Random DVD Round-Up 2 - SEX AND THE CITY 2

I didn't hate SEX AND THE CITY 2 as much as I thought I would, but then again, my expectations were very low indeed. I'd never been a fan of the series. I didn't relate to a bunch of women defined by their conspicuous consumption of luxury goods or the apparent contradiction of wanting to be both sexually liberated AND pining for a rich husband. The show, and indeed the first movie, wanted to both have its cake and eat it, and was expressed with a vulgarity of tone, and shameless excess that seemed to undercut its wannabe-serious political agenda.

Fast forward to 2010 and the release of SEX AND THE CITY 2, and the franchise's crass vulgarity has been amped up even more than I thought possible, simply by transferring the four most egregiously consumerist girls in the US to the most egregiously consumerist nation on earth, the UAE. The resulting film feels like a 2 hour info-mercial advertising Abu Dhabi as a vacation resort just so long as you don't want kiss in public, and of course, conditional on you having $22,000 a night for a suite. The plot is the same-old bullshit we got on the TV show: privileged women whining about how tough life is. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), the lawyer, is angry because her male boss dismisses her. Rather than deal with it maturely, she just quits. This is meant to be seen as a victory. Charlotte (Kristin Davis), having sweated spinal fluid to catch a rich husband and have two children, is tired and pissed off with being a mother, despite the fact that she has full-time help. Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is angry her husband is, well, old, and wants to stay in, and when her book gets a bad review, kisses an ex- in a fit of pique. Her husband's reaction to this is just plain unbelievable. And finally, Kim Cattrall is eating hormones to stave off the menopause, and angry she can't fuck anyone she wants in public in a Muslim country.

Now, there are some moments when the movie feels vaguely interesting. I mean, it's nice to see women actually speaking openly about menopause and hot flashes. And yes, being a mother to small kids is hard. But the movie consistently fails to make itself relatable beyond this. There are few casual sentences referring to the awful economy, or congratulating mothers who survive without help, but when uttered by women in a $22,000 a night suite, it just feels condescending - as condescending as Carrie tipping her Indian butler so that he can fly home and visit his wife.

I guess it must sound like I'm criticising the movie less than criticising the lifestyle of the characters, but in a franchise that sells a lifestyle choice, I think that's fair game. But even if I bought into its lifestyle, would I like the movie? Nope. Because even on its own terms, it fails. The fashion is not fabulous but looks horrid. The women don't look wonderful in their middle age, but haggard and trying to hard. The shooting style is pedestrian and the direction workmanlike at best. And just what was that Liza Minelli song and dance number? Did they take her face and morph it onto a different body? It just looked plain weird.

SEX AND THE CITY 2 opened in summer 2010 and is now available to rent and buy.

Random DVD Round-Up 1 - SHREK FOREVER AFTER

SHREK THE THIRD was a desperate movie - a commercial enterprise designed to squeeze every last buck from a franchise, no matter that the plot was confused and cobbled together. I barely sat through it, and hated every moment. When the franchise began, Mike Myers's Shrek was a loveable anti-hero subverting our idea of a fairytale Prince into a farting ogre and Cameron Diaz' Princess Fiona wasn't just a passive pretty girl waiting to be rescued but a feisty, whip-smart woman whose true self was fat and happy. The joy of those films was to see unlikely friendships form between Shrek, Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and Puss In Boots (Antonio Banderas), and to see Shrek and Fiona fall in love. To be sure, the humour was subversive of the Disney myth, but it was always warm-hearted, and after a pretty straight-forward adventure our anti-heroes would always emerge triumphant and true to themselves.

By contrast, by SHREK THE THIRD, Shrek had turned into a whiny little bitch, and the humour was particularly snarky and mean - coming in the form of cheap, lazy Exorcist spoofs of ROSEMARY'S BABY and teen-rom-coms. Fiona was less feisty woman that put-upon wife, and the whole thing had a rather mean-spirited, vulgar feel. So, when SHREK FOREVER AFTER rolled into our cinemas, complete with that ultimate commercial shake-down - 3D - I decided to give it a miss. Imagine, then, my surprise to discover that SHREK FOREVER AFTER isn't have bad at all!

The good news is that the writers have decided to focus on just one idea - and the big grand concept is that Shrek is so peeved with being a harassed father that he allows Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohm) to trick him into signing a contract in which he never existed. What then follows is a sort of IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE meets STAR WARS movie, in which Shrek sees what would have happened if he hadn't existed, and must get Fiona to give him "true love's kiss" in order to get back to normal. Donkey blanks him; Puss In Boots has become fat and lazy; Far Far Away is ruled by a tyrannical Stiltskin, and Fiona, having rescued herself, has become a Rebel Leader leading her fellow ogres in arms against Vader, sorry, Stiltskin! The great thing about this conceit, is that we get to see Fiona back to being feisty, and we get to relive what was wonderful in the first films - seeing Shrek and Fiona fall for each other again, and seeing Shrek and Donkey and Puss become friends again. It's as though the film-makers didn't want the franchise to end on the downer of Part Three and so restored us to the feel-good feeling of Part One. SHREK FOREVER AFTER is, then, a pleasingly good watch. Not as brilliant as Part One, partly because we can't get back that initial surprise, but good fun nonetheless. Hopefully, the film-makers will have the good grace to end it here.

SHREK FOREVER AFTER was released in summer 2010 and is now available to rent and buy.

BLACK SWAN - glorious trash

Darren Aronofsky's much-praised new film, BLACK SWAN, is beautifully-produced trash, and I say that with all respect and admiration. It brings an auteur sensibility to material that is basically a camp psycho-sexual horror flick, in the style of Polanski's REPULSION or Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA. While the material may superficially resemble Powell and Pressburger's seminal ballet melodrama, THE RED SHOES, BLACK SWAN contains none of that film's elegant framing or love for high-art. Rather, BLACK SWAN is the ultimate B-movie - a genre movie that wears its balls-out craziness on its sleeve. The result is beautiful and exhilarating, but I can't say that it affected me as emotionally and as profoundly as Aronofsky's previous film, THE WRESTLER.

In fairness to Aronofsky, the B-movie craziness of BLACK SWAN can be traced back directly to its roots - the ballet Swan Lake - a Gothic melodrama containing elements of body-horror, psychotic doubling and ending in transformative suicide. If that isn't the stuff of a Polanski horror flick, I don't know what is. In the ballet, an evil wizard transforms the innocent princess Odile into a were-swan. The love of the handsome prince should set her free, but her evil doppelgaenger Odette seduces the prince, with results varying depending on which version of the ballet you watch. In the film, Natalie Portman's Nina Sayer has been infantilised by an over-bearing mother (Barbara Hershey). Under pressure to be the perfect "sweet girl" and ballerina, Nina self-harms, is bulimic, has a pathological desire to please, and a psychotic fear of imperfection. When given the role of the Swan Queen, Nina has to bring her innate sexuality, so suppressed by her mother, out into the open, to inform her dancing of the Black Swan. She simply cracks trying to reconcile her mother's expectations of pre-pubescent innocence and her ballet director's (Vincent Cassel) aggressive demands that she be as instinctively sexual as her understudy (Mila Kunis).

What follows is a movie that creates a sense of building tension through the use of claustrophobic interior shots; invasive close-ups; visual trickery with mirrors; and sound editing that suggests an inner self trying to break through. The movie is never pure horror despite plenty of shots involving nail-clipping and skin-scratching.  After all, we never really doubt whether what we are seeing is real or imagined. Nina is shown to be an unreliable witness too early in the movie for that. What we do have is a powerful display of hysteria - but heightened to the point where it is sometimes unintentionally funny (an early scene bedroom scene, for example) and moves so far beyond realism that one feels almost disengaged from it. Nina is less a person to sympathise with than a delicate compendium of every single neurosis that can arise from intensely un-boundaried parenting.

The thematic material in BLACK SWAN is very similar to THE WRESTLER. In both movies we have individuals who are so dedicated to and defined by their profession, that they ultimately sacrifice their physical and mental well-being to it. The Wrestler staples himself and batters himself to entertain, just as Nina breaks her toes and punishes her body. The Wrestler and Nina may be extreme examples of self-destruction, but they hint at the systematic physical abuse that their professions entail. That's why Aronofsky's shooting style is so perfect. By taking the cameras on-stage, by using tracking shots that immerse us in their worlds, Aronofsky is making us look behind the costumes to see the grueling physicality. He wants us to see the sweat, the muscles, the bleeding toes and the broken bones. 

In a sense, Aronofsky is making a bigger point about the demands the entertainment industries make of its professionals, begging the obvious question of how far this applies to his profession, with its pressure to maintain youthful good looks with botox, plastic surgery and aggressive dieting. To that end, one can only view the casting of Mickey Rourke in THE WRESTLER and Barbara Hershey in BLACK SWAN - both self-mutilated by plastic surgery and injury - as provocations. By casting these actors, Aronofsky is himself blurring the line between actor and character - just as Nina can't separate reality from fiction. Similarly, the use of Winona Ryder to play the prima ballerina Nina supplants is inspired. Ryder was a beautiful young actress whose early success morphed into career stagnation and personal humiliation.  Who else better signifies crushing rejection in reality and on screen?

Still, for all the similarity in material, and in the vérité shooting style used in the apartment scenes, to my mind BLACK SWAN is at once a greater and lesser film than THE WRESTLER. It is a greater film insofar as it shows Aronofsky and DP Matthew Libatique in perfect command of vérité shooting style but also able to inter-cut this with its exact opposite - a super-heightened gothic horror shotting style using chiaroscuro and close-ups. It also shows that Aronofsky can do genre cinema with the best of them. But BLACK SWAN is a lesser film insofar as that willingness to leap into melodramatic horror is ultimately a distancing device. Nina Sayers is such a compendium of crazy - under such extreme pressure - that she becomes a device rather than a person. Accordingly, as the film moves into its final act, it is beautiful but it isn't emotionally arresting. Nina's self-destructive tailspin is transfixing, wonderful, crazy and all-consuming - but it never made me feel the visceral hurt that The Wrestler did. That is BLACK SWAN's only flaw - but it is a serious one.

BLACK SWAN played Venice, Telluride, Toronto and London 2010. It opened last year in the US and Canada. It opens this Friday in the UK, Australia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland and Poland. It opens on the 27th in Chile, Greece, Slovenia and Lithuania, It opens on February 4th in the Netherlands, Portugal, Brazil, Iceland and Norway. It opens in France, Singapore and Mexico on February 10th. It opens on February 17th in Argentina, Hungary, Israel, Russia, Estonia and Spain. It opens on February 24th in Belgium, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Finland and Turkey. It opens in Sweden on March 4th, Italy on March 11th and the Czech Republic on April 7th.

THE GREEN HORNET - in which Hollywood pisses on my eiderdown once more

I am HUGELY disappointed by THE GREEN HORNET. I know it had a "troubled" journey to our screens, with Kevin Smith's scripts hacked and directors dropping out like so many milk-teeth. But when it got to the final credit list, I was full of anticipation. After all, this was a superhero movie that was going to be set square in the tradition of fond mockery - the tradition that produced the brilliantly funny KICK-ASS and genre-pastiches like PINEAPPLE EXPRESS. And who better to mock fondly than director Michel Gondry - the guy behind the wonderfully sweet, adorably goofy BE KIND, REWIND, not to mention quirkier, stranger, more brilliantly crazy THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP. The cast looked fly too - the newly trim Seth Rogen - hilarious in PINEAPPLE EXPRESS was going to bring that child-like enthusiasm and general all-round good-egg persona to the role of Britt Reid/The Green Hornet, playboy millionaire turned masked-crime-fighter. Cameron Diaz - always willing to take the piss out of herself - was going to play the love interest, Lenore Case. We had the promise of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS' Chrisoph Waltz as the evil villain Chudnofsky. And best of all for Battlestar Galactica geeks, we had Edward James "Adama" Olmos as the editor of the Daily Sentinel. Okay, so I'd never heard of the Jay Chou, guy who plays The Hornet's sidekick, Kato, but I was willing to roll with it. So there it was - I was all ready for a superhero pastiche/homage full of good jokes, ridonkulous super-weapons and a general good-time.

But what did I get? Joke-free boredom. And without jokes, all this movie becomes is a Batman/Superman knock-off. Derivative, predictable, silly, emotionally involving, and absolutely no stakes. And when the jokes don't work you have to blame either the script or the actors or, in the case of physical humour, the director. So, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Jay Chou, Cameron Diaz, Christoph Waltz, Michel Gondry, I know want you to go and stand in the corner and think VERY carefully about what you've done. Especially Gondry. I mean, I am genuinely amazed that Gondry even knows how to direct something this banal.

Evidently, somewhere in Hollywood, in some drawer, there is a Kevin Smith script for THE GREEN HORNET that is frackin' amazing. Somewhere, years ago, in some producer's office, there was a dream of a brilliantly witty, action-filled movie. The dream, ladies and gentlemen, is dead.

P.S. I got so angry when I was writing this review that I forgot to mention the biggest insult of all! This movie has been retro-fitted with 3D after principal photography was completed. The result is a film that costs an extra few pounds to see, and where the only material impact of 3D is that it looks several shades more dull than if you were watching it without the glasses.  There are no cool action shots that are enhanced by it. There's no immersive, subtle enhancement of depth of field. Just cynical commercial decision-making at its most brazen.

THE GREEN HORNET is on release in Belgium, Chile, Egypt, France, Belgium, Chile, Egypt, France, Switzerland, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Austria, Canada, Estonia, India, Spain, the UK, the USA and Venezuela. It opens next weekend in Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Japan. It opens on the 28th January in Greece, Singapore and Italy. It opens on February 3rd in Russia.

BLUE VALENTINE

BLUE VALENTINE is a justifiably praised indie drama about a young couple falling in and out of love. The stories of their meeting in the early twenties, and their disintegrating marriage six years later, and presented linearly, but inter-cut. Seeing the couple in their early heady romance juxtaposed so directly with their later frustrations brings an added pathos to what would have already been an incredibly affecting, brutally closely observed story.

Ryan Gosling (HALF NELSON) and Michelle Williams (WENDY AND LUCY) both give bravura performances as Dean and Cindy, perfectly rendering portraits of their characters at two stages of life. Gosling's Dean starts off as a charming, spontaneous, caring young man, stuck in a blue-collar job but apparently not asking anything more from life. No surprise then that Cindy - stuck in a loveless home - is drawn to his open-ness and warmth - so much so that when she falls pregnant she is willing to shelve her career ambitions to make a life with him. Six years later, and Cindy is tired and frustrated - a dutiful mother and working woman. Dean's spontaneity and charm now strike her as infantile, and though faithful to the idea of marriage, she has no desire for him. Meanwhile, Dean is seemingly so content with the idea of being a husband and father that he has no desire to push himself any further in life, or any real comprehension as to his wife's new-found coldness toward him. By marrying Cindy he has achieved more than he could have ever dreamed of - the pretty middle-class girl - and perhaps the greatest sadness of the film is that while Cindy can see more, has been raised to try for more, Dean has never been given that sense of possibility.

The bold performances are matched by documentary film-maker Derek Cianfrance's choices with the camera and editing. He shoots the couple in two very different styles in each period of their life - the courtship is in wide-angled Super 16 that always seems a little bright and grainy - like watching old cine-films of your childhood. It adds to the feeling that these are old memories. The present is shot with long lenses on DV, and it feels like the camera is always positioned to give us the feeling that the two characters are caught in a confined space, and yet never in the same focus when in the frame. It's as though the camera lens is literally entrapping them in a shared space but perpetual misunderstanding.

The overall effect is one of uncomfortable voyeurism. The movie is almost an endurance test. Because we are charmed by the couple's courtship - because they are both essentially good and charming and caring people - it becomes absolutely gruelling to watch them inflict hurt after hurt upon each other for no typically Hollywood-reason - no distinct cause - but just because they have grown up, or haven't in different ways.

BLUE VALENTINE played Sundance, Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and London 2010. It is currently on release in the US, Australia, Malaysia and Canada. It opens in the UK this Friday, in Portugal on February 3rd and in Sweden on April 1st. Both Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams have been nominated for Golden Globes.

THE KING'S SPEECH - wonderful pantomime

In the mid-1930s, Britain was still a proud Empire that ranged from the Caribbean territories in the West, via East Africa, to India, Australia and Hong Kong. But the home country was still reeling from the Great Depression and fearful of the second Great War in living memory. The Empire needed leadership, both from its politicians who had the real political power, and from its monarchy, whose job was to inspire loyalty and imperial unity in the face of adversity. But the politicians fell grip to appeasement, and bar Winston Churchill, utterly failed to anticipate Hitler's aggression. As for the monarchy King George V was dying; and his son, David. the short-lived King Edward VIII, abdicated so that he could marry the scandal-ridden divorcee Wallis Simpson. Thus, David's younger brother, Bertie, the Duke of York (father of the current Queen Elizabeth) was thrust onto the throne as King George VI, with the task of leading his country and his Empire into World War Two. Pity then, the man, courageous and dutiful, but hampered by a debilitating stammer induced, the movie argues, by a shockingly loveless and brutal childhood.

THE KING'S SPEECH is, then, the story of how Bertie (Colin Firth) persevered through humiliation and fear to become technically more accomplished at public speaking and emotionally able to take on the burden of monarchy. He did this, the film posits, through sheer courage; the love of a good woman (Helena Bonham-Carter); and through the advice and friendship of the radically informal, Antipodean speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). 

So here's the thing. THE KING'S SPEECH is basically a really well made and emotionally involving film. It comes to our screens dripping with critical praise and smothered with awards. Director Tom Hooper eschews the typical lavish costume drama production design and shooting style, instead trapping his King in fog-bound streets and narrow corridors. The cast give fine performances. The script is beautifully written. I was deeply caught up in the drama. But, as I write this review some days later, I am less impressed by the film. Because, essentially, I was in the realms of pantomime cinema.

Colin Firth is, after all, playing an essentially Good Man.  Firth's Bertie is understandably angry; occasionally very funny; a warm, loving father and a dutiful king. He is an under-dog hero without faults, played by an actor at the top of his game.His wife is also without fault in this film - determined to help her husband, utterly sympathetic to him, charming to commoners, but conscious of maintaining her regal authority. And even Lionel Logue is a man without fault and dripping with charm! He is wonderfully brash, believes in Bertie's essentially goodness, and constantly helps him, even when Bertie sounds off at him. Even the minor characters are basically charming and lovely.  Logue's wife (Jennifer Ehle) in a few short scenes is a picture of calm concern and wise advice.  The horribly politically wrong Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin (a marvelous cameo from Anthony Andrews) is noble and humble in his failure.  And even Chrurchill (Timothy Spall), the towering personality who seemed to win the War single-handedly through sheer bloody-mindedness and brilliance, is humanised by the admission of a youthful speech impediment. 

And what of the villains of the piece? They too are essentially mono-dimensional. David (Guy Pierce with a pitch-perfect voice impersonation) is basically a bullying, selfish cad, utterly beguiled by the domineering Wallis. The late King George V (Michael Gambon) and his wife are distant, uncaring, bullying parents. And Derek Jacobi's Archbishop of Canterbury is an obsequious passive-aggressive arse.

So there you have it:  THE KING'S SPEECH is the ne plus ultra of feel-good movies, with the added bonus of being about glamorous royals. It comes complete with palaces and princesses - evil villains, unimpeachable heroes, the love that conquers all, the buddy movie, the under-dog story. And the biggest signal that we are in the realms of blatant emotional manipulation? The lazy use of the adagio from Beethoven's 7th symphony and the adagio from Beethoven's 5th piano sonata as we hear the King give his final, triumphant speech and wave to his adoring public on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.

THE KING'S SPEECH played Telluride, Toronto, London and the AFI 2010. It was released last year in the USA, Canada, Greece, Spain, Australia and New Zealand. It is released on January 7th in the UK, on January 21st in Estonia and Finland, and on January 28th in Slovenia, Iceland and Italy. It will be released in France on February 2nd, in Hungary on February 3rd and in Brazil and Sweden on February 4th. It will be released in Portugal on February 10th and in Germany and the Netherlands on February 17th. It will be released in Russia on March 17th.

At the British Independent Film Awards, THE KING'S SPEECH won Best Film, Screenplay, Actor (Colin Firth), Supporting Actor (Geoffrey Rush), Actress (Helena Bonham Carter). It was nominated for Best Director, Supporting Actor (Guy Pierce) and Production Design (Eve Stewart). It has also been nominated for seven Golden Globes and four SAG awards.