MEGAMIND - A pocketful of Kryptonite

Right, you've all seen Superman? in every episode or comic strip, evil Lex Luthor kidnaps the feisty journalist Lois Lane in order to lure Superman to rescue her. Lex is clever, but truth, justice and the American Way wins out. Superman rescues Lois and she goes back to work with the trusty dull Clark Kent, unaware that he is really Superman. And poor photographer Jimmy Olsen never catches anyone's attention, as the Spin Doctors rightly observed. So, imagine what would happen if one day Lex Luthor actually defeated Superman and took over Metropolis. No Superman, Lois at a lose end, Jimmy tries to make his move, but is rebuffed, and Lex bored without an arch-enemy, tries to create a new superhero by zapping Jimmy with Superman's DNA. Only, turns out Super-Jimmy has been brooding with resentment all these years, as the Spin Doctors told us, and uses his powers for Evil, which of course, gives Lex the chance to...er....do good?!

Of course, you can't imagine DC Comics letting Superman get publicly mauled like this, so instead, you get MEGAMIND, wherein Superman isn't so much spoofed as Alan-Moore'd except, of course, with about a tenth of his wisdom and Tina Fey's jokes. The end-result is a ball of laughs, rather sweet, and definitely worth watching.

Will Ferrell plays Megamind - the Evil Genius who thinks he might just want to be nice for a change, wooing the feisty chick Roxanne Ritchi (Tina Fey). It's a a role Ferrell has played a number of times in recent years, typically in movies that alternate with his cruder SNL comedy skits-turned-features. MEGAMIND is one of the few films that allows him to be both vulnerable-sweet AND grossly-comical and the mix is a treat. The typecasting continues with the rest of the cast. Tina Fey does her usual sweet, neurotic, charming thing as Roxanne - Jonah Hill does his creepy, slacker, irritating schtick as Jimmy/Hal - and Brad Pitt basically plays Superman, sorry, Metro Man, as Brad Pitt - a famous star tired of the limelight.

The comedy is definitely three steps wittier and more consistent than DESPICABLE ME. I mean, just look at how good the physical comedy is when Megamind is pretending to be Bernard in his Evil Lair. Or just look at how funny the Minion losing oxygen scene is. That stuff doesn't happen without the intervention of a director like Tom McGrath (MADAGASCAR 1 and 2) and actors like Fey and Ferrell. But for all that, Megamind doesn't have the heart of a movie like DESPICABLE ME, and I really wonder how far young kids will keep up with a movie in which a major plot point is that characters can switch bodies at the touch of a wristwatch - or where a large part of the humour, and a major plot point comes from the lead character putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable of words?

MEGAMIND is on release in the US, Canada, Russia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Egypt, Kuwait, Georgia, Portugal, Argentina, Croatia, Germany, Slovenia, Switzerland, Austria, Brazil, Spain and the UK. It opens next week in Australia, Venezuela, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Serbia and Estonia. It opens on Christmas Day in Finland and Sweden, on December 26th in Norway and on January 7th in Poland.

Kids' flick round-up 1 - DESPICABLE ME

So I caught two kids' movies this week - both of which feature an Evil Mastermind who isn't as evil as he makes out to be. In both cases they have minions called Minion, and a Nemesis who out-evils them both. Both movies are set in the kind of juiced up day-glo world only animation can give us, and both try to have their cake and eat it - splicing cuddly feeeeeeelings with pop-culture banter and post-modern winking-at-the-audience in-jokes. And both feature all-star casts. I liked both, enjoyed both, but only one really moved me, and that's DESPICABLE ME.

In the old days, before the Berlin Wall fell, being Evil was easy. You leaved in a creeeepy Addams family house, you tortured people with medieval spiky things, and you affected an accent half-Soviet half Peter-Lorre. But poor anti-hero, Gru (Steve Carell), has been outpaced and outclassed by a young whipper-snapper called Vector (Jason Segel) who lives in a proper shiny evil lair complete with shark-tank and CCTV. Gru is evil, but hapless. Vector is evil, efficient, cocky and a royal pain in the ass.

Of course in our post-modern confessional culture no-one's really evil. Poor Gru had a mother straight out of developmental hell: nothing was ever good enough for her. And poor Vector was picked on at school. Really, these guys are just lovely, squeezy, fluffy little bunny rabbits on the inside.

So, when Gru adopts three cute cookie-selling orphan girls in order to use them to get access to Vector's layer, we know he's going to have his heart melted by them. And when he gets turned down by the Bank of Evil for the loan he needs to steal the moon, we know that his new kids and his minions, called Minions, are all gonna band together and build him a rocket ship anyways, MacGuyver styl-ee. Because, friends, we aren't in the world of Lemony Snicket, but little orphan Annie.

DESPICABLE ME is just, plain, no-nonsense cute. It tugs on the heart-strings. It's corn-dog cheese. But who doesn't love it when Gru does something selfless for the first time in his life and incinerates a fairground stall because the provincial dolt manning in has cheated his little girl out of a stuffed unicorn? And who doesn't cheer when Dr Nefario (Russell Brand) and the Minnions all band together to back Gru and build the rocket - pledging faith against all reason, all hope and all experience?

To be sure, Universal studios have tried to inject some adult-pleasing post-modern wit along the lines of movies such as SHREK and MADAGASCAR, but this is largely a distraction. Having a sign above the Bank of Evil saying "Formerly Lehman Brothers" is hardly Swiftian in its rapier-like subtlety. And having Gru use modern colloquial idiom just confuses his character with that of the ruthlessly teen-modern Vector. Nope. The strength of DESPICABLE ME is that we care about Gru and his girls, and we will him to succeed. And while this movie is no TOY STORY, it understands that underneath all the clever design and witty puns, ultimately, any movie, but especially a children's movie, succeeds in direct measure to how far its main characters elicit our sympathy.

DESPICABLE ME is on global release.

Late review - London Film Fest Day 2010 Day 11 - SENSATION

You might recognise Domhnall (son of Brendan) Gleeson, the star of SENSATION, from his role as Bill Weasley in the HARRY POTTER flicks. Well, get that image of wholesome family entertainment right out of your mind, because SENSATION is altogether more bleak, more raw, and more uncomfortable to watch. Domhnall plays a feckless young man who inherits a crumbling, shitty little farm in the Irish countryside, and the first thing he does with his new money is hire a hooker. Nervous and anxious in her company, he soon affects a startling transformation into a pimp - slick clothes, new flat, a couple more prostitutes. The mechanics are shown in a very matter-of-fact way - in particular the way in which new girls are recruited, fitted out, and put to work before they can even catch their breath or form any regrets. As the film reaches its conclusion, we see the rozzers close in on Donal and Kim, and their true colours revealed. As in the way of these movies, the hooker turns out to have more integrity than the punter, and our suspicions about who's really exploiting whom are confirmed.

SENSATION is trying to do a couple of things - it's trying to be a black comedy about an idiot boy turning shark and it's trying to be social realist in its portrayal of lonely rural men using prostitutes. The pace didn't slacken and it was an interesting watch, but I can't say that it was particularly memorable. I think the problem is that it isn't consistently funny enough as a comedy, nor is it gritty enough as a social expose. Moreover, the emotional arc is entirely predictable. So, as much as I admire the film-makers for tackling such a subject head on, I can't say this is a movie that particular deserves a wider release. But I'll be looking forward to director Tom Hall's next effort, and I really liked DP Benito Strangio's bleak cinematography.

SENSATION has no commercial release date yet.

Late review - London Film Fest Day 2010 Day 10 - POETRY

POETRY is a delicate, strange, captivating film about an old woman called Yang Mija, living in contemporary South Korea. Grandmother to a feckless grandson, exploited by the OAP she cares for, and generally invisible in modern society, she finds a kind of purpose and connection by attending a poetry writing class and making friends at poetry recitals. Through poetry, she moves from victim and martyr to agent and creator. Famous Korean actress Jeong-hee Yoon plays Mija as a meek, timid woman with inner strength. A woman who will do the unpalatable to protect her grandson, but who will, ultimately gather the strength to stop enabling him. It's a performance of great subtlety and nuance, and we see this quiet transformation over more than two hours. More than a month after the Film Festival, POETRY still resonates - both Chang-dong Lee's acutely observant direction and Jeong-hee Yoon's central performance. Here is a film about ageing, about reclaiming life, about callow youth, about sexual violence, guilty secrets and sexual desperation. And yet, and yet, it's also a film with flashes of comic brilliance - mostly related to the foul-mouthed, warm-hearted poet Mr Kang (Hira Kim). I can't recommend it highly enough.

POETRY played Cannes and Toronto 2010 and opened earlier this year in South Korea and France.

Late review - London Film Festival 2010 Day 16 - INSIDE JOB

This is a guest review written by Alex, who can normally be found lurking in the shadow banking system.....

I feel roughly the same way about Capitalism that Churchill felt about Democracy; “it’s the worst form of [economic system] except all the others that have been tried.” In fact, I wouldn’t be writing for this aptly titled blog if I didn’t feel some sympathy for what Al Capone called “the legitimate racket of the ruling class”, if only because I fear the alternative. Furthermore history, albeit always written by the winners, is on my side.

It’s fair to say that Capitalism hasn’t done well out of the past few years. Its excesses are much more likely to be debated and analysed than its successes.

Narrated by Matt Damon, Inside Job aims to do just that, with a methodical and structured post mortem on the Credit Boom and the global recession which has followed. The interviewers are, overall, incisive and ferocious in their questioning of an impressive cadre of financiers (the internecine tribes which have emerged from the Credit Crunch; “the ones who were proved right” and “those who were wrong but are still rich”), academics, regulators, politicians and investors.

Despite this fine premise, Inside Job is often pantomime-like: France’s Finance Minister Christine Lagarde is vitriolic in her criticism of those evil bankers (the producers omit to mention that she herself is a former corporate lawyer for an Anglo-US law firm), and Elliott Spitzer, former New York State Attorney General and Governor, offers similarly stern invective – “hooray!” Lloyd Blankfein (current CEO of Goldman Sachs) appears – “boo!”, we are almost invited to holler.

Ironically though, often the most damning evidence came from the bankers themselves and their shills. One could wile away hours on Youtube watching film of Goldman’s executives crucifying themselves in front of the US Senate Panel. The film-makers have merely hand-picked some of the edited highlights.

There are some surprising critics; George Soros for example, billionaire financier and a great example of a speculator if ever there was one after he made millions, and cemented his reputation in the investment community, betting against Sterling. The documentary doesn’t seem bothered with these nuances.

Nevertheless there are several genuinely salient and insightful points – one being that this generation is probably the first time that Americans have been both less well-educated and less well-off than their parents.

The left guard give away their limited knowledge of finance, and it’s not just that they mis-pronounce the names of large and well-known investment banks whilst they describe their folly and hubris. Was pronouncing Lehman Brothers, “layman Brothers” a Freudian slip? One interviewer confidently asserts that derivatives were created in the early 1990’s whereas farmers in Illinois were using futures contracts to hedge their production over a hundred years before that decade. Again and again I found myself thinking “if you’re going to tell a story, tell it right!”.

Other documentaries in a similar vein include Michael Moore’s “Capitalism, a Love Story” and the excellent if lengthy “The Corporation” by Canada’s Mark Achbar. The former was more sensationalist, and therefore entertaining, and Achbar’s was more thorough. Since this has been done before, I was a little disappointed that Inside Job didn’t build on or add anything new to the body of similar work.

From the audience’s reaction throughout I sensed that, politically, I was in a minority of one in the screening of this well-made but flawed documentary, and yet overhearing two womens’ conversation on the way out I couldn’t help thinking that deep down the audience understood the limited value in demonising bankers. Despite Inside Job’s propagandising two-hour polemic, everyone knows that the money men, albeit whilst extracting a heavy price, were only the enablers for you and I to buy our dream house, max out our credit card for that luxury holiday we couldn’t afford or otherwise sink deeper in hock. Maybe somebody should have told the film-makers this.

I’ll leave you with another quote from The British Bulldog:

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries”.

INSIDE JOB played Cannes, Toronto and London 2010, and was released earlier this year in Belgium, Portugal, the US and France. It opens in the Netherlands on December 2nd and in the UK on February 18th 2011.

Late and incomplete review - London Film Fest 2010 Day 10 - FILM SOCIALISME

We are on a cruise ship. We are in contemporary Europe. We are at the End of Days. We are in Palestine. We are in politics. We are listening to Alain Badiou. We are listening to Patti Smith.  We are in hi-def DV. We are in lo-def pixelated DV. We are in hi-camp Hollywood. We are in present-day desolation. We are mashing up images from everything and everywhere.

So what is the point? That we live in a post-political society? That we decadent capitalist Europeans care nothing for the class-struggle? That we are beyond political redemption? That we are living in a culture mediated by iconic media images, unable to disentangle reality from fiction? That we are merely repeating /parroting media image rather than critically engaging with life? Does there have to be a point? Is the point that there is no point?

FILM SOCIALISME is the worst kind of pretentious, patronising, pseudo-intellectual bilge that claims to have something profound to say about politics and the nature of cinema, but in fact is nothing more than self-indulgent, adolescent nonsense. The fact that it was produced by Jean-Luc Godard, French auteur, means that reviewers have been generous, ascribing to it meaning and coherence and earnest intentions that it simply does not possess. His film is insulting to us as viewers - it holds us in contempt. It tells us that we are not worth narrative structure or coherent exposition because we are party to the contemporary culture it is condemning. At least, that is the most generous explanation I can give for a film that plays like a collage, a scrapbook, where Godard has pasted in scenes from past films, news-reels and other sources into a layered, incoherent mess. Godard basically holds up two fingers to his audience in the film. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the most hateful film I have seen in recent years. The correct response is to walk out. And that is exactly what I did.

Now, a lot of the film's fans are going to say that basically I am just admitting my own ignorance. That I'm not well versed enough in Godard's back catalogue, that I don't speak French, that I don't understand the philosophical and political movements he is engaging with. That, basically, I am a poor creature who can only feel safe in the warm embrace of mindless Hollywood genre-cinema. To them, I say, in the words Godard might've have used as a title to this film, baise-toi! I speak French, I've watched his films, I read philosophy at university, and I like tough cinema. But this film is a case of the Emperor's New Clothes. It reflects back the pretentions of the viewers and cinema-goers who love cinema, LOVE cinema, should fight back.

FILM SOCIALISME played Cannes, London and Toronto 2010. It was released in France in May 2010 and was released on DVD last month.