London Film Fest 2011 Day 9 - MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE

MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE is a movie with a fascinating premise and a compelling central performance that is let down by a deeply non-credible plot and incredibly flawed cinematographer. It arrived at the London Film Festival fêted with praised and awards from the Sundance Film Festival, but sadly does not live up to the hype.


The central premise is to tell the story of a young girl in the immediate aftermath of her escape from a Charlie Manson like cult.  Day by day we see her struggle to adjust to normal society - her behaviour increasingly paranoid and aggressive - her family turning from accepting to irritated.  I really liked the novelty of taking this point of view. Rather than a lurid movie taking us into a cult in simple chronological fashion, it was far more fascinating to see the impact of the emotional manipulation in nightmarish flashbacks.  (That said, and to resist plot spoilers, I will simply say that I found the final scene to be needlessly "tricksy".)


Elizabeth Olsen plays the girl who has escaped - birth name Martha - but renamed by the cult leader Marcy May - a clever re-naming trick designed to alienate her from her former life and family ties.  I guess she'll forever be referred to as the "other" Olsen girl, but this performance should go some way to give her a name of her own.  Her performance is subtle, brave and deeply compelling - it's the backbone that keeps the movie together - and places her as a young talent to watch in the same peer group as Carey Mulligan and Evan Rachel Wood.


The tragedy is that her performance is undermined by a script by debut writer-director Sean Durkin that is utterly (and literally) incredible.  If your kid sister vanishes for two years, then suddenly calls you begging you to pick her up from the middle of nowhere, is in visible distress, covered in bruises, and starts acting really weirdly, wouldn't you ask what just happened?  Wouldn't you take her to a doctor immediately? Wouldn't you try to reach out to her?  I simply found the character of Lucy, Martha's sister, utterly unbelievable, and I wondered if this was deliberate on the part of Durkin or just a mistake, compounded by Sarah Paulin's icy, almost robotic, performance.  But even before that, I found the plot absurd. In the first scene, Martha escapes from the commune by running off into the woods, and then stops in the nearest town for some food.  One of the men from the cult tracks her down and looks menacing, but instead of hauling her ass back, simply let's her hang out in town assuming she'll come back of her own accord.  That just seemed laughably stupid.

Elizabeth Olsen (Martha) on the red carpet
for the UK premiere of  
MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE at 
the BFI London Film Festival 2011

The other major problem with this film is incredibly poor quality cinematography from DP Jody Lee Lipes. That's not to see each frame isn't beautifully composed - that there isn't brilliant work in creating trick shots - reflections.  But I really hate it when people use DV and create colour palettes where the blacks aren't true blacks but washed out greys. It muddies the picture, and reduces the intensity of emotion.  When Martha runs into the woods, for instance, the scene is less petrifying but the scene looks washed out.  


MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE played Sundance 2011 where it won the Directing Award - Dramatic. It also played Cannes, Sydney and Toronto. It opens today in the US. It opens on December 22nd in Sweden; on January 20th in Poland; on February 2nd in Russia; in Ireland and the UK on February 3rd; in Spain on February 24th; and in France and Germany on March 29th.

CONFESSIONS OF A SHOPAHOLIC - superficial, derivative drivel

CONFESSIONS OF A SHOPAHOLIC epitomises everything that is most invidious about the romantic comedies. The plot is derivative and formulaic; the characterisation is two-dimensional; the concept asks us to suspend our disbelief to the point of absurdity. 

Isla Fisher plays Rebecca Bloomwood - a klutzy girl who funds her designer wardrobe with her credit cards and dreams of writing for a Vogue-like magazine. Chased by a debt-collector, she creates a double-life as - oh the delicious irony! - a personal finance columnist. So successful are her jargon-free columns that she lands a TV spot and the love of her charmingly rich, but hard-working boss, played by Hugh Dancy. Of course, there are stumbling blocks to happiness - but how happy the addict whose hoard of illicit goods can fund an easy conversion to the straight life?

The treatment of addiction is insultingly superficial - as is everything else about this tepid film. Worse still, it can't even boast the guilty pleasure of seeing the wardrobes of SEX AND THE CITY or THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA. Rebecca may spend like Anna Wintour but she dresses appallingly. The humour is strained - zero verbal wit offset by the odd pratfall and wilfully embarassing dance scene. Where is the genuine wit and energy of LEGALLY BLONDE or, indeed, director P J Hogan's previous hit, MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING?

CONFESSIONS OF A SHOPAHOLIC is on release in Russia, Thailand, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Mexico, the US, the UAE, Croatia, Turkey and the UK. It opens next week in Hong Kong, Iceland and Italy. It opens on March 6th in Greece and Finland and on March 12th in Argentina, Australia, Germany and the Netherlands. It opens on March 18th in Belgium and Spain and on March 26th in the Czech Republic, Singapore, South Korea and Norway. It opens on April 10th in April, on May 20th in France and on May 20th in Japan.

Overlooked DVD of the month - THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB

THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB is remarkably like a Jane Austen novel. It's peopled with a group of women searching for love. Althought the women face obstacles, not least their own inability to see love when it's staring them in the face, everything ends happily and order is restored. The entire process is charming and witty and involving and entirely harmless. The ensemble cast do a great job. I particularly liked Hugh Dancy is his role as a relentlessly optimistic IT-geek called Grigg. I've never been particularly impressed by Dancy before but he utterly won me over with his performance in a role which is hard to take seriously. He makes Grigg more than just a two-dimensional nice guy. The upshot is that I finished the movie in a sunny mood entirely at odds with my usual callous, cyncical demeanour.

Once the optimistic glow had subsided, my usual cynicism kicked in and the house of cards collapsed. The whole movie was contrived from top to bottom. The idea is that five women and one man meet once a month and discuss one of Austen's novels. Such is Austen's universal wit and wisdom that they can draw piquant life lessons from her novels and apply them to their own lives in contemporary California. Problem is that a lot of the lessons seem misapplied, or stretched to say the least.

Consider PERSUASION - a wonderful novel about second chances. The lessons are applied to Prudie and Dean. Prudie has delusions of a Left-Bank life; Dean is a neanderthal. Apparently having him read PERSUASION will lead to a rekindling of their romance. Sorry. Not buying it. The whole set up of the film is that they are congenitally unsuited. Reading a novel won't change that. And what about the relationship at the core of the film - between a repressed older woman, Jocelyn, and the younger man determined to win her love - Grigg. Apart from the completely predictable way in which they come together, I really hated the fact that the reasons for Joceyln to be so closed off were never explained. This made it hard to sympathise with her. She just seemed mean.

Apparently these issues are dealt with at more length in the novel and I look forward to reading it. And I suppose any movie can't be all bad if it makes you want to spend more time with its characters....?

THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB played Toronto 2007 and was released last year. It's now available on DVD.

London Film Fest Day 12 - SAVAGE GRACE

It's a story so delicious, you couldn't make it up. The suave heir to an industrial fortune marries a beautiful social climber. They lead a life of privelege and ease in the summer resorts of Europe. She is embarassingly over-ambitious for her delicate young son. All three have casual sex with alarming alacrity. No-one is off limits. Nothing is unexpected. And then, after an hour or two of bed-hopping, the young son and mother indulge in the only coupling as yet untried. The fuck each other. He kills her. He orders chinese take-out and waits for the cops.

All this is true. But so much is left out. We never learn of Barbara Baekeland's disgust at her son's homosexuality. We never see that she seduces him in an attempt to turn him heterosexual, rather than out of careless boredom. We never see Tony exhibit signs of mental illness - the murder is not foreshadowed in anything he says or does. As a result, the movie lacks momentum or narrative drive. It just drifts across the screen - one scene of boredom and casual sex after another. You never understand why any of the characters do anything, much less care. Even during acts of incest or murder, the dull tedium of their lives has infected the movie-goer to the point where we couldn't care less. Things aren't helped by the lack of context in the production design. Apart from one scene in the Stork Club we never see the Baekelands as social animals, living fast in glamourous parties or nightclubs. Maybe this was due to a budgetary constraint? The result is that visually, this is rather a dull film. There's also a sort of prudishness when it comes to the sex scenes. They are hinted at but never shown - certainly this movie has none of the balls-out bravery of Christophe Honoré's MA MERE.

All of this is a tremendous shame. I have great respect for all three lead actors - Moore, Dillane, Redmayne - and the subject matter could have been fascinating. But the movie had a listless, bizarrely prim feel to it. I was utterly unimpressed.

SAVAGE GRACE played Cannes, Toronto and London 2007. It opens in the US, Spain and Turkey in 2008.

BLOOD AND CHOCOLATE - werewolf tale as bland & sappy as day-time TV

BLOOD AND CHOCOLATE is a banal sappy love story set amidst a back-drop of were-wolf lore. Despite the marketing, there is precious little blood, gore, horror or action. (And what there is features a very wet Hugh Dancy trying to look hard with a gun.)

Agnes Bruckner plays Vivian - a teenage werewolf with an American accent living in....wait for it....contemporary Bucharest! She hangs with a bunch of annoying British public-school boys/werewolves in wannabe-cool underground clubs. Vivian has been "promised" to Oliver Martinez' sleazy French ueber-werewolf but is falling for Hugh Dancy's wet (and inexplicably American) graphic novelist. Conveniently, said wet-boy has an in-depth knowledge of were-wolf lore. Cue some unbelievably wet falling-in-love montage shots from uninspired director Katja von Garnier. There is some angst. Some more angst. Earnest little Vivian wonders whether she should "fulfil her destiny" as a hunter of men and play-thing of the sleazy henchman OR run away with the novelist. It's all very very forgettable.

BLOOD AND CHOCOLATE went on release in Russia, the US, Malaysia, the UK, Brazil, Iceland, Singapore, Greece, Portugal, Thailand, Poland, Latvia, Spain and Turkey earlier in 2007. It is now available on DVD.

BASIC INSTINCT 2 - My not-so-secret shame

So I found myself in the West End with a couple of hours to spare and I decided to check out BASIC INSTINCT 2. My motives were pretty miserable: curiousity and a sort of malevolent will to laugh at something bad. So, I slapped down my ten squid, armed myself with some happiness-inducing ice-cream and braced myself for the worst. Two hours later I left the theatre in a state of shock and shame - my entire worldview had been shaken - I had to admit to myself that I *really* enjoyed this movie. Which is, as far as I can tell, a minority view. When something like this happens you have to ask yourself: is the rest of the world completely wrong about BASIC INSTINCT 2 and/or was I smoking crack?

Well, as painful as it is, let's try and work out exactly why I think you too should go see BASIC INSTINCT 2 this weekend. BASIC INSTINCT 2 is an erotic thriller. And before you think that sounds sleazy, you have probably seen and enjoyed more erotic thrillers than you think: Fatal Attraction, Where The Truth Lies, Mulholland Drive, In The Cut....And this sequel is far less erotic and far more a thriller than the original. (I am not saying that this is a good or a bad thing, just noting it for the record.) There is far less explicit sexual content, no obligatory lesbian sex-scene. Indeed, most of the time, sex is hinted at, off-screen, or we just see the sordid consequences of it. In many ways, then, BASIC INSTINCT 2 has taken its relocation to London seriously, and while the content hints at dark-doings, these are no worse than your average British political sex-scandal. (And no, I am not *just* talking about the spoofing of the famous Christine Keeler photo.)

A big sales factor for me is that the movie is shot not just in generic London but in precisely the part of London in which I live. And London looks bloody brilliant: all hyper-modern blade-runner skyscrapers in Canary Wharf and the City contrasted with claustrophic Gothic trophy buildings. It captures everything that I love about this town - that you can walk through the medieval glory of the Tower of London and five minutes later amble by the Lloyds building. And Soho (which these days is rather a gentrified tourist trap) has never looked more like a page from an Alan Moore novel.

But anyways, on to the plot and performances. The plot is pretty similar to the original movie. Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) is a successful author of pulp fiction. Her novels involve sex, drugs, murder: "the basic instincts", and usually describe sleazy crimes that later just happen to occur. In the first five minutes of this movie she speeds off a road into the Thames while having sex with C-list British footballer, Stan Collymore, leaving him to die. This brings her to the attention of the local police, one of whom (David Thewlis) wants to bang her up (ho-ho) whether or not he has the evidence. Catherine is referred to the state's psychologist, Dr Michael Glass (David Morrissey). Glass diagnoses her as a "risk addict" whose own death will be the only final boundary to her reckless actions. He then takes Catherine on as a private patient. A tangled web of affairs and evil-doings unfold involving David's ex-wife, her lover - a tabloid journalist threatening to expose murky secrets in Dr Glass' past - and David's mentor, played by the ever-amazing Charlotte Rampling. As in the first Basic Instinct, as the murders pile up we ask whether Catherine really is a psychopath, or whether Dr Glass, or even the dirty cop, are committing them to save their respective assess.

So far, so good. The plot ticks all the right boxes. How about the execution? Like I said, director Michael Caton-Jones (who bizarrely has the diametrically opposite movie, SHOOTING DOGS in UK cinemas at the same time as this) creates the perfect backdrop in London. London shimmers and seduces in exactly the same way that Catherine should. And, to my mind, Sharon Stone really does pull it off - although I am a "gurl" so clearly am no judge compared to all those moronic guys on blogs posting that she is too old to play the part. Alls I know is that I cannot imagine anyone else acting this outrageously and looking completely authentic while they are doing it. I am less sure of David Thewlis as the dirty cop and David Townsend as Dr Glass. Thewlis goes for over-the-top hammy - presumably on the say-so of the director - and Townsend is little better than a foil. It would have been infinitely more satisfying had they cast a heavyweight actor - whether Yank or Brit. Someone like Clive Owen, I suspect, would have done better.

But finally, I think the film works on a basic level as a whodunnit. The two hours flew by as the bodies mounted up (hehehe) and the plot became more complex. Yes I know some of it is a bit silly, not least the Stan Collymore episode, but you have to admire any film-makers that understand that genre and revel in its possibilities. And I defy any audience not to enjoy the scene where Catherine immitates Christine Keeler, gets Dr Glass hot, and then announces, "I think our time is up, Doctor!" That was one of the many INTENDED laughs that this film got.

So there we are. I really liked this film. What's next? I develop a taste for Jennifer Aniston rom-coms?

BASIC INSTINCT 2: RISK ADDICTION is on global release.

SHOOTING DOGS - another sop to liberal guilt

Where to begin with SHOOTING DOGS? Perhaps with some fundamental questions about how we expect film-makers to deal with historical subjects. My view is that artists are under no obligation to stick religiously to the truth, if there can be "a truth". I am not the kind of person to have a fit when we see Americans winning the Second World War single-handed. I am saddened that for many people movies are their only source of historical education, but hey, Hollywood is not here to compensate for shortfalls in the education system or man's reluctance to pick up a history book. Having said all this, while I do not require that a movie treats history with respect, I find it hard to take a movie seriously that claims to educate/remind/show us *what really happened* and then messes up. Think of it as consumer-oriented movie-going. I don't ask for anything more than guns and car chases, but if the director wants to go all high-brow, he sure as hell should get his facts straight.

All of which is a long lead up to my first criticism of the movie SHOOTING DOGS; it plays fast and loose with the admittedly complex history of the Rwandan genocide despite claiming to treat a serious subject with sensitivity and respect. Let me break it down: if your only knowledge of the Rwandan genocide came from watching SHOOTING DOGS you would think that the Hutus were the murderers, the Tutsis were the victims, the UN were a bunch of racist cowards and that the BBC were marvellous, gallant, brave etc. In reality, while Hutus did murder Tutsis, similarly Kagame's Tutsis murdered Hutus. The UN may have withdrawn but this was because among others, the US did not allocate any troops. And before you think I am having an anti-US moment, this was, as I understand it, partly because Kagame refused to co-operate with a UN army sent in to protect his own people! As for the role of the BBC and other journos, and the motives of the BBC in funding this piece of hackery, you can find further information here. Suffice to say that this is all complex stuff, and I am sure that I am also simplifying horribly. Then again, I have no pretensions to bring this issue to the forefront of the media.

Anyways, if we take it as read that this movie bears no more resemblance to what actually happened in Rwanda than U-571 resembles how World War Two was actually won, we are left with the following key question: Is SHOOTING DOGS any good as cinema? If you just watch it as a fictional drama, does it hold your interest? On this score, I have to give it a qualified thumbs up. First, the flaw. The movie focuses on a nice young Englishman played by pretty-boy, Hugh Dancy. Dancy is the decent everyman character through which we are meant to experience the extreme and frightening unfolding of the genocide. Over the course of the film we see his romantic optimistic nature frozen into hopeless cynicism. The problem is that Dancy's character arc is one that we have seen in many a "fish-out-of-water" movie and Dancy's limited acting talent brings nothing extra to the part. Of course, the film more than compensates by giving us the wonderful John Hurt as a world-weary priest. His character has plenty of nuance - although I am not sure the screenwriter intended that to be the case. Although he is fundamentally a morally upright individual who looks upon the massacre with horror, he is still one of those missionaries whose charity is for the convert alone. At any rate, Hurt brings the kind of weight and seeming authenticity that a film like this requires. In addition, I liked the photography very much and while I strongly believe that it is part of the "magic" of cinema that any location can be made to seem like any other with the right "bag of tricks", there was something eery in knowing that the movie was shot on location in Kigali. The combination of the great photography and John Hurt's performance sucked me into the picture, and I found myself carried away by just those simplistic emotions that the film-makers were presumably aiming for: outrage, guilt, but finally the feeling that, well, we did go see the film after all, and we felt really BAD, so that means we are okay human beings, right?? Right?

SHOOTING DOGS premiered at Toronto 2005 and is currently on release in France. It goes on limited release in the UK on March 31st. There is no reported US release date which I guess you could read something into: either US distributors think there is no market in the US for this kind of liberal, internationalist material about Africa and/or they simply think the film is no good. Answers on the back of a postcard, please....