QUEER** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 10

This is a long film for little plot or interiority.  It proceeds as follows:  ageing disheveled junkie called Lee hooks up with younger man called Eugene who may or may not actually be queer in 1950s Mexico.  They travel to a tropical jungle to take ayahuasca, have a trippy experience, then part. Decades later the older guy is apparently still in love with the boy. And even this overdoes the level of narrative propulsion which is basically nil. I never felt as though I had a handle on whether Lee was actually in love or in lust until the final five minutes of the film. I didn't feel invested in the relationship or the intricacies of whether Lee was a trick or a love interest for Eugene.  There's a limit to how far you can watch Daniel Craig drink tequila in a linen suit.

Still, there are a few redeeming features to this film.  The needle drops featuring Nirvana and Prince are anachronistic but effective.  There's a wonderfully unexpected and bonkers and against type cameo from Lesley Manville (Disclaimer).  Director Luca Guadagnino and his leads, Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, are admirably brave in depicting gay sex. And as I said before, the final five minutes were genuinely moving. But boy there was a lot of self-indulgent, handsomely produced, but utterly dull chaff to wade through to get to the grain.

QUEER has a running time of 135 minutes. It played Venice, Toronto and London 2024. It goes on release in the USA on November 27th and in the UK on December 13th.

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY***** - BFI London Film Festival - Closing Night Gala

I was not the world's biggest fan of KNIVES OUT - Rian Johnson's closed-house murder-mystery starring Daniel Craig as the detective with the broad southern drawl. I sat stony silent in a packed London Film Festival screening with the rest of the audience having the time of their life.  I thought the mystery wasn't complex or interesting and the performances fell flat for me. I just didn't get it. As a result, I had zero expectations for its high-budget sequel, GLASS ONION, and was cringing at the thought of its two-hour twenty minutes running time. 

Well reader, I can happily report that GLASS ONION is one of my favourite movies of the year!  It flew by its running time in a haze of laugh-out loud comedy; brilliantly-acted outlandish characters; and a proper mystery that's both tricksy, meta-textual and politically biting!

The movie stars Daniel Craig, once again returning as Benoit Blanc, and leaning even further into the camp of a fussily over-dressed and anachronistic famous detective in the Agatha Christie style. The new villain of the piece is Ed Norton's tech billionaire Miles Bron, clearly based on Elon Musk. He's a vainglorious fake-hippie who invites all of his old college friends to a yearly retreat, this time on his supervillain island lair.  As the movie unfolds, in good detective tradition, we realise that each of the characters needs Miles for his money or connections and has a motive to kill him. There's even a MacGuffin - a piece of a new renewable energy-producing crystal widget that is also - oh no! - rather dangerous!

The heart of the piece - or maybe its moral compass in a sea of characters that are more or less self-interested and despicable - is Janelle Monae's Andi Brand.  As the movie unfolds we discover that Andi was in fact the brains behind Miles' big invention and they haven't really spoken in years. So why has she shown up on the island? And who invited Benoit?

The first half of the movie explores the connections between the characters and leads us to the murder. The second half of the film goes back and reveals what was really happening. This might sound tedious but it's so damn clever, smart and involving I promise you it won't feel like a rehash. But I can't tell you exactly why it works for fear of spoiling the plot - so I'll just encourage you to watch.

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 139 minutes. It played Toronto 2022 and will be released on Netflix on December 23rd.

KNIVES OUT - BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Day Eight

KNIVES OUT isn't a bad movie. The luscious production design, the all-star cast, the three, count 'em, three laugh-out-loud moments are truly funny.  But I had expected so much more from writer-director Rian Johnson than just a straightforward old-fashioned slow-paced closed-house murder-mystery. I had expected some of the subversion of his debut modern high-school noir BRICK. I had expected at least some of the piquancy of a Wes Anderson movie, whose production design (THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS anyone?!) he so clearly apes.  But no. Oh no. What I got was a murder mystery along the lines of Agatha Christie but less well penned.  I guessed the first hour twist in the first five minutes, and the second hour twist in the first ten minutes of that hour. At least the second hour was more pacy. The first hour was so slow and dull that if I hadn't been trapped in the middle of the row I might've left.  I didn't understand the resounding laughter of the audience who were clearly having a good time. Maybe they just read less murder mysteries than I do and so were genuinely surprised at the ending?  I also really didn't like the heavy-handed political point that the film was trying to make. Ooooh look at all those exploitative rich white dick-heads bested by a warm-hearted immigrant.   What a waste of Christopher Plummer, of Michael Shannon, of so many others.  What a pain to sit through Daniel Craig's piss-poor Poirot pastiche and his Southern drawl.  The only real interest was seeing relative newcomer Ana de Armas do a great job as the "help" and protagonist of the film.  As a closing comment, it's interesting that I love detective fiction and thought Rian Johnson did a mediocre job with this. And I really liked LOOPER, but my husband who actually does life sci-fi, thought THAT was mediocre.  Maybe Rian Johnson just makes mediocre sci-fi movies that anyone who really loves the genre sees right through?

KNIVES OUT has a running time of 130 minutes. It played Toronto and London 2019. It is released in the USA on November 27th and in the UK on November 29th.

The last woman in England to watch SPECTRE, watches SPECTRE

Despite my avatar name, I actually don't like Bond. His glib superficial sado-masochistic fantasy world of spying struck me as thin soup compared to the morally murky but properly Romantic world of John le Carre. Insofar as I liked Bond, it was to appreciate the role that escapism and big brand consumerism has in all of our lives. In other words, if I must have Bond, let it be Bond - kiss kiss, bang bang - Roger Moore's arched eyebrow - absurd gadgets. And so I have struggled with Daniel Craig's Bond films, filled as they are with existential angst. They're Bond trying to be Bourne, lacking in self-confidence, desperate to show that they KNOW the very concept of Bond is absurd in our post-millennial world. Nowhere is this more obvious, nor as grating, as in SPECTRE.

SKYFALL

Despite my pseudonym, I am not in fact a great fan of Bond - rather I named myself after my friend Caspar who famously crashed his car pulling out of Frankfurt airport when distracted by an Aston Martin, and was forever after known as Caespi007.  For me, Bond was a pathetic fantasy denying Britain's post-Suez decline.  A man more in the tradition of Flashman - slick surfaces, sport fucking and sado-masochism.  The movies were, in general, even more ridiculous, with their wonkish gadgetry and porn-name Bond girls.  Some were entertaining in an ironic way, but let's face it, as spy thrillers go, this was a long long way below the standard set by John Le Carre's Smiley. Smiley lived in a world of decay, corruption, failure and bureaucratic incompetence. There was a sense of honour and of love, but it was struggling to survive. 

Of the recent Bonds, CASINO ROYALE was a superior reboot but only because it was trying to be a Bourne film.  Moreover, the dumbing down of the Aston Martin to a Ford, and baccarat to poker, struck me as anti-Fleming, insofar as one cared at all about the heritage of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.  We all know that QUANTUM OF SAUSAGE (HT @djeremybolton) was impenetrable, dull nonsense, and undid much of the goodwill that CASINO had rebuilt.  What then could we expect of SKYFALL, helmed by Sam Mendes, a wunderkind British theatre director of middling reputation as a cinema director, starting with the acclaimed AMERICAN BEAUTY and sliding into obscurity ever since? 

The early signs were good - a cast list full of English thespians of the highest calibre - Ben Whishaw, Rory Kinnear, Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney.  A script from Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (CASINO ROYALE) and John Logan (RANGO) that was going to tackle head-on the incompatibility of kiss kiss bang bang Bond with the age of Bourne.  And photography from perhaps the best DP working today: Roger Deakins.  All was shaping up for a Bond that was in tune with London 2012 and the Diamond Jubilee - a country presided over by an implacable matriarch, learning to be proud of its imperial heritage without making the mistake of being shackled to it, looking to a very different future with some slight degree of confidence. 

The result is a movie that is perhaps the most thoughtful and reflective of the Bond series.  A movie that can look upon its heritage with fond humour but safely put it aside.  A movie that is conservative - passionately making the case for on the ground espionage; for men with the experience to tell them when to, and when not to, fire the bullet; for leaders with the balls to take the tough calls but also with the good sense to know they are accountable. It's the kind of movie, in short, where Bond can do his job with just a gun and a radio, but ultimately also uses the rockets in his Aston Martin DB5, and doesn't feel the need to apologise for either. It's the movie in which a joke can be made about the ejector seat, but in which ultimately we are rather pleased to see order restored - M, Moneypenny, Q and Bond, in a tastefully old-fashioned leather padded room.   This was a Bond I could get on board with.

In fact, SKYFALL may well be the Bond I've seen. It had wry humour; real emotional development; perhaps the most sleazy, scary villain in the canon; precious little cheap sex; and real consequences to actions. It felt plausible in a way so little Bond feels plausible.  The acting was superb. And the cinematography deserves an Oscar. I had a thoroughly good time - laughed, cheered, was moved, was scared.  It was the complete entertainment experience.  

The plot has reflection and consequences and sheer heft built into it from the start.  In the precredits sequence, as Bond (Daniel Craig) chases down a man with a MacGuffin, we see M (Dame Judi Dench) take two brutally hard but necessary decisions, resulting in Bond's apparent death. He goes off on a drinking binge post-credits only to emerge when a terrorist attack on MI6 turns into a very personal attack on M. It appears that a rogue former agent (Javier Bardem) seeks vengeance on M precisely for taking those brutal decisions that put the country before the agent.  Bond is broken, unfit and old; M's "fitness for purpose" questioned by her political superior, Mallory (Ralph Fiennes); and even Q (Ben Whishaw) mocks the idea of exploding pens and the necessity of on the ground fieldwork when the world's battles are now fought with computers. 

Through all this M is our unwavering moral compass. She never questions that her decisions were right, but also fully acknowledges their human cost.  Bond is, through her faith in him, reconstituted from broken man to polished active agent, able to acknowledge that the world has changed, that the new Q is valuable, and to see his own worth within the modern machine.  Mallory is a good example of just how well-thought act the script is - that a minor character with only a handful of scenes can challenge our prejudice about him every time we meet him.  Ralph Fiennes is superbly slippery in the role.  The screenwriters do a similarly superb job with Bond girl Eve (Naomie Harris) who begins as an irritating incompetent, and raises our suspicions of typical Bond misogyny, until we realise that it's all part of her character development.  Ben Whishaw is, as always, a scene-stealer as geek hacker Q. And as for the villain, Javier Bardem has created a character as outlandish as Scaramanga, or Anton Chigurh, or Hannibal Lecter - all of which this movie consciously references.  In a tour-de-force piece of CGI work we see just how damaged he is.  He is at once the most pantomime villain of the series - but also the most scary, sleazy and unnerving.  He is the Bond villain that surpasses all others - just as Heath Ledger's Joker redefined Batman villains.

Behind the camera, Adele provides the strongest theme song in years, with Paul Epworth's orchestration echoing, but never quite pastiching the old Shirley Bassey numbers.  Daniel Kleinman's opening credits sequence is also one of the most memorable of the recent Bond outings.  But most of all the superior quality of this film is down to DP Roger Deakins, long-time collaborator with the Coen Brothers.  You can see this most of all in the Shanghai, Macau and Scottish sequences.  In Shanghai, he captures that exciting neon brightness of the modern metropolis - every glass surface reflects luminous advertising - the city has the unreal air of Newton Thomas Sigel's LA in DRIVE.  In Macau, Deakins has Bond arrive at a casino against a backdrop of darkness surrounded by soft orange lanterns that takes one's breath away.  And in Scotland, we see Bond silhouetted against burnt orange night sky that reminded me of some of the most arresting visuals from Robert Elswit's THERE WILL BE BLOOD.

Is everything perfect? No.  Naomie Harris and Daniel Craig do not have enough sexual chemistry to carry off the shaving scene. And the Scottish scene starts off a little A-Team.  But these are all minor quibbles in what is an incredibly beautiful, superbly written and acted film that lifts the standard of the Bond series and puts it on a much more sustainable footing. Kudos to all involved. 

SKYFALL is on release in the UK, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Iraq, Iceland, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malta, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, South Korea and Sweden, the UAE, Switzerland.  It opens next weekend in Italy, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Serbia, Spain, Argentina, Austria, Bolivia, Chile, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Peru, Singapore, Slovenia, Uruguay, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Estonia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Taiwan, Turkey, Venezuela and Vietnam. It opens in November 9th in Jamaica, the USA, Albania, Canada and Pakistan, It opens on November 15th in Cambodia; on November 22nd in Australia and New Zealand; on November 30th in South Africa; on December 1st in Japan; and on December 6th in the Dominican Republic.

iPad Round-Up 4 - THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN

This new adaptation of Herge's famous children's adventure stories is a technical masterpiece. Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson have come together to create a movie using the latest motion capture, CGI and 3D technology to create a spectacular visual experience.  The problem is that I'm not sure their choices work, and I'm not sure the story can withstand the heavy visuals placed upon it.  

The first problem is that Herge's comics have such a particular style, and the motion-cap work seems to come down somewhere between straightforward animation and live-action, creating a sort of eerie look of humans with plasticine faces and over-large hands.  I  found the mo-cap humans with exaggerated facial features creepy.  

The second problem is that the movie contains so much swash and buckle, so many car-chases, naval-escapades and exotic locales, that I had no idea what was going on or what was at stake.  The whole thing read as a giant MacGuffin, designed to propel us through ever more exciting action sequences. I simply did not care about the clues to treasure that TinTin and his alcoholic sidekick, Captain Haddock, were seeking, nor did I think that they had enough camaraderie to anchor a buddy-action adventure story.

Maybe my whole problem is with the character of TinTin himself? I've never read the comic books and I find this strangely asexual boy-scouty do-gooding journo deeply unengaging.  So much of this film shares the 1920s action serial tropes that made INDIANA JONES so compelling, but without a loveable rogue as the lead character, there's no emotional entry point.

So, count me out for the sequel.

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN opened in October 2011 and is now available to rent and own.

Late review - THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011)

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is a perfectly well made movie that has absolutely no reason to exist.  It adds nothing to the Swedish original, despite being directed by the spiky, visually astute director David Fincher (THE SOCIAL NETWORK).  It feels like just another faithful retelling of Stieg Larsson's best-selling thriller (whose plot I won't bother to recount), albeit with a bigger budget and better production values.  Fincher's fingerprints were too subtly felt.  Let's be honest, if all we'd been given were a music video for Karen O singing Trent Resznor and Atticus Ross' reworking of The Immigrant Song with the wicked cool opening credits, we'd have gone home as happy as if we'd sat through the entire three hour movie. 

If I wanted to get more granular I'd point out the following - two positives and two negative.  I prefer Rooney Mara's Lisbeth Salander to Noomi Rapace, not because there was anything wrong with Rapace's performance, but because Rapace feels more like a woman, and Mara really does look like a girl (although I concede that in the novel she's 23).  That makes her victimisation worse, her toughness more impressive, her being a ward of the state more credible.  Second, I really liked Jeff Cronenweth's digital lensing using the Red One.

The first negative is a bugbear I have with many English language movies set in a non-English speaking countries.  Simply put, I want the director to decide what he wants to do with the accent in the film and then stick to it consistently.  I don't care if the Yanks and Brits are speaking English with some undefined mittel-europische accent, or some approximation at it, but I don't want half doing straight English and half doing cod-Swedish.   There's nothing that draws me out of a scene more than seeing Daniel Craig speaking straight English to Rooney Mara trying to do a Swedish accent complete with "hey hey"s and whatnot.

My second bugbear is the perfunctory manner in which the relationship between Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist is handled in the remake. In the original movie, the genuine chemistry between Michael Nyqvist and Rapace really did centre the film and make us hungry for the next movie.  But in Fincher's take it's all too superficial, and betrays what's meant to be a deeply emotional moment at the end of the flick.  In fact, the movie has a wider problem, which is the very dull, slightly bizarre (plot points changed for no real reason) ending, that drags on for 30 minutes.

Overall, a pretty banal retelling once the opening credits are done. Looks like Fincher did it for the paycheck and directed with a very light hand.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is on release in the UK, USA, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Israel and Slovenia. It is released on January 6th in Hong Kong, Russia, Singapore, Bulgaria, Estonia, India and Australia. It is released on January 12th in Australia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Poland, Spain and Turkey. It is released on January 19th in Belgium, France, Hungary, the Netherlands and Portugal. It opens on January 27th in Brazil; on February 3rd in Italy and later in February in Japan.

Rooney Mara won Best Breakthrough Performer, tied with Felicity Jones for LIKE CRAZY, at the National Board of Review awards 2011.

SYLVIA - dirge

The first film I ever watched at the London Film Fest started a trend of disappointing opening and closing night galas - the programming dictated by commercial interests rather than artistic merit. The movie was Christine Jeffs' dismal biopic of Sylvia Plath: acclaimed poet; wife of the adulterous Ted Hughes; mother to two small children; and suicide. And if you think I'm being reductive, then that is exactly what this movie does: it reduces Plath and Hughes' relationship to a daytime TV melodrama. Oh how pretty tony, young Sylvia (Gwyneth Paltrow) looks! See how her hair shines! See how that devilishly handsome Ted Hughes gets tired of her and betrays her! See how she is martyred in a dismal British flat in dismal post-war London! Oh, how Paltrow emotes inner pain! The whole thing was utterly dull and unconvincing. The fault, however, does not lie with the actors, nor with the score, cinematography or any other matter of execution. It lies in the movie's conception as a touching homage to Sylvia rather than a genuinely engaged, insightful analysis of what was, by all accounts, a passionate marriage and a painful suicide that cruelly left behind small children. The resulting film simultaneously caused offence to Plath's family for daring to be made at all - but causes offence to its viewers by refusing to actually delve into the emotional torment at its heart. It is the same emotional evation that frustrated me in Christine Jeffs' new film, SUNSHINE CLEANING - another film that deals with quite dark, depressing subject matter and yet handles it with all the willingness to truly engage of a rom-com (but without the benefit of actual laughs).

SYLVIA played London 2003 and opened in 2003 and 2004. It is available on DVD.

DEFIANCE - important and entertaining

Edward Zwick (BLOOD DIAMOND, THE LAST SAMURAI) is back with another professionally put together but visually uninspiring thriller that seeks to educate as it entertains. In the case of DEFIANCE, Zwick teaches us the true story of the three Bielski brothers, smugglers whose shady smarts proved invaluable in forming a resistance group against the Nazis and their Belorussian collaborators during the Holocaust. Thanks to these brothers, 1500 Jews survived in the woods of Belarus. Zwick's movie makes a powerful point about modern movie treatment of the Holocaust in which the Jewish characters are often an amorphous mass of passive victims, to be pitied no doubt, but not as individually interesting as the Nazis. By contrast, DEFIANCE is a film that shows us Jews fighting the Nazis and, indeed, surviving.

The movie has been criticised for being somehow too superficial - too fond of battle scenes and too interested in the heroes' love lives - as if an audience can't simultaneously be entertained and educated. Paul Verhoeven has successfully combined both elements in his work, most recently in ZWARTEBOEK, and Zwick pulls off the same trick here, though will less directorial style. So yes, we see Jamie Bell's character, youngest brother Asael, shyly fall in love with pretty young Chaya (Mia Wasikowska). And yes, we see Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber as elder brothers Zus and Tuvia, take lovers after their wives have been killed. But we also see Zus and Tuvia debate the merits of direct action allied with the Communists versus slowing down but giving shelter to the elderly and women. And we see Zus and Tuvia debate the reversal of fortune which sees them - working-class boys, hailed as heroes and respected by the academics and rich.

The result is a thoughtful, well-acted film (Schreiber and Craig excel), that is also fast-paced and compelling. It's not as earnest or ponderous as SCHINDLER'S LIST but it is one of Zwick's better films allied to truly important subject matter.

DEFIANCE is on release in the US. It goes on release in South Korea, Spain and the UK next week and in France and Italy the following week. It opens in Poland on January 23rd; in Croatia on January 29th; in Singapore and Finland on February 6th; in Japan on February 14th; in Iceland on February 20th; in Australia, Brazil and Estonia on February 27th; in Belgium and Germany on March 5th and in the Netherlands on March 19th.

London Film Fest Day 15 - QUANTUM OF SOLACE - the Bond that dare not speak its name

Health warnings up-front. I despise the Ian Fleming Bond novels. They are vulgar, misogynistic, sado-masochistic fantasy novels that miss the mark on international espionage as far as Michael Bay missed the mark with PEARL HARBOUR. Give me the grime of John Le Carre any day. As far as the movies go, I appreciated the pre-Daniel Craig franchise insofar as it was camp, ludicrous, gratuitously luxurious and balls-out ridiculous. To me, Bond was only good insofar as he was driving pretty cars and the villains were stroking a white cat. I can, however, see why many people didn't like the old Bond flicks. The boundary between being camp and just being bad is easily transgressed viz. DIE ANOTHER DAY.

I think a lot of people who hate typical Bond movies liked CASINO ROYALE because it was trying to be a BOURNE film. It had characters with real emotions, a decent plot, proper actors and some okay action scenes. I, on the other hand, hated CASINO ROYALE on the grounds that if I want to watch a decent spy thriller, I'll watch THE BOURNE IDENTITY. If I watch a Bond film I want a Bond film. I don't want Bond driving a fracking Ford Mondeo and playing Poker in the Hotel Splendide.

My view is that the Bond franchise has now boxed itself into a corner. It's too ashamed to do anything too Bond - random rumpy-pumpy, gratuitous violence - but feels that it has to nod to the genre-tropes. So, in QUANTUM OF SOLACE, Bond does have a random shag with Gemma Arterton but it's all very perfunctory and joyless. On the other hand, the movie wants to be both an emotional character drama AND an action film. So you find yourself in a very odd mish-mash of a film. In the case of QUANTUM OF SOLACE, it's directed by Marc Forster (THE KITE RUNNER, STRANGER THAN FICTION) who knows how to do drama. Problem is, he can't direct action movies for toffee. It's all hand-held close-ups and frenetic editing so you can't tell what's going on. I was just praying for him to pull back, keep the camera still and just let the action unwind.

All this is to delay the inevitable point where I attempt to tell you the plot of QUANTUM OF SOLACE. This is tricky because QoS is a really badly written, poorly assembled film, with a narrative (and indeed a title) that never quite make sense. It's a terrible waste of Daniel Craig and Mathieu Amalric as the baddie. Gemma Arterton barely gets a look-in and Olga Kurylenko is once again just a body. The basic idea is that Bond is on the warpath after the shadowy evil organisation that forced the suicide of his lover, Vesper Lynd. So Bond goes ga-ga, indulging in a plethora of chase scenes in the company of similarly vengeful Camille (Olga Kurylenko). They are chasing down Dominic Greene (Amalric), head of a Smersh like org called Quantum (a-ha!) We know he's a purveyor of evil because he's essentially a utilities trader! And that's it. Welcome to Bond does Enron.

Obviously, all the deeply annoying crap from CASINO holds over here. The shameless merchandising; the endless chases; the embarassment at being Bond at all. But even if you liked CASINO ROYALE I think you might be disappointed with QUANTUM OF SOLACE because it doesn't even have the compensation of tight plotting and emotional engagement.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE played London 2008. It goes on release in the UK, France and Sweden this weekend. It opens next weekend in Bahrain, Belgium, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Oman, the Philippines, Switzerland, Argentina, Bolivia,Chile, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Peru, Portugal, Qatar, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Syria, Thailand, Ukraine, UAE, Italy and Norway. It opens on November 14th in Hungary, Austria, Belize, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, Guatemala, Honduras, Iceland, India, Kenya, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Panama, Poland, Romania, Taiwan, Turkey and the USA. It opens in Australia on 19th November; in Spain on the 21st; in South Africa on the 28th; in New Zealand and Venezuela on the 4th December; in Uruguay on the 26th December and in Japan on January 10th 2009.

FLASHBACKS OF A FOOL - a melancholy drama about guilt and fear

The first half hour of Baillie Walsh's intriguing movie is a witty indictment of the savage superificiality of Hollywood. Daniel Craig plays Joe Scott - a self-indulgent, narcissistic, ageing Hollywood star whose cocaine-fuelled lifestyle has alienated his personal assistant (Eve) and his agent (Mark Strong in a fantastic suit and an even better accent). The death of Joe's child-hood best friend leads him to drunken reflection and takes the movie into an extended hour-long flash-back sequence. Amid the pitch-perfect bric-a-brac of 70s Britain, a teenage Joe (Harry Eden) demonstrates that character is fate. He could've had the life of his best friend Boots, dating a local schoolgirl called Ruth. But instead, he drifts into a relationship with a predatory older woman (Jodhi May) only to be brought up short by the consequences of the relationship. Guilt-ridden, he runs away, and presumably kept running all the way to Hollywood and the ultimate life of no consequences, until his past catches up with him.

FLASHBACKS OF A FOOL has much to recommend it. It's patient, intelligent, the characters seem credible and the period detail of 1970s Britain is impressive. The use of period music in the score is absolutely spot-on, and special mention must be given to John Mathieson's wonderful photography. The cast is good, with Helen McCrory and Miriam Karlin particularly good in smaller roles. The only slight mis-step is in the final segment, where the ageing star returns to Britain. On his way to confront the grieving widow he makes a statement about how standing still is more courageous than taking action which seems utterly trite and belies the more enigmatic atmosphere of the rest of the film. In addition, I feel Claire Forlani is mis-cast or perhaps mis-dressed (is that even a word?) as the widow. In her Tiffany necklace, skinny jeans, riding boots and perfect make-up, she looks nothing like the widow of a heavily indebted, poverty-stricken rural Briton.

These quibbles aside, FLASHBACKS OF A FOOL is a melancholy, visually impressive movie that deserves attention.

FLASHBACKS OF A FOOL is on release in the UK and opens in Portugal on June 5th.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS aka The Gutless Cop-Out

What does it say about the times we live in that writer-director Chris Weitz has no qualms in having Jason Biggs masturbate on-screen with a warm apple-pie, but doesn't have the balls to depict an atheist's response to Paradise Lost? I don't know what saddens me more: the anti-liberal tyrannical response of my own Church to this movie, or the self-censorship of a studio too timid to respect Philip Pullman's profound artistic achievement. The upshot is that THE GOLDEN COMPASS is a rather feeble film. It looks pretty enough but it lacks the intellectual bravery of the source material. As a result, the viewer has to jump through the hoops of the complicated narrative without the concommitant emotional pay-off. In fact, the bizarre decision to cut short this adaptation before we have reached the final harrowing scenes of the book makes this film a deeply unsatisfying, unengaging experience indeed.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In 1995, Philip Pullman published the first novel in a trilogy called His Dark Materials. It is that book - called Northern Lights in the UK and The Golden Compass in the US - that we now see brought to the screen. Pullman's trilogy is nominally a set of books for children, filled with fantasy adventure elements and set in a world that shares many characteristics with our own. A plucky young girl called Lyra Belaqua sets off for the North Pole to rescue her friend Roger from the mysterious Gobblers with the help of a truth-telling golden compass that once belonged to her guardian, an Oxford don called Lord Asriel. On the way, she escapes the clutches of the devestatingly charming Mrs Coulter and benefits from the help of a Gyptian king, a beautiful witch called Serafina Pekkala, an aeronaut called Lee Scoresby and an armoured bear called Iorek Byrnison.

The book works well as an adventure story. The "baddies" are suitably sinister, the good guys are wonderfully drawn, and we really believe in the strenth of the friendship between Lyra and Roger. But there is so much more to the story than that. In Pullman's version of the world, a tyrannical ideological Authority is stamping out free will and free thought. It is true that in the novel this Authority is explicitly religious and adopts some of the terminology of the Catholic Church. However I firmly believe that the Authority can be read as a symbol of all intellectual repression and anti-liberalism rather than any particular set of beliefs. Lyra and her guardian are thus battling for freedom and against tyranny - for truth against self- and imposed censorship.

It is, then, ironic, as well as tragic, to find this film refusing to speak plainly and to defend the intellectual freedom that Lord Asriel seeks to defend. Furthermore, having shorn the movie of its intellectual substance, Chris Weitz might at least have left us the searing emotional climax of the novel. But even here he chickens out - and leaves us with just another wishy-washy luke-warm Hollywood ending.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS is on release in the UK, Belgium, Finland, France, Israel, Norway, the Philippines and Spain. It opens tomorrow in Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia and Singapore. It opens on Friday 7th December in Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey and the US. It opens the following weekend in Serbia, Argentina, Hungary, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Estonia and Italy. THE GOLDEN COMPASS opens in Italy, South Korea, Greece, Hong Kong, Brazil and Australia later in December and in Egypt on January 16th 2008. It opens in Japan on March 1st.

THE INVASION - more botch job than B-movie

THE INVASION is an embarassing remake of THE BODYSNATCHERS horror movies that so brilliantly captured the paranoia and moral decrepitude of the McCarthy witch-hunt and the Watergate disaster. This remake has the alien invasion take the form of a virus that is spread my vomit, turning its victims into pod-people. The German director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, created the outstanding Hitler bunker movie, DER UNTERGANG, so we can presume that the blame for this fiasco lies with newbie Dave Kajganich, who failed to translate this paranoia tale into a decade of rendition and starts of CCTV. (Seriously, what could have been easier?) The nearest this movie gets to a political sub-text is its weakly subversive proposition that a society of pod-people would be safer and more peaceful. It never gets sophisticated enough to examine whether it is worth sacrificing moral agency to secure safety. Blame also lies with the studio, who commissioned the guys behind the MATRIX and V for VENDETTA to re-shoot swathes of material. What we end up with is more botch-job that artistic whole. THE INVASION should have gone straight to video. Presumably it only got released because the strength of the big-name cast will partially recoup the costs of this fiasco. The public deserves better.

THE INVASION has already been released in the US, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, India, Taiwan, New Zealand, Singapore, Greece, South Korea, Mexico, Argentina, Slovakia, Italy and the UK. It opens later in October in France, Germany, Brazil, Norway, Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands, Iceland and Spain. It opens in Portugal, Estonia, Egypt, Russia, Slovenia, Lithuania in November 2007 and in Australia on February 28th 2008.

CASINO ROYALE - Whatever happened to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang?!

CASINO ROYALE has four good points: Daniel Craig (the new 007) is a good actor; the opening black-and-white assassination sequence is stylish, funny and hard-as-nails; the movie features a heart-stoppingly gorgeous cameo of an Astin Martin DBS; and the humour is genuinely witty rather than tongue-in-cheek.

Everything else sucks. Much as I hate formulaic movies, the Bond franchise is built on a bloody cast iron formula - hot chicks, fast cars, stuffy Whitehall bureaucrats, witty one-liners, evil megalomaniacs, oddball henchman and a handsome gentleman killer in a dinner jacket. CASINO ROYALE pisses on this heritage from a great height. There are no heart-stopping chase scenes, no random rumpy-pumpy, no cool gadgets, no Moneypenny, no "Q" at all. Craig's Bond is written as a man at odds with his Oxford education - the sort of man who doesn't give a damn if his martini is shaken or stirred and would have the audacity to dine on caviar in a restaurent without his tie. What "luxury" there is is distinctly second-class. We first see Bond driving a bloody Ford; the Casino is not in France but Montenegro and instead of playing Baccarat he plays poker. It's all a little pathetic. Even the sums of money seem inconsequential. £150million hardly seems like a sum on which the future of international terrorist finance hangs. In fact, the movie is downhill from about the fifth minute when the opening titles begin. This must be the most anonymous pathetic excuse for a Bond song and the most low-rent graphics ever seen in a Bond film - and that's saying something.

I can see perfectly well what the director and producers were trying to do. They wanted to inject a little grit and realism in the movie. Fine. It's rather nice to see Bond bleed and sweat, look exhausted and be the victim of an infamous homo-erotic sado-maschostic torture sequence (the nearest, by the way, that we get to sexual excitement in the movie.) But frankly, giving Bond a genuine love interest and some bruising will not turn the franchise into the Bourne Supremacy any more than giving Tom Cruise a wife in MI3 made Ethan Hunt an empathetic character. Instead, we get a half-way house - neither as popcorn-tastic as the usual Bond circus; nor as thrilling as Bourne and certainly not as emotionally affecting as your early John le Carre novel. CASINO ROYALE is actually rather dull.

I don't want post-modern touchy feely Bond. It's just not as entertaining. And actually, I don't think it's any closer to the novels: I always found Bond to be a callow, materialistic, whiny little sado-masochist who got into scrapes and had to be bailed out continuously by Felix Leiter. I wish movie reviewers would stop talking about "getting back to the novel" as being some kind of holy grail. Bond was only ever trashy materialistic entertainment - at its best it still is. I still remember the opening sequence of GOLDENEYE where Bond freefalls off a cliff and into the cockpit of a plane. Class! The audience applauded - here was the Bond we had missed during the sterile Dalton years. And to think it's the same director behind this damp squib! I fear we are headed for the desert once more.....

CASINO ROYALE is on global release from Friday. For a complete set of specific release date, click here.

For a video review of this movie from, Nikolai, click here.

INFAMOUS - Capote as genuinely tragic

Another year, another film about Truman Capote which features strong performances but is flawed nonetheless.

The story is the same. Truman Capote is a famous author who mingles with ladies who lunch in New York, leading a pampered existence. One day he reads about a well-respected farming family that has been brutally murdered in its home in rural Kansas. Capote journeys there to write a magazine article on how the murders have affected the town but soon realises he has enough material for a new kind of book - a non-fiction novel. In order to flesh out the novel, he partially feigns friendship with one of the murderers - Perry Smith. The relationship has a slim core of genuine empathy but Capote exploits Perry. And by the end, he has sold his soul. Capote knows he can only publish his perfect novel when his friend hangs for murder. Capote didn't write anything substantial again.

The films, however, are rather different. In last year's CAPOTE, Truman is portrayed as chillingly calculated. He is mean to his best friend, Nell (Harper) Lee and resentful of her success with To Kill a Mockingbird. He shamelessly manipulates Perry Smith. I found that movie over-long though beautifully shot and acted. Most of all, I resented the fact that Perry was again exploited - a mere mirror to reflect back the emptiness of Capote.

By contrast, this new movie, INFAMOUS, is not well-shot. It's not well put-together. I hate the device of having big-name actors playing big-name socialites. Sigourney Weaver, Isabella Rosselini, Hope Davis, Juliet Stevenson, Peter Bogdanovich and Gwyneth Paltrow look like they are participating in a cheap version of STARS IN THEIR EYES. It's even worse that instead of simply telling the story and allowing us to infer the message, the director has these famous people make like they are in a documentary, talking to the camera about Truman in front of a New York cardboard backdrop.

The bizarre thing is that while I find the purely technical aspects of cinema were better used in CAPOTE, INFAMOUS is, to my mind, the better film. For for the first time we see something of Perry Smith, played with the right mix of strength and vulnerability by Daniel Craig. The movie does not see him as merely a person to throw-up the ruthless ambition of Capote. And this touches on the real strength of the film - which is the nuanced performance of each lead actor.

Sandra Bullock's Harper Lee is a revelation and proves that Bullock is a far better actress than the roles she takes on. And Toby Jones is a fabulous Capote. He captures Capote's love of ease and his own eccentricities - his spitefulness and love of gossip. But in sharp contrast to CAPOTE, Jones' Capote is a man with a heart and a soul. He really does fall for Perry Smith and at once sees the unbearable contradictions this has thrust upon him. There is a tremendous scene after Capote and Smith have kissed where Capote goes back to his hotel room and looks in the mirror. He is giddy with joy at first. But then, without uttering a word, you see his face crumple. Because he can foresee the cruel dilemma facing him - to love a man and yet need that man to die because you cannot live without writing. In other words, instead of Philip Seymour Hoffman's monster, Toby Jones gives up a genuinely tragic figure.

INFAMOUS played Venice, Toronto and London 2006. It opened in the US earlier this month and opens in he UK on January 19th 2007.

RENAISSANCE - visually stunning sci-fi animation

On the face of it, RENAISSANCE is a French sci-fi movie. It's Paris, fifty years from now and the world is much as it we know it. The iconic buildings are still in place as well as that typically Boulevard Haussmann architecture. The only difference is that everything seems amp'ed up. Buildings are suspended on iron girders under which run subterannean free-ways. Glossy corporate HQ's hang in suspension over motorway junctions. ICT is recognisable but more invasive. Instead of wearing bluetooth headsets the Parisian fuzz have implanted Motorola smart-chips. Of particular interest to your humble movie-goer is a mega-corporation called Avalon - a sort of Unilever of the future - with interests from hard-core bio-genics to consumer products.

This beautifully imagined future-present is rendered in animation of a kind I have never seen before. Instead of old-fashioned hand-drawn animation or Pixar-style CGI we have a kind of motion-capture based animation here. It's like the darkest, coolest cartoon strip you've ever seen - complete with pen-and-ink hand-shaded cells, but rendered very very lifelike. The movie has as definite and unforgettable a visual style as Blade Runner.

The black and white visuals give RENAISSANCE the feel of a gritty urban 1940s film-noir. The classic tropes are all in place. Ilona's kidnap is investigated by a hard-ass cop, voiced in the English version by the new Bond, Daniel Craig. It is also being investigated by Ilona's elder sister - a frequenter of shady clubs. The sad part is that as beautifully rendered as this movie is, it resembles classic film noir in one more respect: it has as shambolic and rambling a narrative as I have ever seen on screen. Seriously, it moves at a pace bordering on the necrotic.

I soon lost patience with the RENAISSANCE but I can see how for those with more of a fancy for dark and brooding animation, it might become a cult movie. Certainly it is worth checking out, if only on DVD.

RENAISSANCE was released in France and Belgium in March 2006 and is currently on release in the UK. It opens in the US on September 22nd.

MUNICH - Stick to Dinosaurs, Spielberg

This review is posted by guest reviewer, Nik ...

Steven Spielberg has proven once and for all that being Jewish is insufficient qualification for making a movie about middle-eastern politics. Apparently, MUNICH - based on the events following the kidnapping and murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics - is supposed to be controversial. On the one hand it supposedly humanises terrorists and undermines security measures by the Israeli state, and on the other it allegedly panders to the International Zionist Conspiracy(TM). In reality - it does neither - but bores the viewer with pseudo-intellectual pap occasionally punctuated by loud explosions and gun-play. The only significant contraversies are that the cinema took £6.50 from me to watch it, and that the pick-and-mix cost 99p per 100 grams. Damn that Cineworld.

Okay, so some particularly naive Americans might be shocked that Israeli foreign policy isn't all fun, games and torture - the same people for whom the revelation in THREE KINGS that US foreign policy was based on oil prices and increased hegemony in the middle east came out of left-field. The Christian and Jewish right won't much like the idea that there is some sort of ideology and genuine feeling of grievance behind the activities of Palestinian terrorists. Similarly, the leadership of Hamas may feel unhappy that the film portrays heinous acts of terrorism against innocent Israeli civilians in a negative light. But for the rest of us - the ones who've had the intellectual capacity and time to think through the balance of national security and morality in the work of our intelligence services - and who know basic facts about international affairs - this film will be dour and patronising.

The content isn't challenging, the facts it reveals arn't shocking - unless you're easily shocked or deeply ignorant. The film neither captures the poignancy of the internal moral struggle within the lead protagonist - nor the thrill and excitement of spying. It both manages to fall between these two stools AND fail horribly at executing either. And to top it off, the score and camerawork is condescending - trying to impose a paint-by-numbers depth for the hollywood popcorn-munching audiences - who may be unable to cope without such strong editorialisation. In many ways, SCHINDLER'S LIST did the same - but frankly it was a film that had to be made - and whose content had to be respected because of its intrinsic gravity. Munich didn't, doesn't, and won't be.

By the end of the film, I had no sympathy for any of the characters in front of me - no interest in their lives or their teen-angst emotional struggles - and hoped with every passing scene for the film to end, to stop wasting more of my precious time. The gun-play, graphic violence and sex that had kept me carnally interested in the film, at least in passing, had left the building - and with it any semblance of hope for future enjoyment. The final scene of the film was suitably awful, and I walked out wishing I'd been watching gay cowboys making out. Or anything else, really.

I can only imagine the most facile and ignorant of people enjoying this flick - so if you fit that description, save up your pennies. Otherwise, even if you have an interest in the middle east, save your money and buy a good book on the subject, after a few hours of reading you'll have learnt more, thought more, and enjoyed more than your unfortunate counterparts who opted for the big screen instead. And Steven, stick with dinosaurs, extra-terrestrials, and ruggedly handsome all-action archeologists - it's what you do well - very well - it's what we enjoy. And there was me thinking you'd learned your lesson with AI...

MUNICH is on general release in the US and the UK, not that you ought to care. I don't know when or if it'll be released in France or Germany or anywhere else - I can only hope for them that they can read English and visit this blog often enough to be warned.

Bina007 notes that instead of watching MUNICH, which she also found politically obvious and cinematically hackneyed, you could go rent Kevin MacDonald's ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER instead. It is a brilliant and Oscar-winning documentary which covers much the same ground as MUNICH. ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER is released on Region 2 DVD today.