LION - BFI LFF 2016 - Day 9

LION is an emotionally intense human interest story that comes complete with lovely cinematography.  However, a straightforward structure, slack pacing and ho-hum soundtrack prevent it from being truly great, as opposed to a well-made tear-jerker.

The film is based on the memoirs of Saroo Brierley. He was born in a small north Indian town in the early 80s, but through a twist of fate was separated from his family and ended up on a train to Calcutta, 1600km away.  Unable to speak Bengali, or even knowing the name of his hometown, the boy becomes one of many homeless children, and only narrowly escapes a predator to end up in an equally brutal state orphanage. But a kindly social worker intervenes and arranges for him to adopted by a white Tasmanian family, where it appears that he lived a very happy childhood.  However, when Saroo goes to university he finally meets people from India, and this triggers a wave of memories and a desire both to find his birth family, but not to hurt his adoptive parents.  And so begins a needle in the haystack search for a faint memory of a train station with a water tank, without even knowing if he'll find his family at the end of it. 

300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE 3D

300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE is a highly enjoyable trashy ancient history action romp with a far better technical and historical pedigree than one might, at first, believe.  Rather than a straightforward sequel, the story of this film envelopes and gives context to the narrower, purer story of the original film. In that movie, we see King Leonidas of Sparta lead his personal bodyguard of 300 men to the hot gates, only to be betrayed by a hunchback to their deaths at the hands of the Persians. As this  movie opens we see Spartan Queen Gorga (Lena Headey) sailing with her men into battle, and recounting the back story of those events.  She takes us back to the Battle of Marathon when the Athenian general Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton - ANIMAL KINGDOM) - killed Darius I, inspiring the anger of his son Xerxes that manifested itself in the current Persian wars.  Gorga tells us of how her husband was killed (the events of the first movie) and the bulk of the action sees the simultaneous sea battles with Themistocles pitted against Xerxes' navy - commanded by his female commander Artemesia (the always brilliantly bonkers Eva Green.)  There's a lot of awesome tactical stuff, some ludicrously gory battles, and a stupidly over the top sex scene between the two opposing commanders. (Because - well - just because).  And then finally we get the Battle of Salamis, where after the death of Leonidas, Sparta finally joins its ships to the Greek alliance.  (If you think that's a spoiler, it's bloody 2500 year old history!)

There's a lot to like here.  The battles and tactics are all mostly accurate and the aerial shots mean that even in the midst of all the OTT video-game style violence you still have a clear idea of what's going on.  The acting isn't bad - certainly not as bad as Gerard Butler's Scots inflected "THIS IS SPARTAAAA!" and the style is exactly the hyper-stylised Zack Snyder style of the original, albeit directed by Noam Munro (SMART PEOPLE).  I really loved the way the movie was written, with a lot of back story handled deftly and the nice enveloping of the original movie. All in all, it just felt like an awesome live action version of Total War.

As to the actual history,  the basic outline of the story is true.  There really was a war that united the Greek city states against the Persian empire, and Themistocles really was the leading Athenian politician who commanded the navy, although that post technically went to a Spartan called Eurybides who doesn't appear in the movie.  The Spartans really didn't believe in democracy but united against a common enemy, although in fact they only supplied 16 ships against the Athenians' 180.  The battle tactics we see are mostly true - particularly the awesome battle where the Greeks lure the Persians into a narrow inlet where the size of their fleet works against them.  It is, sadly, unlikely that Queen Gorgo led the Spartans into battle, but Artemesia really was the leading Persian naval commander, and highly influential on Xerxes. She was a skilled tactician, foresaw that Xerxes should have invaded Greece by land rather than sea, but didn't die in battle. Nor was she a gang-raped slave. Rather she was Queen Regent of a Persian client state.

Which neatly brings us to the issue of alleged misogyny. On that subject it has to be admitted that we only have to wait a few minutes before we get a gratuitous boob shot, but set against that so much of 300 is about the objectification of male bodies - so much so that one might declare this a camp classic.  Admittedly, the decision to make Artemesia a sexual slave in order to motivate her vengeance is questionable, as is the fetishisation of her blood lust.  On the other hand, in the pivotal sex scene with Themistocles, when he attempts to take her from behind she turns the tables on him.  Still, I guess there is a problem with the fact that she ultimately dies (all strong women must be punished) - then again, Queen Gorga leads her troops into battle.  So, overall, 300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE has far more slippery politics than one might expect, and it's also the case that we have a sword-swinging action movie where the two most recognizable stars - both of whom go into battle - are women!

In other words, this may well be the first movie franchise that has gone so far round the circle of misogyny that it's actually come back out as proto-feminist.  But maybe I'm just over thinking it!

300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE went on global release on the weekend of March 7th. It has a running time of 102 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK for strong bloody violence, strong sex and sexual violence.

iPad Round-Up 7 - ORANGES AND SUNSHINE

ORANGES AND SUNSHINE is a turgid earnest historical drama more suited to be a TV afternoon movie than a feature release. The debut feature of TV director Jim (son of Ken) Loach, the movie tells the true story of a British social worker in the 1980s who stumbled upon a scandal, whereupon British kids of unwed mothers were shipped off to workcamps in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, only to be abused and exploited. This powerful material should've made for a powerful film but this film is damp, dull, earnest, attempting to beat the audience into submission.  Emily Watson is becoming typecast in these suffering martyr roles - the only real revelation on the acting front is Hugo Weaving as  a suffering man, so far from his superhero roles, and David Wenham as a macho Aussie bloke coming to terms with his childhood abuse.  I suspect one would be better off reading the book upon which the movie was based. 

ORANGES AND SUNSHINE opened in summer 2011 in the UK, Ireland, Australia, Greece, New Zealand and Lebanon. It went on limited release in the US on October 28th. It is available to rent and own.

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA'HOOLE

I really rather liked LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA'HOOLE. It is a beautifully animated, brilliantly voiced, old-fashioned story in the manner of WATERSHIP DOWN.  Moreover, it is blissfully absent of the sort of post-modern wit that propels the SHREK franchise. What's even more astonishing is that it was directed by Zack Snyder - purveyor of visually lush but morally vacuous, if not morally objectionable, fare like 300 and SUCKER PUNCH. The protagonists were sympathetic and endearing and their adventure story more compelling than any plot description would suggest. 

The story is based on the Guardians of Ga'Hoole books by Kathryn Lansky books, and this film focuses on two young owls, Soren and Kludd, who are kidnapped by some nasty racial purist owls. Luckily Soren is taken under the wing of a fellow inmate and taught how to outwit his captors and to eventually seek out the Jedi like Guardians who can teach him how to use his Gizzard and "save the world". If this sounds very STAR-WARS then it succeeds for the same reasons that Star Wars succeeds - it's a classic Saturday Morning Adventure Serial with good triumphing over evil, framed as a coming-of-age story. 

LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA'HOOLE went on global release in autumn 2010. It is now available to rent and own.

PUBLIC ENEMIES - is that it?

Man, this movie was boring. I mean, eye-rollingly, "should I walk out?", "what should I make for dinner?" boring. And all this, despite the fact that I really like Johnny Depp and Christian Bale as actors, I really like gangster movies, and I respect Michael Mann as a director. Maybe it's the script? Maybe it's the cheap-looking, distractingly hand-held DV shooting-style? Maybe it's the fact that Michael Mann just isn't that interested in who John Dillinger really was? But this biopic of one of America's most notorious bank robbers lacks energy and drive. It just never got me by the proverbial balls and made me care.

What a shame. What better time to make a film about a folk hero who robbed the banks that were foreclosing on honest, hard-working folk at the height of the Great Depression? What better time to show the FBI abusing civil rights in its mad dash to imprison Public Enemy Number One? But Michael Mann isn't really interested in all that.

He's interested in telling the same old Michael Mann story - where real men are defined by their job and real movies are about real men who cannot, for some reason, continue in that job, and enter an existential crisis. So here's John Dillinger as the man who robs banks, never leaves a pal behind bars, and offers his coat to ladies. He isn't closed down by the Feds but, more fundamentally, by the crime syndicates who realise that bank robbery is bad for the real business of gaming rackets. Impeded from his typical modus operandi, Dillinger is forced to take work with the psychopath Babyface Nelson - a much higher stakes game.

Don't get me wrong - DV aside - this isn't a bad film. Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Billy Crudup, Marion Cotillard all give decent performances. Stephen Graham as Babyface Nelson is actually superb. But the resulting film is, like bad schoolboy history, just one damn thing after another. I finished up not really knowing why Dillinger loved Billie or why he felt compelled to do what he did or what was going on in Melvin Purvis head. Despite a classic shoot-out sequence it lacks the momentum for an action movie. And despite the ponderous pace and period detail, it lacks the beauty and complexity of a film like THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD. Which makes the movie ultimately an exercise in clever but ultimately vacuous film-making.

PUBLIC ENEMIES is on release in the USA, Canada, the UK, Greece, Denmark, France, Indonesia, Morocco, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Israel, Slovakia, South Korea, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia and Turkey. It opens on July 23rd in Belgium, Hong Kong, Russia, Singapore, Ukraine, Brazil, Norway, Sweden, Egypt, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Iceland, Germany, Portugal, Finland, Romania, Spain and Italy.

AUSTRALIA - What kind of sick country would kick someone with a giant boot?

AUSTRALIA is a magnificent disaster. A cinematic custard of of such epic proportions it rivals DUNE, WATERWORLD and BATTLEFIELD EARTH.

Australian auteur and king of kitsch, Baz Luhrmann, made two brilliantly inspired, wickedly funny movies - STRICTLY BALLROOM and ROMEO + JULIET. In each flick he took bold chances with genre and text and as luck would have it, everything somehow made sense. I was, however, unimpressed by MOULIN ROUGE! It was as if he'd taken everything that was brilliant in his previous work, injected it with speed and set a match to the celluloid. Everything was bigger, louder, brighter, faster. Watching MOULIN ROUGE! was like being assaulted with a disco-ball. I left the movie numb and disengaged - Luhrmann had crossed the line from loving whimsy and genuine pathos into smart-arse pastiche. Now I admit that I was in the minority in my disappointment with and MOULIN ROUGE! but all those worrying tendencies have expressed themselves even more fully in Luhrmann's disastrous follow-up AUSTRALIA. It's a movie that's so indulgent it comes off as a vanity project pure and simple. It's an orgy - a binge on genre cinema's most fatuous tropes. All this could've been regarded simply as a monumental misjudgment - poor taste at its most extreme. The problem is that AUSTRALIA tackles deadly serious material. Its sins, therefore, rank higher.

Luhrmann had the laudable audacity to try to create an epic history for his country in the manner of GONE WITH THE WIND. He wanted to speak to the Australian settler spirit, the travesty of the treatment of the Aborigines and of the Australian wartime experience. To that end he gives us a movie that combines elements of Westerns, melodramatic romances and war-time epics....Nonetheless, the story is as actually pretty thin given the movie's run-time. Nicole Kidman plays an English aristo who persuades an Australian drover (Hugh Jackman) to drive her cattle to Darwin and outwit an evil cattle manager called Fletcher (David Wenham). (Melodrama, fairy-tale contrast of good and evil, Western). During the long drive, the aristo learns to love the drover, the landscape and the half-Aborigine orphan who helps them with his magical powers. (Superficial attempt to tackle Australian racial politics.) The aristo, drover and boy make a home in Darwin but happiness is seemingly destroyed when the boy is interned by the Aussie authorities and the Japanese bomb Darwin. (Ham-fisted politics and clunky CGI war movie. Shameless manipulation. Ludicrous ending.)

The result is a sickly cocktail of wooden performances, absurd dialogue and furiously heightened visual back-drops topped off with a deeply patronising attitude toward the Aborigines and an insulting fairy-tale ending. AUSTRALIA is shot like a musical without the song and dance numbers; like a fable without the intuitive wisdom; like a romance without heart; like a war-movie without the high stakes and tension. It is without a doubt the worst film I have seen in 2008.

AUSTRALIA is on release in Australia, the USA, South Korea, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands, Egypt, France, Indonesia, Taiwan, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Thailand, the UAE, Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Turkey, the UK, Venezuela and Israel. It opens on January 8th in Argentina, on January 16th in Italy, on January 23rd in Brazil, on January 28th in China; on February 12th in Russia and on February 28th in Japan.

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - PURE

PURE is an oddly sentimental movie about a very nasty subject: a small boy coming to terms with his mother's heroin addiction. We first meeting him cooking up her "medicine", lashing out as nasty neighbours who call her what she is - a junkie. Later, he'll try to nurse her through cold turkey. Scenes where she tells him she wishes he'd never been born are almost unbearable to watch.

Molly Parker turns in a brilliant performance as the addict mother who undoubtedly loves her son. David Wenham is quite scarily convincing in his cameo role as the sinister dealer. But the real star is a young Harry Eden, seen recently in FLASHBACKS OF A FOOL. He's utterly convincing and heart-breaking as the young boy old before his time with worry, eager to do right by his mum.

What stops this movie well short of greatness is its tendency towards mawkishness, as reflected in Nitin Sawhney's score. The other great flaw is Keira Knightley trying her best with a chav London accent but failing miserably to convince as a pregnant working-class junkie.

PURE played Toronto and London 2002 and Berlin 2003 where Gillies Mackinnon and Harry Eden won awards. It was released in the UK in 2003 and in the US in 2005. It is available on DVD.

300 - truly a spectacle

300 is truly a spectacle. It dazzles the viewer with stunning images of finely-hewed, red-caped Spartan warriors; decadent Persian courtiers; a gold-flecked, jewel-bedecked god-king; and enough stylised spear-fights to satisfy the most ardent Total Warrior.

The movie is based on Frank Miller's graphic novel which told the story of the Battle of Thermopylae. Thermopylae is a narrow pass in Greece, and in 480 BC King Leonidas of Sparta defended that pass with a small army of his own Spartans and other Greeks against a vastly larger Persian invading force.

Writer-director Zach Snyder beautifully renders Frank Miller's graphic novel: feeding our imaginations with the sort of old-fashioned glamour, excess and epic sentiment that old-fashioned big-studio Hollywood used to specialise in. The director uses the same techniques as in SIN CITY - mixing live-action with CGI to create highly stylised visuals that approximate the graphic novel. Famous plates are re-created closely - specifically Leonidas pushing the Persian ambassador into the well; the Spartans herding the Persians off a cliff; and the final spear throw that grazes Xerxes face. The casting closely matches the facial features of the characters in the graphic novel too - especially the case of the effete Xerxes and Leonidas himself.

The plot is also fairly close to the novel, with no key scenes ommitted. The key difference is that the role of Queen Gorgo is massively enhanced, perhaps as a sop to Hollywood's need for a strong female character and a love-interest. (They did the same thing with the role of Arwen in LOTR). Thus, the film breaks away from the battle-scenes to Gorgo's struggle to get the Spartan council to send the full army in support of Leonidas.

So much for what 300 is. What 300 is not, is a history lesson. It is not a political tract. Nor should we beat it up for failing to give us an exact rendering of the key battles and fighting styles or for simplifying the clash between Persia and Greece as one of freedom versus tyranny. (Although, in its defence, Dominic West's Spartan politican rightly points out to Lena Headey's Queen Gorgo that not all men are born equal, even in Sparta.)

300 does not pretend to be a serious politico-historical discourse. It is, simply-put, epic, fascinating, sensually-luxurious entertainment. The concubines, giant-mutant beasties, scabrous priests and other exotica pander to our most basic desire for the strange and exciting. I defy anyone not to take pleasure in the finale to Gorgo's council speech or Gerard Butler's Connery-like drawl as he refuses to kneel to Xerxes on account of his "cramp".

Moreover, exotica aside, the battle scenes do give us a sense of the scale of the battle and the key tactical necessity of forcing the Persians to abandon an open assault from the beach and attempt to pass through the narrow gorge at Thermopylae. I doubt whether Frank Miller's novel or this film would have been successful as they are without this key central fact: dress it up how you will, the true story of a small band of men defending their home against a mammoth invading army and inflicting disproportionately large injuries upon it is, in a word, quite literally: awesome.

300 is on release in the Philippines, Greece, Malaysia, Singapore, Canada, the US, South Korea, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Turkey, the UK, Belgium, France, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Netherlands and Russia. It opens in Bulgaria, Estonia, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Romania and Spain tomorrow. It opens in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Slovakia, Slovenia on the 29th and in Brazil, Denmark, Latvia and Venezuala on the 30th. 300 opens in Sweden on April 4th and in Australia, Germany, Israel and Portugal on April 5th. It opens in Austria and Finland on April 6th and in Japan on June 9th.

THE PROPOSITION - awesome Australian western

THE PROPOSITION is set in the Australian outback, circa 1880. A hard-as-nails British officer is attempting to bring law to the wild frontier. To do so, he must stamp out an almost mythical outlaw and murderer, named Arthur Burns. Burns has two younger brothers, and the rozzers want the middle brother, Charlie, to kill Arthur. If he doesn't, the youngest brother gets strung up on Christmas Day.

The actors are all brilliantly cast and give wonderful performances. Ray Winstone is characteristically teetering on the brink of psychosis in his portrayal of the British army officer who cooks up the scheme. Arthur Burns is played by one of my favourite actors - Danny Huston - who dazzled me in Ivans XTC and has not been given the opportunity to shine again until this flick. He conjures up a truly three-dimenstional character, combining wisdom, charisma, filial love and murderous charm. Guy Pierce, of Memento fame, plays Charlie, and Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves, Hillary and Jackie) plays Winstone's missus.

In addition, the flick is written by the multi-talented Nick Cave and has all the grizzly, bizarre-O authenticity that one might expect from his music. The movie is also photographed by the superb DP Benoit Delhomme, who also shot The Merchant of Venice and assisted on Manon des Sources and Jean de Florette. What more can I say but that, whether or not you normally go in for Westerns, you should check this film out.

THE PROPOSITION was first shown at Cannes 2005 and was part of the London Film Fest. It opened in Australia in October 2005 and opens in the UK on the 10th March 2006 and in the US on the 5th May.