STILL ALICE

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STILL ALICE starts Julianne Moore in as Oscar-winning turn as Alice Howland - a successful College professor diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's Disease.  The first half hour of the film sees Alice suspect that something serious is behind her sudden memory loss and come to a diagnosis. The second half hour sees the family come to terms with her rapidly deteriorating condition - their bickering, frustration, love but lack of understanding.  The final third of the film focuses on Alice's relationship with her youngest daughter, played by Kristen Stewart - a relationship that was fraught when Alice was well, but finds a new sympathy in her illness.  Alice herself is alienated from herself and much of the rest of her family. This is the true cruelty of Alzheimer's Disease and in that sense the title of the film is ironic. When you take away a woman's intellect, her memory, her job, her sense of self, what is left?

Late review - London Film Fest 2010 Day 4 - CARLOS

CARLOS is a sprawling, intense five hour cine-spectacular biography of the cack-handed, vainglorious terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez aka Carlos aka Carlos The Jackal. Written and directed by Olivier Assayas and originally broadcast as a three part mini-series on French TV, the film was shown in its original length, back to back at this year's London film fest.It is also being released in some countries as a three hour edited down movie. It features a charismatic central performance from Edgar Ramirez who, as Carlos, isn't just IN every frame, but dominates the film.

As the opens we see Carlos as a good-looking, womanising, politically motivated young man living in Paris, hiding weapons in the bedrooms of compliant girls. He moves into the big leagues when he persuades a Lebanese terrorist organisation (the PFLP) to bypass his immediate superior and make him their point-man. Flush with pride and power, he organises a raid on OPEC headquarters in Vienna. The first part of the film ends with the terrorists and their hostages on a plane desperately trying to find an Arab country that will give them permission to land. Carlos thought they would be feted as heroes, but turns out no-one wants to alienate the international community. He is embarrassed and angry, but shows his true colours - when the ultimate sacrifice is called for - he wants life, fame, girls, money - rather than a martyr's death. And so the pattern is set. He isn't a revolutionary. He's a bank robber - self-interested, petty, vain, eager for cash and respect. He hides out in Hungary, festering, brooding, drinking, fucking. He hides out in Sudan. He causes a few more ructions but never really pulls anything off. Basically, he's just a massive pain in the ass. And then, when the Berlin Wall came down, he was a flabby irrelevance, of interest only to Interpol and the vengeful French prison system.

The ironic truth of Carlos' life is established: as a terrorist he's both a failure and a success. In pure terms, he causes little damage - his missions are failures. But in terms of causing terror with his notoriety - he is a roaring success. And this is irony is perfectly portrayed by Edgar Ramirez - in one of the stand out performances of the year - he is everything Carlos is - charismatic, pitiable - good-looking, a physical mess - radical, bourgeois. It's a multi-faceted performance, enabled by the long run-time of the movie - a long run-time, by the way, that simply skips by. The movie is also beautifully directed by Assayas, and while it was financed by TV it really does look tremendous on the big screen. One can only assume that cinematographer Denis Lenoir (PARIS JE T'AIME, RIGHTEOUS KILL) shot the action sequences and that Yorick le Sau shot (I AM LOVE, JULIA) the beautiful vistas of Lebanon. At any rate, however, they sliced up the credits, the film looks beautiful.

There is a rule that states that if a movie is shown on TV anywhere before it's released at the cinema, it can't be eligible for the Oscars. This is a desperate shame because CARLOS would certainly be in the mix for Best Director and Best Actor. It's definitely worth checking out, and ideally in the long form.

CARLOS was shown on French TV in May 2010 and played Vancouver, Cannes and London 2010. It will be released in the UK as two feature films. It is also airing on the Sundance channel as a 3 part mini-series.

London Film Fest 2010 Day 13 - THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

Following her previous film, BLUEBEARD, Catherine Breillat revisits the fairy-tale world with her latest film, THE SLEEPING BEAUTY. She twists strands of various fairy-tales into a whimsical, go-where-it-may story of a little girl fearlessly discovering love, becoming a teenager, and exploring her sexuality.

We start in an eighteenth century middle-European castle, with Princess Anastasia cursed in the cradle by a cackling witch to prick her finger and die. So far, so conventional. But the three good witches give her a new escape from her fate - Anastasia will fall asleep for a hundred years but she will do so at age 6 and awaken at 16, and while asleep she will dream marvellous adventures, because "nothing happens when you're a child". The movie thus sets up childhood as a period of latency and boredom until puberty awakens us to our sexuality. The first act of the film introduces us to Anastasia as six-year old fearsome child, who dreams of being a knight, hates frou-frou ballerina dresses, and brooks no opposition. Carla Besainou is absolutely charming in this role. As Anastasia falls asleep we move into Act Two. She journeys through a peasant world that takes on aspects of the story of the Ice Queen and of Alice in Wonderland and falls in love with a little boy called Peter. Once again, it is Carla Besainou's personality that captivates. In Act Three, Anastasia wakes up as a sixteen-year old girl, wearing a Victorian frock, but in present day France. She is courted by a teenage boy and emerges as a liberated young French girl with short hair and a short dress.

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY isn't as good as it should be. Sure, Catherine Breillat has imagination, and a willingness to put female emotion at the centre of the film, but where's the visual wonder of PAN'S LABRYNTH or the fluidity and surreality of Sally Potter's ORLANDO? And, most of all, where is the willingness to truly explore the danger and subversion at the heart of all fairy tales that we find in Neil Jordan's THE COMPANY OF WOLVES. Catherine Breillat's film simply isn't up to their high level in terms of the intellectual content or the visual style. It's fun as far as it goes, but essentially just a bit of low-budget whimsical fluff. There is, after all, a fine line between go-where-you-will whimsy and plain lack of discipline.

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY played Venice and Toronto 2010. It has no commercial release date.

88 MINUTES - less straight to DVD than straight to Dustbin

88 MINUTES is a "troubled movie", originally scheduled for release in 2005 it was finally pushed out on the crest of the RIGHTEOUS KILL publicity. It shares the same director, genre and star - Al Pacino. It's also shares the same label, "piss-poor". Once again, we have Al Pacino as a schmoove detective (well, forensic psychologist) running around town trying to find a copycat serial killer. The high concept is that the original serial killer, now on death row, is running the copycat, and has threatened that Pacino only has 88 minutes to live.

You can see how this might've looked all sexy and Se7en on paper, but on screen, this is dull as ditchwater. Pacino runs around town, barking orders to his secretary and a friendly copper on his cellphone. Meanwhile, all the audience has to hold its interest is the increasing volume, and ever-shifting colour, of Pacino's perruque.

In fairness, 88 MINUTES is not as unthrilling as RIGHTEOUS KILL - a movie that revealed whodunnit in the first five minutes. I was guessing who the copycat was till the final reel. The problem is that the reason I was guessing is because the script offered no coherent solution. Rather, we had a series of ludicrously shady suspects - all over-acting hideously - and you could've picked any one of them to finish the picture.

Will Alicia Witt ever work again?
Will Pacino fire his agent and/or perruque-maker?
Here's hoping bad thrillers aren't like buses, and we don't get a third on Friday.

88 MINUTES was released in 2007 in Israel, Romania, France and Greece. It was released earlier this year in Japan, the Philippines, Canada, the US, Taiwan, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, South Korea, Turkey, Iceland, Colombia, Venezuela and Kuwait. It is currently on release in the UK and is available on Region 1 DVD.

RIGHTEOUS KILL - a thriller so devoid of thrills it is actually impossible to spoil the plot

RIGHTEOUS KILL is a lazy, lethargic, deeply dull "thriller" that will only succeed at the Box Office because of the residual respect audiences have for the early work of Robert de Niro and Al Pacino. We are so infatuated with movies like SCARFACE and THE GODFATHER that we refuse to admit the obvious: Pacino and De Niro are working to pay the bills: applying no quality control to the scripts that they accept; and falling into pastiche of their tough-guy foul-mouthed iconic performances.

As for RIGHTEOUS KILL, this is a movie that declares its hand in the first five minutes. Pacino and De Niro are cops investigating a serial killer. De Niro is shown in flashback, confessing to the murders. He's a vigilante that goes after rapists and paedophiles who walked. These are "righteous kills".

Now, the audience is intelligent. We know we're watching a thriller. If a killer is presented to us inside the first ten minutes, we know he's probably innocent. And if Robert De Niro's character is innocent, and there's another heavyweight actor in the cast, it's going to be him. So after fifteen minutes, you know that De Niro's superficially angry cop is innocent; Al Pacino's superficially in-control cop is a vigilante; Carla Gugino as the CSI who likes rough sex is a red herring; and Fifty Cent is a tool.

Game over. Thank you for playing. Please slip into retirement and stop flushing your reputations down the toilet.

RIGHTEOUS KILL is on release in the UK, US, the Philippines, Greece, India, Romania, Israel, Russia, Taiwan, Estonia, Italy, Sweden and Turkey. It opens this weekend in Finland and Spain and next weekend in France, Denmark and Iceland. It opens later in October in Portugal, Belgium and Argentina. It opens on January 8th in the Netherlands.