DUNE: PART TWO***

DUNE: PART TWO is probably about as good a film as one can make about Frank Herbert's iconic religio-sci-fi book. The flaws I found in this film are mostly down to how distasteful and uninspiring I find the source material - with its superficial embrace of Middle Eastern and North African culture and the fact that its female characters are almost entirely reduced to breeding vessels. I understand that I am not perhaps the appropriate demographic for the books. But Denis Villeneuve has taken it and created two films of arresting visuals and a stunning score.  Greig Fraser's IMAX cinematography is bold and beautiful and truly envelopes us in Arrakis. And Hans Zimmer is at his finest combining sandworm-commanding drums, rock guitars, and menacing prophecy-reciting choirs.

As this instalment opens, we are mere days after part one. Paul Atreides and his mother Lady Jessica have survived the massacre of their House on the desert planet of Arrakis.  Paul has proven himself a fearsome warrior to the indigenous Fremen, some of whom think he is their long-awaited messiah.  This delights Lady Jessica and Atreides loyalist Gurney Halleck, who believes the Fremen will be a powerful fighting force. But Paul's lover Chani has it right - these prophecies are just stories being used to control the Fremen.  The narrative arc is powered by the choice that faces Paul. Will he be swayed by his prophetic dreams of devastating interstellar war and reject being a messiah. Or will he exploit the Fremen for revenge on the Harkonnens and seize the imperial throne?

There is so much to love in how Villeneuve brings this to the screen. He wisely leaves the sandworms as barely seen epic creatures. The production and costume design of the Harkonnen's world and of the Baron and Na-Baron in particular are arresting. 

But the performances veer from mediocre to weak. I found something almost comical in Timothee Chalamet's petulance as Paul and was unfortunately reminded of THE LIFE OF BRIAN - "He's not the Messiah - he's a very naughty boy!" Once you see the film through that lens - "the gourd!" - there's no turning back. There was zero screen chemistry between Chalamet's Paul and Zendaya's Chani which is odd as they seem to be constantly low-key flirting on the red carpet. Christopher Walken is hopelessly miscast as the Emperor - totally bringing me out of the film with his unique American accent. Only Javier Bardem stood out as Stilgar - petrifying in his increasing religious fervour.

I suspect that performances aren't really what interest Villeneuve. He is all about spectacle. Script and character are somewhat beyond the point for him. But this leads to weird choices around narrative. 

Most obviously, Villeneuve's choice not to allow the narrative to unravel over several years problematic. It felt as though Paul's journey from young pup to Emperor had taken place over a few weeks! Is it really so easy to seize power?  And how is this going to impact the timeline around Alia, who we see as a grown woman in Paul's dreams.  Another choice I disagree with is to minimise the influence of the Guild and put all of the machinations onto the Bene Gesserit cult. 

But perhaps the biggest macro issue I have with both books and film is that there's no-one to really root for. On the one hand you have a decrepit Emperor who seems flaccid and pointless. Then there are the comically evil and therefore uninteresting Harkonnens.  The Bene Genesserit are nuts and seem to have no endgame. The Fremen are religious extremists. And Paul is a self-acknowledged harbinger of mass genocide. It's like watching Succession but without the comedy swearing.

DUNE: PART TWO has a running time of 166 minutes and is rated-PG-13. It is on global release. 

THE CREATOR**

Gareth Edwards (ROGUE ONE) returns to our screens with a sci-fi film that feels like a cross between Battlestar Galactica and The Golden Child, except this time Sada Numpse is Allison Janney. I was surprised at just how slow, dull and soapy the film felt: all saccharine tears and overwrought emotion.  I wanted an intelligent interrogation of the real threat that AI poses. Instead I got sanctimony and a disappointingly guessable plot twist.

The film is set forty years in the future in a world where the West has decided to eliminate AI after it nuked LA, but for some unknown reason "New Asia" has decided it's cool with being out-evolved. For now, the US has the upper hand thanks to a suspiciously Death-Star hover-nuke called Nomad that can take out enemies at will, napalm-in-the-morning style. But New Asia is fighting back: its mysterious scientist Namrata has created a new AI that can neutralise any other tech, embodied in a cute little Cylon child. 

That's about as much actual sci-fi as we get. The film seems far more concerned with moody action sequences in beautifully evocative Asian settings. These hinge on John David Washington's US soldier Joshua being on the lam with the aforementioned Golden Child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) as they search for Namrata and Joshua's Asian wife Maya (Gemma Chan in a hugely underwritten part).  There are some car chases and a lot of shooting. Ken Watanabe has a rather moving cameo.  But the overwhelming feeling I had was, come on, are we there yet? And when we do finally get there, it's all so underwhelming, and indeed laughable (poor Allison Janney!)

The overall impression I get is that Gareth Edwards has made a film that looks fantastic, and imagines a beautiful, grungy, lived-in world.  But his choice to set the action in Asia and to use the Golden Child trope is problematic. His writing is very thin, and this hamstrings his actors. An example of the bad writing is given below: warning it contains spoilers.

THE CREATOR is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 133 minutes. It is on global release.

VICE

VICE is an occasionally very funny film that contains a great performance. But it's also an overlong, baggy mess in which half of what the director throws at the film fails to stick. Even worse, it's a film that pretends to be as close to factual as possible, even while committing the cardinal mistake of painting Bush 43 as nice but stupid (he was neither).  And worst of all, it's a film that pretends to give us some kind of emotional truth about Cheney's loving home life while accusing him of being a venal power-hungry shit. This is all fine, so long as you don't then claim that what you're doing isn't partisan but "factual".  It's simply asinine for a movie director to claim that he's just showing us facts, when he's already admitted that much of what Cheney did is secret.  You can't claim that it's fact that Cheney did X or thought Y.  And to then throw in a mid-credits sequence that wants to cut off criticisms of the film as being nonsense, because it's factual.... well this is the worst kind of bullshit.

But anyway, there are many good performances in bad films.  Christian Bale's depiction of Dick Cheney is indeed a great performance and worth the ticket price. Unlike Rami Malek donning some fake teeth and an accent to play Freddie Mercury, Bale goes way beyond a mere impression (as perfect as his accent is).  In fact, it's pretty insulting to see both of these performances nominated for the same award.  Bale inhabits his character - gives him nuance, and depth, and a whole range of emotions. He has Cheney be a genuinely loyal steadfast father, a loving and proud husband, an almost absurdly slow-moving politician, but also a greedy, conniving, Machiavellian thinker.  When Bale's Cheney turns to the screen at the end of the film to address us, I utterly believed his apologia pro vita sua to be authentic and convincing.

Bale is matched in his endeavours by Amy Adams as his wife Lynne, but I'm pretty sick of two-dimensional Lady MacBeth characters and found little to really engage with.  I thoroughly enjoyed Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld, but he's played, literally, for laughs. But Sam Rockwell looked like a Mad magazine version of W.  So yeah - this is pretty much a one-man show.

As for McKay, the gonzo collage style directing that made THE BIG SHORT so successful goes haywire in VICE.  This film is indulgent, over-long, bizarre, heavy-handed, bludgeoning. I get the fishing metaphor Adam! I don't need to continually cut back to a sinister looking fish moving through water or have end-credits of bait.  I also really think I'd rather not have you use Cheney's heart-transplant donor - a young dead veteran - mouth your script from beyond the grave. That's just distasteful.  Overall, I don't want to get my politics from Mad magazine, and that's what this film is. 

VICE has a running time of 132 minutes and is rated R.  It was released last December in most global markets. It will play Berlin 2019.  

MARY MAGDALENE

MARY MAGDALENE is a truly beautiful, nuanced, finely acted and imagined film that genuinely does something new with a hackneyed story. It stars Rooney Mara as Mary Magdalene - not a reformed whore and temptress of popular myth, but a thoughtful, caring woman who has the fortitude to escape an arranged marriage to follow an inspirational leader.  She becomes his companion and befriends the apostles - but there are no leering gazes or temptations. Rather a quieter tension about interpreting Christ's message and legacy.  To Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor), she is a distraction. His aim is worldly power in Jerusalem. For Mary, the meaning of Christianity is compassion and personal kindness. Somewhere in this miscommunication is a tragic and awful misunderstanding on the part of Judas.

Director Garth Davis (LION) has created a quiet film of great passions with a studious script by Helen Edmundson and Phillippa Goslett taking back seat to imaginatively created moments. Early on we see a terrified Mary exorcised in a lake at night by her father and brother because she refuses to marry. It's a stunning imaginative invention.  Later, when Christ (Joaquin Phoenix) wrestles with a possessed man he seems himself in reflection. And is there anything as heartbreaking as Tahar Rahim's Judas on his knees begging Christ to resurrect his dead daughter? All of this carries an emotional weight because it stands in contrast to the muted dun-coloured palette of Greig Fraser's photography, the simplicity of the exterior landscapes, and the austerity of Johan Johannsson's score. But at the moments when Davis uses CGI and set pieces - he is also superb. The rendering of turn of the millennium Jerusalem from a distance is quite breath-taking - as is his evocation of a temple crowded with people, money-lenders and blood sacrifices. 

MARY MAGDALENE has a running time of 120 minutes. 

LION - BFI LFF 2016 - Day 9

LION is an emotionally intense human interest story that comes complete with lovely cinematography.  However, a straightforward structure, slack pacing and ho-hum soundtrack prevent it from being truly great, as opposed to a well-made tear-jerker.

The film is based on the memoirs of Saroo Brierley. He was born in a small north Indian town in the early 80s, but through a twist of fate was separated from his family and ended up on a train to Calcutta, 1600km away.  Unable to speak Bengali, or even knowing the name of his hometown, the boy becomes one of many homeless children, and only narrowly escapes a predator to end up in an equally brutal state orphanage. But a kindly social worker intervenes and arranges for him to adopted by a white Tasmanian family, where it appears that he lived a very happy childhood.  However, when Saroo goes to university he finally meets people from India, and this triggers a wave of memories and a desire both to find his birth family, but not to hurt his adoptive parents.  And so begins a needle in the haystack search for a faint memory of a train station with a water tank, without even knowing if he'll find his family at the end of it. 

THE GAMBLER

In THE GAMBLER director Rupert Wyatt (RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES) and screenwriter William Monahan (THE DEPARTED) have updated Karel Reisz' bleak 1974 thriller based on a James Toback script and originally inspired by a Dostoyevsky novel. The basic premise is that the protagonist is a University lecturer with a gambling addiction combined with a self-destructive streak of nihilism.  He feels that if he can't be a genius and a winner he should be nothing - it's not even worth trying or being consigned to being mediocre.  The self-conscious self-willed harmful behaviour is compelling to watch.   The way in which the film works is that every now and then it hands the gambler a lifeline - more money from a loan shark or a family member - and then he blows that too.  Finally,  he ends up manipulating one of his students, corrupting them too.  The tension and the thrills come from the writers making us like the character, dangling that lifelines, and watching him climbing up the rope only to fall again. Does the protagonist even want to pay his creditors? Is he an addict or an existential suicide in the manner of  Camus' The Stranger? The resulting film is compelling, sleek, well-acted although ultimately less relentlessly and purely existential as the original.  I think this is a dreadful shame - and undercuts the philosophical stylings the movie aspires to and which Mark Wahlberg would've been capable of delivering on screen. To cast such a man, even in heavily reduced form, and then not use that balance of vulnerability and violence, is a crime. 

THE GAMBLER has a running time of 111 minutes and is rated R.  THE GAMBLER was released last year in the USA and Canada and was released earlier this year in Denmark, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Cambodia, Mexico, Pakistan, Belgium and Germany. It is currently on release in Azerbaijan, Russia, the UK and Ireland.  It opens on February 5th in Kuwait, on March 19th in New Zealand, on April 9th in Ukraine, and on April 24th in Latvia and Japan.

FOXCATCHER - LFF14 - Day Ten

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here:




FOXCATCHER is an extremely slow building true crime drama, based loosely on the murder of wrestling coach Dave Schultz by the incredibly wealthy wrestling patron John E Du Pont in 1996.  The tone of the film is wintry cold - one of repressed emotion, deep insecurity and resentment set in rural isolation.

As the movie opens we meet naive and hard trodden wrestling champion Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum).  He's living in the shadow of his elder brother Dave, another Olympic champion, and receives little in the way of adulation or financial support. Accordingly, he's absolutely ripe to fall for John E Du Pont's sales pitch - to live and train at his palatial Foxcatcher ranch - to move out of the shadow of his brother and achieve greatness on his own terms.  But as we move into the second half hour of the film we realise that Du Pont (Steve Carrell) is not just eccentric but deeply disturbed. Utterly resentful and yet still needing the approval of his contemptuous mother (Vanessa Redgrave), Du Pont has a fantasy image of himself as mentor and guru to Mark - one that he pays to make real by creating motivational videos and fake wrestling championships. At one point he criticises his mother by buying him a childhood friend, but his whole adult life is predicated on that same corruption.

ZERO DARK THIRTY

It's taken me a while to get the necessary distance to review Kathryn Bigelow's controversial but critically acclaimed CIA procedural thriller, ZERO DARK THIRTY. The movie is meant to be an account of how US intelligence tracked down Osama Bin Laden, ending with a recreation on the fatal raid on his house in Abbotabad.  But it goes further than just being a fiction inspired by facts, as Tony Kushner would claim for the scrupulously researched LINCOLN.  Rather, Bigelow's movie opens with a statement of aggressive alignment with the truth, before playing real telephone calls from the Twin Towers.  So, before we even see an actor on screen, Bigelow has asked us to take her movie as THE definitive truth, and emotionally manipulated us by playing harrowing real audio from Bin Laden's most devastating terrorist attack.

We then move into the first two hours of the film, which is basically a standard police procedural, except that it features copious quantities of torture, which are shown to provide the information that leads directly to Bin Laden. Jessica Chastain is perfectly cast as Maya. She looks vulnerable and slight and this nicely contradicts her determination to the follow a slight lead despite her superiors' scepticism, even to the point of participating in graphically and unrelentingly depicted torture.  Of course, one can see Bigelow's not too thinly veiled metaphor for a female director's struggle in Hollywood, and every scene of genuine peril or tension is offset by the scenes of clichéd struggle against The Man. Did the real Maya theatrically and childishly use a marker to chalk up how many days the CIA knew about Abbotabad and refused to act?  Would a character as senior as Mark Strong's director really unleash a standard macho shouty tirade at his team?  It all felt rather written by rote. This was most evident in the sequence where a colleague of Maya's arranges a meeting with a potential lead - a meeting that is built up to be tense but where I was always aware of its dramatic purpose and obvious consequences.

The part of the movie that worked best for me was the final half hour, where Bigelow meticulously depicts the raid on Abbotabad, showing great technical accomplishment in her use of night vision equipment in conjunction with standard camera lenses, working in zero natural light.  I also respected the discretion with which she hinted at, but did not show the death and body of Bin Laden. And perhaps the  most finely judged dramatic moment of the film is the final shot, where Maya, mission accomplished, is left with the horrible existential, deeply political question "where do you want to go?"

The problem is that ZERO DARK THIRTY only deals in such political and moral sophistication in its final scene.  Up to that point, we are in no doubt that it is torture that produces the information that leads to Bin Laden.  For Bigelow, and her screenwriter Mark Boal, to suggest that they are just neutrally depicted "what happened" is disingenuous.  This is problematic.  Not only because it severely streamlines and simplifies a very complex issue, but because movies do not exist in a social and political vacuum as pure works of art with no consequences.  I am unsurprised to see the CIA measured but clearly angry denial that this is an accurate portrait of the hunt for Bin Laden, and to say that the content of this film will be inflammatory in certain quarters is an understatement. 

ZERO DARK THIRTY is on release in the USA, Spain, Canada, the Philippines, Taiwan, Portugal, Macedonia, France, Juwait, the Netherlands, Singapore, Finland, Ireland and the UK. It opens on January 31st in Belgium, Argentina, Australia, Germany, Israel, New Zealand, Lithuania, Sweden and Turkey. It opens on February 8th in Denmark, Italy, Estonia, Iceland, Norway and Poland. It opens on February 15th in Brazil and Japan; and on February 22nd in Chile, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Russia and Bulgaria.

ZERO DARK THIRTY is rated R in the USA and has a running time of 157 minutes.

KILLING THEM SOFTLY

KILLING THEM SOFTLY is an unrelentingly bleak and cynical examination of mid-level criminals in a bad economy.  It chronicles an America bloated and decayed, with a soft belly and a smack addiction, where "hope you can believe in" is just a pathetic fairytale.  America is a business not a democracy, and this movie is about getting paid.  To that end, it is fitting that nothing that happens in this film is a surprise.  The wheels of capitalism, whether on Wall Street or trashy motels, grind on regardless.

The first act sees ex-con idiots Frankie (Scoot McNairy - IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn - ANIMAL KINGDOM) hired by The Squirrel (Vincent Curatola - THE SOPRANOS) to knock off a card game.  The twist is that because the host of the game, Markie Trattman, (Ray Liotta) is known to have held up his own card game once before, the suspicion will fall on him and they'll get away scott free.  The second act sees a dull bureaucrat (Richard Jenkins) hiring muscle to kill not just the guilty trio but also Trattman.  For confidence to be restored to the "market", justice must be seen to be done, even if the underworld have gotten the wrong end of the stick. The bureaucrat hires Brad Pitt's hitman, Jackie Cogan, who in turn brings in James Gandolfini's Mickey, only to realise that Mickey is not fit for purpose. The final act sees Cogan resigned to the task at hand.

There is a grim inevitability to the crime and punishment narrative. But that doesn't mean that the film has no dramatic tension.  The initial heist is painfully, terrifyingly drawn out.  And the final execution is expected but unbearably tense.  I've never seen a punishment beating look so visceral as when Trattman is beaten by two goons.  I've never seen an execution look simultaneously so beautiful and so desperately anonymous as when Trattman is off'ed. I've never seen a smack addict getting high so imaginatively depicted than when DP Greig Fraser (SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN) photographs the perceptions of Russell.

But we all know that director Andrew Dominik is the master of the technically brilliant set-up - the unbearable tense pregnant pause.  That's partly what made THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD an instant pantheon movie - and probably the best film I've ever seen at the London Film Festival.   That film coupled stunning visuals and a foreboding mood with a sickening, fascinating obsessive love story.  It had heart  - a twisted heart, admittedly - but an emotional centre for us to hold on to.  Similarly, Dominik's first film CHOPPER had audacious visuals and superlative editing, but it's success hinged on the charisma and horror of the central character.

The problem with KILLING THEM SOFTLY is that it works at an intellectual but not an emotional level. This is quite deliberate.  Dominik is making an intellectual point - about the decadence and squalor of the USA  - the bad economy - falling wages, rising bureaucracy - that it's just about getting paid, and getting paid is getting harder.  I didn't find the political analogy over-bearing as I know some critics have. I found it not just valid, but urgent.  The problem is that the cynicism of the film is alienating - almost unbearably so.  Dominik just doesn't give us anything to hold on to. And as a result, his latest film is less than the sum of  its parts.

KILLING THEM SOFTLY played Cannes 2012 and opened this weekend in Ireland, Spain and the UK. It opens next weekend in Slovenia. It opens on October 11th in Australia, Hong Kong, Italy and Argentina; on October 18th in Argentina, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Estonia and Lithuania; on October 25th in Greece; on November 1st in Portugal and Norway; on November 9th in Mexico; on November 16th in Poland; on November 23rd in Bulgaria; on November 29th in Germany and the USA; and on December 5th in Belgium, France and Denmark. 

London Film Fest Day 6 - BRIGHT STAR

I had the misfortune of studying Keats in the same term I was taught Byron. As a result, despite admiring his poetry, we teenage girls couldn't help but think Keats a bit of a sap in comparison to dashing, dangerous Byron. He was, after all, just a bourgeois doctor, who talked drippily of sensory experience and the unfortunately named "negative capability" - being open to everything and comfortable with uncertainty. Worse still, his only love affair was with the unfortunately named girl-next-door, Fanny Brawne. As with Byron, Keats' life was cut short, but rather than being killed in a dashing Greek adventure, Keats died of TB - far more pedestrian a death to teenage girls. We teenage girls came to the brutal conclusion that when it came to Keats, it was best to stick to the poetry, and leave off exploring his life because, frankly, he didn't have much of one.

Unfortunately, Jane Campion's new film about the love affair between Keats and Fanny Brawne has not changed my opinion one jot. Ben Whishaw is, of course, a marvellous actor, and is deeply affecting as the limpid Keats, reaching out to touch Fanny's hand at a dinner party. But what can we make of Australian actress Abbie Cornish's Fanny - with her uncertain English accent - and her characterisation as a girl who liked to flirt and sew? Apparently Keats and Fanny bonded over the shared experiences of grief, but frankly, there is not much in this film to suggest why they had such a powerful attraction to each other. By far the most interesting character in the piece is Keats' friend, fellow poet and benefactor, Mr Brown, played by Paul Schneider. He is a fascinating because he was arguably interested in Fanny himself, was evidently a bit of a rogue, but also deeply protective of his friend. Paul Schneider gives a compelling performance but it's a shame that he too cannot pull off the accent required of the role - in this case, Scottish.

When introducing the film, writer-director Jane Campion said that she used to be frightened of poetry and that the audience shouldn't worry if they were, because this film catered to them. That is, to my mind, it's flaw. Because I didn't understand the relationship between Fanny and Keats - because the script and performances hadn't convinced me of it or made it compelling - I was looking to the film for insight into how love had affected Keats' work. But, a few recitations apart, there is very little about the process of writing, or what Keats thought about writing in this film. Indeed, the only clumsy reference to inspiration is in a scene where Fanny's little brother is trying to find a nightingale's nest and then we switch to a scene in which Keats pens his favourite ode. Oh dear.

The upshot is that this film contains a not particularly interesting nor convincing central romance and not much else. Can we say anything positive about it? Well, Jane Campion is, as ever, brilliant at creating a sensory impression - close-ups of flowers, women sewing, etc. The film looks great. But this is by no means a film that should be bracketed with the superb PORTRAIT OF A LADY, THE PIANO or IN THE CUT.

BRIGHT STAR played Cannes, Toronto and London. It is currently on release in the USA, Israel and the Netherlands. It opens in the UK on November 6th and in December in Germany, Greece and Australia. It opens on January 7th in Portugal and on January 13th in France.