MARTY SUPREME*****

MARTY SUPREME is a gonzo caper about a narcissistic arsehole who will exploit everyone and everything to fulfil his dream. The challenge for writer-director Josh Sadie is to make us root for him, and maybe even like him, nonetheless.

Timothee Chalamet stars as the titular protagonist Marty Mauser - an acne-scarred hen-pecked shoe-salesman who dreams of travelling to England to become a champion table-tennis player.  Destroyed in that final by his Japanese opponent, the balance of the film sees Marty try to con and finagle his way into enough cash to go to Japan for the rematch, including but not limited to getting a schlubby put-upon live-at-home man called Dion to produce branded table-tennis balls called the "Marty Supreme", and conning a mafiosi (improbably played by Abel Ferrara) whose dog he was sitting, while also being on the lam from some white hick racists and a psychopathic rural farmer. And that's before we even get to Marty's two love interests: the  woman who loves him - his pregnant childhood friend turned lover played by Odessa A'Zion - and the woman who sees right through him - a faded starlet and trapped trophy wife played by Gywneth Paltrow. 

As that attempt at a synopsis might suggest, MARTY SUPREME is an absurd film, over-stuffed with memorable characters and crazy plot-twists.  It picks you up and takes you on a breathtakingly audacious ride. The running time is long but it never flags, thanks partly to pairing the 1950s setting with a superb 1980s synth-pop heavy soundtrack, just because.  But behind all of its craziness, there's depth.

We are in the mid-1950s, and the world is still recovering from the horrors and bigotry of World War Two. Everyone is shocked that Marty's Japanese opponent is allowed to travel given the recent travel-ban; Marty's good friend and competitor is a Holocaust survivor; and Marty will even exploit his prison camp experience to distract a love-rival.  There's also something to the idea of a film that posits a world of extreme self-actualisation. Marty is the ultimate fake it till you make it manipulative showman, who wants a woman just because she's a symbol of success.  In a weird way his charm is that while he IS manipulative he is also strangely honest.  He just can't help himself from mocking Gywneth Paltrow's heartbroken starlet for sleeping with him. He barely acknowledges anybody's wants and needs above his own, although does seem to have some kind of heavily submerged set of core values. He punches his pregnant lover's husband, saying "shame on you" and seems to mean it. I think he really does seem to see some talent in Dion and root for him.

The only weakness of the film is that Josh Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein decide to give Marty a transformative and perhaps even redemptive moment at the end of the movie.  I think I might have preferred if they had kept him as he was, but I cannot deny that I had an amazing time watching the film nonetheless.  This is full speed ahead, full commitment film-making.  Josh Safdie and Marty Mauser are as one. 

MARTY SUPREME is rated R and has a running time of 150 minutes. It will be released on Christmas Day in the USA and Boxing Day in the UK.

MICKEY 17*****

MICKEY 17 is Korean writer-director Bong Joon Ho's much anticipated follow-up to his Oscar-winning political satire, PARASITE. Once again, his concerns are with economic inequality and political hypocrisy, and as with PARASITE, MICKEY 17 contains moments of trenchant laughter.  But the mood here is lighter, zanier, looser, and altogether more.... gonzo than PARASITE.  The political satire is broad and crude, the violence is ultra, but at heart this is a gorgeous love story and a plea for humanity.

Robert Pattinson continues to make astonishingly good career choices and stars as the eponymous Mickey.  He's basically a harmless but feckless and aimless man in a near-future dystopia.  On the run from mafia loansharks, abetted by his supposed best mate Timo (Steven Yeun), Mickey stupidly signs up to be an Expendable.  He is basically an indentured slave to an exploitative space colonisation mission, put in harms way, killed again and again, and then just reprinted out.  As the film opens, we are on the seventeenth iteration.

Joy of joys! Feckless Mickey somehow falls in love and lust with Naomie Ackie's kickass space-cop Nasha and she loves him back! In fact, I would read this film as a love story most of all.  Improbable, hilarious, sexy, weird, but a love story nonetheless. But things get weird when Mickey 17 is somehow alive at the same time as his sassier, more mischievous reprint Mickey 18.  And both set out to rise up against the kleptocratic rule of a character clearly based on Trump, with a Macchiavellian wife modelled on Imelda Marcos.  Mark Ruffalo seems to be reprising his role in POOR THINGS here, but it's a no less fun turn for that.   But the star of the show is clearly Pattinson.  And the the Creepers. I won't say more for fear of spoiling the plot but I would pay a LOT of money for a plushy that looks like a baby creeper.

MICKEY 17 has a running time of 137 minutes and is rated R. It is on global release.

BARDO - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 4

What a pile of narcissistic pretentious wank this film is! And what a waste of talent! What a waste of Inarritu and Khondji's kinetic, fluid camerawork and mastery of cinema! What a waste of a chance to truly explore the relationship of celebrity to art, and of Mexico to America!

It must be said that I have never been a fan of these sorts of masturbatory solipstic films about film-making. Everything that needed to be said about this was said by Fellini in 8 1/2 and even that film strains at my sympathy. But with BARDO, Inarritu has truly gone through the looking glass.

The film opens with a visually ravishing and playful scene of an unseen man - presumably the director's avatar Silverio Gama (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) taking massive leaps over the Mmexican desert. It had a fantastical feel similar to BIRDMAN and I thought, okay, this is going to be fun!

We then transition into a scene where the director is now waiting for his wife to give birth, but apparently the baby decides the world is too fucked up and instructs the doctor to pop him back in. This we see. It's surreal, darkly comic, and I was still thinking, okay, this is going to be fun!

But we then move into the main body of the film which sees the director move through contemporary Mexico in preparation for a high profile American award. He seems disengaged and childishly refuses to co-operate with the people preparing him for the ceremony. He has a fractious relationship with his son who has been raised largely in America. And he has a fractious relationship with his homeland, which he sees as being conquered again, but this time economically rather than militarily.

It all meanders along with surreal scenes interspersed with banal family drama. At one point his wife is running around the flat, tits out, for no apparent reason, and Inarritu delights in showing us the aforementioned baby hanging out of her for no reason other than to provoke? It all felt rather childish and indulgent and pointless, but of course lensed beautifully.

I feel that within this three hour pointless dream-world there's a really taut 90 minute political satire about the commercialisation and erosion of journalistic values and the economic dependency of Mexico on America. But that's not the film Inarritu wanted to make.  What we end up with is the feeling of a director who is in a zipless fuck with his Mexican heritage. He doesn't actually want to engage with its colonial past or present. He wants to safely skate upon the surface of things. The result is an utterly superficial, uninvolving, unengaging meditation on ego.

BARDO has a running time of 174 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice, Telluride, Busan and the BFI London Film Festival. It will be released on Netflix on December 16th.

UNCUT GEMS

UNCUT GEMS is perhaps the most unique and certainly one of the best films of 2019 - a surreal, 80s-vibe, darkly comic thriller, in which against all probability I became insanely invested in the largely self-inflicted travails of its hero Howard.  As played by Adam Sandler in a role reminiscent of his angry-loveable PUNCH DRUNK LOVE intensity, Howard has a life of unremitting stress. He's broken up from his wife (Idina Menzel) but still enmeshed in Jewish family dinners.  He's set up his mistress in a city apartment.  His diamond business is doing well thanks to the big music and sports buyers his middle-man (Lakeith Stanfield) brings in, and he's just been smuggled a super-valuable rock containing uncut gems. The problem is that Howard also has a massive gambling problem, and spends the entirety of the film's running time trying to fence the gems to pay the debt.  Oh yeah, and did I mention he finances his ever more gargantuan bets with mob loans?  

I was initially reluctant to watch this film because I'd heard such extreme reactions at the London Film Festival. People said it was nerve-wracking and intense - like having Adam Sandler just shout at you for two hours.  But I was pleasantly surprised at how funny the film was, and how the directors really did give the audience a chance to pause and recalibrate every once in a while - usually in a quieter family scene.  But the final act really is super-tense, and just phenomenally well crafted and I was literally on the edge of my seat. I was hugely invested in whether Howard would come through, despite his stupidity, because at the end of the day, the poor idiot is an addict, and actually he's not an idiot - there's something really impressive about his ability to keep spinning stories to keep his debtors at bay.  This is Sandler's best performance since PUNCH DRUNK and I was with him every step of the way. It's hard to think of anyone else carrying off this performance.

Phenomenal performance apart, everything about the production and costume design, the cinematography and the use of music is superb. Darius Khondji gives us  images that are at times gritty and urban-realist and at times claustrophobic and surreal and at times neon-lit 80s music video.  It's like being in a film that's at once recognisably the diamond district and at once something almost fairy-tale like.  Most of all, the Safdie Brothers have a confidence with tonal shifts that take us from casinos to auction houses and back again. This film is a tour de force and deserves to be seen. It also deserves far more awards love than it has been given.  

UNCUT GEMS is rated R and has a running time of 135 minutes.  The film played Telluride, Toronto and London 2019 and is now available to stream on Netflix. 

London Film Fest 2012 Day 4 - AMOUR

AMOUR is a typically austere, unflinching and technically formal Michael Haneke film.  His camera faces the protagonists head on and does not move, refusing to follow the action off screen, waiting for it to return to the original set-up.  As an audience, we are forced into that same immobility.  We are forced to slow ourselves down to the pace of this film, to live inside the four walls of the apartment, and endure what the protagonists endure.  

They are an old married couple (Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva) , still sympathetic, still vital, until she suffers a stroke and a failed reparative operation.  Promising not to take her to hospital again, and repulsed by the brusque carers, he takes on the burden of her care.  We feel her anger and indignity.  We feel his frustration and hopelessness.  Their daughter (Isabelle Huppert) also suffers but her pat solutions seem distance from the reality of her parents' situation. As with all Haneke, a quiet tension builds until a provocative final resolution.  It is a resolution that we have been guessing at and fearing since the prologue.  That it comes as less of a surprise does mt diminish it's force. 

That said, I did not find this film as convincingly deserving of its Palme d'Or as Haneke's THE WHITE RIBBON.  I felt that there was some repetition and tedium during its middle passage. Did we really, for instance, need so much time with Isabelle Huppert's character? Did we really need to see two nurses.  The film also felt a little bit like it didn't know how to end, and the scene that was finally chosen seemed somehow "small" in the context of the powerful emotions that proceeded it.

Still, Haneke that is not quite at the level of perfection of THE WHITE RIBBON and HIDDEN is still quality film-making, and after all we have something here That we do not see so often in his films, and perhaps in life: dangerously selfless love.

AMOUR  played Cannes 2012 where it won the Palme d'Or, and London 2012. It opened earlier this year in Germany, Hungary and Greece, and opens on Oct 24th in Belgium, france, Russia and Italy. It opens in Poland on Nov 2; in the Netherlands and the UK on Nov 16; in Sweden on Nov 23; in Portugal on Nov 29; in the USA on Dec 19; and in Denmark and Norway on Dec 25th.

The running time is 127 minutes.

TO ROME WITH LOVE

TO ROME WITH LOVE is a rather mediocre, derivative, Woody Allen movie - a portmanteau of four stories, neither of which is especially interesting, well-acted or well-developed.  The only real link is that they all take place in Rome - there isn't a link between them - either through the characters or thematically, as far as I can tell. 

The most ill-fitting of the four stories, by virtue of the fact that it's in Italian and also because it isn't romantic but whimsical-philosophical, centres on an ordinary Joe (Roberto Benigni) who suddenly becomes famous for no reason he can see. It's kind of an inverse Josef K situation - and a wry comment on the fatuousness of modern celebrity culture - and reminded  me of early Woody Allen movies where a fantastical idea was worked out to it's ludicrous extreme. The problem is that the story makes a rather simplistic point, and doesn't really take it anywhere.

The story I found simultaneously the best and worst features Woody Allen himself back in an acting role, as a cynical retired impresario who puts his daughter's Italian father-in-law on the stage. Problem is, this simple mortician can only sing when he's in the shower. It's meant to be fantastic and funny but fell rather flat for me. The only redeeming feature was Judy Davis, cast once again as Woody Allen's wife.  She gets the only really funny one-liners of the whole film.

Next up, we have Jesse Eisenberg playing a young Woody Allen character - an unsatisfied cynic who cheats on his earnest girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) with her flighty, flirty best friend (Ellen Page). I really hated this segment, mainly because the romantic triangle is well-worn in Woody Allen; second, because I thought Ellen Page was woefully miscast as the femme fatale; and third, the conceit of having Alec Baldwin play a devil on the shoulder of Jesse Eisenberg's character also just fell flat.

Finally, we have the weakest story of the bunch.  A young Italian couple lose each other - she flirts with an elderly actor and he gets entangled with the cliché Woody Allen brassy whore (Penelope Cruz.) No laughs, no insights, no point.

All in all, after his recent good run, this is an utterly worthless and mirthless movie.  We've seen all this done before - and better. Most of all, it's disappointing to see Jesse Eisenberg wasted on such poor material.  He's an actor who seems to have been playing Woody Allen all his life.

TO ROME WITH LOVE opened earlier this year in Italy, the USA, Argentina, Brazil, Norway, Uruguay, Belgium, France, Israel, Russia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Iceland, Mexico, Denmark, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Hungary, Finland, Greece and India. It opens this weekend in the UK, Ireland and Lithuania. It opens next weekend in Portugal, Singapore, Estonia and Spain. It opens on September 28th in Taiwan and Turkey; on November 9th in Bulgaria; and on December 20th in New Zealand.

CHERI - luscious frou-frou with too sporadic flashes of psychological insight

Stephen Frears is an uneven director. Occasionally he makes devastating, gritty dramas chronicling the savagery of life and love, viz. DIRTY PRETTY THINGS, MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDERETTE. But most of the time, he makes luscious costume dramas that skate delicately over deeper, unexplored issues, and seem primarily conceived for the heritage industry. They are the cinematic equivalent of those cheap tea-towels and mugs you can buy near Marble Arch and on Piccadilly, embossed with pictures of Princess Diana. In this category, I place works like MRS HENDERSON PRESENTS and THE QUEEN. Very rarely, Frears directs a movie that combines luscious cinematography and costumes with real psychological weight, viz. DANGEROUS LIASONS. So where does CHERI fit into this typography? Sadly, mostly in the luscious frou-frou category, although there are flashes of psychological insight in the final scenes.

Based on the novels by French author, Colette, CHERI chronicles the affair between a middle-aged high-class courtesan, Lea, and a twenty-year old bored fop, Cheri. They live together for six years, up-ending conventional social mores. She pays for and keeps him, organises everything, and takes the dominant role. He is the kept woman. The affair ends when his spiteful mother, a former rival of his lover, arranges his marriage to a wealthy young girl. Lea is gracious and lets him go, even, in extremis, giving him the moral courage to make a life with his wife, knowing that, in her old age, she cannot keep him. But, for both of them, this pragmatic decision will prove a moral disaster - because they really were in love.

The resulting film is beautiful to behold, the costumes, locations and colour schemes speak of luxury, indulgence, over-ripe summers and a true belle-epoque. Alexandre Desplat's score is similarly delicious. One would never tell that the characters were living on the verge of the First World War and in a time of increasingly radical politics. Michelle Pfeiffer looks lovely as Lea, and perfectly captures the fact that a well-preserved fifty-year old can look ravishing but can also, in unforgiving light, look gaunt and care-worn. The final scene, where she coolly appraises her lined face in a mirror, is chilling and touching. Every woman can relate. Rupert Friend is similarly well-cast as Cheri. He is similarly beautiful and captures the cynicism of a dandy who is bored with the champagne life but also too lazy and vapid to commit to anything more profound. He does a tremendously good job of making a superficial character likeable. The supporting characters are also well-cast with the exception of Kathy Bates - a brilliant actress but just not convincing as an ageing former beauty and about 10 years too old for the role.

The substantial problem with the movie is that it skates over the deeper psychological insights of the novel - the torment is too tepid - and makes nothing of the characters' isolated self-absorption as a grand metaphor for the society that would be swept away by the war. Stylistically, there was too much exposition, largely in the form of a clumsy voice-over narration from Frears himself. It seemed to hint at the style of JULES AND JIM but was clumsy, unnecessary and its trite tone undercut the emotional heft of the story.

CHERI played Berlin 2009 and is currently on release in the UK, Belgium and France. It opens in the Netherlands and the USA on June 26th and in Germany on August 27th. It opens in Finland on September 11th, in Norway on October 2nd, in Portugal on October 8th, in Russia on October 15th and in Spain on November 6th.

STEALING BEAUTY - interactive voyeurism

Disturbingly leery film in which a variety of men and women are transfixed by a virginal American teen staying in Tuscany. The voyeurism hinted at in the title begins in the opening credits when our protagonist (Liv Tyler) is stealthily photographed on a plane to Sienna. It continues as the old bohemians speculate about her losing her virginity and implicates the viewer as we're forced to watch her being deflowered. This is after we've sat through two hours of flirting with a terminally ill Jeremy Irons and a whole bunch of teen angst, condensed into mind-numbingly juvenile poems. It's all left me asking, "So what?" This being a Bertolucci film it looks fantastic, of course, but without the political context or deep psychosexual drama of THE DREAMERS and LAST TANGO it all seems rather thin.

STEALING BEAUTY played Cannes 1996 and was released that year. It is available on DVD.

FUNNY GAMES U.S. - who gets the last laugh?

FUNNY GAMES U.S. is Michael Haneke's shot-for-shot remake of his 1997 post-modern horror flick in which two polite teenage boys torture an affluent family for no reason other than to entertain themselves. The genius of the original film and this English-language remake is to create an atmosphere of stomach-churning tension without actually showing us any gory violence. Our imaginations fill in the blank between the scared reaction shots and the blood-spattered TV set. As a slow-burn thriller of almost unbearable tension, FUNNY GAMES is hard to beat. After all, what is more frightening than an evil that we cannot reason with? It's for this reason that I find the HOSTEL movies laughably unthreatening. If someone wants to sell me to a torturer, I'll simply offer more money. No, what's really terrifying is a situation in which I have simply no language in which to communicate with my kidnapper - no purchase on his conscience or on his wallet. The final shot of a torturer holding our eyes unashamed is brilliantly frightening.

On one level, we can simply watch FUNNY GAMES U.S. as a brilliantly executed thriller. But Haneke wants us to question our enjoyment of the experience. He does this by having one of the torturers break the fourth wall and directly question the audience. Not only is he torturing the couple, he is trying to make us feel bad for enjoying our voyueurism.

I have to say that I find this trite post-modernism rather simplistic and condascending. I feel no shame in enjoying a movie like FUNNY GAMES qua horror movie. I find it cathartic. I do not enjoy it as a voyueur but as an intelligent, affluent, comfortable woman who can empathise with the situation of the family in the film and who is working out her fear of social change through the experience. So who gets the last laugh? The director who tries to under-cut our enjoyment of his masterpiece with his hectoring, or the audience, who can choose to dismiss such foolishness and get a brilliant thriller anyway?

FUNNY GAMES U.S. played London 2007 and Sundance 2008. It was released in Canada, the USA and Greece earlier this year. It is currently on release in Finland and the UK and opens later this month in Israel, Singapore, Belgium, Norway, Frnace and Sweden. It opens in May in Portugal, Russia, the Netherlands and Germany. It opens in Romania in June and in Spain in July.

A partial review of MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS

Wong Kar Wai has made some great movies in the past, not least the pantheon film, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE. His movies are known for their lavish attention to production design; beautiful women in stunning dresses and the mesmerising control of Christopher Doyle's cinematography. They also contain some out the great performances of Asian cinema, not least Tony Leung in IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE and 2046. Sadly, MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS, his first English-language, American-set movie, is a travesty. In fact. I walked out of MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS after forty-five minutes. I had wanted to leave after ten minutes, but willed myself to keep sitting there, hoping that the movie would pick up. It didn't.

The problems are manifold. The script has no narrative drive; characters speak in banalities; Norah Jones, Rachel Weisz and David Strathairn over-act; one suspects that Norah Jones actually cannot act; Jude Law can't maintain a Northern English accent; Rachel Weisz can't do a Southern American accent; Darius Khondji's cinematography is deliberately stylised but looks cheap and amateurish (how many ways can you film someone through a window or reflected in glass, or shot from a CCTV camera?).....Net result: I had zero interest in continuing to watch Norah Jones' heartbroken waitress drifting through different bars, moping at various uninteresting characters.

Essentially, this is a movie that is badly written, badly acted and badly filmed.

MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS opened Cannes 2007 and was released in Canada, Finland, France, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, Greece, China, Singapore and Estonia in 2007. It opened earlier in 2008 in Hong Kong, Latvia, Turkey, Russia, Switzerland and Bulgaria. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in March in South Korea, Colombia, Argentina, Italy, Brazil and Japan. Finally, it gets a limited release in the US on April 4th.

THE INTERPRETER - over-reaching ambition sinks this thriller

THE INTERPRETER is the worst of all things - an over-long, flabby, dull thriller that fails to excite, enthrall or build up any tension. The idea is that Nicole Kidman is a translator at the United Nations building in New York. One night she overhears a plot on the life of an African president. She goes to the police with this, but comes under suspicion herself. So the movie becomes a bog-standard whodunnit, albeit with pretensions at more overt political subject matter, which it largely manages to dance around. For me, this movie was a noble failure. Despite the great photography of the United Nations building, I kept being brought out of the movie by three things. First, Sean Penn's hammy acting (he seems to be turning into a parody of himself, much like Al Pacino). Second, Nicole Kidman's fluctuating South African accent. One cannot help but wonder how far the film's credibility would have been improved if they had cast Charlize Theron - a brilliant actress who is actually South African. Third, there are a number of plot points, which if not exactly plot holes, certainly stretch credulity. These include who has access cards to different parts of the UN, why a President at risk of an assassination attempt would be left alone, how come Sean Penn can get in the safe room with just a key....And don't even get me started on the ridiculousness of the ending. Nicole Kidman used to be a flag for a good film - I almost always trusted that if she had opted to be in a film then it had a good script and production team. But it seems that of late her radar has been off and THE INTERPRETER only confirms my view. So, as much as it pains me to say this of a Sydney Pollock movie starring Penn, Kidman and Catherine Keener, this is probably one to avoid.

THE INTERPRETER is on global release.