SNOW WHITE (2025)****

Disney's live action remake of one of its most iconic and oldest properties, SNOW WHITE, came to our screens freighted in politics, as evidenced by it being ratings-bombed on IMDB.  So I came to the film with low expectations. However, I am delighted to report that I had a wonderful time watching this film! I found its production design and costumes beautiful and full of wondrous detail. I loved the look and characterisation CGI non-dwarves who take Snow White in.  I loved all three lead performances from Rachel Zegler, Gal Gadot and Jeff Morrow.  And most of all I loved the reworking of the messaging - not as woke - but in a way that does not stretch the credulity of the modern viewer.

Let's start with the look and feel of this film. It's set in a lovely fairytale medieval middle Europe with endless beautiful detail in its architecture and costumes.  Gal Gadot's wicked stepmother has a ridiculously beautiful and stunning set of costumes - peaking in an epic sequinned dress and long cape in jewel bruise tones.  She leans into the camp. There is no back story justifying her evil. And I loved it. Snow White's iconic blue and yellow dress has been similarly beautifully rendered by designer Sandy Powell. Layers and layers of chiffon in the skirt. And yet somehow, despite all of this, a very young-looking Rachel Zegler, with a fresh face, makes Snow White seem like just a young girl rather than a princess. And we put it all together in scenes that again and again made me gasp with how gorgeous they looked - whether vistas in the forest or a particularly lovely rendering of Snow White's bier in the forest.

And on to the messaging. In this version of the story - nearly ninety years after the original - to be "fairest of them all" is to literally be fair, and kind, and beautiful from within. Snow White does indeed whistle while she works, but rather than becoming a servant to the dwarves she shows them how to clean up after themselves. We realise that poor Dopey doesn't like being so-called (who would!) and Snow White gives him the confidence to move into the spotlight. Most importantly, rather than a total stranger of a prince kissing Snow White awake, we now have a young man with whom she has already fallen in love doing the job - far easier for a modern audience to rationalise.  And yes, he is not a prince but a person living in the woods Robin Hood style.  As a result, the movie doesn't end with the kiss but with Snow White reclaiming her throne, inspiring her people to be better, to be kinder, to remember what it was to share and to hope.  Yes it's hokey. But it isn't woke. To quote the new SUPERMAN, maybe thinking the best of people is what's actually "punk rock" now.

Kudos to director Marc Webb (500 DAYS OF SUMMER) who has done a beautiful job with this film. And to screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN) who threaded the needle of keeping what we love in the fairytale but also making it more palatable for a modern audience.  I really hope the film finds its audience in due course away from all the controversy and hatefulness around its release. It's a lovely film full of heart and earnest good intentions.

SNOW WHITE is rated PG, has a running time of 109 minutes and is on global release.

TRUTH - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Eleven

In 2004 legendary news anchor Dan Rather aired a report on his 60 Minutes news programme that accused President Bush of pulling strings to get a cushy domestic air force job during the Vietnam War and then not even bothering to fulfil that duty properly. This was at the time when his electoral opponent John Kerry was being accused of falsifying his Vietnam war record. The report, airing just before a Presidential election, was incendiary, and all the more so when the two documents upon which it was based were accused of being forgeries. In the end, the misreporting of the story cost Rather his job, and also that of Mary Mapes, the producer who put the story together.

Now I’d never heard of Mapes, or of this story, and only of Rather in some vague way, and certainly not the particulars of his resignation. Accordingly, all I know of this case is what writer-director James Vanderbilt has chosen to present me with. I think he wants to tell a tale in the manner of George Clooney’s GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK, or of Aaron Sorkin’s THE NEWSROOM, about crusading journalists out to expose the truth no matter what the discomfort to the powers that be. So, in that vein, he has many characters tells us again and again - at award dinners and in touching scenes of personal inspiration - how Dan Rather embodies all that that is right and good in integrity and the public trust. He does this is speeches that are very Sorkin-esque. Vanderbilt also paints Mary Mapes as a heroine - a woman beaten by her abusive father for daring to ask questions - and so per Vanderbilt, her psychology reduced to a father-daughter relationship with Rather. As the final music swells over the end credits, Vanderbilt tells us that Mapes’ work on exposing Abu Ghraib won a Peabody Award and that she hasn’t worked in TV since 2004. The space then hangs for us to fill in - what a tragedy - what an injustice!

Now I have no doubt that Rather and Mapes are motivated by the best of intentions and that their report was in good faith as presented here. But even here, presented as the heroes, as it was being constructed it all looked a bit slapdash to the untrained eye. I mean, when your document expert is being cut off and cut down for daring to ask about the sourcing of the document or raising queries about type face by your supposed heroine that does look bad. And although Mapes and Rather keep saying over and over that it isn’t about the document but about the abuse of power, well yes, but the document goes to prove that. You can’t just assert stuff, you have to prove it. That’s what journalism is, isn’t it?

I feel bad for all involved, but is Vanderbilt really doing Mapes any favours here? In a the big rousing speech she gives to her mean, nasty interrogators - the independent panel set up to investigate the claims but clearly loaded with right wing corporate interests - she is hoist by her own petard. She says the story is that so many of Texas’ spoiled rich kids got off going to Vietnam by going into the air guard. The guy asks her if any of them might just have gotten in on their merit. And she says no. People in the cinema ware clapping, but if you don’t even admit of a chance that just one of these guys got in of their own merit - not knowing them or their cases - isn’t that just prejudice?

Like I said, I don’t know anything about this case. I do think Bush probably got an easy ride because of who he was, and that is a story that should’ve been exposed, no matter what Viacom’s business with Congress. But per the evidence in this film, the investigative work done by Mapes didn’t prove that, and shouldn’t have been aired. Yes the questions should’ve been asked, but the answers had not bean adequately demonstrated.  Even worse, the fake documents became the story. Incompetence prevented the exposure of truth.

So what we have here is a very very weird film indeed that seeks to portray a woman as a heroine for creating a news report that was substantively right and sticking by it, except that the movie does not, to my mind, show that it was substantively proven. And that just undermines the whole exercise. Worst of all, it undermines the very concept that it is trying to defend - rigorous, unprejudiced, investigative journalism no matter how powerful the target. So with that major flaw of choice of subject matter, or just how it was shaped and presented, writer James Vanderbilt makes Cate Blanchett’s typically fine performance redundant.

TRUTH has a running time of 121 minutes and is rated R.  It played Toronto 2015 and is currently on release in the USA. It opens in Sweden on November 16th, in France on February 10th 2016, in the UK on March 4th and in Germany on March 17th.

TRACKS - LFF 2013 - Day Eight

TRACKS is a rather lovely, beautifully shot movie depicting the true life journey of an Australian woman called Robyn Davidson who walked 2000 miles from Alice Springs to the western Australian coast.  She did this with three camels that she'd wrangled and trained, her pet dog, and occasionally the company of an aboriginal elder and a National Geographic photographer.  One might ask why and there are lots of hints at explanations on this film.  Maybe it was something to do with her own father's safari in Africa, or her innate loneliness, or of her bored dissatisfaction with life in the 70s.  Either way, I like that director John Curran doesn't feel the need to make everything obvious and easy, but allows us to see some of her charisma and mystery.

The film is beautifully made, and it serves as a hymn to he harsh beauty of the Aussie outback.  That said, any nature lovers should be cautioned that this isn't a movie that shies away from the harsh reality of nature, and animal lovers probably should give this film a wide berth.  In front of the camera, Mia Wasikowska carries the film as Robyn, and does a good job in making quite a prickly character interesting and sympathetic. Adam Driver, who seems to be popping up everywhere at the moment, is also highly enjoyable as Robyn's photographer cum suitor - the guy who has to reconcile, as we do, Robyn's need for solitude and her intense loneliness.  Ultimately, though, this isn't any actor's film.  It belongs to the cinematographer Mandy Walker who captures the stunning landscapes and people of the outback.  

TRACKS has a running time of 110 minutes. 

TRACKS played Venice, Toronto and London 2013 and does not yet have a commercial release date. 

RED RIDING HOOD - sexless

With her self-consciously naive re-telling of the Little Red Riding Hood fairytale, TWILIGHT director Catherine Hardwicke undoes all the good work of Angela Carter in bringing Charles Perrault's original story up to date with modern sexual mores. For, as she revealed in her brilliant short story, which was itself made into the film, THE COMPANY OF WOLVES, Red Riding Hood is really a story about a young virgin fearful of the bestial sexual appetites of men. In the original fairytale, the young girl is taught to stay well clear of men, lest she be raped and murdered. But in Angela Carter's retelling, the young girl takes control of her fate, fucks the wolf and lives happily ever after. Unfortunately, in this strange new world of teen cinema, where teenagers fall in love as if their lives depended on it, but no-one actually has sex, there is little room to explore the themes of The Little Red Riding Hood story. The resulting film is strangely neuter - strangely childish - a lot of fuss about nothing.

In this film Amanda Seyfield (MAMMA MIA!) plays Valerie aka LRRH as a drippy emo teenage girl, desperate to get it on with her dishy boyfriend Peter (Shiloh Fernandez - a poor man's Ed Westwick) but affianced to the similarly dishy Henry (Max Irons - a poor man's Robert Pattinson). She nearly fucks Peter, and flirts a little with Henry, but the potential for anyone with brown eyes to be the Big Bad Wolf obviously puts a dampener on things. Is it Peter? Is it Henry? Is it Julie Christie's gothic-loopy Grandmother? Who knows? Who cares? The movie grinds through its hokey whodunnit plot and the big reveal turns out to be dull and sexually uninteresting.

Amanda Seyfried is, I suppose, passable as the drippy teen, but both Max Irons and Shiloh Fernandez are wooden. Virginia Madsen as the mother and Gary Oldman as the sinister inquisitor are wasted and Julie Christie is in hammer-horror territory. The soundtrack, with music by Fever Ray, is suitably atmospheric, and Mandy Walker's photography is suitably moody, but she is let down by Thomas E Sanders' (Coppola's DRACULA) too shiny, too over-designed Alpine village set. I particularly hated screenwriter David Leslie Johnson's attempt to critique the use of torture in a war on terror (I kid you not!) and as I said before, his refusal to deal with the sexual subtext is just bizarre.

Overall, RED RIDING HOOD is just absolutely zero. A movie with no soul, no heart, no sex, no tension and no resolution worth its name. The only possible reason to watch it is for the comedy gold moment when you realise that the Reeve is Colonel Tigh!

RED RIDING HOOD was released in March in the USA, Singapore, Canada, Iceland, the Philippines, the USA, Kazakhstan, Russia, Bulgaria and Denmark. It was released earlier in April in Turkey, Armenia, Australia, Kuwait, Finland, Norway, Belgium, Portugal, Slovenia, Colombia, Spain and the UK. It opens next week in France, Sweden, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Italy and Venezuela. It opens on April 28th in Greece, Hungary and Estonia. It opens on June 10th in Japan, and on June 24th in Poland.

AUSTRALIA - What kind of sick country would kick someone with a giant boot?

AUSTRALIA is a magnificent disaster. A cinematic custard of of such epic proportions it rivals DUNE, WATERWORLD and BATTLEFIELD EARTH.

Australian auteur and king of kitsch, Baz Luhrmann, made two brilliantly inspired, wickedly funny movies - STRICTLY BALLROOM and ROMEO + JULIET. In each flick he took bold chances with genre and text and as luck would have it, everything somehow made sense. I was, however, unimpressed by MOULIN ROUGE! It was as if he'd taken everything that was brilliant in his previous work, injected it with speed and set a match to the celluloid. Everything was bigger, louder, brighter, faster. Watching MOULIN ROUGE! was like being assaulted with a disco-ball. I left the movie numb and disengaged - Luhrmann had crossed the line from loving whimsy and genuine pathos into smart-arse pastiche. Now I admit that I was in the minority in my disappointment with and MOULIN ROUGE! but all those worrying tendencies have expressed themselves even more fully in Luhrmann's disastrous follow-up AUSTRALIA. It's a movie that's so indulgent it comes off as a vanity project pure and simple. It's an orgy - a binge on genre cinema's most fatuous tropes. All this could've been regarded simply as a monumental misjudgment - poor taste at its most extreme. The problem is that AUSTRALIA tackles deadly serious material. Its sins, therefore, rank higher.

Luhrmann had the laudable audacity to try to create an epic history for his country in the manner of GONE WITH THE WIND. He wanted to speak to the Australian settler spirit, the travesty of the treatment of the Aborigines and of the Australian wartime experience. To that end he gives us a movie that combines elements of Westerns, melodramatic romances and war-time epics....Nonetheless, the story is as actually pretty thin given the movie's run-time. Nicole Kidman plays an English aristo who persuades an Australian drover (Hugh Jackman) to drive her cattle to Darwin and outwit an evil cattle manager called Fletcher (David Wenham). (Melodrama, fairy-tale contrast of good and evil, Western). During the long drive, the aristo learns to love the drover, the landscape and the half-Aborigine orphan who helps them with his magical powers. (Superficial attempt to tackle Australian racial politics.) The aristo, drover and boy make a home in Darwin but happiness is seemingly destroyed when the boy is interned by the Aussie authorities and the Japanese bomb Darwin. (Ham-fisted politics and clunky CGI war movie. Shameless manipulation. Ludicrous ending.)

The result is a sickly cocktail of wooden performances, absurd dialogue and furiously heightened visual back-drops topped off with a deeply patronising attitude toward the Aborigines and an insulting fairy-tale ending. AUSTRALIA is shot like a musical without the song and dance numbers; like a fable without the intuitive wisdom; like a romance without heart; like a war-movie without the high stakes and tension. It is without a doubt the worst film I have seen in 2008.

AUSTRALIA is on release in Australia, the USA, South Korea, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands, Egypt, France, Indonesia, Taiwan, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Thailand, the UAE, Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Turkey, the UK, Venezuela and Israel. It opens on January 8th in Argentina, on January 16th in Italy, on January 23rd in Brazil, on January 28th in China; on February 12th in Russia and on February 28th in Japan.