STEVE JOBS - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Closing Night Gala

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Danny Boyle (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE) is a great director with a kinetic visual style and a great use of dance music. He creates fast-paced films and all his best traits are evident in this new biopic of the iconic Apple founder, Steve Jobs.  But this is not so much a Danny Boyle film as an Aaron Sorkin creation. The screenwriter famous for The West Wing and THE SOCIAL NETWORK has an instantly recognisable style - heavy dialogue - often combative - delivered at fast pace while the characters are on the move.  On top of that style, Sorkin has also chosen a highly theatrical conceit for structuring this movie. Rather than a conventional biopic, he splits the film into three acts, each forty minutes long, and each taking place behind the scenes of one of Apple's iconic shareholder meeting. And in each segment, Steve Jobs, as played by Michael Fassbender (12 YEARS A SLAVE) confronts the same people.  

First up are the techies. We've got Seth Rogen (THE INTERVIEW) in an utterly straight role as Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder and genuine computer engineer.  He confronts Jobs about his desire to have everything frustratingly closed system and his unwillingness to credit the unsexy but cash-generative Apple II and its team.  We've also got the marvellous Michael Stuhlbarg as Andy Herzfeld, the engineer who we see as being serially bullied by Jobs.  

THE DROP - LFF14 - Day Four

THE DROP is an extreeeeeemely slow burning thriller with a fantastic punchline that probably comes about ten minutes too late for the audience. Still, it's well-made, well-acted and as grimy as one would hope from a film based on a Denis Lehane novel.

The film stars Tom Hardy (BRONSON) as Bob - a bartender in Brooklyn so self-effacing he almost looks mentally challenged.  As the film opens he rescues a small battered puppy from the trash can of a similarly vulnerable woman called Nadia (Noomi Rapace - PROMETHEUS).  Naturally they bond, but incredibly slowly as only two introverts can. Meanwhile, the personality hole is filled by James Gandolfini playing a kind of comically unsuccessful version of Tony Soprano - the guy who thought he was something, but was never the guy who was feared, and ultimately ended up losing his bar to the local Brooklyn Chechen gang. This kind of sets up the story. We have the bar being used as a drop for mafia money that some or other people are trying to knock off. We have Nadia's psychokiller ex boyfriend Eric trying to get his dog and girlfriend back. And in the midst of it we have mild-mannered long-suffering Bob.

To say more would ruin the plot twist but all I would say is to go in patient and delighting in the language and the pauses and then just hold on to the finale.  Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace and Matthias Schoenaarts in the three main roles seem, to me at least, to do a great job with their Brooklyn accents and to utterly feel their roles. Gandolfini is a a bit more on autopilot but let's not disrespect the man in his final film.  Is the film perfect? By no means. But the payoff is worth it, even if it takes some getting to.

THE DROP played Toronto and London 2014. It was released earlier this year in the USA, Canada, Belgium, Luxembourg and Spain. It opens later this month in Singapore, Azerbaijan, Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, Estonia and Kenya. It opens in November in Greece, France, the Philippines, Armenia, Australia, Belarus, Hong Kong, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Malaysia, the UK, Ireland, Poland, South Africa, Portugal, Taiwan, Vietnam, New Zealand, and Norway. It opens in Germany on December 4th, Finland on December 5th, Argentina on December 11th, the Czech Republic and Slovakia on January 8th, and Italy on March 19th.

London Film Fest 2012 - Day 11 - SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (SURPRISE FILM)

David O Russell brought arthouse integrity and quality to the underdog sports movie with THE FIGHTER, and pulls the same trick on the rom-com genre with SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK. It's a clever, funny, superbly acted movie with a visceral, up-close and uncomfortable shooting style that almost fools you into thinking that it's a braver, more unconventional movie than it really is.  At its heart, the movie is a basic one - boy meets girl, girl loves boy, boy's too hung up on former lover to realise he loves girl, there's a dance contest, they kiss, the end. The twist is that he's bipolar and just out of a mental institution, she's a widow with massive SLAA issues, his dad's OCD  with anger management issues, and his mum's clearly an enabler. The film's plot is driven by the unhealthy quid pro quo: she'll help him contact his ex (against whom he has a restraining order) if he'll participate in a dance contest with her.

David O Russell's script (based on Matthew Quick's novel) is whip smart and crackles with energy.  Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper have real chemistry and seeing them spar is one of the joys of the film.  It's great to see her broaden her range beyond put-upon hardened teen and similarly it's great to see him move beyond pretty-boy wise-ass roles. There are mis-steps to be sure -  the age difference threw me off and I never really bought it.  The inclusion of an African American character (Chris Tucker is his most modulated and impressive performance to date) only to have him, per movie cliché  contribute to a dance scene by having the white characters "dance blacker". And that schmaltzy final declaration could've come out of a risible Richard Curtis movie.  But overall, it was fun to spend time with the main characters and feel the grunginess of working class Philadelphia through  Masanobu Takayanagi's (WARRIOR) frenetic camerawork. 

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK played Toronto 2012 where David O Russell won the People's Choice Award for Narrative Feature. It was the surprise film at London 2012. The film will be released in the USA, UK, Russia and Iceland on November 21st. It opens in Portugal on December 6th, in Sweden on December 21st, in Germany, Norway and Turkey on January 4th, in Spain on January 11th, in France and Australia on January 31st, in New Zealand and Bulgaria on February 8th, in Argentina on February 21st, in Belgium and the Netherlands on February 27th, in Italy on March 14th and in Denmark on April 25th.  

FAST & FURIOUS - no alarms and no surprises

The latest installment in the FAST & FURIOUS franchise is a slick but vacuous affair, with none of the authentic drift-racing of part 3, TOKYO DRIFT, and none of the self-mocking ridonkulousness of CRANK 2. The movie plays with all the earnestness of a tragic love story despite the MTV visuals, misogyny, auto-eroticism, wooden acting and risible dialogue. Other than a quite brilliant lorry heist in the opening ten minutes, the movie is unwatchable. Basically, we're back in LA, with Vin Diesel and Paul Walker reprising their roles as a street racer and a Fed respectively. They both compete in a street race to win slots as drug mules for the infamous Mexican drug lord Braga. It's not entirely clear why a major drug dealer would want to draw attention to himself by organising big-ass illegal street races, or why he would want to ferry H across the border in day-glo cars. But what am I saying?  This is a movie of which it would be impossible to under-intellectualise. 

FAST & FURIOUS is on global release.

PRIDE AND GLORY - tragically uninvolving dirty cop thriller

PRIDE AND GLORY is a dirty-cop thriller that brings nothing new to the genre at all. This is a great disappointment, given that it's written by Joe Carnahan - who wrote NARC - and it stars two great actors - Colin Farrell and Ed Norton. Norton plays a New York cop investigating the death of four rozzers at the hands of a missing drug-dealer. Unsurprisingly, the trail leads to his brother-in-law (Farrell), who's been shooting gangsters for pay. The whole thing is bone dry, over-wrought, boring and entirely uninvolving - and culminates in an entirely under-powered denouement in a bar. All this for a bout of fisticuffs. Do yourself a favour and chuck LA CONFIDENTIAL on the DVD player instead. 

PRIDE AND GLORY played Toronto 2008 and is currently on release in the US, GReece, Israel, Italy, Panama, Peru and the UK. It goes on release in Iceland on November 21st; in Belgium, France and the Netherlands on December 3rd; in Argentina on December 18th; in Germany on January 22nd; and in Norway on January 30th.