AMSTERDAM***

What a glorious failure AMSTERDAM is! A film that is indulgent, incoherent, tonally uneven and not as whacky as it thinks it is.  And yet, and yet, there's something noble in its square-on look at racism, fascism, class snobbery and misogyny - a film that shows us clearly what war actually does to vital bodies - at the same time as attempting a JULES ET JIM romance combined with a Coen Brothers'esque caper. Writer-director David O Russell is more than ever himself - for all his brilliance and over-reach. This film is absolutely his.  I found flashes of brilliance within it. And in a month where Germany convicted men of fomenting a far-right coup, the central message remains important.

Christian Bale channels Kramer from Seinfeld in his role as Burt, a World War One veteran with a glass eye and a fondness for self-medicating with gonzo drugs. Burt is balanced out by Harold, a black lawyer who oozes charm, calm and confidence in a much-needed straight performance from John David Washington.  The third partner in their friendship is Valerie Voze, a daring, courageous artist played with elan by Margot Robbie.  The three live a bohemian life in post-war Amsterdam, helping vets recover from their horrific injuries, until the boys return home to New York.  

Fast forward to 1933, where the film opens, and a glamorous rich young woman (Taylor Swift) is murdered shortly after asking our boys to investigate the suspicious death of her father, their commanding officer. So begins a shaggy caper in which we discover that a bunch of fascist sympathisers are trying to manipulate a US general (Robert de Niro) into launching a veteran-backed military coup. Sound too fanciful? It really happened. 

The resulting film is, as I said, a mess. But it's a well acted one with some amazingly funny set-pieces and a truly sinister slippery turn from Rami Malek and Mike Myers as a British spy standing out among the bit parts. The film also looks fantastic, with stunning production and costume design and a dreamy sepia tinted warm glow thanks to Emmanuel Lubezki's lensing. I don't know what this film truly is, genre wise. It doesn't coalesce. But I'm glad it exists. 

AMSTERDAM is rated R and has a running time of 134 minutes. It is streaming on Disney plus.

THE REVENANT

In the 1820s much of north west was harsh country, fought over by various colonial and native american factions.  There was money to be made though - trapping animals for their skins - and military outposts to guard the frontiers and protect trade.  One trapper, Hugh Glass, became incredibly famous for surviving a real life bear attack and somehow managing to get back to camp despite being abandoned by his colleagues. That story in turn become a novel by Michael Punke, and now a film written by Mark L Smith and directed by Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu (BIRDMAN).

The resulting film is epic.  It is meticulously grounded in authentic reality - from Emmanuel Lubezki's natural light photography to the incredibly violent, raw depictions of human and anima violence.  And yet the story itself is absurd, taking the real story of Glass and making it bigger, crazier, larger at every turn. Whether you enjoy this film therefore depends on how far you can allow the former to trump the latter.

To speak of the film's strengths is to start and end with Inarritu's visual direction and the central performances. In BIRDMAN Inarritu created a technique of circling his actors with a fluid and expressive camera, and for creating shots that felt never-ending.  He uses that technique here to bring us up close to a key character, pans around to show us what they are seeing, and then pans back by which team we see them already reacting, moving away or into action. It creates an amazing feeling of being inside the action and reaction of this organically unfolding story.  Another thing is that Inarritu is fearless when it comes to showing us violence - an arrow through the head - a bear ripping up a man's back - a man sealing up a gash in his throat with dynamite - to name but a few.  

When it comes to the performances, this is a lead role that asked Leonardo di Caprio to experience and portray hardship, as he keeps telling us in his Oscar campaign. It's a very good, gritty, nuanced performance. But the guys who really steal it for me are Tom Hardy as the cynical but interesting trapper that leaves Glass behind and Will Poulter as the young man he co-erces to help him.  What's amazing about Hardy's performance is that here's a guy who does things we hate. But he's also a man who survived being near-scalped. So in a sense he's a commentary on how war brutalises us all, as is the entire movie.  And as for Will Poulter, his career is quite impressive. He's done broad comedy in WE'RE THE MILLERS and pure drama in this and WILD BILL. An actor to look out for.  So from my perspective, the direction, cinematography and performance by Hardy deserve Oscars. I suspect it's Dicaprio who will get one.

Turning now to the annoying.  I get that Inarritu is probably one of the few directors to actually treat his native American characters with anything like respect and to give them fully developed motives but did Glass really need a son and lots of Terence Mallick-style quasi-spiritual shots of wheat fields and floating wives and whatnot. It's just derivative nonsense designed to make Glass the good guy because not only does he not share the colonial views of the bad guy he can visibly display this in protecting his son. It's all so unnecessary. The Glass story is great enough without making him some kind of anachronistic earnest liberal.

THE REVENANT has a running time of 156 minute running time and is rated R.  The movie went on release in the USA on December 25th 2015 ad went on global release throughout January.

BIRDMAN

BIRDMAN is a laugh-out loud satire on the insecurity of the actors and bitter negativity of critics that also plays as a tragic tale of mental illness.  It's also a technical tour-de-force of cinematography that's meant to take you right inside the claustrophobic mania of its lead character - a device that both impressed and alienated me and made the experience of this film less visceral than it should be.  It's a great film and a failed film all at once - ambitious both in its subject matter and style - way beyond anything Hollywood is currently giving us.  Noble in its pitch and flawed in its final act. 

Michael Keaton riffs on his own past to play Riggan Thomson, a Hollywood star who used to play a superhero called Birdman.  Today, he's old, divorced, with a daughter just out of rehab and a legacy he's unsure of.  Still beloved by the public, Riggan wants more - he wants artistic credibility.  He wants to literally be the star who makes the front page when he goes down in a plane crash with George Clooney.  The fine line the movie walks is whether Riggan is just another insecure Hollywood star or whether he's genuinely unwell - is he really seeing Birdman and the musicians who form the backing track to this film?  Does he really think he has superpowers?  The evidence in favour of the first theory is that everyone else in the theatre is as insecure as he is, from the ageing starlet played by Naomi Watts to the self-parodying method actor played by Ed Norton. In fact, it's arguably Ed Norton who cuts closest to the bone in his portrayal of the gifted actor who can't be real in real life, and self-sabotages every project he's in.  You have to wonder at the psychology behind Norton - the real Norton - who is so willing to portray himself as a vulnerable douchebag on film. 

GRAVITY - LFF 2013 - Day Three

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

Wow.  Just wow!  GRAVITY is visual story-telling at its finest - a movie full of stunning setpieces and breathtaking space-scapes.  The technical mastery involved in creating an immersive experience of zero gravity is clear, but it's never allowed to trump the pure emotion at the movie's heart.

Sandra Bullock plays Ryan Stone, a scientist brought on her rookie space mission, helmed by veteran astronaut Mike Kowalski (George Clooney).  We get about ten minutes of funny banter between the two and their third crewmate (played rather improbably by Ronnie from Eastenders!) before a missile strike at a Russian satellite sets off a chain reaction of debris that knocks spaceships and stations out of the sky.  The movie then turns into a race against the odds thriller, as our heroine tries to get back to her ship, and then to a functioning space station with an escape pod, and somehow land on earth.  However, in contrast to CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, who tension never let up, GRAVITY is punctuated with moments of quiet, pained reflection and deeply felt emotion for which Sandra Bullock will presumably be nominated for an Oscar, going up against Cate Blanchett for BLUE JASMINE. 

What I love about Alfonso and Jonas Cuaron's screenplay is that it has the balls to be pure - not to sidetracked or to feel obliged with any audience pandering nonsense.  This is the story of a middle-aged woman, who has been beaten up by life, relying on herself to get home.  In its own quiet way, for a Hollywood film in which women are typically adjuncts of men, or falling apart in a flappy romantic way, this is rather subversive, and certainly some of the costume design hints at the strength of the Ripley.  How right they were to cast Sandra Bullock - an actress who simply drips integrity and authenticity and just makes you will her to succeed.

But really, the big story of this movie is the astounding technical achievement - led by Alfonso Cuaron and his Director of Photography Emmanuel Lubezki (TREE OF LIFE). I saw this film on the massive Odeon Leicester Square screen in 3D and that was immersive, but I can't wait to see it again in IMAX.  This surely has to be one of the most beautifully produced space movies of all time, and rather than wait for DVD or TV, you really must try to catch it on the biggest screen you can find. 

GRAVITY has a running time of 90 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA.

The movie played Venice, Telluride, Toronto and London 2013.  It opens this weekend in Australia, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Macedonia, Russia, Canada, Estonia, India, Spain and the USA. It opens on October 10th in Argentina, Brazil, Israel, Peru, Singapore and Mexico. It opens on October 18th in Iceland; on October 25th in France, Chile, Portugal, Norway, Sweden and Turkey; on November 7th in Denmark, Finland, Greece and the UK; and on December 13th in Japan.

THE TREE OF LIFE

This review contains spoilers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHILDREN OF MEN - dystopia is now

There's a road about five minutes walk from where I live in Central London. I worked there for around four years and I still walk down it most days. In the opening scene of CHILDREN OF MEN, a crumpled, aggrieved Clive Owen walks out onto that street with a cup of coffee in his hand. A bomb goes off shattering the shop front. Clive Owen ducks for cover and then continues on his journey, haltingly. Because in the London of 2027 our fears (and memories, those of us who remember the IRA) are realised: terrorist attacks are commonplace. It is a world where humans have become infertile and the youngest person alive is eighteen. Civil order has broken down around the world and Britain is the last nation still standing. Or rather crouching with its hands over its face as a fascist policeman brings down the boot.

It's amazing just how easy it is to make contemporary London on a wet November afternoon look like P.D. James dystopian future. The crumbling Victorian infrastructure, the half-light and perpetual drizzle, the uncollected rubbish and weary indifference to increasing numbers of armed rozzers. The genius of this movie is not to over-do the differences but insist on the similarities. The incidental cultural references are the same as now - the 2012 Olympics is an icon of the past not the future, but the music, dress and language are the same. When the world's youngest boy is killed, people still have lunatic outpouring of grief, Diana-stylee, and the English sense of humour is still alive and kicking. In fact, this movie, while intelligent and frightening, is also really rather funny. Reassuringly, "Britishly" funny. Now and then though, we are caught off guard by an image that is horrifying because it comes straight from our tele-visual memory. From news footage and documentaries of the Holocaust or the Bosnian war.

In a movie like CHILDREN OF MEN the key task for the film-maker is to create a world which is at once alien and believable. Director, Alfonso Cuarón and cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki succeed by a long chalk. But the movie really works because it creates a series of memorable and believable characters thanks to some brilliant writing and top-notch performances from all the cast. The plot hinges on Clive Owen's character - Theo. He is kidnapped by his ex-wife, Julian, played by Julianne Moore, and asked to help take a miraculously pregnant woman (Claire Hope-Ashitey) out of England and to safety. In this, he is aided by two ageing hippies, played by Michael Caine and Pam Ferris - arguably their best performances on film. The supporting cast is also first class, featuring the ubiquitous Chiwetel Ejiofor as a terrorist and an intense cameo performance from an unrecognisable Charlie Hunnam (that's the blonde teen from QUEER AS FOLK to you and me.) Danny Huston is absolutely chilling as the pragmatic aesthete who sits among his art drinking fine wine while England burns. Among such an accomplished cast it is hard to single out the scene stealer, but it is probably Peter Mullan who takes the biscuit with his darkly comic portrayal of the weed-dealing bent copper, Syd.

I could go on about how superb I think this film is - visually, intellectually, comedically (of all things!) Of course, there are some quibbles. The religious imagery is laid on sporadically thick - especially with the naming of characters and one rather cloying scene near the end. But I think this is a small price to pay for a rare piece of film-making that gets the brain whirring and the pulse racing.

CHILDREN OF MEN is on release in Ireland and the UK. It opens in Japan, Belgium, France, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Iceland, Latvia, Norway, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal and Finland in October. It opens in Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Brazil, Estonia, Chile, Croatia, Italy, Romania, Turkey, Singapore and Mexico in November. It finally rolls into Sweden and the US in December.