A COMPLETE UNKNOWN**

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is a deeply frustrating biopic of Bob Dylan.  Rather than challenging his misogynistic bullshit, the film replicates it.  Director James Mangold (WALK THE LINE) is not interested in interrogating the complexity of Saint Bob. Rather, everything must be packaged neatly in a convenient narrative arc.

That arc is massaged to within an inch of its life. Young Bob - choirboy turned gravelly voiced folk-singer - makes a pilgrimage to New York to meet his chronically ill hero Woody Guthrie.  Scoot McNairy (IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS) stuns in an entirely wordless performance as Guthrie, struck mute with Hungtington's Disease, but still keen to be surrounded by music. Such is Bob's evident talent that he is taken in by a kindly, paternal Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) and his wife Toshi, a couple whose life was devoted to preserving the American folk music tradition.

Bob finds fame and massive music sales with his protest songs against a backdrop of the civil rights movement.  But this is the era of the Beatles and The Stones and The Kinks and he feels trapped in amber by the historicity of the folk movement.  He hires a blues rock band and records what will be his first electric rock album, Highway 61 Revisited.  

The narrative arc poses a big showdown at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Will Bob play nice and play folk? Or will he disappoint everyone around him and play electric rock?  We all know the answer. And we all know that what transpired afterwards didn't happen at Newport but in the Manchester Free Trade Hall a year later. But that doesn't fit Mangold's neat and claustrophobically American narrative. Nowhere do we see Bob travel to London and the influence the Swinging Sixties Carnaby Street vibe had on him. He just goes from one scene to the next transformed from shabby folk clothes to extra tight Carnaby Street suits and winkle pickers.  

The problem with the way this film is constructed is that most everyone is a single-dimension character, giving the excellent cast very little to do. Pretty much everyone just looks at Bob with an air of disappointment.  Elle Fanning (The Great) plays Sylvie Russo - a thinly veiled version of Bob's real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo - and just looks at Bob disappointed and heartbroken.  Monica Barbaro plays folk icon Joan Baez and just looks at Bob disappointed and contemptuous. Peter Seege looks disappointed and paternally heartbroken.  You get the picture.

And what of Bob himself? Timothee Chalamet (DUNE) plays Bob with pads in his cheeks to give him a boyish round-face, and has admirably mastered his growly deliberately ugly style of singing and playing. It's a great impersonation, but for my money, outclassed by Scoot McNairy in the acting department.  You get the ferocity of Bob, his uncompromising attitude toward music.  But the film skips so lightly over his way of mooching off women, or his initial passive-aggressive barb that Joan Baez sings too well.... Imagine a film with this cast that really wanted to get into the verbal attack on Joan in Like A Rolling Stone, or his womanising, or his fundamentally dishonest appropriation of a persona.  

But no, this is a film for fans that wants us to see (rightly) just how bloody brilliant his early music was. Where the film shines is in giving is so much music so brilliantly rendered. But by including so much music it squeezes out the time that could have been spent on personal relationships.  I feel like maybe this was a deliberate choice and a cowardly one too.

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is rated R and has a running time of 141 minutes.  It was released in the USA on December 14th and opens in the UK on January 17th 2025.

MARY SHELLEY

In 1816 a young woman called Mary Shelley created the story of Frankenstein - the "monster" created by assembling corpses and revivifying them with electricity.  It's a story of an innocent, faithful creature misused by the real monster, Doctor Frankstein. The monster is violent and vengeful but also displays more humanity than his creator.  The woman who created this story was not just sensitive and romantic with a capital R, but deeply intelligent, well-read in the classics, fascinated by science - an active participant in the political and philosophical debates of the day. Her reputation as a radical philosopher may not be in the same league as that of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, but her fictional creation has achieved more fame, and argued more powerfully for the radical cause. And yet history has diminished her - describing her more often as the scandalous girl seduced by Percy Bysshe Shelley, keeper of his artistic legacy, and almost by chance creator of a gothic masterpiece. Only very recently has she been subject to serious intellectual enquiry. And in this film I had hoped to see a similarly respectful portrayal of this radical woman.

The film is okay as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far or deep enough. It is very good at portraying Mary as a naive silly little girl who falls for a charming but vain and capricious seducer.  But it makes a fateful and disrespectful error in portraying her as being extremely passive. She watches and observes as men show her things - articles of galvanism or gothic paintings - which will work their way into her famous book.  But nowhere does it show Mary to be an active agent in her intellectual life.  There's nowhere that we SEE Mary as interested in science. We're just told by a bunch of male characters that she is.  The result is a heroine that is admirably free of cant, but one that is frustratingly passive. And it becomes very difficult to understand why she keeps returning to her emotionally abusive husband because he too is a pretty face. If there's no credible intellectual spark between the too, what's there to engage with?

That said the film is occasionally worth watching for the odd engaging performance - Tom Sturridge gets Byron exactly right.  But dialogue that is occasionally anachronistic, too conscious of the #timesup movement, and lead characters who are too thinly drawn, undermine the entire project. 

MARY SHELLEY has a running time of 120 minutes.  The film is available to rent and own.

THE BEGUILED

Sofia Coppola's remake of the 1971 Don Siegel film, THE BEGUILED, is shorn of much of its historicity and hysteria, and teeters dangerously close to absurdity.  That is survives to become an enjoyable viewing experience is down to the evocative, romantic cinematography of Philippe le Sourd, a delicate score from Phoenix, and its perfect casting.

The story is based on a pulpy Southern gothic novel by Thomas Cullinan, and is set in Civil War Virginia.  A brutally injured Union soldier called McBurney (Colin Farrell) has deserted the battlefield and is rescued by a young schoolgirl at a pretentious plantation seminary run by two teachers and five girls who have no safe homes to go too.  McBurney may be crippled, but his charm is in tact, and he lays it on thick to ensure that the ladies don't turn him in to the Southern army or force him to find his own regiment. And the ladies are no less collusive in the decision to keep him on, justifying their own decisions in the echo chamber that is the claustrophobic schoolroom.  Each of them is beguiled - the younger girls claim special friendships - the teenager Miss Alicia (Elle Fanning) flirts with him outrageously - the younger teacher Miss Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) harbours dreams of marriage but secretly wants sexual fulfilment - and the headmistress, Miss Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman), seems to delight in the sheer companionship of an adult, but also comes close to a kiss. 

TRUMBO - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day 3

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

It isn't too hard to imagine a time when an over-weaning government declared an un-ending war against an abstract noun and used that war to invade its citizen's privacy and over-ride their constitutional protections.  But I suppose there is some savage comfort in knowing that there are no new challenges that haven't already been overcome.  And as the protagonist of this new movie tells us, there are no heroes or villains, just ordinary people victimised by the terrible choices they should never have been asked to make.

So let us turn to the particular. It's the late 1940s and America is in a Cold War with the Soviet Union.  It's government has decided to investigate communist party members at home, despite the fact that it is not illegal to be a member of the Communist party.  In Hollywood, a group of right wing fearful and powerful individuals - including Ronald Reagan and the influential gossip columnist Hedda Hopper - make it their business to expose the Communists and blackmail any studio who hires them with picket lines and protests.  They might act from a misplaced sense of patriotism but the tactics are dirty, and hint at the latent anti-semitism in the Hollywood system at the time. 

THE BOXTROLLS

THE BOXTROLLS are a bit like Wombles. They sift through our junk and take it to an underground world where they polish it up and make it useful. They're odd but mostly harmless.  And yet in the epilogue to this beautifully stop-motion animated and witty* film, the evil Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley) wants all the box trolls killed!  So follows a kind of murky animated noir with trolls being chased through Dickensian streets, moodily lit, and then escaping into gorgeously warm toned underground steam-punk worlds of loveliness - kind of like Fraggle Rock!  It's just a wonderful time being in their world. Into this adversarial status quo comes our hero, a young kid called Eggs (Isaac Hempstead Wright) who has been raised by a boxtroll called Fish, just like Mowgli in Jungle Book. So when Fish is snatched by the evil Snatcher, Eggs stumbles into the above-ground world and meets the lovely Winnie (Elle Fanning), who happens to be the daughter of the Mayor who's in league with the Snatcher!

This movie is everything a children's movie should be! It creates a unique and visually stunning world populated with whimsical and wonderful characters that warm our hearts.  There is genuine peril and tension but a happy ending and a clear message about not trusting everything you're told and the danger of prejudice. The voice acting is a delight and there's more than enough verbal wit to keep the parents happy.  There is simply nothing not to like here. In fact, it's one of my favourite recent animated films, along PIRATES! IN AN ADVENTURE WITH SCIENTISTS!

THE BOXTROLLS has a running time of 96 minutes and is rated PG. *"Do you think these box trolls really understand the duality of good and evil?"  The movie is on global release.

MALEFICENT 3D

I fell in love with MALEFICENT despite its obvious weaknesses. Maybe it's because I'm one of those kids who was terrified by the Disney villain but also kind of wanted to be her! She was wicked and sarcastic and marvelous in the way that made Alan Rickman a scene stealer in the Kevin Costner ROBIN HOOD - that supercilious British aristocratic charm that makes Americans fawn over Dame Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey. That, and I'm a sucker for a gothic fairy tale - and a subversive Angela Carter investigation of the sexual motives at their heart.

So in this movie, per Linda Woolverton's (BEAUTY AND THE BEAST) script, Maleficent was once a wonderfully romantic innocent child who happened to fall in love with an ambitious man who used her cruelly, physically and violently to gain the throne. Mutilated and bent on revenge she curses the new King Stefan's daughter Aurora and he descends into paranoia, sending his daughter off to a cottage in a forest guarded by three good fairies. But in another twist, they are self-absorbed and incompetent, and it's only Maleficent's at first-reluctant, and then eager, care that keeps the girl safe. In a wonderful irony, the girl herself is not insensible of this care, calling Maleficent her "fairy godmother", and as all of us who have seen FROZEN know, true love's kiss can be recast - this time as a maternal rather than sibling bond.

Am I spoiling the ending? No, I think it's telegraphed widely beforehand.  As soon as we see the perfectly cast, almost fey Elle Fanning as Aurora gushing over her fairy godmother, the brilliantly comedically uncomfortable Maleficent, we know where the story is heading.  And perhaps this is the place to point out how marvelous Angelina Jolie in the role. Of course, her looks are perfect for Maleficent, and enhanced further by super-sharp prosthetic cheekbones.  But it's her rarely scene comedic acting that seals the deal  - the bemusement and discomfort when the cute baby Aurora (played her real-life daughter) asks to be picked up, or the patronising amusement as she prevents the baby from wandering off a cliff.  The supporting cast is similarly well appointed. I loved Sam Riley as Maleficent's soft-hearted "evil henchman" Diaval - and I'm sort there's fanfic being written about the two of them as we speak.  But how lovely to see Juno Temple as one of the three good fairies too.

So kudos to all involved - for Linda Woolverton's well-thought out script, to Peter Stromberg for his direction which is 9/10th amazing production design, to the charismatic Jolie and the believable relationship with Fanning's Aurora. If there's any false note it's perhaps Sharlto Copley's almost method-insane Scottish King Stefan, curiously grim and out of step with the almost self-consciously arch delivery of Angelina Jolie. He seemed to be in quite another film.

MALEFICENT has a running time of 97 minutes and is rated PG. MALEFICENT went on global release on May 28th. It will open in Japan on July 5th and in Bangladesh on August 6th.

The Best of 2012 - ARTHOUSE MOVIES

So here's to the wilfully obscure, fragile, indulgent movies that fought the accountants and got made in the teeth of every sound investment principle. Away from the mainstream formulaic releases, the reason we watch hundreds of films a year is to uncover gems such as these.  In retrospect, I can discern a theme, which is of young naive girls left to fend for themselves when their parents abuse their responsibility toward them.

Matteo Garrone's audacious REALITY

First up, Matteo Garrone astonished me with his visual audacity and provocative take on reality TV. His REALITY was one of those films that leaves you reeling - at once surreal and profoundly familiar. He focuses on a small-town guy desperate to appear on the Italian version to the point where he becomes delusional.  There's a rich seam of black humour, a joy in the grotesque, and a deep truth about how in the world of Facebook and Youtube our lives only have meaning if documented. 

Another Italian director, Daniele Cipri, elaborated on the themes of moral corruption and easy winnings with his similarly ambitious, audacious, darkly comic but ultimately terrifying film, IT WAS THE SON.  The movie stars Toni Servilio as the father of a family in a decrepit mafia-riddled town, squabbling over a windfall to the point of insanity. It shows humanity as grotesque and greedy but never with scorn. 

From Italy to Denmark for Thomas Vinterberg's fictionalised account of an innocent schoolteacher accused of paedophilia, THE HUNT. Mads Mikkelsen visibly shrinks into his role as the quiet, downtrodden teacher, and the movie is all too believable.  It serves as a modern fable about the danger of quick judgements and mob hysteria. 

Mexican director Michel Franco's brutal film about schoolyard bullying, AFTER LUCIA, was perhaps the most brutal watch of the year.  It meticulously shows how an escalation of bullying can lead to devastating result, and hinges on a superb performance from teenager Tessa Ia. Every parent of a teenage daughter needs to watch this flick with their kid.

From Mexico to Chile, where Pablo Larrain's superbly researched NO! tells the story of Chile's referendum to end dictatorship from the point of view of the ad exec hired by the pro-democracy campaign.  Gael Garcia Bernal is compelling as the cynical exec crafting Coke-like ads to woo the youth slowly discovering his political conscience.  I had no clue about this episode before the film, but was utterly riveted and can still remember the ad jingles. 

Next up, two films about teenage girls of no mean courage forced to fend for themselves in extraordinary circumstances, symbolic of their times. Aussie director Cate Shortland recreates Germany at the end of World War Two in this German-language drama about a young girl, LORE, whose Nazi parents are apprehended.  She must take her small siblings across the war-torn, lawless countries, as well as grappling with the enormity of the fact that her parents were on the losing side, and all that they told her may not have been true.  It's a deeply affecting, beautifully made picture. 

The second film is Sally Potter's loosely autobiographical GINGER & ROSA, set in highly politicised 1960s London. Elle Fanning has a perfect British accent as sensitive, intelligent, naive young Ginger whose best friend Rosa sleeps with her father causing an emotional crisis. It's a delicate, fragile movie that drips with authenticity and melancholy. 

As brutal as AFTER LUCIA, Scott Graham's tense, austere drama SHELL was astounding. The British drama featured Chloe Pirrie as a teenager in remote rural Scotland living with her widower father: a relationship in such isolation that it become necessarily unhealthy. 

From Europe to the Middle East for Israeli dirctor Rama Burshtein's visually ravishing, intense, claustrophobic emotional drama, FILL THE VOID. The movie stars Hadas Yaron as Shira, a naive young girl in the Orthodox Israeli community.  She is pressured by her family into marrying her deceased sister's widower, and is repulsed, shocked and entranced by the emotions she feels for him and the impact she has on him.  This was perhaps the movie that prompted the most visceral reaction in me all year.  

Back to the USA, and perhaps my favourite film of the year: the poignant, melancholy, deeply affecting buddy movie, ROBOT & FRANK.  Jake Schreier's drama is set in the near future, and stars Frank Langella as a retired burgler suffering from Alzheimer's, called, Frank, who forms an unlikely attachment to his medical carer robot. This movie poses so many profound questions about the nature of memory, and the duties of family, and what constitutes a "real" relationship, but does so with an admirably light touch.  I'm not ashamed to say it got a little dusty in the theatre. 

Finally, two honourable mentions: movies with art-house sensibilities but mainstream releases: Ang Lee's LIFE OF PI and Wes Anderson's MOONRISE KINGDOM.  Both movies with particular and beautiful visual palettes that tell seemingly fairytale stories of deep import.  Both among the best films of the year. 

THE HUNT was released in the UK in November 2012 but does not have a US release date yet. REALITY will be released in the UK on March 22nd 2013 but has no US release date.  LORE will be released in the UK on February 22nd but does not yet have a US release date. SHELL will be released in the UK on March 15th but does not yet have a US release date. NO! will be released in the UK on February 8th and in the USA on February 15th. ROBOT & FRANK was released in the USA last year and will be released in the UK on March 8th. IT WAS THE SON, FILL THE VOID and AFTER LUCIA do not yet have a US or UK release date. 

London Film Fest 2012 Day 4 - GINGER & ROSA

2009 was a great year for British literature, with Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and A.S.Byatt's The Children's Book duking it out for the Booker. The latter book was deeply concerned with how the sexual liberation of the Edwardian bohemians impacted their children. One of the key themes of the novel is to contrast the earnest liberal politics of the Bohemians with the lack of regard for their actual children. They want to make the world a better place, regardless of whether their children are fed and cared for, or hurt by their affairs. Byatt makes the point that artists and intellectuals can be both admirable for their work but a nightmare to live with. Strict principles can often be a convenient fig leaf for selfishness.

Sally Potter's new film, GINGER & ROSA makes much the same point, drawing on a much smaller canvas, but with greater intensity. It's about how a father's radical conception of personal freedom damages his doting teenage daughter. Roland sees Ginger's tears but cannot stop the actions that cause the pain, equating personal sexual freedom, and setting aside bourgeois morality, with his opposition to armed conflict. It's a pompous but not indefensible position, but the the same could be said for so much that happens around the girl. Her gay godfathers genuinely care for her, but their tales of radicalism fuel her wallowing deaths possibility of a nuclear holocaust. Similarly, their friend Bella praises Ginger's activism but denies whipping her up. It's no wonder the poor girl is sad and confused, desperately trying to please and not complain.

Alice Englert and Elle Fanning,
Rosa & Ginger respectively.

And what of Ginger's best friend Rosa? Although the focus of the film is not on her, she's an equally tragic figure. Where Ginger suffers from a surfeit of concerned but misguided adults, Rosa has a distracted mother and an absentee father. No wonder she latches onto Roland as an impressive father figure - a composite man to take care of her and shepherd her into adulthood.

GINGER & ROSA seems to me to be a perfect film - tightly scripted, beautifully acted and photographed, evoking in minute detail the spirit and design of early 60s London, but also hinting at wider themes of revolt and parenting. I love that in place of the Swinging Sixties cliché we get a drab, grimy post-war world and an uneasy conflict between radicalism and 50s suburbia. Particular praise has to go to Elle Fanning (Ginger) who carries so much of the emotional burden of the film, but also Christine Hendricks in a smaller but equally intense role as her mother. Alessandro Nivola as Roland, her father, brings just the right balance of sleaze and headstrong idealism. But ultimately, the triumph of this picture is Sally Potter's, in bringing a new perspective to 60s London, and doing so with such formal control and intensity. If there is any justice, this film, and particularly Fanning and Hendricks' performances, will be recognised come awards season.

GINGER & ROSA played Toronto and London 2012. It opens in the UK on October 19th. The running time is 89 minutes.

Ankle frack round up 3 - WE BOUGHT A ZOO

WE BOUGHT A ZOO is Cameron Crowe's first film since the mawkish, embarrassing ELIZABETHTOWN, and I'm afraid that it's another flabby sentimental film in which the central characters do not hold our interest. Based on a script by Aline Brosh McKenna (27 WEDDINGS) the movie sees a recently widowed journalist pour his family's money into a neglected zoo. Everything is utterly predictable.  There's an angry exchange that provides catharsis for the father and his teenage son.  There's flirtation with bankruptcy before a triumphant reopening of the zoo. There's a mean government inspector, a cute vet love-interest for the dad, a cute vet's niece love-interest for the son, and an attempt to put some bite into the mix with a sarcastic older brother.  The material is hokey as hell, but I couldn't help wonder if different casting might have helped - and direction toward broader humour. Perhaps Ben Stiller and Amy Adams  as the father and vet rather than Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansen? 

I despair that Crowe will ever again direct anything with the emotional depth, narrative sophistication, dark undertones, and genuine heart (as opposed to manufactured schmaltz) of ALMOST FAMOUS.

WE BOUGHT A ZOO was released in winter 2011/2012 and is now available to rent and own.

SUPER 8

SUPER 8 is a supremely self-indulgent movie, and whether or not you enjoy it depends on how far you share the nostalgia of the film-makers. Writer-directer J. J. Abrams and cinematographer Larry Fong grew up in the 1970s, making amateur genre movies on Super-8mm cameras, and obsessing over the movies of Steven Spielberg, whose movies were themselves self-indulgent. After all, take away that sense of visual wonder - the spaceship in E.T.; the pirate ship in THE GOONIES; the effects work in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS - and every Spielberg film is basically the same. They are movies that document the struggle of kids growing up in working-class middle-America in an era when mum and dad are divorced, both parents are at work, and the kids are pretty much left to their own devices. The world of Spielberg is full of peril, but the plucky kids always pull through thanks to friendship and smarts. And when they do, well, their previously uncomprehending, distant parents show up with a big hug and a few tears. These are movies of alienated children creating a sense of family where there was none: through their friends - and finally by forcing their parents to notice them. The aliens, the sharks, the pirate ships - these are basically just super-dramatic MacGuffins.

Of course, every genre film has its subtext. Zombie movies from the 60s and 70s are really depicting society's fears of Soviet infiltrators, or the rise of consumerism. So it shouldn't be surprising to find that E.T. is really about divorce. But what I do resent is how Spielberg allows what should be sub-text to dominate his movies. I don't mind it getting a little dusty in the cinema at the end of a movie but I do resent the infantilisation of the audience that characterises his work and the emotional manipulation that swamps the final act in every Spielberg movie - and absolutely ruins A.I. This is, after all, the director who felt it necessary to pick out a little girl being swept into the Warsaw Ghetto in a red coat - as if the tragedy of the Holocaust were not enough. The audience had to be directed to the tragedy. The result is that SCHINDLER'S LIST - in some ways an admirable film - is irredeemably kitsch.

All this may seem a little off the point, but once you understand that SUPER 8 is a love-letter to Spielberg - not a pastiche, but often containing elements of pastiche - it makes more sense. J.J.Abrams and Larry Fong want to take us back to their childhood - to create that same sense of wonder at the magic of celluloid - to a time before the meaningless CGI and fatuous camera angles of Michael Bay. The nostalgia is even wider. The opening shot shows us a sign in an "employee-owned" steel mill - and the film-makers want us to appreciate that this was an era where America made things; where greed wasn't good; where gas was cheap; towns were communities; where kids still called adults Mr. and Mrs; and the most trouble you could get into was to smoke a little pot. In essence, J.J.Abrams and Larry Fong are taking us back to an era before irony and slick production values. Maybe that's why Abrams directorial style (insofar as he has one outside of making Spielberg flicks) is creating lens flares. Lens flares are typically seen as a mistake - as amateur - as something to be avoided. But according to an interview in American Cinematographer magazine, for Abrams "Flares can be purposeful and addictive, and at the right time they remind me, in a good way, that I'm watching a movie. It doesn't take me out of it. I think it draws me in deeper." In other words, Abrams is in love with cinema, and he wants to be reminded that he's watching a movie every once in a while. He is in love with his childhood and he wants us to be too.

The movie takes place in the 1970s in Spielbergian mid-town working-class America. A bunch of school-kids are making a Super-8 zombie movie, sneaking out to film late at night. They witness their school science teacher deliberately derail a military train - an event that triggers their town being taken over by sinister military types looking for the train's cargo - cargo that is messing with the town's electricity, scaring its animals, wreaking havoc with its machinery and abducting its people...With so much real-life Area-51 type activity, the kids at first treat it all as a great opportunity to film some real-life special effects, but when their friend Alice goes missing, the adventure really begins.....

When the film works best, it's showing us the wonder of kids obsessing over celluloid. You get a real sense of camaraderie and fun from the young ensemble cast, and I particularly loved the soft satire of directorial obsession that is Riley Griffiths' Charles asking the photo-developer for a rush job (three days!) and screaming "production values". I also loved the nascent love story between young Joe (Joel Courtney) and Alice (Elle Fanning). The gory special effects are fun - Larry Fong obviously had a lot of fun re-creating the amateur look of the kids' Super 8 film (shown over the credits) - and Ryan Lee as the pyromaniac Cary pretty much steals every scene he's in. J.J.Abrams does a great job in keeping the monster off screen for as long as possible, building up tension, and Larry Fong brilliantly recreates the look and feel of both CLOSE ENCOUNTERS.

But the film is let down by its need to recreate the emotional schmaltz of a Spielberg film. I understand why Joe's bereaved father, deputy Jackson (Kyle Chandler) is distant from his son. But poor Ron Eldard didn't have any time or room to establish why Louis Dainard was such a drunk, why he was so mean to his daughter, Alice, or why he improbably became so caring by the end of the film. Worst of all, I felt it was rather too convenient that anyone who touches the monster creates a "psychic connection". That convenient little plot device allows for a last-act redemption and touchy-feely blast off that is utterly emotionally unearned. The overall verdict is the same as for any Spielberg flick - great camaraderie among the kids, and amazing visual effects - but all ruined by improbable reconciliation and schmaltz at the end.

SUPER 8 was released in June in Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the USA, Ukraine, Canada, Taiwan, Vietnam, Belarus, Greece, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Russia, South Korea, Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Qatar, Sweden, Turkey, Armenia and Japan. It was released n July in Israel, Belgium, Denmark, Portugal, Finland and Norway. It was released this week in France, Switzerland, Germany, Ireland, Mexico and the UK. It goes on release next week in the Netherlands, Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay. It will be released in Spain on August 19th and in Italy on September 9th.


Comment by Blog Contributor Daniel Plainview: Let's be honest about it - it was a piece of fluff fan-fiction BMX-ing late 70s homage to big Steve. But having said that, it was fun while it lasted. You wouldn't touch it with a barge pole on DVD, for all the reasons you've stated. But spending a tenner and seeing it at the cinema was inoffensive, fun, and stupid at the same time. 

I think the only reservation I would have to add to that is that the schmaltz doesn't work. As you say, it is emotionally unearned - we feel no depth of reconciliation with the wee lassie and her father, and frankly we don't care enough about the central character to mind what happens to him. In fact, had the monster given them some fucked up disease, or just killed them all, I would probably have laughed maniacally rather than being upset. Instead, it set up a psychic connection by fingering them, which is gay in so many different ways.

Still a fun movie though

SOMEWHERE - I got you under my skin

I thought I was going to hate SOMEWHERE. In fact, I almost wanted to hate it. I had even crafted the first line of this review. "It must be possible to create a movie about boredom and alienation that is not itself boring and alienating." And as the curtain lifted on Sofia Coppola's latest movie, I thought I was going to have to walk out. For here we had a guy driving round a dirt track in a Ferrari - driving fast, going nowhere, static framing, not even choosing to show the whole circuit in the frame - and I thought "Oh god, this is some pretty heavy-handed metaphor we're trading in here." The credits came up and we switched to an interior scene at the infamous Hollywood hotel, the Château Marmont. Stephen Dorff is Johnny Marco - Hollywood star and good-time boy - so drunk he falls over and injures his wrist - recuperating in his bedroom with two blonde twins pole dancing for him in a manner so unerotic as to be ridiculous. I thought - here we go: poor little rich movie star, all alone in the Chateau Marmont, bored, alienated, self-hating, blah blah blah.

Having watched the entire movie, I can't disagree with its critics. This is yet another Sofia Coppola movie in which we see static framed, dialogue-free shots of beautiful people hating their beautiful lives. There is a deep-set narcissism here - both in terms of the narcissism of the characters and Coppola's assumption that we, The Ordinaries, give a rat's ass. There's also something rather snide in her treatment of the people who enable the Stars. Public relations people, agents, producers and TV stars are all depicted as basically sycophantic, fake morons. Even worse than that, SOMEWHERE could be seen as a deeply misogynistic film. Every woman Johnny meets throws herself at him, and even when they hate him (nasty text messages, "what the fuck?" meetings in hotel lobbies) they still respond to his summons. Even his 11 year old daughter Cleo, brilliantly portrayed by Elle Fanning, loves him, mothers him, raises an eyebrow but not a fuss when his one-night stand shows up at breakfast. She'll still love him even after he off-loads her at camp.

This movie has technical faults too. No film-maker should dare to quote from Fellini's masterpiece of ennui, LA DOLCE VITA unless they are willing to make the stakes as high (death, suicide, alcoholism) as Fellini did. But Coppola does it twice - first in a press conference where the questions are asinine, second in a pivotal scene near the end where Johnny's confession to Cleo is drowned out by the sound of a helicopter. Worst of all, I think the movie is simply ten minutes too long. I bought into all of it except the final character development. Without spoiling the ending, is it really credible that we should see such action from a person who has up until now been entirely passive?

Still, for all its narcissism and misogyny, SOMEWHERE really did get under my skin. Why? Because I genuinely enjoyed watching the relationship between Johnny and Cleo and Johnny's best friend Sam (Chris Pontius). There is something rather touching in the way in which a guy who is basically a waster can still be a loving father, at least when his daughter is within his sight. I also like the symmetry of actions e.g. when Cleo is with Johnny she lovingly cooks for him, then when he's on his own he makes a cak-handed attempted to cook for himself. This is a more eloquent portrayal of a lonely soul than a histrionic emotional breakdown would've been. I also got into the static framing and long takes of not much happening. It was relaxing and contemplative and gave me room to consider what was going in the relationships on screen. So, overall, I'd say that I really liked SOMEWHERE. It's not flawless, but it did affect me, and it affected me more than the movie most critics seem to prefer, the thematically similar but stylistically more showy LOST IN TRANSLATION.

SOMEWHERE played Venice 2010 where it won the Golden Lion, beating BLACK SWAN, and London 2010. It opened earlier this year in Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Kazakhstan and Russia. It is currently on release in the UK and the US. It opens later this month in Australia, Norway, Finland and Malaysia. It opens in France, Estonia and Brazil in January and in the Czech Republic on February 10th. It opens on April 2nd in Japan.

Overlooked DVD of the month - RESERVATION ROAD

I'm not sure why RESERVATION ROAD didn't get distribution in the UK but the good news is that it's available on DVD. It's a beautifully crafted, emotionally charged drama about the impact of a hit and run accident on the perpetrator and the victim's family. The perp - Mark Ruffallo - is a divorced father who doesn't stop because he's afraid that the legal ramifications will result in him losing his son. It's a cowardly but plausible action and the rest of the film is about the character working up the courage to confess. The victim's family - Jennifer Connelly and Joaquin Phoenix - are alienated from each other by the death. The father takes to stalking the road where the accident took place, photographing the plates of similar cars, trying to track down the killer. Eventually he realises that the perp is his lawyer. Some people have said that this seems convenient. But I think it's eminently plausible that when a devastating act hits a local community, the ties that bind are many and various.

RESERVATION ROAD is one of those films that takes its time and patiently investigates the emotional distress of its characters. The acting is raw and powerful - the ending suitably ambiguous. I love that for once we see both sides of a story and that the so called bad character - the hit and run driver - is shown to be just a typically flawed and frail man trying to be a good father. Mark Ruffalo deserves credit for his brilliant central performance. And as a straightforward investigation of grief this movie has far more honesty about it than something like THE THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE.

RESERVATION ROAD played Toronto 2007 and was released in 2007, though not in the UK. It is available on DVD.

THE NINES - tricksy, smart, but not quite convincing

THE NINES is a movie that is tricksy and smart and gripping, in parts, but I was too often reminded of other movies that had covered the same ground more convincingly.

The movie was written and directed by Hollywood screen-writer John August (CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, BIG FISH). It deals with issues of fact and fiction in a manner reminiscent of Charlie Kauffman movies. It deals with haunting coincidence in the manner of THE NUMBER 23. It satirises the Hollywood/network TV game in the manner of THE TRUMAN SHOW or EDTV. All these movies and more were swimming round my head during this film. The only thing that was genuinely new was the fact that Ryan Reynolds was given room to flex his acting chops, to great effect.

The movie has three inter-twining strands starring a trio of actors playing different actors, sometimes reminiscent of John August - sometimes just playing themselves. In the first strand, Reynolds plays a network TV star. He goes on a drug-fuelled binge and ends up under house arrest, being babyset by his publicist, played by McCarthy. His "desperate housewife" neighbour, played by Hope Davis, starts a flirtation with him, but it's soon clear that both she and the publicist hate each other and are hiding things from him. The tone of this strand is uneasiness - sort of similar to INLAND EMPIRE but infinitely more straightforward. There's a fair amount of spooooky seeing and hearing number nine everywhere but the reason for this is also straightforward. Hope Davis' character is jealous of McCarthy's overweight publicist. Ranked out of ten, she thinks Reynolds' TV star belongs with the nines.

The second strand sees Reynolds playing a TV writer based on the real-life John August. He's trying to get his pilot picked up by the network represented by Hope Davis' exec. The network want the writer to drop his best friend from the cast - Melissa McCarthy - and replace her with the more svelte real-life actress Dahlia Salem. She'll appeal more to the test audiences who loved the pilot - the ones who ranked it "in the nines". Reynolds' character's moral vacuity is captured on reality TV. He muses on the fact that while he plays god with his characters, for the reality TV producers, he's merely a puppet.

The TV pilot is about a wife (McCarthy) and a kid (Elle Fanning). The husband (Reynolds) leaves them in a forest to go call for help. He is intercepted by a hotter chick (Davis) who once again fears that his domesticated life with his fat wife is holding him back from his true potential. He's a video game designer who's over-stepping the boundaries in his self-designed Second Life.

I find the issues raised by THE NINES compelling. The increasing availability to consumers of virtual worlds. The moral redundancy of network TV and especially of reality TV shows. The superficiality of modern society. But John August never convinced me that he was fully in control of them. What's more, he retreads on ground that was broken by Kauffman almost a decade ago. All this, makes this a film that one can probably overlook.

THE NINES played Sundance 2007 and went on release in the US in August. It is currently on release in the UK.