SORRY TO BOTHER YOU - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Day Five

Cash Green (Lakeith Stanfield - GET OUT) is your typical millenial struggling to make rent in Oakland.  He gets a job as a salesman at Regalview but can't connect with customers until Danny Glover's older wiser colleague advises him to use his "white voice".  Once Cash does that, he starts making bank, and while his friends and girlfriend (Tessa Thompson - Westworld) are trying to unionise, Cash gets promoted. Problem is, what he's actually doing in his new job is selling labour - and not just any kind of labour - voluntary slave labour!  Cash does so well suppressing his conscience for money that Armie Hammer's rival megalomaniac tries to poach him to sell an even more bizarre form of labour, wherein he'll both control the labour and its malcontents.

The result of all this is a film that doesn't have the attention span to mine any of its ideas properly - but just keeps throwing more and more outlandish scenarios at the wall.  When it works it's great, but by the final half hour I had utterly lost interest in its absurdist premise.  The tragedy is that writer-director Boots Riley goes so far beyond his original concern about code-switching that we kind of forget what point he was making. (As a side note, I thought it would have been FAR more effective to show actual code switching rather than the allegedly funny ruse of dubbing the black actors with actual white voices). I feel that Boots Riley has a lot that is vital and urgent to say, but that he needs a strong producer to really edit down his thoughts so that each film is powerful and memorable for a single strong idea. There's just waaaay to much happening here for it to be coherent. 

SORRY TO BOTHER YOU has a running time of 111 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Sundance and SXSW 2018 and opened this summer in the USA. It is currently playing the BFI London Film Festival and will open in the UK on December 7th.

ARRIVAL - BFI LFF 2016 - Day 7

ARRIVAL is a handsome, intelligent sci-film with stunning visual and aural design and great performances. It's a little bit lit down by thematic and plot similarities to some other recent sci-fi films, but remains a superb film.

The film stars Amy Adams as a linguist called in by the US government to interact with aliens that have landed 12 spaceships all over Earth.  As the movie opens, each host country is co-operating with the other and sharing research - learning that the Heptapods communicate visually and slowly translating their non-linear speech.   But pressure is on - the Chinese is leading a group of nations who interpret their messages as threatening - withdraw from co-operation and are potentially about to launch a first strike.  This leaves Adams' character in a race against time to have the spirit of scientific co-operation trump that of nationalistic belligerence. 

This straightforward plot is complicated by a thesis about the nature and power of language itself.  In an early scene, Adams' character hypothesises that the specific language that we learn affects not just the way in which we think, but the actual neural wiring of our brains.  And so, by extension, to learn a new language could be to rewire the brain.  Accordingly, we have an intellectual idea being explored here - one that posits that by learning the aliens' non-linear language - one that exists outside of conventional time - that Adams' character might herself learn to think, behave and experience life in a non-linear fashion.

SOUTHPAW

SOUTHPAW is an earnest but risibly cliched and over-acted boxing drama written by Kurt Sutter (SONS OF ANARCHY) and directed by Antoine Fuqua (TRAINING DAY).  The movie starts Jake Gyllenhaal in a typically intense, hyper-realistic portrayal of a working-class kid turned successful boxing champion.  He's married to the love of his life (Rachel McAdams) and has a young daughter which is all so far so ROCKY. But pretty soon, his wife is caught up in a shooting and dies in one of those over-scored over-dramatic moments that will serve as the lynchpin for the rest of the film, in which our broken hero tries to resurrect his career and win back his daughter from the evil social services. His flashy manager (50 Cent - actually ok as an actor) having left him, our hero winds up begging a wizened old boxing manager played by Forrest Whitaker to train him.  Because as in ROCKY, the best training is low-rent, austere hard work on the worn-out mats of a back-street gym.  

THE BUTLER

THE BUTLER is a pretty hackneyed, emotionally manipulative, conservative examination of US race relations in the twentieth century.  Told through the eyes of a fictionalised version of real White House butler, the movie shows us the attempts by presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan to address the race issue, and the conflicting attitude of African Americans toward this struggle.  The butler, Cecil Gaines, after a harrowing childhood experience of extreme prejudice and lawlessness of a 1920s cotton firm in the South, decides to use a strategy of smiling compliance in the search for safety. He will numbly hear anything, and be subservient to anyone, to keep his family safe in the relative middle class affluence of Washington DC.  By contrast, his son Louis is affronted by this subservience, and first joins the peaceful protests led by Martin Luther King, before briefly flirting with the violent activism of the Black Panthers, and ending with direct political engagement.  

The problem with the film is that this political dialogue between father and son - between safe servility and dangerous activism - is so heavy handed and starkly drawn that it threatens to overpower what is actually the far more interesting aspect of the story - the character drama that sees a convincing marriage shown over fifty years. What gives this film emotional heft is not the fact that after years of prejudice, the Butler finally gets to meet President Obama, but that his wife is not there by his side, after decades of struggle, overcoming alcoholism and genuine love. That's the reason why I cried a little at the end of the movie - because that's the part of this film that has emotional honesty and authenticity.

As for the politics, it's fairly simplistic in its opposition between father and son.  The only nuance is delivered by the Martin Luther King character who makes a slight (and rather unconvincingly continued) case for the idea that the butler figure is not subservient but subversive. As for the depiction of the various presidents, this is fatally undermined by stunt casting and few of the famous actors chosen manage to transcend that "ooh look it's Robin Williams as Eisenhower" novelty to approach authenticity.  I suspect the only one who really manages is Alan Rickman as Reagan - but he also has the most nuanced character insofar as he seems to have the most genuine connection to Gaines but also the most offensive race policies.  The movie also plays a bit like history as "one damn thing after another".  We spool through presidents, each with their allotted five minutes, until it becomes more of a fashion parade than anything else.  One senses a rather cheap need to depict famous fashion moments with Nancy Reagan and the scene showing Jackie Kennedy in her famous blood-stained pink suit struck me as very exploitative indeed.  The stunt casting of Mariah Carey as Cecil Gaines mother also fatally undermines what should be a very tragic character.

So in all this - the stunt casting - the simply drawn politics - what is there to like in this film? A strong performance by David Oyewolo as Louis Gaines - the son who embodies the civil rights struggle. And most of all a magisterial performance from Oprah Winfrey as Cecil's wife who moves from blowsy drunk to noble loving wife.  It makes you wonder about the performances we have missed because of her talk show day job.  As for Forest Whitaker, a fine actor, I feel that he isn't given a wide range here - his character essentially being stalwart in his views and reactions until a small epiphany near the end of the film. He serves, if anything, as the counterpoint to Winfrey's Oscar-worthy performance, but that's merely the result of the script. 

THE BUTLER is on release in the USA, Canada, the Philippines, Portugal, France, Denmark, Iceland, Israel, Germany, Kuwait, Indonesia, Spain, Sweden, Singapore, Finland, Australia, Brazil, Lebanon, the UK, Ireland and Mexico. It opens in Hungary on November 21st, in Romania on November 29th, in Belgium on December 4th, in the Netherlands on December 5th, in Norway on December 25th, in Poland on December 26th, in Chile and Greece on January 30th and in Japan on February 15th. 

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE - weather with you

Spike Jonze, the visionary director behind BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and ADAPTATION, returns to the big screen with an adaptation of Maurice Sendak's iconic children's book. The book is slight, dark but also joyful: a little boy called Max throws a tantrum, is sent to his room, and disappears into an imaginary world of wild things. The wild rumpus if fun, but he grows lonely and returns home in time for his supper, which is still hot! BBC Radio 4 produced a marvellous programme on the book and its iconic status, interviewing Sendak. He said he thought the book was radical because Max wasn't a WASP but a little Jewish kid, and because Max wasn't a classic innocent child but a realistic rage-filled, energy-filled little boy. And after all, he had it both ways - King in his imaginary world, but also welcomed back into his home.

Spike Jonze and writer David Eggers have taken the slender meat in the book and spun it out into a beautifully rendered, overwhelmingly dark and pyschologically truthful film about the fears and resentments of childhood. In truth, there isn't much joy left in it, and I'm not sure what kids will make of it. But for adults, the film is a deeply emotionally affecting depiction of what it's like to be a child, and indeed, the pressures on parents in a modern world of working parents and divorce.

The first hour of the film gives us the reality of little Max (Max Records), a nine year old kid growing up in the snowy American burbs. His elder sister is too busy being a teen to hang with him, his working mum (Catherine Keener) tries her best to give him attention but has her own stress to deal with. He loves mischief - instigating a snowball fight with his sister's friends - but gets scared when the fight gets out of control and they smash his igloo. The film is full of visual references to kids seeking small dark places to hide and feel safe in, but that safety being intruded upon. It's also full of play fights that have real emotional consequences. In these early scenes, I love the efficiency with which Jonze and Eggers essay Max's emotional life. The fight that triggers his running away comes out of nowhere. I also love the freedom of the camera, capturing with handheld the rumpus, but also shooting from Max's POV and height. There's a lovely scene where Max is sitting under his mum's desk tugging at her tights - a wonderfully intimate moment but also hinting at his need to express himself and incapability of doing so with words.

By the second half hour, Max has run away from his house having thrown a tantrum and bitten his mother on the shoulder - a highly charged scene. He takes a boat and through scary waves, lands in the land of the wild things. There he meets a loose collective of monsters and becomes their king, starting play-fights that soon sour. All of these monsters are expressions of Max's own insecurities and fears - the fear of not fitting in, of being abandoned for cooler friends, of not being understood, of not being loved, of sadness. The fear that doing a robot dance won't make his mum happy and won't make the monsters happy either.

I love this section for its wonderful visual style. When Carol (James Gandolfini) takes Max to see his model world, it really is magical. There's a kind of magic to the simple mastery of making and doing rather than CGI wizardry. That translates to the monsters themselves. They are giant muppets that have been ever so lightly CGI animated to show the facial expressions of the actors voicing them. It's a really wonderful result - they look real, they have weight, but they also look, well, muppety enough to have come from a kids imagination. I also love the wry humour. Classic example: Max and Carol are walking through a desert and an absolutely enormous monster appears on the horizon. Carol dismisses it as a harmless pup: "don't feed it or he'll follow you around." But there's no denying that this section is also pretty much a constant downer. The monsters talk like a bunch of depressed characters from a Woody Allen film, filled with neuroses about failed relationships and low self-esteem. They speak in phrases that kids must hear and not quite understand. They have an abiding sadness that poor Max can't shift because, after all, he's not a real king.

In the final section, emotions come to a head. Some of the monsters realise that Max favours KW and Carol - that's he not an equal opps king. And then they realise that he's not really a king at all. And then, most crucially, as Max tries to convince KW about the need for family and why she should return "home" to Carol, he also realises that he too needs to go home. What is learned? Maybe not much. Max always loved his mum, and still has trouble expressing himself. The rage and the fear are still there.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE is a brave, bold and beautifully imagined movie that takes us into the psyche of a kid who has trouble expressing himself. Is it a kids film? Not sure. But it is certainly a superb film about being a kid, and about being a parent. It is uncompromising, challenging, dark, scary and makes you cry. Spike Jonze remains one of the most fascinating directors working today.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE was released in October in the USA, Canada and Italy. It was released in November in the Ukraine, Malaysia, the Czech Republic and Romania. It is currently on release in Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Denmark, Lithuania, Norway, Turkey, the UK, France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Spain. It opens on December 30th in Belgium. It opens in January in Brazil, Singapore, Finland, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Japan, Argentina, Greece, Portugal, Venezuela and Sweden. It opens on February 4th in Russia.

THE AIR I BREATHE - pretentious wank

"I always wondered, when a butterfly leaves the safety of its cocoon, does it realize how beautiful it has become? Or does it still just see itself as a caterpillar?"

Who writes such nonsense? Debut feature director Jieho Lee apparently. The ensuing film, THE AIR I BREATHE, is a deeply unhappy affair.The laborious structure sees four inter-twining stories each focusing on a character whose story, apparently, illustrates an Asian proverb that life is made up of Happiness, Pleasure, Sorrow, and Love. This apparently gives Lee leave to include dialogue as banal as that quoted above. Forest Whitaker plays a naive low-level banker who loses a ton of money in an illicit gambling den and ends up robbing a bank to pay back Andy Garcia's rent-a-mobster. In an inter-related story, the mobster's cocky nephew (Emile Hirsh) is being shepherded through the night by a clairvoyant goon (Brendan Fraser). The goon will end up saving a teen popster (Sarah Michelle Gellar) from the mafiosi, and all the stories are linked when Kevin Bacon's doctor realises the popster has a rare blood type that can save the life of the woman he loves.

The performances fall into two broad camps. Garcia, Whitaker and Hirsch play to type, lazily. Fraser and Gellar are running as fast as they can from their typical screen personae. The script is banal and never matches up to its self-proclaimed profundity. The direction is gimmicky. Need I say more?

THE AIR I BREATHE was released in early 2008 and is available on DVD.

STREET KINGS - once a patsy....

STREET KINGS is a dull, predictable, mis-cast, dirty-cop-thriller from the director of HARSH TIMES and writer of TRAINING DAY. The movie features Keanu Reeves as a meat-head, bent-out-of-shape, vigilante cop. Forest Whitaker is the corrupt police chief pulling his strings. The Reeves character has an attack of morality and goes after the gang-land killers of another cop who was actually snitching on him. It's a cute little Catch 22 situation. If he finds the killers, they could implicate him (wrongly, for once) in the hit. Should he take the fall but do the right thing? In a town so corrupt, what's the right thing anyways?

After LA CONFIDENTIAL and TRAINING DAY, I need to see something pretty special from a dirty cop film to justify its existence, and this film just doesn't have it. The script is derivative, paced too slow, and the plot twists will be obvious to anyone familiar with the genre. The casting is an even bigger problem. Keanu Reeves is plain unconvincing as a grizzled, hard-as-nails cop. He's about as hard as my grandmother. Hugh Laurie is similarly unconvincing as a foul-mouthed, intimidating Internal Affairs cop. Forest Whitaker hams it up as the Chief - it's like watching one of those grim Al Pacino performances where he randomly shouts things and pastiches himself. In fact, pretty much the only actors who do a good job are two young, relatively inexperienced cast members - Naomie Harris as a grieving widow and Chris Evans as a rookie cop.

STREET KINGS is on release in the Philippines, Singapore, Estonia, Finland, Indonesia, Turkey, USA, Oman, Germany, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan and the UK. It opens next week in Argentina, Denmark, Iceland, Spain and Sweden and the following week in Norway. It opens in May in Belgium, Hong Kong and in June in Australia, France, Italy and Poland.

VANTAGE POINT - tedious, exciting, laughable

VANTAGE POINT is an action movie about a terrorist attack on the US President. The concept is to have the attack re-hashed from the points-of-view of different characters until the audience can piece together the truth, Rashomon-style.

The first third of the film must have looked really clever on paper, but is actually pretty tedious to watch. We see the attack around four or five times, each time learning a little more about the conspiracy, but not enough to justify rehashing the story *yet again*.

The second third of the film picks up in inverse proportion to the film-makers' willingness to drop the Rashomon conceit. A further plot twist is revealed and the movie settles down into an exciting political thriller, complete with betrayals and a high-adrenaline car chase.

But the film-makers drop the ball in the final third of the film, which is literally laughable. We are asked to believe that various people would survive hideous car crashes and that a hardened terrorist would swerve to miss a child.

The movie has its moments but overall it's rather forgettable. In such a large ensemble cast, no single actor has a chance to shine, or to capture our imagination. We never get a clear handle on the terrorists' motivations, and the whole thing seems rather mechanical. The attempt to graft on a sentimental story involving a divorced parents and a small girl is simply toe-curlingly saccharine.....Basically, this is a movie to avoid.

VANTAGE POINT is on release in the Philippines, the US, Hong Kong, Qatar, Austria, Canada, Mexico, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Argentina, Germany, Kuwait, Russia, Swizterland, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Sweden, India, Estonia, Japan and the UK. It opens later in March in Indonesia, Australia, Croatia, New Zealand, Slovakia, Brazil, France, Chile, Portugal, Singapore, Bulgaria, Finland, Bahrain, Belgium, Egypt, Jordan, Oman, Greece, Israel, Lebanon, Nigeria, Slovenia, the UAE, Iceland, Lithuania, Norway and Romania. It opens in April in Peru, Thailamd, Ecuador, Kenya, Latvia, Polamd, South Africa, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Netherlands, Turkey, Colombia, Uruguay, Bolivia and the Ukraine.

THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND - well-acted but...

THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND is a much-hyped first feature from acclaimed documentary film-maker, Kevin MacDonald. It features Forest Whitaker (GHOST DOG, PANIC ROOM) in a fantastic performance as the Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin. Set in the 1970s and filmed on location in Uganda, the movie uses hand-held documentary style photography, editing and vintage tunes to bring Amin's reign to life. For the first time on film we see how bloody charming Amin was - what a popular demagogue - and the full extent of his bizarre love of the Scottish people.* We get far less of a feel for what a menace he was - even in a grotesque scene of violence near the end. It is filmed in such a way as to seem almost like an exploitation flick - it seems disembodied from the rest of the film - surreal rather than anchoring the drama of the story.

Come to think of it, there is quite a lot I didn't like about this movie, performances aside. I didn't like the insertion of the early love interest with Gillian Anderson's perfectly pitched upper class Brit. Perhaps it really happened, but it just held the narrative up. I didn't like the orchestral score. It was over-worked and manipulative, even resorting to the dreaded high-pitched violins at a moment of gruesome horror. I didn't like the Kay Amin story-line. Again, it may have happened that way but it was something I had seen in a million different films, notwithstanding the exact rendering of the denouement. And finally, I didn't like the protagonist. This is not a comment on James McAvoy's performance - which is A-okay. Rather on the character itself. Nicholas comes across as a wilfully naive, callow, self-important man in over his head. He turns his nose up at his father's quiet propriety and at Simon McBurney's scene-stealing oily diplomat, but these are the better men. In particular, Nicholas takes the diplomat's insistence on "clarification" as obfuscation - but they are fateful words. I realise that it's usually praise-worthy for a director to allow a protagonist to be unlikeable, but I found it a great bar to my empathising with his situation and his downfall. And isn't that a point of a film like this? There but for the Grace of God go I? After all, there is little else to it. Kevin MacDonald has not lifted his eyes up from this human morality tale to look at the political or social context behind Idi Amin's story.

Overall then, THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND joins that roll-call of London Film Fest gala films - SYLVIA, THE CONSTANT GARDENER, GOOD NIGHT & GOOD LUCK - with worthy intentions, compelling central performances - and yet no real bite.

THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND played Telluride, Toronto and London and has been on limited release in the US. It opens in the UK and Sweden in January 2007, in Germany, the Netherlands, Brazil, Belgium, Argentina, Italy and France in February 2007. *Not bizarre because Scots are inherently unloveable but bizarre insofar as he goes around dressed in a kilt, naming his kids Campbell and Mackenzie and offering to liberate Scotland from the English!