ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD

Quentin Tarantino's ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD is a triumph.  Indeed it may be my favourite of his films since the superlative JACKIE BROWN.  It's a love letter to old Hollywood, and drips with compassion for fading stars, and indulges in nostalgia for the days when radio stations were the soundtrack of our lives.  The movie stars Leonardo Di Caprio as Rick Dalton  - a fictional TV star of the 50s and 60s whose career is in the doldrums because of his age and alcoholism.  As a portrait of the fickle callousness of the star system, it's a moving film. There isn't much that's honourable or likeable in Rick, but he's our idiot, and to see him bested in his art and conversation by a child star (Trudi - a scene-stealing Julia Butters) is to weep for him. To see him lured by the quick cash of Spaghetti Westerns and saddled with a young wife is to laugh at our own frailty. He's an idiot, but we care that he's okay.  And we care largely because of the most humanising thing about him - his long and loyal friendship to his stuntman/driver/buddy Cliff Booth. In a career-best performance from Brad Pitt, Cliff is just a decent no bullshit kind of a guy. He's tough.  We see him beat up Bruce Lee in one of the most hilarious scenes in the film, and we hear rumours about a potentially murderous past, so the final showdown is well within the realms of his capabilities, despite his being high as a kite. There's something so tragic about his life in a mobile van, heating up tinned food, and something so likeable about his seeming indifference to it.  He's just a good guy. We see this too in his care for Bruce Dern's Spahn - exploited owner of the ranch in which the Manson Family are living. Which of course brings us to the other story in this film...

I think a lot of us came to this film thinking it was going to be a film about the Manson Murders and it's kind of discombobulating realising that it isn't really. We only meet Manson in one scene, and barely see Polanski from a distance at a party.  Polanski and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) live next door to Rick, but their lives are largely separate.   And what of Tate?  She's barely given the same screen time or depth of character as the two male leads. She's just a sunny happy dancing blonde, exciting to see herself on screen, in a scene that will give anyone who knows about Tarantino's foot fetish the creeps.  I felt sad for Robbie, who has nothing to do in this film, but really sad for Sharon Tate, who apparently isn't worthy of an inner life.  We do see the events of that fateful night play out. The way in plays out won't surprise people who've seen Tarantino's recent films.  It's really fucking entertaining.  But...

ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD is rated R and has a running time of 119 minutes.  The film played Cannes 2019 and went on global release last summer. It is now available to stream, rent and own.

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.

KILLER JOE - some thoughts from Bina007

KILLER JOE is a visceral and provocative trash-noir film from director William Friedkin - most famous for THE EXORCIST - but more similar in tone to his more recent tour-de-force examination of mutual psychosis, BUG. Shot in three weeks on a $10m budget, KILLER JOE has a similarly creepy, violent, sexually tense, sleazy atmosphere, and is similarly tightly written - and it comes as no surprise that both movies were based on plays written by Tracy Letts, of Steppenwolf Theater fame. 

The movie focusses on a messed up southern family - dumb naive father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church); sexually provocative stepmother Sharla (Gina Gershon); failed drug-dealer son Chris (Emile Hirsch) and the apparently mentally disturbed daughter Dottie (Juno Temple).  The family live in a trailer, want to bump off Ansel's first wife for the insurance money, and hire Matthew McConaughey's Killer Joe to do the job. Trouble is, he wants more than money - he wants the sexually naive Dottie.

The resulting thriller is both a film of double crosses in the standard style, but also a psychological drama about Dottie (Juno Temple) - her violent childhood; her twisted virginity; her seduction; her escape.  More widely, it's about Killer Joe bringing the entire family under his control, resulting in the two set piece scenes of sexual power - the aforementioned with Dottie, that's really at the centre of the film - and the second, likely to become the film's notorious calling card, involving Sharla and a piece of fried chicken.

It's no surprise to find that these scenes have provoked unease in viewers, and in its final reel, the movie really does just go crazy with the violence.  But what I found most disturbing wasn't the movie's violence (particularly toward women) but its humour. Because, make no mistake, this film is funny, particularly in its depiction of caricature  tuna-casserole-eating white-trash.  The genius of the film is, then, Friedkin's ability, to walk the tight-wire between dark comedy, and genuinely horrific violence, in a way that, say, Werner Herzog's BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, didn't.  I also rather like the casting - Juno Temple is particularly impressive as Dottie, but the real genius move is the casting of McConaughey.  Friedkin has realised that McConaughey's too perfect, too manicured beauty is slightly unnerving and creepy, and harnessed that for the Killer Joe persona - the knowing, sleazy, seductive bad cop.

KILLER JOE is on release in the UK. It opens in the USA on July 27th; in Finland on August 10th; in Russia on August 23rd; in France on September 5th; in Belgium on September 26th; and in the Netherlands on November 8th.

KILLER JOE - in which Matthew McConaughey is, for once, not just a pretty face.

This review is brought to you by Alex:

Killer Joe’s US movie poster features a bloodied piece of fried chicken. This probably tells you all you need to know about what to expect from the latest piece by William Friedkin (director; The Exorcist, The French Connection). Based on Tracey Letts’ play and screen adaptation and exploring the seedy underbelly of American society, this film does not disappoint.

The Smith family are archetypal trailer-trash, bit parts straight from an episode of My Name is Earl or Eastbound and Down. The best thing that can be said about father Ansel Smith (Thomas Haden Church) is that he knows he is stupid. Gina Gershon is masterfully cast as his second wife Sharla, as feisty as she’s slutty, and no fan of Ansel’s hapless son Chris from a previous marriage. Juno Temple plays Chris’ younger sibling Dottie.  They concoct a plan to pay off debts owed by the hapless loser Chris to a local loan shark, by arranging for “Killer Joe” to rub out Chris’ mother Adele. Chris plans to collect her life insurance in Dottie’s name. Matthew McConaughey is counter-intuitively cast as Joe, a local policeman who moonlights as an assassin.

Surprisingly, McConaughey doesn’t disappoint and manages to step outside of his typical Rom Com repertoire to play the title role memorably, one part smooth-talking gigolo-cum-southern gentleman, the other part malevolent predator.

Of course, in true film-noir style the plan goes very wrong, and we see the family twist and swing, throttled by the Gordian knot of their situation as it worsens each time they try to fix it once and for all. It’s very enjoyable to watch, and tension builds to a climactic final scene where we learn exactly how sadistic and evil Joe really is.  Violence is unflinching but interspersed with humour, and characters turn on a dime, one moment charismatic, the next skin-crawlingly vile. Friedkin, who I was fortunate enough to hear in Q&A after the premiere, has said that his work is about the thin line between good and evil in us all. It’s a theme the film forces us to reflect upon.

His examination of the subaltern world of the South-Western United States, where even policemen are crooked and feared, suits the director’s tonal nod to Grindhouse cinema. In fact several scenes seem to have come with specific acting direction towards that genre.

Indeed, Kurt Russell’s unexpectedly good turn in Tarantino’s Grindhouse homage “Death Proof” is reminiscent of McConaughey’s role here as the eponymous Joe. Friedkin has really managed to bring something new out of the actor, and he is fun to watch.

The rest of the cast fits snugly into this hybrid noir-trash flick genre, especially the feral Emil Hirsch as Chris (worth checking out in “Into the Wild”). Relative newcomer Juno Temple (soon to be seen in “The Dark Knight Rises”) portrays Dottie superbly, Lolita-like in her innocence and subversive sexual power. It is Dottie’s control over Joe that is the lynchpin of the plot and as such Temple carries a heavy weight on her shoulders. She acquits herself fully.

Richly deserving of its NC-17 rating in the US, Friedkin’s oddball approach to directing will be called violent and misogynist by his critics. I’ll leave that to the reader to decide, but he has managed to imbue inanimate objects (a tin of pineapple chunks, a fried chicken-leg, a watch carefully removed and laid on a table as foreplay to brutality) with trauma in such a way that the viewer can’t fail to be reminded of the roles they play in this film long, after they have left the cinema. This is part of what makes Killer Joe refreshing. I’m sure I’ll be watching it again soon.

KILLER JOE played Venice, Toronto and Sitges 2011, and SXSW 2012. It opens this weekend in the UK, and on July 27th in the USA. It opens on August 10th in Finland; August 23rd in Russia; September 5th in France; September 26th in Belgium; and in the Netherlands on November 8th.

London Film Fest Day 13 - TAKING WOODSTOCK

TAKING WOODSTOCK sees Ang Lee, director of tense, beautiful tragic romances - LUST, CAUTION and BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN - take a step back into gentle comedy. The resulting film is warm-hearted, earnest, occasionally funny, but also somewhat ramshackle, meandering and ultimately, unsatisfying. Interesting characters are given too little screen time in an ensemble film, uninteresting characters are left to over-act wildly, and the third act acid trip is a complete waste of half an hour. Maybe the problem is that Ang Lee doesn't quite have the conviction he needs to make a film about a famous concert that IS NOT a concert film. He wants to tell the story of the family who's run-down motel became the HQ of the organisers and the impact the festival had on them. He wants to make a point about Woodstock being, for most people, about the journey there and the people you met, rather than the concert itself. But Ang Lee does cave in and gives us his protagonist journeying toward the mainstage and getting dragged into acid trips and mud-slides. It's just too much of a tease! Either focus on the motel, or give us the concert, but don't flail around in the mud!

The movie starts of well. We have a likable protagonist called Elliot - a sweet kid, who's compromising on his dream of going to San Francisco because he's helping out on his parent's run-down motel in the Catskills and because he can't quite admit that he's gay. Faced with foreclosure, he decides to invite the Woodstock festival to relocate to his parents' motel and his neighbour's land, when the folks in that town rescind the permit, scared of thousands of freaks showing up. Before you know it, the cash is rolling in and Elliot's conservative parents are surrounded with hippies and beats. Both they, and Elliot, experience many-splendored life, and then the festival rolls of out town.

The period setting and casting are absolutely spot on, with the exception of rather broad performances from Emile Hirsch as Billy and Dan Fogler as Devon, the Earthlight Player. Imelda Staunton and Henry Goodman are particularly good as Elliot's rather flummoxed parents, and Demetri Martin is affable and congenial as Elliot. But the two most interesting characters get way too little screen time. The first is Eugene Levy in a fairly straight performance as farmer Max Yasgur, the guy who actually rented out his fields to the festival. Why was such a provincial farmer so very liberal minded? Fascinating, but unexplored. The second fascinating, but too little explored character, was Vilma, a former US marine turned transvestite, played by Liev Schreiber. What a wonderful character! And what a fascinating nascent relationship with Elliot's father! I would have loved to spend more time with them. But instead we get Ang Lee trying, very clumsily, to speak to Vietnam in the form of the cliche of a battle-traumatised Vietnam vet, and to speak to the counter-culture in the form of a completely pointless acid trip. And when Ang Lee tries to create some real dramatic tension with a final act revelation involving Elliot's mother, it all seems out of tone with the rest of the film. Shame.

TAKING WOODSTOCK played Cannes 2009. It opened earlier this year in the US, Australia, Canada, Sweden, the USA, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, Estonia, France and Spain. It is currently on release in Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore, India, Italy, Taiwan, Belgium and Greece. It opens in the UK on November 6th, in Argentina and Mexico on December 10th and in Brazil on January 15th 2010.

THE AIR I BREATHE - pretentious wank

"I always wondered, when a butterfly leaves the safety of its cocoon, does it realize how beautiful it has become? Or does it still just see itself as a caterpillar?"

Who writes such nonsense? Debut feature director Jieho Lee apparently. The ensuing film, THE AIR I BREATHE, is a deeply unhappy affair.The laborious structure sees four inter-twining stories each focusing on a character whose story, apparently, illustrates an Asian proverb that life is made up of Happiness, Pleasure, Sorrow, and Love. This apparently gives Lee leave to include dialogue as banal as that quoted above. Forest Whitaker plays a naive low-level banker who loses a ton of money in an illicit gambling den and ends up robbing a bank to pay back Andy Garcia's rent-a-mobster. In an inter-related story, the mobster's cocky nephew (Emile Hirsh) is being shepherded through the night by a clairvoyant goon (Brendan Fraser). The goon will end up saving a teen popster (Sarah Michelle Gellar) from the mafiosi, and all the stories are linked when Kevin Bacon's doctor realises the popster has a rare blood type that can save the life of the woman he loves.

The performances fall into two broad camps. Garcia, Whitaker and Hirsch play to type, lazily. Fraser and Gellar are running as fast as they can from their typical screen personae. The script is banal and never matches up to its self-proclaimed profundity. The direction is gimmicky. Need I say more?

THE AIR I BREATHE was released in early 2008 and is available on DVD.

Random DVD Round-Up 5 - IMAGINARY HEROES

Derivative and poorly directed drama about a disfuntional suburban family dealing with teen suicide is elevated by strong performances by matriarch Sigourney Weaver and a troubled young Emile Hirsch.

IMAGINARY HEROES played Toronto 2004 and was released in 2004 and 2005. It is available on DVD.

Random DVD Round-Up 1 - THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR is only interesting because it contains early performances from actors who would later go on to do interesting things: Emile Hirsch, Paul Dano and Timothy Olyphant. Elisha Cushbert however, does what she did in that awful teen slasher flick - pander to teen fantasies in films of dubious quality and sleazy morals.

Hirsh plays a nerdy schoolkid who falls for the girl next door. Turns out she's a porn star. So he, cajoled by his crass buddies, assumes she's easy and takes her to a hotel room, and she, being a classic movie hooker/porn star with a heart of gold, gets offended. The whole plot then grinds on for another interminable hour.

Grim.

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR was released in 2004 and is available on DVD.

Remember when you were a kid and you drank too much cheap cherry cola too fast? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you SPEED RACER

From the makers of THE MATRIX comes a new feature length adaptation of the classic Japanese TV kids cartoon SPEED RACER. It's a technically brilliant movie that beautifully renders the futuristic-kitsch of the speed racer world. The costumes and sets are all acid-bright colours, '50s americana and the shooting style is high-octane in every sense. Camera angles swoop and glide around the racing track and the editing is out-standing. Talking heads rotate as background shots cut in and out - kids' daydreams become gonzo animated - and even the narrative cuts in and out of the past and present with hold-on-to-your-hats speed.

Take, for example, the bravura opening sequence. Over the course of a car race, we are shown the back story of the characters. Rex Racer, is a champion racing driver, idolised by is kid brother Speed. But Rex decides to leave Pops Racer and sign with a corporate sponsor. Soon, he's using dirty tricks, bringing shame on the family. Finally, he's killed in a motor accident. Years later, his kid brother, Speed Racer is also a champion racer, idolised by his kid brother Sprittle, and on the verge of signing with a big corporate sponsor, Royalton Industries. The film picks up at the point where a spurned Royalton is trying to squeeze the Racers out of the industry. Speed teams up with the enigmatic(!) Rx to bring down the corrupt cartel that controls racing, by driving in the hazardous cross-country race, The Crucible.

So far so peachy. The movie is clearly technically amazing. I also loved the self-conscious home-spun wisdom and earnestness of the Little Guy versus The Man message. And there are some very funny moments, usually involving Paulie Litt. He steals the show as Spritle, getting into scrapes, hopped up on sugar, with his pet chimp.

But the movie has a problem. It has no heart. For all the day-glo visual brilliance, and the earnest dead-pan performances from all the actors, the CGI overwhelms emotion. I found it desperately hard to get into the film - to sympathise with Speed's dilemma - to be excited about the true identity of Rx Racer. And if you don't care, all the CGI doesn't mean a damn.

SPEED RACER is on release in the US, UK, the Netherlands, Argentina, Germany, Greece, Germany, Hong Kong, Kuwait, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Italy, Spain and Venezuala. It opens later in May in Hungary, Estonia, Turkey, Egypt and Russia. SPEED RACER opens in June in Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Poland, Australia, Belgium, France, Israel and Norway. It opens in Japan on July 5th.

London Film Fest Day 10 - INTO THE WILD

I always think of Sean Penn as making angry films about disaffected, lonely men: movies that feature alienated members of society but also movies that alienate the audience with their chilly, depressing picture of humanity. I often admire Penn’s performances and directorial efforts. I rarely find myself moved by them. So it came as quite a surprise to find that INTO THE WILD was an incredibly warm and touching movie.

It tells the real-life story of an American kid called Chris McCandless. At the turn of the 1990s, Chris McCandless was a bright college graduate with a fondness for poetry. He was destined for Harvard Law and a solid middle-class life. But he abandoned his car, gave his college fund to charity and burned his petty cash and headed for the open road. He deliberately kept his parents in the dark. With their abusive marriage built upon a tissue of lies, and their typically middle-class fondness for nice “things”, they represented everything he was escaping from. More cruelly, he also kept his little sister in the dark, and we hear her understanding turn to hurt in Jena Malone’s touching voice-over throughout the film.

Before the film, I was prejudiced about McCandless. I thought his decision not to get in touch with his parents was callous. But the film shows him to be a warm-hearted, generous man, capable of empathising with people and of really listening to them. He was a good friend and often transformed the lives of people he lived with. In turn, the world seems to have shown him a smiling face. From the wonderfully caring hippies called Rainey and Jan (Brian Dierker and Catherine Keener) to a an old lonely man called Ron (Hal Holbrook) who actually offers to adopt him. Even when Chris kayaks into Mexico, loses his boat, and then turns up at the border crossing without ID, the immigration guard seems faintly amused and let him through. Throughout his two years of travels McCandless picks up survival skills and starts training for his Big Alaskan Adventure. The loneliness of the Yukon proves the ultimate test of his mission to live a pure life in all of nature’s beauty. But, despite being infinitely less irresponsible than Timothy Treadwell, he falls foul of mighty nature in the end.

Emile Hirsch gives a wonderful portrayal of McCandless. He fills the screen with warmth and a sense of adventure and has genuine chemistry with all the people he meets along his journey. We can see that McCandless is foolhardy in his determination to follow an extreme course, but we are never allowed to judge him for it. But most of all, I think that Sean Penn deserves special praise here. As screen-writer and director, he discreetly shows the audience the home-life that Chris was escaping from and the wonderful beauty of the American landscape that lured Chris on. The visuals are absolutely stunning and are perfectly complemented by Eddie Vedder’s songs. I left the movie theatre grateful to have spent time with McCandless and all the people he had met on his travels. I was deeply moved by his epiphany and the journey’s end.

INTO THE WILD played Toronto 2007 and has already been on release in the USA, Canada and the Czech Republic. It goes on release in the UK today. It opens in Russia, Iceland, Australia and Denmark later in November and in Turkey and Brazil in December 2007. It opens in Romania, Japan and Spain in January 2008 and in Germany and Norway in February. It opens in Sweden in March.

ALPHA DOG - Guns don't kill people, rappers do

You're a fifteen-year old boy living in middle-class luxury with a stifling mother. Your elder step-brother is neo-Nazi Jewish drug-addict with martial arts moves that would make Tarantino proud. He owes some local cocky wannabe-gangsta $1200, so the gangsta kidnaps you in a moment of spontaneous madness. But these gangstas are just middle-class kids with too much money and not enough parental control. So they take you to some cool parties, get you high on dope and get you laid. In short, you're having the time of your life! Problem is, while the stooge actually guarding you is a decent guy, these boys are already looking at life. They're too dumb to see another way out and, to quote a brilliant line from SHOOTER, their moral compass is so off whack they probably couldn't find their way to the parking lot. So they decide it's better to be hung for a sheep tham a lamb.....

Apparently all this really happened not so long ago in California. You have to cling on to that fact - indeed, writer-director Nick Cassavetes makes you cling on to this fact with documentary style talking-head interviews, captions and split-screens. Because without this belief, the whole yarn would look so ridiculous as to be incredible. The characters are so plain stupid, so intentionally and uninentionally funny, that the movie feels like a live-action version of whacky races.

The difficuly for Cassavetes is managing the tone. When he's capturing the absurdity of rich white kids playing gangsta he's very good - thanks to a good script and brilliant performances by Emile Hirsch (who looks like a young Jack Black in his goofier moments) as the gang-leader, Justin Timberlake as his love-able side-kick and Ben Foster as the kidnapee's elder brother. Foster's creation is a work of comic genius - channelling both Spud and Begbie fom TRAINSPOTTING. Cassavetes also manages to film some really affecting drama - not least when Timberlake's softy has to deliver the kidnapee to his fate.

But the shift in tone is not well handled. Neither is the social critique, which is bluntly stated but not explored. Essentially, Cassavetes seems to say that the whole fiasco can be blamed on 1) too many MTV videos and 2) parents who are so self-absorbed that they are barely parents at all. To quote the tatoo on Ben Foster's character's chest: let not the sin of his mother be blotted out. The film also contains one gigantic error of judgment, and that is to put Sharon Stone in a cheap fat-suit for her final monologue to camera. The viewer is distracted from her strong performance as a grieving mother by the cheap and unnecessary make-up effect.

ALPHA DOG played Sundance 2006. It was released in the US, Israel, Russia, Iceland, Italy, Panama, Turkey, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria, France, Portugal, Spain, Latvia and Denmark earlier this week. It opens in Finland and the UK today and in Belgium next week. Itopens in Hungaru on May 3rd an in the Netherlands on July 5th. Finally it opens in Argentina in November 2007. ALPHA DOG is released on Region 1 DVD in May.