THE SALT PATH*

Theatre director Marianne Elliott has adapted Raynor Winn's best-selling but now controversial book about her and her husband's epic walk around the south-coast of England. Sadly I watched this after the controversy broke so I am not sure how far I was influenced by accusations that key elements of the biographical book were faked.  I hope I just watched the film on its own terms.  But boy this is a tedious film.

It opens with middle-aged husband and wife Raynor (Gillian Anderson) and Moth (Jason Isaacs) destitute, homeless and hiking around the pretty southern coast of England.  They both have regional accents, with Isaacs pulling his off better than Anderson.  They look rough, sun-burned and stressed. They have no money - are reduced to busking - and Moth has a degenerative illness. So the film starts in bleak dull tones and a reduced aspect ratio.  However, the apparently literally regenerative power of being one with nature and walking in beauty allows the film's colour scheme to become sunnier and the aspect ratio to widen. I cannot imagine a more on-the-nose directorial choice.  But I saw no real signs of enlightenment and I was not moved by the couple's plight. The pace was slow and nothing really happens beyond the odd stranger donating a pot of hot water or momentary stress at whether their kids are okay. Apparently there is some malarkey about being "salted" but I was unconvinced and unmoved. I also thought the landscape and seascape photography would be more impressive.

THE SALT PATH is rated 12, has a running time of 115 minutes and is on release in the UK. It played Toronto 2024.

THE PALE BLUE EYE**

Scott Cooper (CRAZY HEART, HOSTILES) returns to our screens with a gothic crime story starring Christian Bale as a jaded, grief-stricken detective called in to solve a gruesome murder at West Point in the 1830s. He is assisted by the young Edgar Alan Poe who really did attend West Point briefly.  Harry Melling gives the stand out performance of the film as the strange, mournful but intelligent young writer. The murder involves some strange, apparently ritualistic mutilations that allow for spooky slash Dickensian cameos from Robert Duvall and Gillian Anderson respectively. In fact the latter made me think of her turn in the wonderful BBC adaptation of Bleak House as this film matches a lot of that show's colour palette and elegiac tone. 

The problem with the film is that it lacks any real drive or propulsive impact either as a detective puzzle or as a horror story. I think it maybe wants to be an emotional investigation of grief instead? Even that didn't really work for me. It just felt dull and overlong. The only reason to watch it is for Masanobu Takayanagi's (HOSTILES) stunningly wintry colour-drained photography. 

THE PALE BLUE EYE is rated R, has a running time of 127 minutes and is streaming on Netflix.

Preview - BOOGIE WOOGIE

BOOGIE WOOGIE is a highly enjoyable, acerbic satire on the contemporary art world, directed by debutant Duncan Ward and based on the novel by Danny Moynihan. Both are art-world insiders and the film has the feel of authentic anecdotes on speed.

The film has a large cast and many sub-plots, but these all coalesce around the gallery of Art Linson - a Jay Jopling like art-dealer who stands at the centre of the London art scene. Art is played in trademark oleaginous, sinister mode by Danny Huston, who needs to seriously worry about typecasting. Three main stories whir around Art. First, his main clients - art collectors Jean and Maclestone (Gillian Anderson and Stellan Skarsgard) are fucking a young artist and a gallery assistant (Amanda Seyfried) respectively, and are engaged in a bitter battle over who gets the art. Second, naive Dewey (Alan Cumming) is trying to promote his best friend, video artist Elaine (Jaime Winston) who ditches him for Art's assistant Beth (Heather Graham). Finally, ageing collector Alfred Rhinegold (Christopher Lee) is being manipulated by his wife (Joanna Lumley) and her butler (the ever brilliant Simon McBurney) to sell a valuable painting, at a price manipulated by art dealer Art Linson.

In short, the majority of characters are self-involved, sexually promiscuous, and care more about jockeying for money and fame than about art itself. Only a few - Alfred Rhinegold and Dewey - have a genuine passion for the work - and they basically get screwed over for their pains. It's not that the art world is indifferent to their pain, but that characters like Beth and Elaine will actually exploit it. After all, in the era of reality TV and constant self-exposure, pain is just another means to create a sensation.

The movie moves quickly; finely balances humour and disgust; assuredly handles its large cast; and is sharply photographed by John Mathieson (HANNIBAL, GLADIATOR). Art aficionados will appreciate the fact that the art was curated by Damien Hurst. I presume that when this finally gets released, it will be very limited. But this flick is definitely worth seeking out.

Additional tags: Joanna Lumley, Christopher Lee, Alan Cumming, Duncan Ward, Danny Moynihan.

BOOGIE WOOGIE played Edinburgh 2009 and will be released in the UK and US in April 2010. It is, rather improbably, currently being shown on British Airways long-haul flights.

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE - amiable enough, but pulls its punches

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE is a conventional romantic comedy in which a hapless bloke overlooks the small-town girl who will make him happy in his quest to shag a Hollywood star until the mandatory final reel emotional epiphany. Simon Pegg plays the bloke - and is amiable enough even when he's being a total arse. After all, which Joe Everyman wouldn't temporarily loose his head when offered VIP status and It-Girls a-go-go? Megan Fox (TRANSFORMERS) has a thankless role as the aforementioned It Girl and Kirsten Dunst also has a thankless role as the "real girl".

In fact, the script feels altogether under-written, and rather pulls its punches. Underneath all the rom-com guff we're meant to have a stinging indictment of the shallow materialism and corrupt back-scratching of the Hollywood media machine. What we get instead are a few pithy lines from Danny Huston and Gillian Anderson as the journalist and PR woman respectively. But the movie seems to have about as much interest in pushing this critique as Jeff Bridges has in his performance as the magazine editor.

So, all in all, this movie slips down easily enough, but it's pretty thin fair.

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE played, improbably, Cannes 2008, and opened this weekend in the US, UK and Poland. It opens next weekend in Belgium and Russian and opens on October 16th in South Korea and on October 23rd in Australia. It opens in November in Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.

THE X-FILES - I WANT TO BELIEVE - huh?

Never seen an episode of the X-Files. Never going to. Definitely not after this film, which plays like a sub-CSI police procedural artificially stretched beyond its natural 45 minute run-time.

6 years after the end of the TV show, cultural icons Mulder and Scully are pulled back into the FBI to help find a missing agent with the aid of a psychic, paedophile priest. At the same time, Scully is now a paediatrician, struggling with her conscience: should she give a kid a painful stem-cell treatment with a small chance of success or let him die in peace?

The spoooooky X-Files kidnap/organ-harvesting storyline was very lo-rent. Certainly sub-CSI and at around the level of an Urban Legend spoof. The stem-cell storyline could've been cool but the movie jumps the shark when Scully learns how to conduct cutting edge complex surgery by *googling* "stem cell research". Seriously?!

I'm sure the TV show was better than this. At least, that's what the message boards and my informal sample of 2 frends who are massive sci-fi geeks suggest. But there's no need to schlep to the cinema for this unless you really have a strong fan-boy urge to see Mulder and Scully kiss on the big screen.

THE X FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE is on global release.

STRAIGHTHEADS is an embarassment

STRAIGHTHEADS is a film that attempts to sit in the rape-revenge-thriller genre. It's a genre that features some of the most emotionally powerful, socially provocative and technically pioneering movies in cinema history. From STRAW DOGS to THELMA AND LOUISE to IRREVERSIBLE, movies in this genre have confronted the audience with brutal imagery, shaking us out of our comfortable lives. The implication of these films is that violence is random and that, in the final analysis, we can only turn to ourselves for justice. Most frightening: we are all capable of violence if forced to it. Given all this, a rape-revenge thriller should be a harrowing, depressing experience.

STRAIGHTHEADS, however, is a joke. Literally. You laugh when you should be outraged. It almost plays like a parody, and with Danny Dyer of SEVERANCE fame in the Dustin Hoffman/Vincent Cassel role, I found myself wondering whether it was MEANT to be funny. But a cursory perusal of the production notes suggests that, no, we the audience are meant to see this as some profound psychological drama. In fairness, Gillian Anderson does play it straight and is fairly convincing until she does a rather absurd thing with a shotgun.

So, who do we blame for this fiasco? First and foremost, the writer-director Dan Reed. His script is under-written and psychologically implausible. Would Anderson's character really do what she does in the final sequence given everything that has gone before? Wouldn't Heffer have simply driven off with Sophia rather than tell her to run off and then run back in? Why did Anderson's character have an austere change of clothes when she and Dyer's character were driving back to London? This raises an interesting point about the film's truncated run-time. I suspect that the film has been under the knife and that the character arcs have suffered as a result. At least, that would be one excuse.

Also, as a side criticism I wonder at the casting of Anderson and Dyer. Like I said, Anderson is great at playing trauma, but she is far less convincing as the sexually confident career woman who picks Dyer up. Playing these sorts of roles takes the devil may care confidence of a Sharon Stone or Monica Bellucci. Anderson falls short of the mark, and the sex-scenes with Dyer are embarassingly unerotic. There's simply no chemistry. And as for Dyer, perhaps the lad is just too funny for his own good. I am yet to be convinced of his ability to play serious drama.

So, a pretty crap movie, unless you watch it for laughs, which would be in pretty bad taste. Still, many thanks to Darkmatt for the invite!

STRAIGHTHEADS goes on release in the UK on April 27th.

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!