WELCOME TO ME

WELCOME TO ME is a truly unique, moving and darkly film from debut feature director Shira Piven and writer Eliot Laurence.  It stars Kristen Wiig as a bipolar woman called Alice Krieg who goes off her meds and uses her lottery winnings to fund a daytime talk show in the manner of her heroine, Oprah Winfrey. Except this show is an unfiltered expression of all of Alice's insecurities, obsessions and historic persecutions.  Despite the fact that she is clearly unhinged, a commercial production company takes her money and puts the show on air, to surprisingly decent growing ratings, until Alice suffers an emotional crisis and runs out of the necessary cash. Along the way, we come to admire her ever-loyal support network of parents, ex-husband and best friend Gina, and have some hopes that a nascent relationship with one of the show's producers might be sustainable.  We also come to have huge sympathy for Alice, despite her bouts of hurtful narcissism.  

The performances from the first-rate cast are superb.  Kristen Wiig allows herself to be utterly vulnerable and yet also manages a laconic deadpan humour that takes us through the movie's most awkward and disturbing moments. Linda Cardellini has the most to do as Alice's best friend and their final scene moved me to tears. It's also a pleasure to see Joan Cusack, James Marsden (as the show's producers), and Alan Tudyk (as the ex-husband) and Tim Robbins (as the psychiatrist) in smaller roles - all won over by Alice in the best way.  Only Jennifer Jason Leigh's producer stands in for those viewers put off by Alice's antics - or feels morally queasy by the fact that this entertainment is the result of mental illness.

A movie tackling the subject of mental illness that also purports to be an albeit very dark and dry comedy treads on this ice.  But the results here are provocative, assured, moving and unique.  This has to be one of the best films I've watched this year.

WELCOME TO ME has a running time of 87 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Toronto 2014 and was released in the USA and Canada last year. It is currently on release in the UK.

THE END OF THE TOUR - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Ten

THE END OF THE TOUR is a deceptively simple movie.  It chronicles the five days that Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky spent interviewing the famous writer David Foster Wallace at the end of Wallace's book tour for his novel, Infinite Jest.  I was a bit nervous walking into the screening because I haven't read any of Wallace's work, and only vaguely new the story of his depression and eventual suicide.  Also, I was a bit nervous that the two Davids were being played by Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg respectively.  Not that I don't think they're good actors. It's just that they tend to play the same sort of characters all the time. Siegel in particular tends to go for those big loveable man-child comedy characters and I was wondering if he could play a quieter, more intellectual, more complex character and actually disappear into the role.

Well, my fears were utterly overturned by what is a subtle, quiet, nuanced performance that truly shows Segel's range. This is his film.  

Random DVD Round-Up 8 - WAR INC.

WAR INC. is a lo-fi but high concept political satire set in a fictional post-Soviet Islamic republic. Focussing on the key differentiator of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the country isn't occupied by the US Army but by a Blackwater style private mercenary organisation run by a Cheney like former US Veep (Dan Aykroyd). He hires John Cusack's assassin to kill a Middle Eastern oil minister in order to provide further money making opportunities. So, Cusack's character goes undercover as a...er...wedding organiser for a local pop star (Hilary Duff, sending herself up brilliantly).

Written by Cusack and the guy behind the Warren Beatty political satire BULLWORTH, WAR INC. has its moments of visual and verbal humour and I love the over-arching concept. But the humour just isn't well enough developed or sustained to create a truly funny or insightful movie. Somehow the movie just doesn't cohere. This confirms my belief that good satire is one of the most difficult genres to pull of in any medium let alone film. One has to work hard to make it subtle and sharp and one has to resist the temptation to go for broad-brush sending up of obvious targets. Moreover, satire is ultimately an alienating form of humour, and it is hard to do well while also engaging us emotionally - as in the final scenes of this movie.

So, WAR INC. is a failure, but a noble failure.

WAR, INC played Tribeca 2008 and was released that year in the US, Israel, Russia, Taiwan, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal. It is available on DVD.

MY SISTER'S KEEPER - slippery

Not having read Jodi Picoult's book, and going purely by the trailers, I had thought that MY SISTER'S KEEPER would be a provocative courtroom drama examining the moral and legal issues around "savior siblings" - that is, children conceived in order to provide perfect match organs to their cancer-ridden siblings. But MY SISTER'S KEEPER isn't actually interested in the legal dilemma but the simpler story of a family under extraordinary emotional pressure. Yes, the other siblings may be taken for granted by their parents, but it isn't really the issue of organ-harvesting but a wider issue of just spending time with them. And the movie isn't so much about the ethics of taking organs from children who cannot consent, but about coming to terms with the fact that people die and not all battles can be won. In other words, this is a Weepie rather than an intellectual film.

To the extent that this movie wasn't a courtroom drama, I was disappointed. And I was rather annoyed at the slippery way in which this aspect of the movie was derailed. But then again, how credible was a courtroom drama really going to be given that Cameron Diaz is cast as the aggressively pro-organ donation lawyer-mother - a role beyond her ability - and Alec Baldwin (a prisoner of his 30 ROCK persona) was cast as opposing council. Only Joan Cusack, as a grieving mother and presiding Judge, adds any emotional weight and credibility to those scenes.

So how did the resulting emotional drama hold up? I didn't like a lot of the stylistic choices - particularly the voice-overs from the different characters explaining their points of view. (Although this is apparently a feature of the book). I especially didn't like the happy-family sunlit montages set to schmaltzy music. Jason Patric as the passive father looked mostly bored. Cameron Diaz as the aggressive mother looked mostly hysterical. Aunt Kelly looked entirely redundant. Ignored younger brother Jesse just looked mopey and is it me, or is Abigail Breslin just acting the same in all her films.? I feel she is over-exposed. The only thing that saved the story was the luminous lead performance from Sofia Vassilieva as the cancer-ridden teen, the touching evocation of her first and only romance with a fellow patient, and the realistic portrayal of her illness. This girl is definitely one to watch. I also applaud the writer-director for creating an ending that is, apparently, more realistic than that in the original novel.

MY SISTER'S KEEPER is on release in the UK, USA, Canada and Mexico. It opens next week in Iceland and Greece. It opens on July 30th in Australia and New Zealand; on August 6th in Slovakia; on August 13th in Russia, Ukraine and Taiwan; on August 21st in Romania, on August 27th in the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, and Bulgaria; on September 4th in Italy and Norway; on September August 9th in September; on September 17th in Portugal; on September 23rd in Belgium, Argentina, Brazil and Sweden; and on December 4th in Finland.

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.

MARTIAN CHILD - banal bonding movie

Actor John Cusack and director Menne Meyjes are reunited in sentimental father-son bonding drama, MARTIAN CHILD. Cusack plays a grieving sci-fi author who fosters a disturbed young child who combats his feeling of isolation by claiming to be a martian - photosensitive and thus unable to come out from under a box and play with the other kids. Cusack's character starts to believe that the kid might actually be an alien - so spooky is his ability to predict when traffic lights will turn green. The film-makers certainly lead the audience down this road. But in the final analysis, the film-makers aren't particularly interested in creating a spoooooooky film, but a sentimental one. The final scene sees Cusack's character battling a sceptical social welfare panel for the right to adopt the child and there are no prizes for guessing how it all turns out. Paternal love can be the foundation of powerful drama - viz Cusack's GRACE IS GONE - but not in this hackneyed treatment.

The technical aspects of this film are fine but nothing special, and you could say the same for the performances, barring Joan Cusack as a scabrous older sister.

MARTIAN CHILD was released in the US in fall 2007. It went straight to video in the UK and is currently available on DVD.

Pantheon movie of the month - BROADCAST NEWS

Before James L Brooks became famous as the writer of THE SIMPSONS, he was famous for making award-winning tragi-comic cinema. Indeed, with AS GOOD AS IT GETS, he proved he could still do it. BROADCAST NEWS is, to my mind, his best film. It's a wonderfully funny, chillingly perceptive movie about the kind of relationships that over-achieving careerists have, and the decline in the quality of public discourse. Unlike NETWORK, the brilliantly cruel satire of the "dumbing down" of television, BROADCAST NEWS has a heart. And unlike George Clooney's more recent homage to the good old days of journalists with integrity, GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK, BROADCAST NEWS has a sense of humour. In short, BROADCAST NEWS is the most wonderful of films: intelligent; funny; scabrous, but never despairing.

The movie opens with a brilliant little intro to its three main characters as kids. First up is a cute but dumb kid called Tom who wonders what a cute but dumb kid can do for a living. Answer: network news anchor! We then switch to a high-energy, highly-strung kid called Jane who berates her father for applying the word "obsessively" to her incorrectly. Caption: network news producer. We then switch to a nerdy kid called Aaron, who berates the school bullies as he graduates early: "You'll never earn more than $19,000!". Caption: network investigative journalist. So there you have it: the philosophical and emotional triangle has been established. Jane is the ambitious editor who admires everything Aaron stands for and sympathises with him. They're the smart kids who hate the dumb, beautiful people who are killing intelligent news coverage. Problem is, Jane doesn't fancy Aaron. Worse still, she's falling for Tom's open charm and winning good looks.....

BROADCAST NEWS gets so much right. We care about the three main characters. We ache for Aaron, with his unrequited love; we are confused with Jane; and we fall for Tom's charm. Their emotional entanglements, flaws and foibles seem real. Albert Brooks, Holly Hunter and William Hurt are all excellent in their respective roles. The supporting cast of characters is full of recognisable types and odd-balls - notably Joan Cusack as Jane's assistant and Jack Nicholson as the hard-assed Network anchor. But what James L Brooks really gets is how seductive the adrenaline-rush of the deadline-driven job can be. We all know that it's unhealthy - a little off-balance, but that feeling of camaraderie and achievement when you've pulled it out of the hat at the last minute? Brilliant.

The only tiny flaw with this film is the denouement, which is just a little too pat. And I guess that such a flaw should disqualify BROADCAST NEWS from being a pantheon film on my own rules - a film of which I would change not a frame - of which every component is perfection - and the combination magnifies their brilliance. But frankly, this movie is so damn good other than those three minutes, I can break my own rules!

BROADCAST NEWS was released in the US in 1987 and played Berlin 1988 where Holly Hunter won the Silver Bear. At the Academy Awards, it lost Best Film to THE LAST EMPEROR; William Hurt lost Best Actor to Michael Douglas for WALL STREET; Holly Hunter lost Best Actress to Cher for MOONSTRUCK; it lost the Best Screnplay award to John Patrick Shanley for MOONSTRUCK; it lost Best Cinematography to Vittorio Storaro for MOONSTRUCK; it lost Best Editor to Gabriella Cristiani for THE LAST EMPEROR. On the whole, as much as I love BROADCAST NEWS I can't disagree with these choices. MOONSTRUCK is a great film and both Nic Cage and Cher are outstanding in it. And as for WALL STREET, BROADCAST NEWS is by far the more intelligent, prescient film, but Michael Douglas' performance is iconic. BROADCAST NEWS is available on DVD and on iTunes.

Overlooked DVD of the month - FRIENDS WITH MONEY

FRIENDS WITH MONEY is a laudable attempt to make an intelligent movie about how middle-aged women interact with each other. It has pedigree: the movie comes from the same writer-director as LOVELY AND AMAZING - a really fantastic, insightful, funny indie movie from 2001. FRIENDS WITH MONEY also has a heavy-weight cast - including Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand and Joan Cusack as the friends of the title and Jennifer Aniston as the flaky no-money protagonist.

The movie takes a painful, up-close look at the neuroses of these well-off middle-aged women. It also looks at the petty indignities suffered by their drop-out friend. In some of the cases, the women allow themselves to be victimised, or enter into a state of mutual delusion. The dialogue and situations seem credible and ruthlessly well-observed.

FRIENDS WITH MONEY comes from a darker, more despairing place than LOVELY AND AMAZING - as a quick comparison of the titles might suggest. It has none of the leavening flashes of black humour or brief moments of emotional connection between the characters. LOVELY AND AMAZING was all about damaged and unlikely characters finding companionship in the most unexpected of ways. By contrast, in FRIENDS WITH MONEY, self-involved people live their lives in parallel lines. They stop once in a while to judge others - distracting themselves from their own inadequacies - and then move on, having learned little. The bleaker tone is evident from the final plot twist - a move that has been criticised as trite, but which I found allowed Holofcener to create a challenging and horrifying ending. Just watch that final scene, and the willing victimisation of each person in it, and tell me you don't feel physically sick. Now, that's provocative film-making. So, while I can't see myself wanting to watch this movie again, I strongly urge you to check it out.

FRIENDS WITH MONEY was shown at Sundance 2006 and went on limited release in the UK and US in the Spring. It is available on Region 1 and 2 DVD and opens in theatres in France, Brazil and Spain later this month.