WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING**

Director Olivia Newman has turned Delia Owens best-selling southern gothic thriller into a frustratingly dull, bloodless that fails to truly interrogate southern poverty, prejudice or sexual tension. 

The heroine, Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is abandoned by her mother and siblings and left with her abusive father living in rural poverty in the North Carolina marshes. The book makes us feel the indignity of her poverty and the cruelty of the townsfolk that forces Kya to live as a hermit. But in this film the rough edges are smoothed over and her shack is expansive, sun-dappled and picturesque even before the make-over she can afford when her nature book is finally published. We never feel her hunger or otherness. 

The same goes for her interactions with the two men in her life.  Tate (Taylor John Smith) is the kind-hearted kid who teaches her to read and develop her interest in wildlife before leaving her for university - yet another betrayal in a life where everyone leaves her. Chase (TRIANGLE OF SADNESS' Harris Dickinson) is the local jock who uses Kya for sex and ends up dead with Kya defending herself in the courtroom drama framing device. In neither relationship is there any hint of sexual chemistry or emotional depth. It's all so.... plastic. 

As for the rest of the film it's so cliched it borders on offensive. We have David Strathairn phoning it in, in a pastiche of the earnest southern lawyer made iconic in To Kill A Mockingbird. And a lot has already been written about Delia Owens' treatment of the two thinly-written and earnest black shopkeepers who take Kya under their wing. It's a shame that screenwriter Lucy Alibar didn't give Michael Hyatt and Sterling Macer Jr more to do in these paper-thin roles.

WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING has a rating of PG-13 and a running time of 125 minutes. It is now available to rent and own.

AS I LAY DYING - LFF 2013 - Preview

As the anticipation builds for the London Film Festival, you may find that a lot of the obvious hot tickets are already sold out. So I thought I'd give a shout out to some of the more under the radar movies that you can still buy tickets for, here, at the time of writing.

James Franco's directorial début AS I LAY DYING is just such a film.  The actor, artist and writer has made his own adaptation of William Faulkner's novel, and brought it to screen with a starry cast and an earnest fidelity to the source material.  It's the tale of a family of poor farmers in the American South of the early twentieth century.  This may be a country of motor cars, but their existence remains one of poverty, ignorance and superstition.  The dying mother's last wish is to be buried in the town of Jefferson, and much of the movie chronicles the physical and emotional toll that the journey to Jefferson, decaying body in tow, has on her husband and children.  

Anse, her husband, is staunch and strict, burdened with rotting teeth and selfish needs. His portrayal by Tim Blake Nelson begins comic - a spoof of Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel, complete with rotting teeth - but becomes more sinister as the movie progresses.  The three grown sons - Darl, Jewel and Cash - are plagued by doubts, conflicted desires and take the physical and mental toll worst.  I'm not sure if James Franco ever really convinces as the mentally fragile Darl, but Logan Marshall-Green is devastatingly moving as Jewel  - the son who doesn't agree with the journey but can't quit it either.  And Jim Parrick, as Cash, is as close as we get to a sympathetic everyman in this story.  Meanwhile, kid brother Vardaman, seems the most slippery, and sister Dewey Dell (Alma O'Reilly) is hiding a secret that contributes to Darl's ultimate fall. 

When the movie works, it works because it faithfully transcribes Faulkner's haunting, slippery style.  There's a heavy use of voiceover and different, sometimes misleading, points of view.  This is not a movie you should watch if you don't like hearing peasants speak in vaguely pretentious terms of life and death.  I suppose one could argue that there are things that work on the page that seem absurd on the screen, I'm not sure how one could try to translate Faulkner, and his style, without this device.  Where I think the movie is in more troubling territory is when Franco makes a stylistic choice that has nothing to do with Faulkner. Most notably, he uses a split screen, showing two characters from different angles, sometimes engaged in conversation with each other, at other times with a separate conversation overlaid on the audio track. Maybe Franco's trying to make a point about how disconnected the family is? Either way, it's an alienating device for the audience, that undermines the intimacy that the voiceover is trying to create. 

Overall, AS I LAY DYING is still perhaps the most faithful adaptation of Faulkner's novel as you're likely to see, and has moments of visual beauty - and in Logan Marshall-Green's performance - great strength.  It's not always successful, but at least Franco's taking chances. 

AS I LAY DYING has a running time of 110 minutes and is rated R in the USA.   The movie played Cannes 2013 and will play London 2013.  It will be released in Portugal on October 10th 2013. It will be available as VOD in the USA on October 22nd and on DVD on November 5th. It will open in the Netherlands on November 21st. 

SUNDANCE LONDON 2013 - MUD

Despite the critical hype surrounding Jeff Nichols' TAKE SHELTER, I just couldn't get into it. It was just so dour, and obscure and wilfully pessimistic that it alienated me.  Nichols' sequel MUD is an entirely different beast, and worth every ounce of praise it's receiving.  The movie drips with humanity and compassion.  It speaks, as did BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, to a vanishing of a lifestyle rooted in its environment and local community on the banks of the Mississippi.  The stakes couldn't be higher.  But to the movie's great credit, it's shot through with a disarming blunt humour delivered by one of its two superb child stars, Jacob Lofland.  That helps to make us really care about the characters, and so to become susceptible to the thriller-like tension of the movie's final act.  

The plot is deceptively simple.  Two charming kids, Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacon Lofland) stumble upon an escaped convict called Mud (a grungy, grifty looking Matthew McConaughey).  Ellis - from a mixture of plain decency and romance - decides to help Mud gather the materials to repair a boat and escape purely because he wants Mud to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart Juniper (Reese Witherspoon).  The tension comes from the fact that Mud killed Juniper's abusive ex-boyfriend and his family is out looking for vengeance.  Moreover, at an emotional level, we are deeply concerned as to whether the vulnerable skittish Juniper will have the courage to follow through with Mud.  Indeed, a theme that flows through this movie could be summed up as "la donna e mobile".  The movie is full of  women who are flighty and let down their romantic with a capital R menfolk.

The resulting film has a wistful, darkly comic tone.  We feel the grittiness and the griminess of the locale as well as the stunning beauty of the river. The plot point that motivates the final act is heavily foreshadows and yet the betrayal that triggers it is so powerful that one can't help but get carried along with it.  McConaughey continues his run of superb character roles, really getting shabby and battered for this one. And while Mud is charismatic enough to get these boys to help him, this is no Magic Mike style pure show-man. Mud is a far more layered, vulnerable and sometimes even pathetic character.  Reese Witherspoon is good in a cameo role, but it's really the kids who carry the film and win our hearts. 

MUD has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA.

MUD played Cannes 2012 and Sundance 2013. It opens on France on May 1st and in the UK on May 10th.

THE PAPERBOY

THE PAPERBOY is a superbly trashy tawdry movie in the best tradition of the Southern Gothic. Set in a late 60s bumblefuck town in Florida, the movie opens with a racist obese cop having his guts eviscerated in a parking lot and closes with a sunkissed teen ferrying brutalised bodies over an alligator swamp. In between, we're going to see a convicted murderer command his infatuated fiancée to simulate oral sex in front of the journalists trying to prove him innocent. We're going to see that same fiancée pee on the sunkised teen lashed by a jellyfish.  We're going to see his elder brother brutalised in a sadomasochistic act in which he might have been complicit. And we're going to see a man rip the guts out of a gator as if it ain't no thang. 

In all this craziness, it's questionable where our focus is really meant to be?  Are we really meant to care about proving the innocence of creepy Hillary van Wetter (John Cusack)? To be sure, reporters Ward (Matthew McConaughey) and Yardley (David Oyewolo) do some investigating but I never really got a hold of what they were meant to be uncovering and how it got him released, or even why Ward was so convinced of his innocence after the way he talked to his fiancée Charlotte (Nicole Kidman).  (I figured Yardley never cared one way or another, just so long as he got to publish something.)

No, the focus of the movie seemed to be far more on kid brother Jack (Zac Efron), his infatuation with Charlotte (so slippery for the narrator to keep calling it love), and his unending loyalty to his brother, despite everything that he saw in that plastic sheeted motel room.  There are moments between Ward and Jack, amid the garish grotesquery, that are so intimate and authentic they make you realise how rare it is to see true sibling love on screen. I'm thinking of a snatched conversation on the banks of a swamp - and the way in which Ward cradles a drunken Jack as they sail out to see Charlotte in the movie's final act. And let's be honest, the flash of anger in which Jack uses the N-word in front of his beloved housemaid, Anita (Macy Gray) and then makes up with her says so much more about the reality of race relations in that period than THE HELP ever could. 

So, while THE PAPERBOY might fail as a conventional investigative procedural, while it's focus might be fuzzy, it succeeds like no film I know in holding us rapt - just waiting to see what on earth could happen next to these characters that, after all, we have come to care about. Because, yes, I did want the oversexed trailer trash prison groupie to be happy. And I did care about Jack and Ward, and wince every time someone mistreated Anita. 

I love the way that Lee Daniels (PRECIOUS) and DP Roberto Schaeffer's Super 16mm photography and impeccable production design make the movie jump off the screen. I love the way we can feel the sweat, and the taste the dirt and smell the filth.  And I have to say that as much as Nicole Kidman got a lot of award season glory this really is an ensemble cast that has no shame, no pride and every willingness to look trashy in service of the story.  I guess we've come to expect this from Matthew McConaughey who's reinvented himself as the king of sleaze, but I was shocked at John Cusack's transformation.  Macy Gray is also wonderful as Anita, in one of the rare examples of a narration that really works. 

THE PAPERBOY played Cannes and Toronto 2012 and was released last year in Croatia, the USA, Belgium, France, Canada, Israel, Russia, Bulgaria, Greece and Portugal. It opened earlier this year in Poland, Lebanon, Finland and Australia. It opens this weekend in the UK and Ireland, in Chile on April 4th, in Mexico on April 5th, in Turkey on April 12th and in Argentina on May 9th. 

THE PAPERBOY has a running time of 107 minutes and is rated R in the USA. 

WINTER'S BONE

WINTER'S BONE arrived in the UK from Sundance and Berlin covered in praise for its strong central performances and gritty portrayal of middle-American rural poverty.

The heroine of the film is seventeen-year old Ree Dolly played with impressive authority and conviction by Jennifer Lawrence. Ree is the daughter of an absent felon father and mentally ill mother, and has been forced to take on the parenting of her younger brother and sister. This involves a delicate balance of learning how to live on scraps and handouts without losing a sense of pride. This fragile existence is put under threat when bail bondsmen threaten to seize Ree’s house and woods unless she can find her father and bring him to jail. One could almost regard the search for the father as a MacGuffin – an excuse for the Ree to take us on a journey into the wider community. Because that’s what this film ultimately is – an excuse to explore a community full of adults that have responded to the lack of economic opportunity in the Ozarks, and turned to drug-using, drug-dealing and violence. Every single adult Ree turns to for help refuses to take the responsibility befitting an adult. And while, to spoil the ending, she does ultimately keep her house – and there is palpable relief that she won’t be separated from her brother and sister – that relief is ultimately false. Because we leave Ree in exactly the same position that we found her in at the start of the movie – living in poverty, forced into maturity before her time, and martyring herself for her family. We’ve basically just seen a young girl literally beaten to a pulp in her fight to stand still – just maintain.

So, WINTER'S BONE is no pleasure-ride, but it is an impressively made and well-acted movie, and that gives a certain pleasure of its own. By persuading the people from Ozarks to let her use their houses, and to appear as extras and minor characters, director Debra Granik imbues her film with a rarely seen sense of authenticity and sympathy. To be crude, even when viewed from the comparative luxury of your art-house cinema seat, this film never feels like poverty-porn. Is the movie flawless? No. I found the black-and-white animated dream sequence gauche and what should have played as a grimly horrific scene on a river was so over-the-top I laughed. Nonetheless, this is a powerful film – a film that creates and sustains a menacing tone, and that contains fleeting glimpses of genuine familial tenderness in the most unforgiving of circumstances.

WINTER'S BONE played Berlin 2010 where it won the CICAE Award and the Reader Jury Prize of hte Tagesspiegel. It also played Sundance 2010 where it won the Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. It was released earlier this year in the US and is currently on release in the UK. It opens in France on November 3rd.

MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL - a flabby film

Clint Eastwood's adaptation of the fabulously popular true-life fiction novel is a baggy, flabby affair that fails to truly capture the weirdness and sinister eccentricity of the original. The light is too bright, the situation too contemporary and recognisable, and some of the acting risible.

The story is simple. In 1980s Savannah, not the most hospitable environment for a rich white man to come out of the closet, a young hustler (Jude Law entirely failing to pull off a Southern accent) is murdered in the lavish house of a wealthy art dealer (Kevin Spacey). The resulting court case is covered by an out-of-town journalist (John Cusack). The problem is that he looses all objectivity and is drawn into the gothic world of voo-doo, secrets and a charismatic transvestite called Lady Chablis (playing herself).

The resulting movie doesn't know whether it wants to be a John Grisham style courtroom drama or a voyeuristic look at a bunch of eccentrics. Either way, it is dull, long and bland - something the novel never was. I never fully felt the scandal of tawdry sex invading genteel upper class surroundings. I never had chills running down my spine as we lingered in cemeteries at midnight with a voodoo priestess. The comedy wasn't dark and subversive but gentle and inclusive. A great disappointment.

MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL was released in 1997 and 1998. It is available on iTunes and on DVD.

BUG - unforgettable, excruciating, unbelievably overlooked

Agnes is an alcoholic coke addict who hides from her abusive ex-husband in a seedy motel in an unspecified Southern state. The cine-literate will note her white-trash uniform: filthy wife-beater, greasy hair and cut-off jeans; abode: the sort of motel room that hides Psychos behind the shower curtain and voyeurs behind the air vents. Agnes drinks to mask a real, profound sorrow. She is retreating from life. When Peter appears, he seems almost too earnest...but in her loneliness, Agnes takes him in, relieved to find a companion by whom she is not threatened. These two form an unlikely bond despite the mocking, threatening visits from Agnes' ex. Agnes' desperation to have someone in her life, and to make sense of her grief, makes her pathetically susceptible to Peter's paranoid delusions of government conspiracy and experimentation.

If Agnes expresses our need to believe, even if we knowingly delude ourselves in that belief, then Peter is the extreme reaction of every sane, right-thinking human being to the travesties of justice and trust that we experience on a daily basis. Every time my government takes away a right I have had since Magna Carta; every time I bring home a DVD with an RFID chip; every second I inch closer to a compulsary ID card; my faith in the system is eroded. It may take severe mental illness to get to Peter's stage of paranoia and revulsion, but what makes his predicament so terrifying is that, on one level, I can sympathise with it. To that end, BUG is the movie that INVASION so desperately wanted to be - a perfect expression of angst in an era of twin fears; terrorism and counter-terrorism.

Tracy Letts' screenplay places these two characters in a claustrophobic motel room and watches them work each other up into a state of frenzied insanity. The trajectory is clear from the outset, but it is testament to the script and the performances that the audience is fascinated by their disintegration and fearful for them at every step. Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon are astonishingly raw in their roles as Agnes and Peter. The script and direction take them into the realms of the surreal. The movie flirts with a very black, dead-pan humour. Some of their actions and dialogue seems bizarre - maybe even laughable. But thanks to the conviction of their performances, the audience is not allowed to break the tension with a nervous laugh. Were it not for the extreme nature of the scenario and the fundamental cowardice of the voters, one could imagine both actors being nominated for Oscars. In smaller supporting roles, I was impressed by Harry Connick Junior who gives a very carefully modulated performance as Agnes' voluble but menacing ex-husband.

As for William Friedkin's direction and Michael Grady's photography, I can't praise them enough for managing to take the stock elements of a gothic horror and turn them into an entirely original, oppressive, psychological horror. A classic example of their art is the scene in which Agnes wakes up to find a fresh pot of coffee brewing. She takes a cup and wanders to the bathroom to thank Peter. The door opens and steam rolls out, elegantly obscuring a leaner torso thant we would expect from Peter. The head is obscured by steam, but the stance and voice are all wrong. Agnes' ex steps into the room and into the light. Her dream of a passive partner dissolves into the reality of a brutish husband. It's all so beautifully done

So, let us be clear. BUG is an amazing film. By turns emotionally engaging, excruciating to watch, impossibly to turn away from, frightening and fascinating. Why then, is it only playing on one small screen in the Odeon Panton Street in London? Why is there no publicity? Why was the screening near empty? This film has been done a great disservice by its distributors. This will no doubt fuel its status as Cult Movie of 2007.

BUG played Cannes, Toronto and London back in 2006 and Berlin 2007. It was released in France, the US, Turkey, Russia, Greece, Brazil and Thailand earlier this year and is currently on release in the UK. BUG is available on Region 1 DVD.

TIDELAND - the best Gilliam since BRAZIL

TIDELAND is an outstanding new movie from director Terry Gilliam. It tells the tale of a young girl called Jeliza-Rose. A child of rare wit and imagination, Jeliza-Rose is the daughter of heroin addicts. When her mother dies, her father takes her to her grandmother's derelict house in the middle of the countryside. She prepares her father's injections, scrapes peanut-butter from a near-empty jar, and must amuse herself as best she can.

TIDELAND is not a pleasant ride. But, unlike most cinema, it delivers something new, challenging and genuinely disturbing. Not least when Jeliza imagines that she has a boyfriend in a dim-witted young man called Dickens. Or when, in the final ten minutes, you feel the urge to laugh darkly at a Pyscho-esque taxidermy moment. It is the sort of film where you desperately search for a toe-hold, so strange and plentiful are the disturbing and often random occurences. Think Alice in Wonderland re-imagined by Hunter S Thompson by way of the Polish Brothers and then add that pure undiluted Gilliam visual style. Even the ending is not so much a resolution as a chance to breathe. The overwhelming tone of this film was, for me, sadness for this amazing but lonely little girl who is so desperate for interaction that she will make dolls and ghoulish strangers her best friends.

Kudos must go to Terry Gilliam for adapting the cult novel by Mitch Cullin so faithfully and for coaxing a quite breath-taking performance from Jodelle Ferland, who plays the young girl. This is perhaps the second film this year, after TONY TAKITANI, to really stay with me long after the screening. And while both have very different stories and styles they are both centred on loneliness, abandonment, and the desperate need to connect.

To my mind, TIDELAND is the best and "most" Gilliam movie since BRAZIL. I strongly urge you to check it out if you are in the mood for something different.

TIDELAND showed at Toronto back in 2005 and has since been on release in Russia, the Netherlands, Greece, Portugal, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Poland, Japan and the Czech Republic. It is currently on release in the UK, Ireland and Iceland and rolls into Taiwan later this month. It opens in Argentina, Canada, Rumania, New York and Finland in October 2006.

UNDERTOW - There are some things we just don't need to see

Josh Lucas mud-wrestling a squealing pig, his pale ass-cheeks wobbling over the top of his muddy britches. No, sir. We also do not need to see inferior remakes of cinematic classics, no matter what the pedigree of the director. No matter how impressive David Gordon Green's first two films were, there is no excuse for this blatant rip-off of The Night of the Hunter. In this version, Dermot Mulroney plays John Munn, the father of two kids, living in the backwoods of Georgia in savage conditions. One day his younger brother Deel Munn, played by Josh Lucas, shows up. He's after some old Mexican coins that Mulroney inherited from his father. This being one of Green's trademark "Southern Gothic" flicks, the fight for the coins soon turns violent. So the two kids abscond, chased by their sinister, murdering Uncle. Now, despite my deep scepticism as to the point of remaking (broadly speaking) The Night of the Hunter, there is a lot to like about UNDERTOW. Apart from Josh Lucas, the cast is outstanding. In particular, Jamie Bell and Devon Alan are captivating as the two young Munn boys. The evocation of mood - from photography to Philip Glass' score - is also first class. However, whenever Josh Lucas appeared on screen I was totally taken out of the movie thanks to his hammy over-acting. He plays menacing by opening his eyes *really* wide and getting all shouty in the manner of Al Pacino's more hammy performances. And when he starts on his sinister rampage he just reminded me of Jason Lee in My Name is Earl. And that's about as menacing as the English pace attack. (i.e. not very.) To sum up, there are worse looking films out on DVD this week, but I doubt if any are more frustratingly mis-cast.

UNDERTOW screened at London 2004 and went on limited release in the UK last autumn. It was released on DVD yesterday.