller.  It stars Jesse Eisenberg as a stoner called Mike who's actually the last man standing of a weird US spy programme designed to create and mind-control super-spies.  When the ruthless CIA careerist played by Topher Grace decides to kill Mike, his handler Lasseter (Connie Britton) decides to activate him in order to save his life.  We then get a series of really insane action scenes, as well some genuinely moving emotional scenes in which Mike wonders who he really is and how his relationship with girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) is really operating. But what really impressed me was the feeling that the director an DP had a clear idea about how they wanted to tell the story. It's using cinema and all it has to offer to create powerful and complex and memorable storytelling.  There's a superb scene near the end where our bruised and bloodied couple are hobbling out of a destroyed building to the sound of a Chemical Brothers attack, framed in smoke from the fireworks they've let off and covered in the green laser sight-tags of machine guns.  The director, Nima Nourizadeh, decides to show the couple's interactions in silence with just the track playing.  That's some memorable shit right there.  My only slight gripe is the way that Max Landis chooses to end the film. Didn't feel right to me, and maybe a cheesy set up for a sequel.

AMERICAN ULTRA has a running time of 96 minutes and is rated R. The movie is on global release.

THE EQUALIZER (2014)

THE EQUALIZER is the big screen remake of the 1980s TV show starring Edward Woodward as ex CIA agent Robert McCall who provides vigilante justice for the downtrodden. Denzel Washington stars as a buttoned up insomniac loner who befriends a hooker with a heart of gold (Chloe Grace Moretz - KICK ASS). When she gets beaten up by her Russian pimp, Robert tries to buy her out, and when this doesn't work goes on a violent revenge spree, revealing in turn that he is obviously a skilled pro killer (although not using guns, as in the show). The movie then degenerates into a classic action-packed killing spree - although more stylish and imaginative than most movies.

It's hard not to like any movie starring Denzel Washington and Chloe Grace Moretz embraces an older and gritty role. Director Antoine Fuqua certainly has a sure and compelling visual style and as his TRAINING DAY proved, he knows how to build and sustain tension.  But the movie is fatally undercut by its sub TAXI DRIVER cliche of a young imperilled sex worker and its mid-point descent into violence.  The problem is that that violence doesn't have the emotional heft, or character development of the superb TRAINING DAY. In other words, what we have here is a superior stylish version of a Tony Scott movie. I also feel that the movie could have lost a good half hour of its running time.

THE EQUALIZER has a running time of 132 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Toronto 2015 and is on global release. 

LOLA VERSUS

LOLA VERSUS is a mediocre drama about a twenty-something girl living in Manhattan and how she fails to cope with being dumped by her fiancé. This rather predictably includes trying to sleep with her male best friend, resenting her female best friend when she gets together with him, and basically having all sorts of questionable sex.  I didn't mind that Lola was rather self-absorbed and unlikeable - because that's what people who've just been dumped are like.  I did, however, object to the rather thin characterisation and any kind of witty one-liners.  It says a lot about Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister Jones' (BREAKING UPWARDS) rather earnest, lacklustre script that even the charming Greta Gerwig (DAMSELS IN DISTRESS) can't bring it to life.

Maybe there's something even more fundamentally wrong here?  Even though I have big issues with Lena Dunham's output, there's a way in which when her characters talk about sexually transmitted diseases and hate sex it has the ring of painful truth which is sadly missing in LOLA VERSUS. There's a sense in which we believe in twenty-something angst because we see the characters literally bare themselves in demeaning relationships.  There's none of that willing self-abasement here. 

LOLA VERSUS played Tribeca 2012 and opened earlier this year in the USA. It opens in the UK this weekend. It opens in Turkey on September 7th, in Russia on September 20th, in Estonia on October 5th, in France on November 28th and in Germany on December 13th.

LOLA VERSUS is rated R and has a running time of 87 minutes.

THE KILLER INSIDE ME - They fuck you up, your mum and dad Part Two

Lou Ford is a courteous, softly spoken cop in 1950s Texas. He has a sweetheart called Amy who dotes on him: the townsfolk think he's a stand-up guy. But when he was a kid, Lou's housekeeper got off on his spanking her. And this poor little fucked up kid grew up into the kind of guy who can only express love through violence. Lou is something of an enigma - he is alienated from himself - from real emotional engagement with others - and thus from the viewer. Far more intriguing, from a psychological standpoint, are the two women - his girlfriend and his hooker-mistress - who love him. It's mysterious that they love such an emotionally avoidant man - let alone that they continue to do so despite suffering at his hands. Maybe they too were fucked up by their parents? Maybe it's just another case of people being attracted to people whose pathologies enable their own.

Whatever the answer, this is not the kind of film that deals in straightforward answers. Rather, Michael Winterbottom gives us a more or less faithful adaptation of the celebrated pulp novel from Jim Thompson - its triumphs and failures in tact. The film works best as a sinister mood piece, anchored by the superb central performance of Casey Affleck and embedded in superlative production design. I was genuinely surprised that actresses known best for fluffy rom-coms - Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson - would want to appear in such a film, and yet more surprised to see how well they acted in the demanding supporting roles as Lou's mistress and girlfriend respectively. They really hold their own against a supporting cast of the calibre of Ned Beatty and Elias Koteas. This movie is worth watching for the quality of the performances and the cinematography alone.

Nonetheless, this is a flawed film. Yes, there's a crime caper that propels the plot, and some faint dramatic tension between the unions, big business, and a cover up, but this movie is basically a psycho-drama. The fault of the piece lies in the fact that, as psycho-drama, it always holds the viewer at a distance from the motivations of the three key characters. This makes for a frustrating film - a teasing provocation.

One final word about the violence in the movie. THE KILLER INSIDE ME got a lot of press coverage in the UK on account of its graphic depiction of violence against women. Moreover, the movie was accused of misogyny on the grounds that the women in the movie apparently get off on being victimised. To my mind, THE KILLER INSIDE ME is not at the extremes of graphic violence in cinema. Viewers used to the cinema of Haneke or Noe will have seen far worse. Moreover, there is no sense in which this film is "torture porn". Winterbottom's intentions are manifestly earnest. I also find accusations of misogyny misplaced. Yes, the fact that these women go back for more is disturbing. But surely the movie/book are saying something about a particular psychopathology - and in this case it happens to involve the man as sadist and women as masochists. But there is no general point to be made about the role of men and women in such relationships. After all, just look at the dependent relationship between Johnny Papas and Lou.

Additional tags: Mags Arnold, Melissa Parmenter, Tom Bower, Simon Baker, Liam Aiken, Jay R Ferguson, Jim Thompson

THE KILLER INSIDE ME played Sundance and Berlin 2010 and is currently on release in the UK, USA and Denmark. It opens next weekend in South Korea. It opens in August in Belgium and France; in September in Switzerland, Greece and Taiwan; in Finland and the Netherlands in October.

SURVEILLANCE - when weird trumps conventional judgment

SURVEILLANCE is a deeply bizarre film that works against all probability. It's directed by Jennifer Lynch who is known, if at all, for being David Lynch's daughter and for directing the bizarre flick BOXING HELENA - a movie so odd Kim Basinger tangled with lawyers to avoid it. Years later, and Lynch is back with a movie that starts off as a conventional horror flick. Two serial killers savagely kill a sleeping couple pre-credits and then disappear into the night. Post-credits, two Feds turn up to interrogate the survivors - an eerily observant young girl; a coked-up teenager; and a dodgy state cop. The title of the flick alludes to the fact that the Feds hook up surveillance cameras to watch the interrogation, but not a lot's made of it. Rather, the movie plays like a thriller in which the corrupt cop and the coked-up teen evade their interrogators, and the Feds try to extract information from the kid. Anyone who knows anything about horror movies will guess the plot twist - the "whodunnit" - miles before the ending. But the movie actually gains in interest after that. Because just how the serial killers are entrapping their victims, and just what they do to them when they get them, is so bizarre it's transfixing, despite the balls-out ridiculous performance from the parties involved.  There's also mild enjoyment to be had from the sub-David-Lynchian tropes his daughter has adopted - Feds with eccentric mannerisms and a nihilistic world in which the powers that should be protecting you are typically the most frightening of all.

SURVEILLANCE played Cannes 2008 and was released last year in Portugal, France, Germany and Austria. It opened earlier this year in Croatia and the Netherlands and is currently on release in the UK. It opens in the US on June 26th.

Juatifiably overlooked DVD of the month - YOU KILLED ME

John Dahl (ROUNDERS) tries very hard to create a stylish noir romantic-comedy but fails by a whisker. He wants to make us laugh at the bleak and bizarre coupling of a old recovering-alcoholic hitman (Ben Kingsley) and his younger girlfriend (Tea Leoni), as mediated by his sweet-as-pie mentor (Luke Wilson.) The script is occasionally funny, but by far neither funny nor insightful enough. Moreover, the movie doesn't have the distinct visual flair or truly balls-out bleak humour of IN BRUGES. Fatally, Ben Kingsley had no real chemistry with Tea Leoni, who, by the way, was by far the most impressive person in this film. Her laid back, dry, rather desperate line-readings were absolutely spot on, but even then, not enough reason to watch this film.

YOU KILL ME played Cannes 2007 and went on cinematic release last year. It is available on DVD.

SCARY MOVIE 4 - less funny than just watching Tom Cruise

SCARY MOVIE 4 is not a satire on horror movies. It is a string of vague pastiches of recent films and events in popular culture that centre on the Tom Cruise vehicle, WAR OF THE WORLDS. It certainly isn't scary and spends little time spoofing the horror genre in the manner of the infinitely superior SHAUN OF THE DEAD. One of the sight gags consists of a cloud shaped like an arse farting lightning. If that makes you laugh, and good for you if it does, then you should check this movie out. To my mind, the chief targets of this movie - George Bush and Tom Cruise - are so easy to mock that the movie's writers have set themselves all too undemanding a target. What's worse, they have opted for low-grade funnies rather than anything more biting. Frankly, you can get a lot more malicious laughter from watching the actual Tom on Oprah footage or the banned episode of South Park, both of which are available on You Tube. A link to the first is underneath the title of this post. Enjoy!

SCARY MOVIE 4 is on global release.

ALIEN AUTOPSY - sporadically funny, usually dull, British "comedy"

The ALIEN AUTOPSY of the title refers to the mythic footage that was supposedly taken at a US army base in the 1940s. The footage apparently shows army officials disecting an alien. Fast forward to 1995. A British chancer called Ray Santili allegedly uncovers this footage and sells it to the world's TV stations, where it is greeted with awe and then scepticism. Fast forward to 2006, and now, for your viewing pleasure, we have ALIEN AUTOPSY, the movie: a low budget British comedy about the infamous hoax.

I have to admit that this movie is far better than we had any right to expect given that it stars two British "entertainers" called "Ant and Dec" - self-styled cheeky Geordie chappies who have fashioned a career in Light Entertainment. True to their TV form, Ant and Dec inject a sort of low-key sporadic humour to the film - especially in the scenes where the hapless crew re-shoot the autopsy while the Gran passes round sausages on sticks. And, for all people forced to live in and around the 1970s horror that is the Barbican, there is a sustained joke at the expense of the Museum of London: surely the most ugly and pointless of London's tourist attractions. Lovely. But I just felt that a lot of great comic talent had been wasted. Why hire Jimmy Carr and Omid Djalili and then give them nothing to do? Whenever the movie strays out of Islington - to the house of a laughably bad Hungarian mafiosi, for instance - it becomes deathly dull. Worse still, Ant and Dec look hopelessly out-of-depth when sharing screen time with screen-legend Harry Dean Stanton. Stanton acts everybody else off the screen and spends most of his time looking like a deeply pissed-off refugee from a better movie. What possibly induced Harry Dean Stanton to appear in such mediocre fare?

ALIEN AUTOPSY goes on release in the UK on April 7th 2006.

DEAR WENDY - Billy Elliot goes Gangsta!

DEAR WENDY tells the tale of a bunch of losers in mid-town America. The kids club together and found The Dandies - a club for pacifists who dress well, read poetry..... They also meet in darkened mines, learn everything they can about guns and become crack-shot shooters. Crucially, though, they never fire a gun in "open warfare". The key is to allow the fascination with guns and mastery of them to be empowering rather destructive. And empowered they are. The kids find friendship, community, self-respect - they start playing music again (largely, bizarrely, 60s hits by The Zombies). Their guns become their girlfriends, named, beloved. The kids get laid, get tits, get top hats. Yes, yes. Into this off-whack self-help group steps a black kid called Sebastian. He makes a move on Dickie's gun, his girl and his gang. Is it any surprise that in a movie populated by armed-up, sexually frustrated, jealous teens, it all ends in a gun-fight and tears before bedtime?

This being a Lars von Trier-scripted film, the America of DEAR WENDY is somewhat off whack. Poor white miners can afford to hire black maids and kids drink tea. Perhaps even more bizarre than drinking tea, these US kids sometimes affect a "Brideshead stutter" - mimicking fictional toff and cult figure, Antony Blanche! I mean, seriously, how many mid-western teens have even heard of a novel about a bunch of Catholic aristo repressed homosexuals? Other Trier-isms include the fact that the destructive violence is introduced by a young black kid. And on one level, much as he denies it in interviews, I am sure he would love for this movie to be read as a searing indictment of America's gun culture as well as Bush's foreign policy. A bunch of insecure people armed up and firing first out of fear and misunderstanding. Iraq, anyone?!

But this movie is better than the recent von Trier agitprop. This is because DEAR WENDY is directed by Thomas Vinterberg, one of my favourite directors. He came to notice with the haunting drama Festen, which won, among other things, the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. Handed a dry polemic fuelled by conceptual hocus-pocus, Vinterberg breathed life into the script. The sets are great and shot with intimacy on hi-def video. The kids all invest the film with energy and goofiness. Don't get me wrong - DEAR WENDY is not a dramatic tour-de-force - but it's a perfectly enjoyable coming-of-age story and not as pretentious as the reviews suggest

Best of all, the message of the film, if there is one, is rather the opposite to what the US critics would have you believe. I find the film to be an indictment of liberals who deceive themselves that they are pacifists and immune to the allure of guns, while being as vulernable to gun culture as paid-up members of the NRA. The directer himself was raised in a honest-to-goodness hippie commune in Denmark, where "gun" was a dirty word, and admits to his fascination with guns. Moreover, the movie indicts Dickie, the leader of the gang, for trying to "dandify" Sebastian, the convicted criminal. If there is a moral to this film, it is that liberals should cut the crap, admit how beholden they are to gun culture, and stop talking about redeeming society of violence. The ultimate gunfight is inevitable. America may be damned, but so if everyone else.

DEAR WENDY premiered at Sundance 2005, went on limited cinematic release over the summer and is now available on region 1 and region 2 DVD. The movie cost $8m to make and took $100,000 on theatrical release. This should not be taken as an indication of its quality.