HAPPY END - Day 10 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

Meester Phil and I walked out of HAPPY END after an hour of tedium and inanity.  Advertising blurb suggesting it's a sharp satire of contemporary French financial and racial inequality in the shadow of the Calais migrant camp was wildly overblown. There's a rich family. It includes Isabelle Huppert. They run a construction company. There's a feckless grandson who may or may not inherit the company. There's a granddaughter who's mum just attempted suicide. There's a little baby who's shot on an iPhone with text messages indicating her train of thought. What there isn't is drama or meaning or any kind of coherence.  In fairness that might have all been resolved in the final 45 minutes but life's too short to find out.

HAPPY END has a running time of 107 minutes. It played Cannes, Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto and London 2017.  It opened earlier this month in France and Austria. It opens in Belgium on Oct 11th, Germany on Oct 12th, Hungary on Oct 26th, Sweden on Nov 3rd, the UK on Dec 1st, the USA on Dec 22nd, and Norway on Dec 25th.

JAKOB THE LIAR - should a Holocaust film really be a feel-good movie?

Jakob Heym: Hitler goes to a fortune-teller and asks, "When will I die?" And the fortune-teller replies, "On a Jewish holiday." Hitler then asks, "How do you know that?" And she replies, "Any day you die will be a Jewish holiday."

JAKOB THE LIAR is a schmaltzy, manipulative but patently earnest film about the Holocaust. Robin Williams is in typically over-the-top as Jakob, shut in the ghetto, who stumbles into telling his fellow sufferers uplifting lies of advancing Allies via his illicit, imaginary, radio. This newfound hope transforms them: Liev Schreiber's loveable Mischa starts courting.

The problem with this film is that it takes a fundamentally grim subject and tries to turn it into a tale about the triumph of the human spirit. It leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. It's the same problem I had with SCHINDLER'S LIST and LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL: both earnest, well-made, and arguably better-written and acted than this film. There is something that strikes me as hokey in anything that dilutes the raw power of documentaries like THE SORROW AND THE PITY or SHOAH.

JAKOB THE LIAR played Toronto 1999. It is available on DVD.

Bina007's Danny Dyer Memorial List of the Ten Most Piss-Poor Flicks of 2008

Just in case you'd thought I'd gone soft, we return to bitter invective with this year's Trashcan of Shame. To find each nugget of Cinema Redemption your humble servant must crawl through a veritable sewer of lazy, formulaic, badly produced, stinky bilge. Here are the worst of the many offenders, conforming to the usual mix of shameless cash-in genre flicks; politically offensive exploitation flicks and auteurs gone awry.

THE SHAMELESS CASH-INS GENRE FLICKS.

1. P.S. I LOVE YOU. Hilary Swank attempts comedy. The film-makers mistakenly believe you can make a feel-good comedy out of bereavement. Mawkish. Unfunny. And what accent is Gerard Butler going for exactly?

2. MADE OF HONOR. Another offensively lazy, formulaic and charmless romantic comedy - all the more impressive for killing Michelle Monaghan and Patrick Dempsey's natural charm.

3=. 88 MINUTES and RIGHTEOUS KILL. Lo-rent "thrillers" in which Pacino and de Niro live off viewer nostalgia and clip their pension coupons. You know it's gone Pete Tong when Fiddy is far from the worst actor on screen.

HUMOURLESS EXPLOITATION FLICKS.

5. NEVER BACK DOWN. Like Karate Kid without the naive charm, NEVER BACK DOWN was basically misogynistic macho bullshit attracting the same sort of voyeurs who get kicks from happy slapping.

6. WANTED. Again with the misogynistic, macho bullshit. Bored viewers were left to ponder which was more ridiculous: James McAvoy affecting a six-pack or the Loom of Fate?

7. RAMBO. By far the most tragic entry in my trio of macho idiocy because as lurid as FIRST BLOOD was, it at least had a point. How are the mighty fallen.

8. BABYLON A.D. The existential angst of Vin Diesel vanishes in a puff of improbability. Mathieu Kassovitz flushes his art-house rep (LA HAINE) down the toilet with this star-vehicle sci-fi mish-mash. Even Michelle Yeoh as a kick-boxing nun can't save it.

AUTEURS GONE AWRY.

9. W. Liberal intellectuals wanted answers. Oliver Stone gave them a pastiche. 

10. AUSTRALIA. Baz Luhrmann promised us a knowing epic embracing romance, political injustice and war-time melodrama. He gave us a wooden, poorly edited, over-blown vanity project - a failure of monumental proportions.

BABYLON A.D. - All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing

Over-budget, over-schedule, unloved by its studio, disowned by its director, heavily edited down and released in two versions....BABYLON A.D. is a confused movie with a void at its centre, and I'm not talking about Vin Diesel. Writer-director Mathieu Kassovitz, who made the brilliant flick LA HAINE, has a done stitch-up job on the studio, accusing them of blocking his artistic vision with harsh editing. He's right. This dystopian thriller, based on the novel by Maurice G Dantec, has had its guts ripped out in the editing suite. The poor viewer never really has a clear idea about what the frack is going on.

My vague feeling is that a hundred years in the future, Russia has turned all of Europe and Asia into satelite states that have disintegrated into cyber-punk savagery. America is a locked-down haven of functionality but at a price - culture has been commercialised to the point where religion is sold through billboards like face-cream. Years ago, a mad scientist created a cylon baby who would have a virgin birth, propelling a particular sect to world domination. This baby, now a woman, is to be smuggled to the sect's headquarters in New York by a mercenary called Toorop and, for no particular reason other than sheer improbaility, a kung-fu nun.

The key point is this: the only bit of that plot summary that comes across coherently in the actual film is the final sentence. In other words, this movie is just one long chase scene for no particular reason. The only real pleasure is in observing the production design, which veers from a cool, gritty Kreuzberg like Europe, via Canadian snow-scapes, to a futuristic New York.

Mathieu Kassovitz claims that the studio hacked his film to death. I believe him. Still, that's only half the problem. The other half is the piss-poor casting. On the one hand you have Vin Diesel who, gods love him, can't really depict characters in the midst of moral dilemmas. And then you have Mélanie Thierry who plays the girl. Now, for the first hour of the film I swear to god I thought she was about fifteen. But then, in a really excruciatingly embarassing scene, her character comes on to the mercenary and you think, oh my god, she's actually meant to be in her twenties! I came home and looked up the actress' age on IMDB. She's actually 27!!! Amazing. Put it this way, you can cast her as your lead actress, but you need to put her opposite someone who looks like he could conceivably have a relationship with her without being accused of pederasty or indeed crushing her to death in the palm of his hand.

So all I'm saying is this. Kassovitz needs to come clean. Yes, the film is shit. Yes, the studio probably did bad things with FinalCut Pro. And maybe, just maybe, they forced Vin Diesel onto him. But he acquiesed. And then he cast an actress who looked 15 opposite him.....

BABYLON A.D. is on release in France, Belgium, Russia, Canada, the UL and the USA. It goes on release next weekend in Indonesia, Argentina, Portugal, Mexico and Panama. It opens on September 11th in Austria, Germany, Singapore and Brazil. It opens in Spain on September 19th. BABYLON A.D. opens in October in Australia, South Korea, Finland, Italy, Norway and Egypt and in November in Venezuela and Greece.