THE FIRST MONDAY IN MAY

THE FIRST MONDAY IN MAY is a fascinating documentary about the collaboration between Vogue magazine and the Costume Institute at the Met - as embodied in the iconic American Vogue editor Anna Wintour and the Met's Curator Andrew Bolton.  While he is an unknown quantity at the start of the film, you soon learn to respect him. He has a passion for costume, and an understanding of how applied art is as important as a means of creative expression, and as a reflection of our economic social and political times.  He also shares an obsessive eye for detail and a faith in his own taste with Wintour.  Together, we see them shape a new exhibition and fund-raising ball, to be themed China: Through The Looking Glass.  For the curator, this is an opportunity to showcase haute couture that has been influenced not just by China, but by the fantasy of China shown to the West through movies and stars such as Anna Mae Wong or Wong Kar Wai.  Indeed, the latter is a designer of the exhibition and helps pull together the sound and visual design of the work.  For Wintour, the main task is to organise the now iconic Met Ball, balancing egos and red carpet stars and their entourages.  We realise that the money raised by this one event keeps the Costume Institute in business for the entire year.  

Together the pair work against tight deadlines and pull of a fantastic show and event.  They battle naysayers.  At the Met, the head of the Asian galleries is justifiably concerned that the fashion and showmanship is going to overshadow his works of art.  And in China, there are concerns that the exhibition is showing a fantasy rather than the reality of engagement with China, and reflecting years of Western appropriation and exploitation. But no-one seems more conscious of those debates than Bolton himself, who is keen to unpack those issues and explore those debates.

I came out of this documentary conscious that it was partly produced by Conde Nast, and so unlikely to show the protagonists in a bad light. Nonetheless, I was surprised at how far it was willing to engage with, and honestly depict the real controversies around the West's engagement with China, and indeed other issues in fashion. For instance, the show uses pieces from a John Galliano show, and the designer explains candidly what drew him back to fashion after he became, in his own words, an outcast, for an anti-semitic rant.  In general, it's the time spent with the designers that's the most fascinating. I loved touring the galleries with John Paul Gaultier - seeing him reminisce about different collections and explain why they worked.  And I guess that reflects the real strength of this doc - which is its access to people.  I loved hearing Galliano and Gaultier comment on design, or being taken inside Wintour's home. All of this makes THE FIRST MONDAY IN MAY essential viewing for anyone interesting in art or fashion or the combination of the two.

THE FIRST MONDAY IN MAY has a running time of 90 minutes and is rated PG-13. The movie was released in the USA on streaming services in April and is currently on release in the UK in cinemas and on streaming services.

THE GREAT GATSBY (2013)

Here's my one minute take on Baz Luhrman's GATSBY: it's something of an achievement to direct a movie that has such reverence to the source text, and yet misses the point so completely.

And of course, reverence for the text is perfectly correct. F Scott Fitzgerald's slim novel depicting the glitz and the loneliness of Jazz Age America is arguably the greatest American novel of all time, and certainly one of the greatest novels of all time period. It has an elegance and a depth that belies its brevity. The supreme tragedy of Gatsby is that he is a man who is desperately trying to be something that he can never authentically be - a man of inherited wealth - in order to win the love of the blue-blooded débutante Daisy.  But what we know, what Nick knows, is that Gatsby isn't really in love with Daisy.  She's just a cipher for his delusion that he can replay his youth - a youth blighted by his poverty and then parlayed into organised crime.  There's a sense - a much-needed and necessary sense - that while Gatsby knows that his lifestyle, his name, his means of earning  - are a lie - that he simultaneously totally believes the fiction. He is his own great work of art. 

Baz Luhrman's reverence for the text is literally writ large on the screen.  We see key phrases shown as written on the screen; the dialogue is almost entirely lifted directly from the novel; even key visual moments are taken from the book - such as the white drapes fluttering as Nick, our clear-eyed narrator,  first meets Daisy.  Luhrman even opens the movie out, giving it a framing device, wherein an older, jaded, alcoholic Nick (Tobey Maguire) is "automatic writing" his experiences with Gatsby and Daisy - and that written therapy will eventually become the novel, "The Great Gatsby".  And more fundamentally, with the exception of this framing device, the plot unfolds in the film exactly as it does in the novel.  Our young narrator Nick hires a humble cottage next to the extravagant mansion of the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby (Leonardo Dicaprio).  Gatsby's famous for throwing marvellous parties that he doesn't attend.  And we discover that he's throwing them as bait to lure Nick's now married cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) - his first love - and the woman he hopes to begin again with.  Meanwhile, Daisy's husband Tom (Joel Edgerton) is having an affair with a brassy, blowsy mechanic's wife (Isla Fisher) - an affair that casually exploits and manipulates the emotions of the mechanic, but also belies Tom's proprietorial feeling toward Daisy, and his innate distrust of Gatsby.  

And within that reverential depiction of the novel, there are certain scenes that work brilliantly well.  In particular, Luhrman and Dicaprio totally get that the first scene where Gatsby meets Daisy is funny - it's painfully, embarrassingly, gauche and physically funny in a way that Robert Redford and other Gatsby avatars have never been.  I also think that the visual depiction of the Valley Of Ashes was truly inspired and brought them to dingy, desperate life in a way that I didn't really get from the novel.  And in terms of performances, I think Joel Edgerton and Isla Fisher are superb and vital in smaller roles;  I was shocked by how effective the casting of Amitabh Bachchan as Meyer Wolfsheim was; Tobey Maguire is perfectly cast as the wide-eyed and yet not naive narrator; Carey Mulligan is suitably insipid although, if I were harsh, I would say that she doesn't quite get the quite whispering voice.  But this is really Leonardo Dicaprio's movie and the tragedy of this film is that in a quieter movie, his performance would be garnering Oscar buzz. As it is, you can't hear him above the sound of the Jay-Z.

So here's the problem with Gatsby. As much as Luhrman loves the text, he loves high-camp even more. Which  means that every scene gets Luhrmanned.  It moves, faster, brighter, louder, crazier than anything you've ever seen before. I lost count of the amount of times I was trying to look through things, or hear dialogue beneath music, to get at the performances.  It was like trying to watch a fundamentally great movie in a theatre filled with partying teenagers.  I guess the shock is that one might have thought that Luhrman's all-out glitz style might have worked in depicting the jazz age, but it just never seemed to coalesce. The sum of the parts drowned out the whole. 

THE GREAT GATSBY is rated PG-13 in the USA. It has a running time of 142 minutes.

THE GREAT GATSBY is on global release.

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.

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.