A spoiler-filled essay on BABYLON***** but also Zero - it's an alpha gamma film

It pains me to say that Damien Chazelle hasn't made a wholly decent film since WHIPLASH and it's clear where he's gone wrong. WHIPLASH was tight as a drum, taut with tension, constructed with precision and escalated from a whisper to a bravura climax. It centred on a single story and a single relationship that captured us and spat us out at the end, exhausted and exhilarated. By contrast, BABYLON starts at eleven and keeps on going, throwing everything at the screen in bravura set piece after bravura set piece. Some of it works. In fact the first 100 minutes or so is some of the most impressive cinema I've ever watched. But it all goes wrong when Tobey Maguire appears on screen. No disrespect to Maguire but his performance is clearly a misdirected misfire of epic proportions that jumps the shark, or leaps over the alligator, or whatever. And the film never gets back on track. After that it's just overlong repetitive unnecessary coda after coda culminating in one of the most patronising epilogues of all time. Yes, Chazelle, we get that you're telling the story of SINGIN' IN THE RAIN as tragedy rather than comedy. We. Get. It. We are clever. Stop trying to hammer it home. Stop trying to big yourself up.  Stop trying to place yourself at the heart of the unending unspooling of cinematic history because you are doing yourself no fucking favours.

Anyways. Long pause for breath. Let's talk about the stuff that is absolutely amazing in this film. Let's talk about a film that is in love with what film means to its audience, and the madcap pioneers who made it all happen, but is also under no illusions about the cruelty and crassness and exploitation of the industry itself, as depicted in its earliest scene where an elephant shits over the audience. 

We open with a 30 minute bacchanalia at a movie producer's house in proto-Bel Air, surrounded by desert scrub and bristling in saturated dry heat.  Everyone is part-naked, coked-up and fucking. Jean Smart's thinly veiled Hedda Hopper-style gossip columnist wants to see the secret room upstairs where the producer keeps the underage girls. A thinly veiled Fatty Arbuckle is getting pissed on by a wannabe starlet who is soon to OD, and will be smuggled out by cover of elephant. 

Lest we think Hollywood has corrupted these people, Chazelle shows us they started out corrupt.  Margot Robbie's wannabe starlet and Clara Boy cipher Nellie LaRoy arrives at the party wearing nothing and looking for drugs, and when she gets her big break she decides to bear her iced nipples: she's no naive innocent and no-one is forcing her to be lewd.  As a result, it comes as something of a surprise in the film's second act when she seems shocked and saddened at being called "low" - so saddened that she acts out by trying to wrestle a snake, leading to perhaps the coolest, crudest and sexiest meet-cutes of all time. Thankfully Nellie's attempts at reformation are short-lived. She doesn't progress or learn or grow. Maybe a drug and gambling addict can't - at least not in an environment of enablement where every set has a friendly dope-pedlar. In her fragile vulnerability and incapacity to escape herself I found myself thinking of Elizabeth Short, now known as the Black Dahlia, another vulnerable woman who came to Hollywood for stardom.  There but for the grace of God.  When LaRoy disappears into the night, high as a kite, dancing to the music in her head, was any other ending ever possible? Or maybe the other ending is that ascribed to LaRoy's mother, institutionalised. Maybe Hollywood is to be lauded for at least allowing a "wild child" to be wild?

Similarly, Chazelle has cast newcomer Diego Calva for his dreamy eyes, but his Manny Tores is shrewd from the start. It's his idea to use the elephant as cover and he will literally do anything for access to a movie set including disavow his own family and racial heritage. So it comes as no surprise that an hour later into the film he will cruelly decommission Nellie's lover and Anna May Wong cipher Lady Fay (Li Jun Li) as inconveniently gay at a time when the wild west of Hollywood is about to be self-policed by the prurient Code.  I was happy when Manny came a cropper and didn't buy into the importance of his epilogue redemption. Do I give a shit that Manny now sees the magic of film? Or understands his former colleagues' place in its history? No.  And his casual dismissal of Lady Fay echoes Chazelle's inability to give Li Jun Li the story she deserves because of the constraints of the story he is telling. She has to escape to Europe for a career when the Code cuts her short. And so she disappears from BABYLON much to its loss. The same holds for Olivia Hamilton who plays an early female silent film director. This film cannot say much about her because Hollywood did not allow her to thrive. But it was wonderful to see  the early female directors recognised. 

In fact, the irony is that the least corrupt characters are arguably the old-hands: Jean Smart's gossip columnist and Brad Pitt's kind-hearted old-fashioned silent star, loosely based on John Gilbert. They love the movies for what they are - honest working class entertainment providing an escape for the lonely and poor.  Pitt's Jack Conrad gets one of the best scenes in the film when he tells his thespian fifth wife that the audiences a Broadway show pulls would be considered a flop in Hollywood. And it's heartbreaking to see him fail to make the transition to sound, and the toll this takes on him in his final scene.  It's even more heartbreaking because we know that while Jean Smart offers him immortality in exchange for heartbreak, those early nitrate films barely survive and are rarely seen. It was a bum deal, and somehow Jack Conrad always knew it. 

But Jack Conrad's self-managed exit from the stage isn't the films most heart-breaking moment. That is reserved for Jovan Adepo's jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer. He starts the film at the aforementioned bacchanal and ends up benefiting from the move to sound films, earning vast amounts of money but at the cost of enduring patronising white folks at a fancy country club dinner where Nellie, perhaps viscerally expressing what Sidney is feeling, ends up projectile vomiting over the pretentious cunts who act as gatekeepers. Later, he will be asked by Manny (a fellow minority presence in Hollywood but in full denial of his ethnicity) to black up so that his face doesn't look too white on screen.  No cinema in the South will show an integrated band.  Manny, by this time fully a tool of the system, emotionally blackmails Sidney and tells him the whole band will be out of a job if he doesn't comply and you can see every calculation - emotional and logical - that Sidney goes through - and what it costs him - with no words but etched on his face as he plays the trumpet.  It's a brutal scene that will stay with me for a long time. Thank Christ Sidney escaped to Harlem and got back his self-respect. But again, how sad for us and the film that he has to perforce leave our screens, yet another reason why its final hour is  - with the exception of Jack Conrad's exit - woeful.

So this isn't a terrible film, as many reviewers would have you believe. It's a brave bold beautiful disgusting chronicle of a brave bold beautiful disgusting set of people who wanted to create art, make money and make us laugh and often exploited people - and themselves - in order to do so.  Their aim, Chazelle's aim in highlighting what they endured, is noble. And if the film makes just one person pick up an autobiography of Clara Bow, or find an old clip of a silent film on BFI Player, then it's all worth it.

BABYLON is rated R and has a running time of 189 minutes. 

ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD

Quentin Tarantino's ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD is a triumph.  Indeed it may be my favourite of his films since the superlative JACKIE BROWN.  It's a love letter to old Hollywood, and drips with compassion for fading stars, and indulges in nostalgia for the days when radio stations were the soundtrack of our lives.  The movie stars Leonardo Di Caprio as Rick Dalton  - a fictional TV star of the 50s and 60s whose career is in the doldrums because of his age and alcoholism.  As a portrait of the fickle callousness of the star system, it's a moving film. There isn't much that's honourable or likeable in Rick, but he's our idiot, and to see him bested in his art and conversation by a child star (Trudi - a scene-stealing Julia Butters) is to weep for him. To see him lured by the quick cash of Spaghetti Westerns and saddled with a young wife is to laugh at our own frailty. He's an idiot, but we care that he's okay.  And we care largely because of the most humanising thing about him - his long and loyal friendship to his stuntman/driver/buddy Cliff Booth. In a career-best performance from Brad Pitt, Cliff is just a decent no bullshit kind of a guy. He's tough.  We see him beat up Bruce Lee in one of the most hilarious scenes in the film, and we hear rumours about a potentially murderous past, so the final showdown is well within the realms of his capabilities, despite his being high as a kite. There's something so tragic about his life in a mobile van, heating up tinned food, and something so likeable about his seeming indifference to it.  He's just a good guy. We see this too in his care for Bruce Dern's Spahn - exploited owner of the ranch in which the Manson Family are living. Which of course brings us to the other story in this film...

I think a lot of us came to this film thinking it was going to be a film about the Manson Murders and it's kind of discombobulating realising that it isn't really. We only meet Manson in one scene, and barely see Polanski from a distance at a party.  Polanski and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) live next door to Rick, but their lives are largely separate.   And what of Tate?  She's barely given the same screen time or depth of character as the two male leads. She's just a sunny happy dancing blonde, exciting to see herself on screen, in a scene that will give anyone who knows about Tarantino's foot fetish the creeps.  I felt sad for Robbie, who has nothing to do in this film, but really sad for Sharon Tate, who apparently isn't worthy of an inner life.  We do see the events of that fateful night play out. The way in plays out won't surprise people who've seen Tarantino's recent films.  It's really fucking entertaining.  But...

ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD is rated R and has a running time of 119 minutes.  The film played Cannes 2019 and went on global release last summer. It is now available to stream, rent and own.

DEADPOOL 2

I loved DEADPOOL - the dark humour, the self-awareness, the bloody violence, and the surprisingly mushy love story at its heart.  And I can happily say that DEADPOOL 2 lives up to the promise of the first film, while giving the protagonist a motley crew of superhero buddies and poking even more fun at superhero films, its own actors, and everything else.

The movie opens with our cynical wise-cracking mutant hero murdering bad guys for pay before going home to his beloved wife who is murdered in turn.  Being worthy of meeting her in heaven motivates the otherwise self-interested Deadpool to try to save an angry young mutant called Firefist (Julian Dennison who could easily be Rebel Wilson's kid brother such are his looks and facility for comedy).  Deadpool has to do this in opposition to time-travelling tough guy Cable (a ridiculously ripped Josh Brolin), who just wants to kill Firefist to prevent  him wreaking havoc in future.  Along the way, Deadpool picks up a new super-lucky mutant friend called Domino - a charismatic scene stealing performance from ATLANTA's Zazie Beetz - while hooking up with Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead from the first film, as well as her girlfriend Yukio.

What I love about this film is that while it has a filthy sense of humour it really does have a heart. It really is about family and reaching out to people. And it's values are rock solid. Not just in the classic mutant universe as a metaphor for civil rights way. But in making a point about having a protagonist who is plus sized, a teenage lesbian relationship, and a strong black female lead.  The film is also clever. The way in which it uses time travel is neat, and all of its jokes hit their mark, getting particularly meta in the credits sequence, and with a fantastic use of music. 

Having tired of the Marvel and Star Wars franchises, I can honestly say I'm genuinely looking forward to DEADPOOL 3!

DEADPOOL has a running time of 119 minutes and is rated R. It is global release.

THE BIG SHORT

We here at the blog formerly known as Movie Reviews For Greedy Capitalist Bastards have often taken a rather contemptuous tone with movies covering the financial sector.  Too often they have unintentionally glamourised the very profession they purported to condemn. And with very few exceptions they have failed to show the reality of what to many of us is life in financial services.  Away from the yachts and the blow and the strippers of cinema, most bankers are just insecure over-achievers, suckered into aligning their self-worth with a big-name brand, running on a treadmill where the big bonus is never as much as the next guy, increasingly doing twenty hour days, working weekends and trapped in a one percent bubble.  There was systematic fraud in the last crisis and plenty of people new their was a gigantic conflict of interest. But a lot of junior bankers were just people trapped in a complex system trying to do optimise their profit and impress their boss.

FURY - LFF14 - Day Twelve

FURY is a movie that probably gives us the most realistic depiction to date of what is must have been like to be inside a tank in World War Two - the claustrophobia, dirt, fear, and almost obsessive need to trust in your fellow soldiers to get you through.  It's because of this realism and grit that you remain captivated despite the somewhat hyperbolic set-up of the film, in which a single US tank attempts to hold off of an entire Nazi regiment.  

The set-up of the film is hackneyed through and through. Brad Pitt plays the war-hardened, uber-experienced tank commander, "Wardaddy" contrasted with Logan Lerman's nervous rookie Norman Ellison. This is exactly the set-up we've gotten from director David Ayer's own TRAINING DAY as well as movies like GRAVITY. The other three members of the tank crew comprise Shia LaBeouf's religious Gunner Swann, slack-jawed yokel Travis (Jon Bernthal) and dips driver Garcia Michael Pena.  In Act One we see our boys and their Yankee brethren retake a German town.  Act Two sees our boys share a dinner with a pair of German ladies.  I think the director wanted it to be full of menace and tension and unsaid meaning but instead it just feels too contrived, patronising and ultimately getting in the way of the real story - which is the relationship between the men and their tank.  In Act Three, the men are sent behind enemy lines by their commander (Jason Isaacs) and we get into the claustrophobia and extreme peril of tank warfare.  This is what we've paid to see - the utter commitment of the production to show us the horror of war in genuine World War Two tanks with the highest quality of military advisor. 

The resulting film isn't perfect but it is affecting and gives us something genuinely new in war films.  It also gives us Shia LaBeouf in his most winning performance in quite some time - a hopeful thought in a film so devoid of hope. 

FURY has a running time of 120 minutes.  The movie played London 2014 and is on release in the Bahamas and the USA. It goes on release on October 22nd in Belgium, France and Singapore; on October 23rd in Australia, Hong Kong, Croatia, Hungary, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal and Thailand; on October 24th in Estonia, the UK, Ireland, Iceland, Cambodia, Lithuania, Latvia, Norway and Sweden; on October 30th in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Ukraine; on November 13th in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Italy; on November 14th in Spain, India and Vietnam; on November 29th in Greece; on December 5th in Kenya; on January 1st in Germany; on January 15th in Argentina; and on February 5th in Brazil and Peru.

THE COUNSELOR

THE COUNSELOR has been comprehensively drubbed by the film reviewing community, recalling Roger Ebert's seminal review of Vincent Gallo's THE BROWN BUNNY, along the lines of "I've had colonoscopies that were more funny."  And just as I really liked THAT film, I actually rather like THE COUNSELOR. Or rather, I should say that I'm fascinated by why people are so horrified by it.  It's not that I enjoyed watching it so much as I enjoyed all the provocations it presented as I watched it.  

The movie opens with and maintains a rather opaque narrative style - a mash-up of abstruse conversations in beautifully designed international locales inter-cut with grungy Mexican drug runners pushing a truck full of cocaine disguised as human shit over the US border.  The Counselor of the title is a naive but greedy lawyer (Michael Fassbender) who is defined his love of the equally naive Laura (Penelope Cruz).  The Counselor works for Reiner - a flamboyant drug dealer and club owner played by Javier Bardem as a cross between Brian Grazer and Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys. Which is weird because Brad Pitt also stars in the film as a kind of a redneck magus, who tries to wise the Counselor up, but to little avail. The plot, such as it is, sees someone hijack the drug shipment and pin it on our crew, which violent and grim consequences.

Bardem does Grazer's fright wig

The moral of the story, is that there are no morals. There's just the hunt. This is a fascist world in which weakness, and flamboyance, and hubris are brought low in a manner that is so foul and evil as to be shocking.  The moral is that you should not be shocked.  There is a brutal simplicity and fascination in seeing faceless men pull off brutal procedural heists. But also something bewildering about seeing actors such as Toby Kebbell and Natalie Dormer pop up in small roles that hint at something more fascinating that isn't given a chance to develop. 

Anyone looking for the redemptive final act of Cormac McCarthy's sublime novel, The Road, is looking in vain.  And critics who have panned the film have typically blamed McCarthy for forcing this word-heavy, abstract, opaque script on a high quality cast and director.  I disagree.  This is like a sleazy B-movie filtered through an art-house lens -  as grungy and elliptical as Raymond Chandler - as absurd and meaningless and provocative.  As an example, I'd give you the notorious scene in which Reiner's wonderfully unapologetic and spiky girlfriend Malkina fucks a car.  This is as shocking as Chandler's depiction of the nympho Carmen Sternwood would've been in THE BIG SLEEP.  But what is the movie really focussed on? Not her sexual act - she is confident, unapologetic and uncaring about what you or I or Reiner might make of it.  The movie focusses on the reaction of the men in the picture - their horror, fear, inability to process.  In fact, I would argue that THE COUNSELOR is a shocking and reviled movie because it's so radical.  No-one's a good guy.  The bad guys are pussies.  And the bad girl doesn't care what you think.

THE COUNSELOR has a running time of 117 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

THE COUNSELOR is on release almost everywhere except Taiwan where it will be released on December 6th and in Italy where it will be released on January 30th 2014.

12 YEARS A SLAVE - LFF 2013 - Day Ten

You can listen to a podcast review of this film below, or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

Steve McQueen is a young British artist turned director whose previous two movies - HUNGER & SHAME - both gave us an unflinching portrait of dark and complex issues - the IRA hunger strikes and sex addiction. Both combined strong central performances from Michael Fassbender with stunning visuals and painfully held tableaux.  Both were the stand out movies of their year at the London Film Festival.

Accordingly, 12 YEARS A SLAVE came to the London Film Festival on a sea of hype - so much so that twitter had been filled with unblemished praise from critics who had seen the film that morning.  And even Festival Director Clare Stewart seemed speechless in her introduction to the film.  After the screening, the BFI tweeted pictures of standing ovations at the cinema. Everyone agrees the movie is moving, important and destined for Oscar glory.

I'm sad to say that I don't agree.  Yes, the film in important and unflinching. It's beautifully shot - all the more horrible to contrast the beauty of the Southern landscape with the cruelty of slavery. And yes, the movie hinges on a powerful central performance from Fassbender.  But too much of the rest of it seemed to me to be redundant, and a worse crime, to descend into emotional manipulation.

But let's start at the beginning. The film is based on the true life story of Solomon Northup, a successful free black man in Saratoga, married with children.  He was tricked into a business trip, captured and sold into slavery, first to a relatively benign slaveowner called Ford and then to a more complex sadistic coupled called the Epps.  Finally, he is freed when he manages to get a message out through a liberal white Canadian, although that reunion is tinged with bitterness at leaving his fellow slaves behind. 

Chiwetel Ejiofor is said to have given the performance of his career as Solomon, and to be sure he has grace and power, but I personally prefer him in DIRTY PRETTY THINGS.  I do, however, hope that he wins awards for this because let's be honest, as a black actor, how many other starring roles of this gravitas is he likely to get?  In minor roles, I really liked American Horror Story's Sarah Paulson as the sadistic, jealous Mistress Epps, erging on her deeply troubled husband to whipping the slave, Patsey, that he seems to be sexually obsessed with.  I also rather liked Paul Dano as the classic nigger-hating plantation overseer Tibeats whose jealousy at the favour Ford shows Solomon leads to Solomon being chased off the estate. He brings real insecurity and violence to that role.  It's truly sinister.  But perhaps surprisingly, the one mis-step is perhaps the usually note perfect Benedict Cumberbatch as the nice plantation owner Ford. Admittedly, Cumberbatch has little to do in this rather thinly drawn part, but his Southern accent doesn't seem convincing.

For me, this film belongs to two actors - Michael Fassbender as the tortured Epps and Lupita Nyong'o's slave Patsey.  Fassbender brings layers of menace, vulnerability and borderline madness to his portrayal of the almost superstitiously religious man who has a bizarrely close tortuous relationship with his slaves that culminates in one of the most horrendous scenes of the film. Goaded by his wife, he cannot bring himself to whip Patsey so he forces Solomon to do it instead. This is psychosexual terror at its most devastating. As Patsey, Lupita Nyong'o is more than a match for Fassbender, bringing layers of pride and then terrorised desperation to her character.  It's a fine performance.

Behind the camera, Steve McQueen's usual austere framing is somewhat diluted here, in what is undoubtedly his most mainstream movie. The exception are two pivotal scenes of great power. The first is one when Tibeats has Solomon strung up, and the overseer leaves him there.  The camera stays on him in his suffering then pulls back showing us slaves, so fearful, that they have to continue their work around him. Then we pan round to show how close this hanging is to the main house, and to see the mistress of the house looking on almost lackadaisically.  It's a beautifully pointed scene.  The second is the forced whipping of Patsey that I referred to before, and then Epps taking the whip himself.  The detail is rightfully brutal.

So what stops this from being a great film?  Too long spent in the banality of Ford's plantation.  Too long spent away from Fassbender in general.  The rather absurdly drawn character of Bass, the liberal Canadian played almost like a salvation Jesus by Brad Pitt.  And the ending.  McQueen could have ended this film on the scene where Solomon leaves the Epps plantation - a close-up on his half-unbelieving, relieved and yet guilt-ridden face, as Patsey faints in the background. That would have perfectly summed up the conflict at the heart of this story of personal liberation.  Instead, he tacks on the standard schmaltzy scene of catharsis, where Solomon is reunited with his family - martyred apologies and group hugs all round. Conventional, unnecessary, sugary and ruinous. 

12 YEARS A SLAVE has a running time of 133 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

12 YEARS A SLAVE played Telluride, London and Toronto where Steve McQueen won the People's Choice Award.  The movie will be released in the USA on October 18th, in Germany and Spain on October 31st, in Greece on December 12th, in Singapore and Sweden on December 20th, in New Zealand on December 26th, in France, Finland and the UK on January 24th, in Norway on January 31st, in the Netherlands on February 20th and in Denmark on February 27th. 

WORLD WAR Z

So here's a quick ten minute audio review of Brad Pitt's passion project, WORLD WAR Z, based on one my favourite novels of the past decade.  I went into this flick worried about the "troubled" nature of this project - budget over-runs, re-writes - and director Marc Forster's poor track record with big budget action flicks (QUANTUM OF SOLACE, m'lud).  To be sure, the tonal shift is obvious where Damon Lindelof takes over the writing, and this is a very different beast to the novel.  But overall, I really enjoyed it - in fact, it's arguably the best of the summer blockbusters to date. Tune in for more....

WORLD WAR Z has been rated PG-13 in the USA and has a running time of 116 minutes.

WORLD WAR Z is on release in the USA, Egypt, Hong Kong, the Philippines, South Africa, Australia, Bosnia, Croatia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, New Zealand, Portugal, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the UAE, Bulgaria, Canada, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Lithuania, Mexico, Romania, Turkey, the UK and Vietnam. It opens on June 27th in Argentina, Austria, Cambodia, Chile, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Peru, Russia, Switzerland, the Ukraine, Brazil, Colombia, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia and Panama. It opens on July 3rd in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Poland; on July 11th in Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden; on July 19th in Finland; on August 2nd in Spain; on August 10th in Japan and on August 16th in Venezuela.

KILLING THEM SOFTLY

KILLING THEM SOFTLY is an unrelentingly bleak and cynical examination of mid-level criminals in a bad economy.  It chronicles an America bloated and decayed, with a soft belly and a smack addiction, where "hope you can believe in" is just a pathetic fairytale.  America is a business not a democracy, and this movie is about getting paid.  To that end, it is fitting that nothing that happens in this film is a surprise.  The wheels of capitalism, whether on Wall Street or trashy motels, grind on regardless.

The first act sees ex-con idiots Frankie (Scoot McNairy - IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn - ANIMAL KINGDOM) hired by The Squirrel (Vincent Curatola - THE SOPRANOS) to knock off a card game.  The twist is that because the host of the game, Markie Trattman, (Ray Liotta) is known to have held up his own card game once before, the suspicion will fall on him and they'll get away scott free.  The second act sees a dull bureaucrat (Richard Jenkins) hiring muscle to kill not just the guilty trio but also Trattman.  For confidence to be restored to the "market", justice must be seen to be done, even if the underworld have gotten the wrong end of the stick. The bureaucrat hires Brad Pitt's hitman, Jackie Cogan, who in turn brings in James Gandolfini's Mickey, only to realise that Mickey is not fit for purpose. The final act sees Cogan resigned to the task at hand.

There is a grim inevitability to the crime and punishment narrative. But that doesn't mean that the film has no dramatic tension.  The initial heist is painfully, terrifyingly drawn out.  And the final execution is expected but unbearably tense.  I've never seen a punishment beating look so visceral as when Trattman is beaten by two goons.  I've never seen an execution look simultaneously so beautiful and so desperately anonymous as when Trattman is off'ed. I've never seen a smack addict getting high so imaginatively depicted than when DP Greig Fraser (SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN) photographs the perceptions of Russell.

But we all know that director Andrew Dominik is the master of the technically brilliant set-up - the unbearable tense pregnant pause.  That's partly what made THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD an instant pantheon movie - and probably the best film I've ever seen at the London Film Festival.   That film coupled stunning visuals and a foreboding mood with a sickening, fascinating obsessive love story.  It had heart  - a twisted heart, admittedly - but an emotional centre for us to hold on to.  Similarly, Dominik's first film CHOPPER had audacious visuals and superlative editing, but it's success hinged on the charisma and horror of the central character.

The problem with KILLING THEM SOFTLY is that it works at an intellectual but not an emotional level. This is quite deliberate.  Dominik is making an intellectual point - about the decadence and squalor of the USA  - the bad economy - falling wages, rising bureaucracy - that it's just about getting paid, and getting paid is getting harder.  I didn't find the political analogy over-bearing as I know some critics have. I found it not just valid, but urgent.  The problem is that the cynicism of the film is alienating - almost unbearably so.  Dominik just doesn't give us anything to hold on to. And as a result, his latest film is less than the sum of  its parts.

KILLING THEM SOFTLY played Cannes 2012 and opened this weekend in Ireland, Spain and the UK. It opens next weekend in Slovenia. It opens on October 11th in Australia, Hong Kong, Italy and Argentina; on October 18th in Argentina, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Estonia and Lithuania; on October 25th in Greece; on November 1st in Portugal and Norway; on November 9th in Mexico; on November 16th in Poland; on November 23rd in Bulgaria; on November 29th in Germany and the USA; and on December 5th in Belgium, France and Denmark. 

MONEYBALL - Unloved

Brad Pitt as Oakland A's manager Billy Beane and
Jonah Hill as his statistician sidekick Peter Brand. 

Michael Lewis is the chronicler of our age - the man who takes us inside big money, whether on the trading floors of Wall Street (LIAR'S POKER, THE BIG SHORT) or in the soccer and baseball stadiums of America (THE BLIND SIDE, MONEYBALL).  Lewis is the documentarian who shows us who big money distorts ethics and produces outcomes that are inefficient, even from a financial point of view.  In previous novels he took us insides world we didn't know and showed us their glamour and danger.  Heck, LIAR'S POKER was as big a recruiter for Wall Street, as well, WALL STREET.  

The fundamental problem with MONEYBALL is that his big angle is really not that insightful.  Lewis wants to tell us that when baseball managers buy players, they are distorted and prejudiced by all sorts of extraneous and irrelevant information - how good looking a player's girlfriend is an index of self-confidence is - how good he is at doing one thing when really what you're buying him for is something really different.  As a result, Lewis argues that the managers systematically misprice players - overpaying for "stars" and underpaying or plain ignoring the hidden gems. Yes, that's it.  That's the big idea.  And for those of us who are the 1 percent, that's really not revolutionary.  It's just Ben Graham's concept of value investing applied to sport. 

Still, even without a revolutionary idea, MONEYBALL could still have been a good underdog sports movie, of the type that DODGEBALL satirised so well. There is something genuinely romantic about failed player and down on his luck coach Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) taking his two-bit club, the Oakland Athletics, to baseball's greatest winning streak in history, and a genuine contender for the World Series. And, because he didn't have the money to outbid the Yankees for the best players, he had to do it with smarts - with a geeky kid called Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) who believed that stats could pick a holistic team of write-offs and turn them into a great and consistent squad. All this in the face of stiff competition from the conservative old guard, particularly coach Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the rest of the baseball fraternity.  I was expecting a buddy movie - as the handsome jock and nervous geek unite against the world - an underdog movie - a David versus Goliath feelgood epic.  And who cares if I don't know about baseball? I love cricket so much I can appreciate a game suffused with stats, and that chronicles the triumph of the statos over the jocks. 

But no, MONEYBALL turns out to be an utter damp squib of a movie - unloved, uncared for, without a single voice, a single vision, or any conviction about what it's trying to do.  I guess the problem is literally one of rejected parentage. Originally this was a movie that was going to be directed by Steven Soderbergh (CONTAGION) with a screenplay by Steven Zaillian (the forthcoming GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO).  But then, at the last minute, Soderbergh was axed in favour of Bennett Miller, a relative unknown who hasn't done anything since 2005's CAPOTE, and the script was rewritten by Aaron Sorkin of THE SOCIAL NETWORK fame.  The result is a script and a film that just never finds its groove.  

For the most part the dialogue is flat, and characters ill-fleshed out. There is no charismatic connection between Pitt and Hill.  Pitt does that thing where he thinks he's acting if he constantly eats on screen and squints.  Hill turns out to be utterly uninteresting in a straight, non-comedic role.  Poor Philip Seymour Hoffman barely gets anything to do as the antagonist. We don't feel the stakes. We don't buy Pitt's apparently tragic back story.  His connection with his daughter seems utterly trite. There's  not enough actual gameplay. But then again, I didn't really feel like I knew what the coaches were doing or why certain moneyball tactics were working.  The only flashes of wit and excitement are a couple of scenes where Beane is playing off team's against each other, and another brilliant scene in Boston - scenes that scream Sorkin and jar against the tone of the rest of the film.  One can only imagine what this film might have been with Fincher and Sorkin behind the camera, and maybe Clooney and Gordon-Levitt in front of the camera.  And believe me, you'll be so bored, you'll have plenty of time for such conjecture.

MONEYBALL played Toronto and Tokyo 2011. It was released earlier this year in the US, India, Mexico, Russia, Panama, Iceland, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Japan, Taiwan, France, Israel, the Netherlands and Brazil. It opens this weekend in the UK and Ireland. It opens on December 2nd in Finland and Lithuania; on December 8th in Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Sweden and Turkey/ It opens on December 16th in Norway; on December 23rd in Estonia; on January 12th in Portugal; on January 27th in Italy; on February 2nd in Germany and Spain and on February 16th in Singapore. 

THE TREE OF LIFE

This review contains spoilers.

THE TREE OF LIFE opens with a mother in an idealised 1950s American Suburbia reacting to a telegram telling her that her that her son has died. This is inter-cut with a middle-aged man in a contemporary American city - a prisoner of the sterile modern architecture that he has helped create.  We intuit that this man is her son, the elder brother of the child who died. And he too is trying to make sense of his grief - to unravel the meaning of his life and his brother's death - and to understand - on the most profound existential level - "how did I get here?"  

This opening prologue sets up both the style and themes of the movie that is to follow.  Stunning photography of the natural world set against the world that ambitious men have created. Whispered voice-overs questioning the meaning of existence - the choice between Grace and Ambition.  The audience left to intuit what is really happening - and to glory in the sensory experience.  I suspect that most viewers will know at this point whether they are going to find the film a pretentious, wilfully obscure film over-loaded with hokey spiritual themes, or a cinematic masterpiece that pushes the boundaries of narrative cinema and has an earnest engagement with spiritual matters that leaves most contemporary cinema looking superficial and banal.  I fell into the latter camp. 

And so, after its opening prologue, the film moves into its first act - the most challenging in the film and presumably the point at which many audience members walk out. Because the questioning brother, now grown-up, tries to answer his questions by taking us right back to the beginning. Not to the beginning of his brother's life, but to the beginning of life itself.  We are immersed into a twenty minute display of creation - Kubrickian visuals that are quite simply wonderful in the literal sense of that world. Writer-director Terrence Malick wants us to wonder at the glory of nature - the power and beauty of it - but also to see that the tendency toward brutality was always there - even from the time of the pre-history.  My reaction to a scene where a dinosaur holds down the head of another injured dinosaur, and then tentatively lifts up his foot, was to see this is the same questioning of grace versus brutality.  I wouldn't blame others if they thought, WTF?  

In the second act we return to 1950s suburbia, and see the birth of three sons of the family.  Brad Pitt plays the father, truly loving but also a strict disciplinarian. It is a nuanced performance and arguably the best of his career. He has a harsh self-improvement philosophy, and is feared rather than loved by his children. The mother, played by Jessica Chastain, is cast as a kind of Virgin Mary figure - loving, forgiving, gentle, a source of succour.  She looks on mournfully as she sees the father castigate the children.  And so we have embodied the battle between the Ambition and Grace. It is a battle that the father ultimately loses - his musical career and his patents come to nothing  - and they have to leave their family home in a scene that ends the second act. He admits in a voice-over that his striving has brought him nothing but estrangement from his family and disappointment. He demands kisses from his children, he knows that they hate him.  The one son he is truly proud of - who he accompanies on the piano in a marvellous scene - is killed. And the elder son, who watches this scene of intimacy from outside the window, is left resentful.  

That isn't to say that this section of the movie is depressing - there are scenes of children goofing around that made me utterly nostalgic for my own childhood - and all portrayed with an intimacy that is captivating.  The camera is typically placed at the height of a child, looking around table-legs or looking up at adults. And the mother is portrayed in one particular scene as floating in the air - just as a little kid might ideate his mother as a kind of angelic figure. It is truly beautiful. 

In the final act of the film, we move into a kind of dream world, where the questioning middle-aged son is reunited with his family from the 1950s - including his kid brother. The mother and father are overjoyed to see the little boy, it feels to anyone familiar with the Bible like a reunion in paradise. And then we have, after two hours of questioning, a scene that I found utterly cathartic - a scene in which the mother seems to accept that God has taken her son, "I give him back to you", surrounded by the supporting embrace of the people on the beach.  A lot of reviewers have criticised this scene in particular as being an unnecessary epilogue - detracting from the scenes in suburbia. But to me, this is the most crucial part of the film. Without it, we have no resolution, no closure, and the film really has been for nothing.

I am fully aware at how earnest and pretentious this review might seem. What can I say? Malick approaches his material with such a sense of wonder and goodness and earnest questioning - his films are quite without cynicism and it seems mean-spirited to approach them with anything but that same degree of earnestness.  I suspect that this unabashed, heart on your sleeve approach - this wide-eyed wonder at the beauty of nature and the goodness in the world - is what irks so many modern viewers, so used to post-modern irony and nihilism.  This is a film that comes from a time before ironic detachment. In fact, it wants us to jump into our sensory experiences, without barriers, and to really feel everything.  It is, in that sense, a truly radical, truly stunning, beautiful, graceful film. It is, to my mind, Malick's best work since Badlands, a worthy winner of the Palme D'Or, and a true pantheon film.

THE TREE OF LIFE played Cannes 2011 where it won the Palme D'Or. It was released earlier this year in France, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, Greece, Israel, Portugal, Sweden, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Canada, Poland, Germany, Austria, Taiwan, the Philippines and Australia. It was released this weekend in Hong Kong, Thailand, Ireland, the UK and the USA. It opens on August 12th in Japan; on August 25th in New Zealand and Finland; on September 2nd in Norway; on September 16th in Spain; on December 9th in Estonia and on December 15th in Argentina.

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.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS - meh

So here's the thing. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is not a disaster. It's quite watchable and occasionally leavened by good performances, both comedic (Christoph Waltz, Brad Pitt) and dramatic (Mélanie Laurent), not to mention beefcake (Til Schweiger). There are flashes of Tarantino craziness (in a superb basement-tavern set-piece for one) but somehow the movie never takes off - never quite convinces us that we are in a surreal alternate place. In a sense, Tarantino is too good. He does what he's never done before - he creates genuinely dramatic, emotional, credible situations of fear and tension. And then he expects us to switch back in Tarantino the Comic Fantasist mode. As a result, when Tarantino does something that really fracks with reality (e.g. the ending) it just feels wrong. Final reaction: flat. Meh. Walk out of the cinema thinking, what just happened here?

Now, down to the nuts and bolts. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is really two films. The first is a pretty serious revenge movie. Mélanie Laurent plays a young Jewish woman who has watched her family butchered by Nazis, and is now in a position, as owner of a Parisian cinema, to blow up the entire German High Command at a premiere of some Nazi propoganda. Melanie Laurent is excellent as Shosanna Dreyfuss - just watch her suppress her fear when she realises she is taking coffee with the man who butchered her family. Diane Kruger is also notably convincing as a German film-star who has to charm her way into the premiere in order to disrupt it. The tension when she is being interrogated by the same Nazi officer who terrified Shosanna is palpable. The second movie, which surrounds the first, is a more broadly drawn Tarantino comedy in which a bunch of American Nazi scalp-hunters, led by Brad Pitt, team up with Diane Kruger's German film-star and Michael Fassbinder's British soldier, to also blow-up aforementioned Nazis. The comedy comes from Brad Pitt as a sort of Dirty Dozen war hero and his interactions with the Nazi villain played by Waltz (whose performance unifies the two parts of the film). The comedy does not come from a particularly ill-judged cameo from Mike Myers.

My suspicion is that the movie won't satisfy anyone. Tarantino fans will want more Brad Pitt/Basterds craziness and tire of the Parisian drama. Not to mention the fact that, rather bravely, Tarantino has chosen to be vaguely credible in keeping most of the dialogue in French and German. Indeed, he goes further, with a great running gag about Americans not speaking foreign languages. I just wonder whether that gag will back-fire with his target demographic. The cult-fans looking for kick-ass violence and witty dialigue might also object to the fact that, ultimately, this is not really a movie about France, Nazis, the Holocaust or anything other than Tarantino's abiding love of cinema, and his childlike belief that movies really can change the world.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS played Cannes 2009, where Christoph Waltz won Best Actor, Berlin and Melbourne 2009. It is released next weekend in Belgium, France, the UK, Australia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, New Zealand, Russia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Austria, Canada, Estonia, Norway, Sweden, Taiwan, the USA and the Netherlands. It is released the following weekend in Iceland, Argentina, the Czech Republic, the Portugal, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Denmark. It opens in September in Finland, Romania, Israel and Spain. It opens in October in Italy, Japan, Singapore, Mexico and Brazil.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON - technically brilliant, emotionally sterile

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON is a very, very long, oppressive movie based on a very, very short, funny story about F Scott Fitzgerald. The only commonality is that both book and film are about a man called Benjamin who is born as an old man and ages backwards - through decrepitude, into middle-age, to the sexual immaturity, childhood to infancy and then death. His life experiences come in the right order, but his body rebels. As a newly born old man he has cataracts and arthritis. As a long-lived infant he suffers from dementia. In middle age, he has to grapple with how to live someone who is "going the other way".

The movie is broadly speaking, an elegy. An elegy for the young men who died needlessly in World War One and the old men slaughtered in front of Benjamin's eyes in World War Two. It's an elegy for lost opportunity and failed marriages. It's an elegy for those who we condemn to death before their time, shutting them away in nursing homes, fit only for ceremonial visits once a year. Finally, most clumsily, it's an elegy for the New Orleans that was destroyed in Katrina.

Insofar as the movie works at all, the first ninety minutes pass quickly. The viewer is mesmerized by the fairy-tale feel of the story - enlivened by the fabulist prologue concerning a blind watchmaker and tales of a man struck by lightening seven times. I could have used more of that charming whimsy. The movie simply looks fantastic, and as David Fincher and DP Claudio Miranda take us into steamy brothels, misty tug boats, and shabby Soviet hotels, the senses are overwhelmed. 

Where the movie falls down is when the traveling stops and Benjamin returns home after the war and we focus on his relationship with Daisy. She was fascinated by him as a child, throws herself at him as a twenty-something, rejects him at thirty and finally has a passionate affair with him in her forties. They "meet in the middle", but their tragedy is that they cannot grow old together. I think this part of the movie failed for me because I just didn't buy into why Daisy would find Benjamin so fascinating - a character who has become a passive observer of a world he is separated from by his freakish aging process. I find passive heroes very hard to get a hold of. I also just didn't buy into the motivation that underpins a major decision at the centre of the second half of the film. And if you don't buy into it - if you don't feel you are being swept up in an emotional tragedy - the second half of the movie is a pretty tedious affair.

All of which got me thinking what I really liked about the film. It certainly wasn't the passive performance from Brad Pitt as Benjamin or the rather typically good but not outstanding performance from Cate Blanchett as Daisy. Rather, I responded to the little vignettes, and the colourful characters that filled the margins of the story.  Taraji P Henson, Tilda Swinton and Jared Harris all give strong performances but the latter is particularly charismatic as the drunken Irish sailor who takes a semi-decrepit Benjamin from his "child-hood" home in New Orleans to Communist Russia and thence to World War Two. In addition, there's also something fascinating and funny about "fish out of water" stories. To that end, seeing an old-looking but pre-teen Benjamin visit a brothel or get drunk is wonderfully funny. But let's not get too pretentious. It's the same brand of entertainment as FREAKY FRIDAY.

So, in the final analysis, for me BENJAMIN BUTTON is a game of two halves - a beautifully made, elegaic fable enlivened by the odd flash of raucous humour, somehow hitched to a film that tries to be an epic love story but left me cold. 

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON opened in 2008 in the US and Australia. It opened earlier in 2009 in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, Sweden, Egypt, Greece, Portugal, Denmark, Poland, Argentina, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland, Austria, Iceland and Venezuela. It opens this weekend in Belgium, France, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Estonia, Italy, Norway, the UK and Japan. It opens next weekend in South Korea and on February 20th in Finland.

BURN AFTER READING - a bleak tragedy shoehorned into a screwball comedy format

BURN AFTER READING is a profound discussion of middle-aged angst - nihilistic, bleak, depressing - shoe-horned into the form of a typical Coen Brothers screwball comedy. It's as if the atmosphere of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN has infected THE BIG LEBOWSKI. The result is, unhappily, pretty painful to watch. It's a film in which unhappy people make bad choices, creating an mess that signifies nothing. As the lights went up, I wondered what I had just witnessed and the answer was, basically, the most wilfully mis-marketed film of the yar. Maybe that was the point - that underlying all comedy is tragedy. But, the odd laugh aside, it was neither as enjoyable as the great Coen Brothers comedies nor as profound as their best work. More superficially, without Roger Deakins at DP the film lacked visual flair - all the more noticeable since it is set in Washington DC and yet makes no use of that environment.

The plot of the movie, for what it's worth, is a caper gone wrong. Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt play gym instructors who chance upon a CD containing "CIA secret shit". They use it to blackmail John Malkovich's CIA agent. Of course, he's a mess too - an alcoholic, fired from his job, being divorced by his wife (Tilda Swinton) who's cheating on him with a marshall (George Clooney) who is also sleeping with Frances McDormand's character, and himself being divorced. George Clooney's character is also deeply tragic - an insecure man who slips from woman to woman always looking for an audience to impress and signs of adoration. Wires get crossed, people die, characters become ever more desperate for love and whatever they think will make them complete. The CIA looks on in bewilderment, shovelling all the stupidity all under a rug and closing the manilla folder. What do we learn? That disillusionment lies ahead. That most things are empty and meaningless. All of which is fine subject for a movie, but why choose the comedy-caper as the vehicle for such a message and advertise with George Clooney pulling his trademark zany face and Brad Pitt with the trademark Coen Brothers crazy hair?

BURN AFTER READING played Venice 2008. It opens in the UK on September 12th; in the US on September 12th; in the Netherlands on September 18th; in Russia on October 2nd; in Spain on October 10th; in Australia on October 16th; in Norway on October 17th; in Finland on November 21st; in Belgium and France on December 10th.

Guy Ritchie retrospective - SNATCH

SNATCH follows the exact-same formula as LOCK, STOCK except that this time, the world of underground gambling and narcotics has been replaced with diamond-smuggling and under-ground boxing. The visual style is similar - flashy editing, video-game manipulation of action and the all-knowing mockney voice-over, this time from our protagonist Turkish (Jason Statham). To that extent, SNATCH is doomed to be less satisfying than LOCK, STOCK because it's less of a surprise.

On the other hand, I do really like SNATCH because it's even less compromising than LOCK, STOCK. Accents are thicker, and in the case of Brad Pitt's charver, deliberately impenetrable. The violence is harsher - including an arson attack and a particularly nasty form of dispatching errant crooks. The humour is darker, the double-crossing is nastier, the sets are grimier and the language is filthier. Despite the Tarantino-like comedy anecdotes, Alan Ford is genuinely menacing as the evil gangster Brick Top, and unlike LOCK, STOCK, there are several scenes of genuine peril. The most memorable of these is a scene where footage of hare-coursing is inter-cut with footage of a small-time burglar getting nabbed by Brick-top's men. It's outstandingly well put-together. Similarly, the boxing scenes are really well shot, even if they take heavy inspiration from RAGING BULL.

My over-riding feeling after watching SNATCH was that this was a holding picture. Ritchie was still in his comfort zone regarding characters and settings but had become a lot more accomplished technically. He was set up nicely for a third film. That was until he took a left-turn into Kabbalah and up himself with SWEPT AWAY and REVOLVER.

SNATCH was released in 2000 and is available on DVD.

London Film Fest 5 - In unqualified praise of THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD is, alongside 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS, the best film I have seen at London 2007 so far, and one of the best films I have seen all year. And this comes from the reviewer who had read so many bad reviews that she was expecting to walk out after an hour and grab lunch with some friends. But to my surprise, I found myself riveted by this sprawling three hour contemplation of the final days of the infamous outlaw and the nature of his infamy. Every scene is a visual delight; every performance of the hightest quality. Casey Affleck establishes himself as one of the finest young actors in Hollywood; Brad Pitt's every glance spreads fear. And in its final scenes, writer-director Andrew Dominik of CHOPPER fame shows that he has a profound understanding of the nature of celebrity and the kind of mob culture that can turn Princess Diana into an icon.

To start at the beginning, how do you make a new and interesting film about one of the most notorious figures of the Wild West, when his life story has already been analysed and re-analysed, his corpse photographed, lithographed, and his name checked in rock songs, rap songs and more besides? Dominik confronts this head on with the style and structure of the film. For a start, we never see Jesse in his hey-day, robbing trains with his original gang. It is assumed that we are already impressed with his reputation, and Brad Pitt has so much charisma that he pulls this off. Dominik also subtly contrasts the scenes that flesh out the received wisdom with the "real" psychology of the story. We have a narrator and a series of scenes which could have come from a penny-comic or a stub on Wikipedia. These are shot with a convex lens that keeps the centre of the frame in focus but blurs the edges, analagous to a sepia tinted portrait.

But Dominik's biggest innovation is to place Bob Ford centre stage. Bob has that dangerous combination of arrogance and insecurity. He believes he is destined for great things but he's desperate that no-one will give him a chance to show his greatness. Much like Thomas Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf, Bob Ford is in love with his hero Jesse James to the point of wanting to BE Jesse James. But Jesse is in no position to return that affection. For a start, Bob Ford's hero-worship is creepy, putting Jesse's wife on edge. Ford is also the butt of everyone's jokes and hardly a serious contender for the role of "side-kick". For another, Jesse James is now at the end of his career and paranoid about being double-crossed. He wouldn't trust anyone, let alone a young pup whose love could easily turn to contempt, hatred and finally murder. Casey Affleck's performance as Bob Ford deserves an Academy Award. It's subtle. Every stifled grimace at humiliation shifts him one step closer to killing the man he loves. Brad Pitt is also good as Jesse James, but has less to do. The performance is one-note but is no less impressive for that. He has to show how a folk-hero can become so dogged by being on the run and mis-trusting his colleagues, that he can choose to lay down his weapons and offer his back to a man he knows will kill him. The supporting cast is more of a revelation. In particular, Paul Schneider and Jeremy Renner are very good as members of the gang.

Other than the performances, the other key reason to watch this movie is the superb cinematography by the Coen Brothers' regular DP, Roger Deakins coupled with the production design by Lynch regular, Patricia Norris. They combine to simulatenously un-do all the things we expect from Westerns. Rather than a classic Western fought in dusty scrubland and grimy saloon-bars, the modern exemplar of which is 3:10 TO YUMA, the majority of this film is shot in snowy fields and clean, stark, well-kept houses. The costumes are clean and spare, as is the crisp early morning light. Combined with the leisurely pace, the movie almost feels like a Terrence Mallick flick.

All in all, THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD is a triumph of cinema. It's a movie in which I would change not one single thing: a pantheon movie in the making.

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD played Venice, Toronto and London 2007. It is already on release in the US, France, Israel and Belgium. It opens in Germany and Spain later in October and in Australia, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina and the UK in November. It opens in Singapore on December 27th and in Japan on March 15th 2008.

OCEAN'S THIRTEEN are smug bastards

OCEAN'S THIRTEEN is an arrogant film. Look how smooth we are; look how well we dress; look at our private jets and our designer sunglasses; look at the luxury hotels we stay in; look at the stand-up friends we have; look how effortlessly we slice through apparently impenetratable security systems.....

In short, look how COOL we are.

We're so cool, you'll pay ten quid to watch us be cool. And we won't have to create genuine plot twists like in OCEAN'S ELEVEN. And we won't bother having a love-story at the movie's heart. Heck, with our ludicrous channel tunnel plot-line we'll break all bounds of credibility. And you won't even care because you'll be so blinded by our dazzling teeth.

The fact that the script-writers have the audacity to rail against the modern Vegas - the crass commercialisation and PG-i-sation the Strip - infuriates me with its hypocrisy. And were they trying to make some point about underpaid Mexican workers? I mean, seriously, do they really think that from THIS platform, they can hint at a social critique? I am stumped.

OCEAN'S THIRTEEN is on global release.

BABEL: Let's challenge prejudice together

This review is brought to you by guest reviewer, Nik, who can usually be found here.

This is the last in the trilogy of films by Alejandro González Iñárritu starting with the Bafta winning AMORES PERROS, followed by 21 GRAMS, and completed by BABEL - a film of interwoven characters and relationships spanning the globe, from the Mexican desert, to the sunshine of San Diego, the wastelands of Morocco, and the buzzing nightlife of Tokyo. The locations are exotic, the scenery and visuals are quietly stunning, and despite the sarcasm of the title of this review, this film doesn't think too much of itself, or withdraw up its own arse.

In fact, the beauty of the film is that it so carefully treads the thin line between being in your face, paint by numbers morality - and being so understated that it becomes arthouse wank. It makes a simple point simply - and beautifully - that it's not so easy to be prejudiced when you have to look a human being - crying, broken - in the face and in the eye. That it's not so easy to condemn when you see acts of self-less human kindness from those who are unlike you - of whom you are initially suspicious and judgemental. This film doesn't pretend to say anything greater - or anything more fundamental or groundbreaking. And it does what it does so well. The acting is powerful, the script is excellent and spans 4 different languages and 4 different cultures with ease. It's well edited - and put together in a seemingly natural non-chronological order - not to make the plot twist at the end, or to be clever, but because it needed to be that way.

That's not to say the film didn't have its downsides - it wasn't quite a work of genius. This may seem trivial, but the musical score - an incessant Spanish guitar - started to grate after a while. It was too heavy handed. And the film probably stretched the point out for too long - although I can understand why all the scenes are in there, and why they're so long - the plot in each story just wasn't substantial enough to justify the running length, and nor were the almost incidental crossovers of the stories. And Brad Pitt looked like he thought he was doing some great community and social good by starring in a film that was mostly in foreign, and wouldn't be screened outside of Canada. Although his performance was good, if slightly 2-dimensional.

Furthermore, I didn't actually identify with any of the prejudices. I like Mexicans, and think they probably do most of the work in California. I don't think all Arabs are terrorists. And I so would have fucked the deaf-mute girl. In fact, thinking on it, what a sweet deal. How's she gonna complain if it's bad? Write me an email? Send me a fucking text message? Imagine it, boning a chick from behind, and suddenly a little scrawled out paper note appears on her back: "harder. and down a little" - class. And anyway, what'll she have to complain about? It's not like she's gonna hear me shouting out someone elses name*.

Having said all that - it was a very good film, and very worthy - it passed the time and it ought to have been made. And while I almost certainly won't be buying it on DVD and have no particular urge to see it again, because it wasn't substantial enough for a second watch, I do happily recommend it to anyone who likes a thinking and sensitive film. My fear is, of course, that this, as with most good art, is only going to be seen by people who already agree with its central points. Sadly the most prejudiced are often the most ignorant - and have little or no access or inclination towards good art, which this film represents. In other words, the people that this film was meant to challenge will be too busy seeing the latest shock flick, or masturbating at home to old episodes of Baywatch.

But all that said, it was a fitting end to the trilogy, and indeed a worthy close of the London Film Festival. And I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though the free popcorn they gave us was so ludicrously undersized. Thanks to Bina007 for the ticket, and thanks in advance to the Royal Association for Deaf People for settling out of court.

*Could all complaints from disability associations or disable people please be directed to nikolai.segura@gmail.com and not to Bina007, who does not endorse any of my jokes, however funny.

BABEL played Cannes, Toronto and London 2006. It opened in Denmark, Italy, Mexico, Sweden and the US last week. It opens in Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey, wide in the US on November 10th. It opens in Belgium, France, Finland and Argentina later in November. BABEL opens in Spain, Germany and Australia in December and in the UK, Estonia, Latvia and Brazil in January 2007. It opens in Japan in March.