MARTY SUPREME*****

MARTY SUPREME is a gonzo caper about a narcissistic arsehole who will exploit everyone and everything to fulfil his dream. The challenge for writer-director Josh Sadie is to make us root for him, and maybe even like him, nonetheless.

Timothee Chalamet stars as the titular protagonist Marty Mauser - an acne-scarred hen-pecked shoe-salesman who dreams of travelling to England to become a champion table-tennis player.  Destroyed in that final by his Japanese opponent, the balance of the film sees Marty try to con and finagle his way into enough cash to go to Japan for the rematch, including but not limited to getting a schlubby put-upon live-at-home man called Dion to produce branded table-tennis balls called the "Marty Supreme", and conning a mafiosi (improbably played by Abel Ferrara) whose dog he was sitting, while also being on the lam from some white hick racists and a psychopathic rural farmer. And that's before we even get to Marty's two love interests: the  woman who loves him - his pregnant childhood friend turned lover played by Odessa A'Zion - and the woman who sees right through him - a faded starlet and trapped trophy wife played by Gywneth Paltrow. 

As that attempt at a synopsis might suggest, MARTY SUPREME is an absurd film, over-stuffed with memorable characters and crazy plot-twists.  It picks you up and takes you on a breathtakingly audacious ride. The running time is long but it never flags, thanks partly to pairing the 1950s setting with a superb 1980s synth-pop heavy soundtrack, just because.  But behind all of its craziness, there's depth.

We are in the mid-1950s, and the world is still recovering from the horrors and bigotry of World War Two. Everyone is shocked that Marty's Japanese opponent is allowed to travel given the recent travel-ban; Marty's good friend and competitor is a Holocaust survivor; and Marty will even exploit his prison camp experience to distract a love-rival.  There's also something to the idea of a film that posits a world of extreme self-actualisation. Marty is the ultimate fake it till you make it manipulative showman, who wants a woman just because she's a symbol of success.  In a weird way his charm is that while he IS manipulative he is also strangely honest.  He just can't help himself from mocking Gywneth Paltrow's heartbroken starlet for sleeping with him. He barely acknowledges anybody's wants and needs above his own, although does seem to have some kind of heavily submerged set of core values. He punches his pregnant lover's husband, saying "shame on you" and seems to mean it. I think he really does seem to see some talent in Dion and root for him.

The only weakness of the film is that Josh Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein decide to give Marty a transformative and perhaps even redemptive moment at the end of the movie.  I think I might have preferred if they had kept him as he was, but I cannot deny that I had an amazing time watching the film nonetheless.  This is full speed ahead, full commitment film-making.  Josh Safdie and Marty Mauser are as one. 

MARTY SUPREME is rated R and has a running time of 150 minutes. It will be released on Christmas Day in the USA and Boxing Day in the UK.

IRON MAN 3

I had a great time watching IRON MAN 3. What I love about the movie is that after the Whedony alien-esque craziness of AVENGERS ASSEMBLE, we get a much more intimate, personal film, in which a handful of key relationships underpin the story. I mean, the evil villain has a personal motivation.

All of this is down to writer-director Shane Black, the guy who wrote the Lethal Weapon movies and trademarked his brand of authentic buddy movie action comedy. He hasn't directed anything since his cult comedy-noir KISS KISS BANG BANG., which not unco-incidentally also starred Robert Downey Junior aka Tony Stark aka Iron Man. Taking over from the franchise's original director, Jon Favreau, Black makes the story smaller, funnier, less action dependent (although there are still some exceptionally good set pieces) and more anchored in the performances. The result is a movie that has some of the psychological depth of Christopher Nolan's Batman with none of its turgid self-congratulation. 

So, down to business. The movie picks up where AVENGERS ASSEMBLE left off. Tony Stark has saved New York from aliens, but he's suffering from PTSD and a girlfriend (Gwyneth Paltrow) seriously unimpressed by his withdrawal into tinkering with his Iron Man suits. Meanwhile, the US is apparently being threatened by a nasty Bin Laden like terrorist (Ben Kingsley) although the fact that the suicide bombers can regenerate Terminator style, hints at the involvement of an Evil Scientist (Guy Pearce). 

So far, so predictable. Where the movie gets interesting is when it undermines the importance of the suit. Still a prototype, it repeatedly malfunctions at key moments, leaving Stark to fall back on his core skills: making cool simple stuff. It's in this middle section that the movie's at its best: as Stark goes all McGyver aided by a smart kid with whose he has real chemistry.

In fact, the movie can be seen as something of a buddy film in three parts. First, Stark has good banter with his Knight Rider style posh English computer cum valet, Jarvis (Paul Bettany). Then he meets his emotional and verbal match in the cute kid. And finally we some brilliant wisecracking with Don Cheadle's Iron Patriot.

I guess the overriding theme of the flick is that suits are cool but that having a few good mates is better. That, and that science starts out pure but ends up weaponised. The latter has been heavily done already in this franchise. The former is a refreshing change. And despite the epilogue, I certainly hope we see more. 

IRON MAN 3 is on release in the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Belgium, Finland, France, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Taiwan, Argentina, Bolivia, Bosnia, Chile, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Peru, Portugal, Macedonia, Singapore, South Korea, Brazil, Bulgaria, Estonia, India, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Romania, Spain and Vietnam. It opens next week in Germany, South Africa, Thailand, Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Ukraine and the USA. It opens on May 9th in Poland.

IRON MAN 3 is rated PG 13 in the USA and the running time is 130 minutes.

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE - that ole Whedon magic!

Joss Whedon's Avengers Assemble is about as good as it gets for a superhero blockbuster movie.  The action set pieces are thrilling; the emotional stakes are high; and in Robert Downey Junior, Whedon has found the perfect avatar for his trademark pop-culture savvy wit.  The movie itself is the logical culmination of all those marvel adaptations we've seen in recent years, from the less successful (Hulks inter alia) to the commercially successful (Jon Favreau's Iron Man) to the hammy (Thor) to the more emotionally satisfying (Captain America.) 

In this flick, the MacGuffin is the tesseract: a blue cube that apparently unleashes untold energy that can be used for good or ill.  When Thor's resentful brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) comes to earth, wanting to use the tesseract to bring in an alien army, it's up to Samuel L Jackson's slippery government agent to unite the superheroes and save the world.   

Whedon does a masterful job of handling a wide cast of characters, of whom the audiences have different levels of familiarity.  He uses a prologue to set up Loki's theft of the MacGuffin then quickly moves to a couple of scenes that set up the new characters of the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansen)  and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and re-establish Dr Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo).  From there we're into the meat of the story:  whether the Avengers can put aside their personality differences and learn to work together. This take us through spectacular action set pieces in a flying aircraft carrier/ supherhero lair and an alien obliteration of midtown Manhattan. 

For me, the brilliance of Whedon isn't just the witty dialogue, although that sure goes a long way to lighten up a movie that's basically about macho blokes beating each other up.  His genius is that he can crack jokes while simultaneously giving characters emotional doth and complexity in a few short scenes.  This is particularly true of the way in which he depicts Bruce Banner as a deeply sympathetic, borderline suicidal genius struggling with "the other man".  What's amazing is that Whedon/Ruffalo's Banner is simultaneously the most emotionally interesting and realistic character but also the one that generates the biggest belly laughs. His scenes in the final battle where he thumps Thor and throws Loki around like so much confetti are absolute crowd-pleasers. 

And that brings me to the final reason why Whedon has made the best summer blockbuster I've seen in a long time: he knows how to direct action!  Too many modern films have action sequences so frenetic that it's hard for the viewer to keep pace with the choreography of what's actually happening.  I'd blame Michael Bay, but I think among the better quality filmmakers, the desire to imitate Paul Greengrass' Bourne films is also to blame.  Whedon gives us all the loud bangs and crashes but never, never, let's us lose sit of the bugger picture. He keeps us engaged at every turn. And that's what makes AVENGERS ASSEMBLE a superhero movie with wit, heart and exhilarating action.  I can't wait for the next installment. 

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE AKA THE AVENGERS is on global release. The running time is 143 minutes. The US rating is PG-13 but parents be warned: there's a sneaky quim joke!

Guest review by George Ghon - CONTAGION

A ghastly virus breaks out. It kills so fast that any hope to find a suitable remedy in time becomes elusive. A father, whose wife had died, tries to protect his daughter from the evil disease (Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Anna Jacoby-Heron respectively). The government official (Laurence Fishburne) with field experience shows his toughness and rigor to handle the nightmarish situation according to his professional standards. He cooperates with the World Health Organization, which in turn sends a cute epidemy specialist (Marion Cotillard) to analyse the trajectory of the virus and determine where it had come from, ending up on site in Hong Kong. The scientist in the laboratory (Jennifer Ehle) does what she can and all along the viewer waits for an unexpected turn in the plot. 

Is a James Bond villain behind all this? Does the CIA have secret intelligence? Can it be that a Swiss pharmaceuticals CEO has gone insane under the current economic pressure and a little experiment to boost the sales for Aspirin went way out of control? 

No, nothing, the story just continues and the source of the disease is backtracked to an obscure bat population in the Asian jungle. The whole trick box of elaborate Hollywood dramaturgy remains closed, giving preference to a Realistic account of a current-day bio-catastrophe. There is no evil scheme to be discovered. The guys in power are working hard, doing their job as best as they can. The alternative souls (Jude Law as Frisco-based wannabe journalist) are as corrupt and prone to sell their conscience to greedy hedge fund managers as every other human being could possibly be. And even the offices of high profile government organisations, and with them their functionaries, are suspiciously unattractive.

Steven Soderbergh, who wants to see this? Hollywood is the dream factory, not the documentary Mecca! It is easy to dismiss this film as unsuccessful try to wrap an action plot into some layers of the Real. Boring! On the other hand, do we need to see another hyper-stylized, action packed, fast cut, over-dramatized doomsday film? Isn’t Steven Soderbergh here discovering an interesting gap that uses all the tools Hollywood has on display, but does not heighten them to a flasher à la Michael Bay? 

The film is purely led by the prosaic unfolding of a story, which could happen any day, without any conspiracy scheming that goes unnoticed by the public. The lead characters are not immortal (Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise, watch out for Mr. Soderbergh’s casting director, he might eventually get you), nor are they overly beautified (ok, Gwyneth Paltrow looks sexy in a party scene, but no one else would show her deliberately with reddened skin irritations on the neck, I guess) or morally beyond (the people having privileged access to the vaccine that is eventually found gladly take it, without making too much fuss about their ius primae seri). Contagion doesn’t bother too much with aesthetic conventions or viewer’s expectations. It just tells it how it is. Hollywood for the quotidian.

CONTAGION played Venice 2011 and opened in September in Hong Kong, Singapore, Italy and the US. It opened in Hungary on October 13th; and in Finland, Ireland, Poland, Sweden and the UK on October 21st; in Norway on October 28th. It opens in Belgium and France on November 9th; in Spain on November 29th; in Australia on December 3rd and in Germany on December 24th.

SYLVIA - dirge

The first film I ever watched at the London Film Fest started a trend of disappointing opening and closing night galas - the programming dictated by commercial interests rather than artistic merit. The movie was Christine Jeffs' dismal biopic of Sylvia Plath: acclaimed poet; wife of the adulterous Ted Hughes; mother to two small children; and suicide. And if you think I'm being reductive, then that is exactly what this movie does: it reduces Plath and Hughes' relationship to a daytime TV melodrama. Oh how pretty tony, young Sylvia (Gwyneth Paltrow) looks! See how her hair shines! See how that devilishly handsome Ted Hughes gets tired of her and betrays her! See how she is martyred in a dismal British flat in dismal post-war London! Oh, how Paltrow emotes inner pain! The whole thing was utterly dull and unconvincing. The fault, however, does not lie with the actors, nor with the score, cinematography or any other matter of execution. It lies in the movie's conception as a touching homage to Sylvia rather than a genuinely engaged, insightful analysis of what was, by all accounts, a passionate marriage and a painful suicide that cruelly left behind small children. The resulting film simultaneously caused offence to Plath's family for daring to be made at all - but causes offence to its viewers by refusing to actually delve into the emotional torment at its heart. It is the same emotional evation that frustrated me in Christine Jeffs' new film, SUNSHINE CLEANING - another film that deals with quite dark, depressing subject matter and yet handles it with all the willingness to truly engage of a rom-com (but without the benefit of actual laughs).

SYLVIA played London 2003 and opened in 2003 and 2004. It is available on DVD.

TWO LOVERS - whiny people do stupid things

On an objective level I can see that James Gray has crafted an impressive relationship drama in TWO LOVERS. The slippery title speaks to a simplicity of purpose that the characters in this film are too emotionally immature to attain. Joaquin Phoenix plays Leonard, a severely depressed thirty-something with an infantile sense of humour who still lives with his parents in their mummified apartment in Little Odessa. Leonard mumbles incoherently about lost love and has no direction. Despite all this, he attracts the love of Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) - a level-headed family friend who seems to want to mother him more than marry him. Leonard carries on a relationship with Sandra, maybe to please his folks, maybe just because it's easy, maybe because on one level he does care for her. But at the same time, he's fascinating by the blonde beauty living upstairs - a similarly emotionally infantile thirty-something called Michelle played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Michelle offers everything Sandra doesn't: a glimpse into life in the City away from the suburbs - a sense of adventure. She's also someone who is such an emotional wreck that for once Leonard can be the emotional support, rather than the parasite. For Michelle, Leonard is an enabler. Someone who listens to her whine about her self-created crises and fuels her fantasies of getting away and thinking things through.

These three people are all in relationships that are ultimately delusional and unsustainable. I am sure that to many people this is what makes for a compelling, tragic, authentic drama. I partly agree. The relationship between Sandra and Leonard was fascinating. But I have to say that I found the relationship between Michelle and Leonard utterly unsatisfying. They had no chemistry - Michelle seemed less interesting that whiny (maybe intentional?) and Paltrow mis-cast as an allurement (even if the part was written for her.) Matters weren't helped by the inclusion of one of the most unintentionally funny sex scenes I've seen in a long time.

Like I said, objectively speaking, I can see that this is an impressive film. The tone is beautifully weary, the cinematography impressive, the dull grey-blue colouring all-pervasive. I like the focus on every-day details of life in Little Odessa and the fact that a film dares to deal with the reality of relationships rather than rom-com fantasies. Still, for all that, I was rather bored throughout the movie and rather relieved when it was over.

TWO LOVERS played Cannes and London 2007 and was released in France and Belgium last year. It was released earlier this year in the US and is currently on release in Greece, the Netherlands, Italy and the UK. It opens next week in the Czech Republic, and on May 21st in Russia. It opens in Argentina on September 17th.

THE GOOD NIGHT veers off track

THE GOOD NIGHT is a rather straightforward movie about lucid dreaming and comes off as indebted, but deeply inferior, to THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP. Martin Freeman (THE OFFICE) plays a faded Britpop star frustrated with his new career writing derivative commercial music. He's also frustrated with his deeply irritating girlfriend (Gwyneth Paltrow) and fantasises about a beautiful woman played by Penelope Cruz. Mocked by his amoral best friend (Simon Pegg), our hero turns to a variety of new-age kooks for techniques to sustain and even control his dreams. Finally, he actually meets a girl who looks just like the object of his fantasies.

The movie has some little comedic gems - Simon Pegg is on brilliant form and Britpop legend Jarvis Cocker is unnervingly convincing as a talking-head. But overall, THE GOOD NIGHT is a mess. The look of the film is bizarre - it's meant to be set in New York but is transparently set in London. The acting is mixed, with Danny de Vito and Michael Gambon wasted, and apparently unmotivated, in smaller roles. But most of all the script, from writer-director Jake Paltrow, veers off track. The movie starts of a romantic-comedy with an odd-ball streak, but ends up feeling like an Almodovar rip-off. Paltrow simply doesn't have the stones to handle the severe material he introduces.

THE GOOD NIGHT played Sundance 2007 and went on release in Russia, Greece, the USA and Israel in 2007. It was relased in 2008 in the UK and South Korea and is now available on DVD.

IRON MAN was okay, but it could've been so much more

Tony Stark is a super-rich, super-clever, super-funny, super-handsome forty-something who just happens to enjoy selling the US Army cool weapons. After seeing those weapons turned on himself in Afghanistan (our enemy du jour), Stark decides to repudiate the arms trade and make the world a better place by......er....creating a weapon-laden flying suit and blowing up terrorists and stockpiles of his old weapons. Stark's epiphany is manifested in his personal life too. Instead of being a sleazy womaniser, he's going to mack onto his secretary, Pepper Potts, who is ludicrously shy and goofy given that she's a thirty-something.

All this makes IRON MAN's politics a better disguised version of the violent, radical utopianism at the heart of NEVER BACK DOWN. The message seems to be that arms dealers are evil when they sell weapons to terrorists who want to reshape the world according to their personal vision. BUT IRON MAN is GOOD when he acts according to his vision of justice - when he feels "in his heart" that blowing shit up and leaving bad guys to vigilante justice is good. Frankly, I've had enough of people blowing shit up because of "what's in their heart" rather than what's in the intelligence transcripts.

Am I taking this all too seriously? Well, I'd argue that this movie asks the audience for serious consideration. After all, it follows the graphic novels in ret-conning Tony Stark's story for the post 9-11 era. It positively winces as it sits on the fence of touchy-feely liberalism and patriotism that verges on jingoism. To that extent, this film is a perfect expression of the current American political divide.

So much for the flimsy politics, how about the actual entertainment? Jon Favreau has created a common or garden superhero summer blockbuster. The CGI special effects are suitably big and noisy. There's lots of product placement for fast cars and mobile phones. Robert Downey Junior is 100% fun to watch as Tony Stark and I wasn't bored.

On the other hand, I'm not particularly excited about the inevitable sequel. First off, Favreau shows none of psychological insight of Christopher Nolan in BATMAN BEGINS. There's nothing in his direction or script choices that make me think he's going to handle Tony Stark's descent into alcoholism sensitively. Second, I hate the way the script-writers short-changed pretty much every character bar Stark. Where's the flirting between Potts and Happy Hogan? And where was the substance to Stark's enemy, Obadiah Stone? Poor old Jeff Bridges was left to chew up the scenery. There was none of the conflicted psychology or back story we got in the comics. His motivations are thin - simply that "greed is good". Well, frankly, a super-hero needs a worthy opponent. Similarly, Terrence Howard is given absolutely nothing to do as Stark's best friend Colonel Jim Rhodes and there's no inkling that he'll become a character who'll question the Iron Man's vigilante actions and eventually don the suit.....

Basically, I'm annoyed. I love IRON MAN. This was one of the films I was most looking forward to this summer. Favreau's movie isn't a disaster. It's fun as far as it goes. But it could've been so much more.

IRON MAN is on release in Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, the UK, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Malaysia, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Panama, the Philippines, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, Venezuela, Australia, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Kuwait, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, South Africa, Sweden, the UAE, Canada, India, Pakistan and Turkey. It goes on release in Japan on September 20th.

Crimes Against Cinema 3: THE GOOD NIGHT

Debutant writer-director Jake Paltrow pisses on the memory of the Ealing Comedies from a great height with his alleged rom-com, THE GOOD NIGHT. Paltrow audaciously chews up great movies like VANILLA SKY and THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP and spits out an uneven, mis-judged movie filled with insufficiently drawn characters. Martin Freeman of THE OFFICE fame does his usual schtick as a disenchanted middle-aged sell out. In this instance, he's bored by his long-time squeeze (Gwyneth Paltrow) and fantasising about a perfect women in his dreams (Penelope Cruz.) Before you get all excited, the movie takes a left turn at WEIRD SCIENCE and ends up in dulls-ville. Freeman meets the women who inspired his sub-conscious fantasies and, guess what, she's not so perfect in reality. Gee whiz, who knew?! And as for Simon Pegg's supporting role, after RUN FATBOY RUN and BIG NOTHING, he needs to go and stand in the corner and think very carefully about what he's done.

THE GOOD NIGHT played Sundance 2007 and opened in Russia, Greece, the US and Israel in 2007. It is currently on release in the UK and opens next weekend in South Korea.

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS - incoherent

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS is a star-packed adaptation of a best-selling memoir that is now the subject of a lawsuit. Unsurprising, given that the author, Augusten Burroughs, depicts his adoptive family as a bunch of crazies (technical term) stretching the viewer's credulity. Dumped by his egocentric, failed poet mother, Augusten moves into the criminally filthy, decrepit Finch household in the mid-1970s. There follows many a bizarre-O scene involving Papa Finch (unlicensed, tablet-dispensing, tax-owing Psychologist - Brian Cox); Mama Finch (eats pet food); Hope Finch (high-strung, eats dead cat - Gwyneth Paltrow); Natalie Finch (raped as kid, rebel - Evan Rachel Wood); Bookman (schizo, gay, paedophile - Joe Fiennes); kid who poops under the Christmas tree.......Sadly, the director, Ryan Murphy never manages to fashion a coherent whole from this gallery of grotesques. Worse still, he never makes us care. Final result: dull, dull, dull, despite a star-turn from the ever-brilliant Annette Bening as the kid's mum.

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS was released in the US last October, in Brazil in November and in Germany, Norway and Spain in January. It is currently on release in Singapore and the UK and goes on release in Italy on the 16th and in Argentina and Israel on the 22nd. It opens in Sweden on March 16th, France on March 21st, Belgium on March 28th and Australia on March 29th.

INFAMOUS - Capote as genuinely tragic

Another year, another film about Truman Capote which features strong performances but is flawed nonetheless.

The story is the same. Truman Capote is a famous author who mingles with ladies who lunch in New York, leading a pampered existence. One day he reads about a well-respected farming family that has been brutally murdered in its home in rural Kansas. Capote journeys there to write a magazine article on how the murders have affected the town but soon realises he has enough material for a new kind of book - a non-fiction novel. In order to flesh out the novel, he partially feigns friendship with one of the murderers - Perry Smith. The relationship has a slim core of genuine empathy but Capote exploits Perry. And by the end, he has sold his soul. Capote knows he can only publish his perfect novel when his friend hangs for murder. Capote didn't write anything substantial again.

The films, however, are rather different. In last year's CAPOTE, Truman is portrayed as chillingly calculated. He is mean to his best friend, Nell (Harper) Lee and resentful of her success with To Kill a Mockingbird. He shamelessly manipulates Perry Smith. I found that movie over-long though beautifully shot and acted. Most of all, I resented the fact that Perry was again exploited - a mere mirror to reflect back the emptiness of Capote.

By contrast, this new movie, INFAMOUS, is not well-shot. It's not well put-together. I hate the device of having big-name actors playing big-name socialites. Sigourney Weaver, Isabella Rosselini, Hope Davis, Juliet Stevenson, Peter Bogdanovich and Gwyneth Paltrow look like they are participating in a cheap version of STARS IN THEIR EYES. It's even worse that instead of simply telling the story and allowing us to infer the message, the director has these famous people make like they are in a documentary, talking to the camera about Truman in front of a New York cardboard backdrop.

The bizarre thing is that while I find the purely technical aspects of cinema were better used in CAPOTE, INFAMOUS is, to my mind, the better film. For for the first time we see something of Perry Smith, played with the right mix of strength and vulnerability by Daniel Craig. The movie does not see him as merely a person to throw-up the ruthless ambition of Capote. And this touches on the real strength of the film - which is the nuanced performance of each lead actor.

Sandra Bullock's Harper Lee is a revelation and proves that Bullock is a far better actress than the roles she takes on. And Toby Jones is a fabulous Capote. He captures Capote's love of ease and his own eccentricities - his spitefulness and love of gossip. But in sharp contrast to CAPOTE, Jones' Capote is a man with a heart and a soul. He really does fall for Perry Smith and at once sees the unbearable contradictions this has thrust upon him. There is a tremendous scene after Capote and Smith have kissed where Capote goes back to his hotel room and looks in the mirror. He is giddy with joy at first. But then, without uttering a word, you see his face crumple. Because he can foresee the cruel dilemma facing him - to love a man and yet need that man to die because you cannot live without writing. In other words, instead of Philip Seymour Hoffman's monster, Toby Jones gives up a genuinely tragic figure.

INFAMOUS played Venice, Toronto and London 2006. It opened in the US earlier this month and opens in he UK on January 19th 2007.

Early review of PROOF – When formulae fail

You can just see the Weinstein boys and their monkeys at Miramax huddled round an excel file plugging in known variables: Oscar-nominated director (John Madden), check; Oscar-winning actress (Gwyneth Paltrow), check; Oscar-winning actor (Anthony Hopkins), check; cool Sundance-award-winning screenwriter (Rebecca Miller), check; plot point similarity to multi-Oscar winning movie, (“A beautiful mind”), check. With the tried and tested formula for a high-grossing award-winning movie in place, what can go wrong?!

Nearly everything. This is a movie based on a play by David Auburn, and reunites director John Madden and actress Gwyneth Paltrow from their recent success on the West End stage and in “Shakespeare in Love”. Paltrow is Catherine, a Math whiz from Chicago who gives up her own grad-work to care for her mentally-ill father, Robert. Robert, played by Anthony Hopkins (best-known as Hannibal Lecter), was a genius who transformed numerous fields of Mathematics in his youth. When Robert dies, his former student, Hal, played by Jake Gyllenhaal (“Donnie Darko”) discovers a ground-breaking new proof among his papers. The second half of the movie hinges on whether Robert or Catherine wrote it.

First off, there is a lot of stuff that, if not “right”, is “not wrong” with PROOF. The acting, editing, photography, set design etc. are all workman-like and the script is funny in unexpected places and touching where it should be. Better still, there is not that obvious tugging of the heart strings that you get with all sentimental Ron Howard movies, notably “A beautiful mind” and “Cinderella Man”.

But I found it very had to care either way who wrote the proof, or to empathise with Catherine’s fear that she, too, is going mad. I think the problem is one of authenticity. In films like “A beautiful mind” and Hustle and Flow it is essential that we believe that the protagonist could have authored the product around which the plot turns, and that we believe that the product is of sufficiently high quality to warrant the hoop-la. So, in “A beautiful mind” we have a nice little explanation of, at a very simple level, Nash equilibria, and we see their importance to a variety of different fields. In a very different film, Hustle and Flow, we hear D-Jay write and perform rap songs and these songs are really really good. We believe that he could have a career as a recording artist. The problem here is that we do not really buy into the idea that either Hopkins or Paltrow are gifted mathematicians, or have a sense of Hopkins greatness. And without that, it all seems like so much shouting about not much in particular.

PROOF was released in September in the US and opens on 24th February 2006 in the UK.

THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS - the perfect tragicomedy

With the recent release of the deeply disappointing Wes Anderson movie, THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU, I am taking this opportunity to re-examine Anderson’s earlier movies, starting with what I consider to be the best of all, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS. As with THE LIFE AQUATIC, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS is a movie full of eccentric, larger-than-life characters living in a richly-imagined world one degree more whacky than our own. Whether or not you like this film will depend on how far you buy into, and are charmed by, this tragi-comic heightened reality. For my part, I found the family, and therefore the film, utterly winning.

The family is headed by a long absent father named Royal Tenenbaum. He is played by Gene Hackman, who looks like he is having a whale of a time on screen for the first time in years. Royal is a corrupt lawyer who has been ostracised by his family for the past decade, but is seeking reconciliation by any means necessary. In this, he is aided and abetted by his sidekicks, Pagoda and Dusty, the bell-hop at the seedy hotel he has made his home - a classic understated and hilarious cameo performance by Seymour Cassel. In his absence, the family has been headed by Royal’s wife, Etheline, played by Angelica Huston. Etheline is written as a wonderful mother, ever-concerned with her children’s welfare; decent but not credulous. She is seeing an accountant played by Danny Glover - another good, earnest man. The love scenes between the two combine sweetness and comedy in a manner that recent British mockumentary, CONFETTI, entirely failed to pull off. Meanwhile, the children are all having emotional breakdowns. Richie (Luke Wilson) is a failed tennis pro in love with an unattainable woman; Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) is in a loveless marriage and has failed to live up to her early promise as a writer; Chas (Ben Stiller) is in mourning for his wife and is paranoid about the safety of his twin sons, Uzi and Ari. In the mix we also have Ritchie’s oleaginous childhood friend Eli Cash (Owen Wilson), a wildly popular but talentless writer with a drug problem who has long wanted to be a Tenenbaum, and Bill Murray as Margot’s husband. Will it come as any surprise to regular filmgoers to discover that Bill Murray’s character is a melancholy and world-weary middle-aged man?

As can be seen from these short character descriptions, the Royal Tenenbaums is about a bunch of troubled people, who are drawn back to the family in search of solace – whether or not they were part of the family in the first place. As each character comes to terms with awkward reality, the tone of the movie alternates between tragedy and comedy with such ease as to make this a master-class for screen-writers. Both the tragic and comic scenes are elevated to perfect pitch and the film puts, to my mind, not a foot wrong. Of course, as with all Wes Anderson movies, the production design and sound-track are also out-standing. The attention to detail is staggering - from whimsically designed wallpaper, to the book covers of the novels that the characters write, to the brand of beaten-up old taxis that roam the streets of this re-imagined New York. Meanwhile, the sound-track features mournful songs from Nico, Dylan, Elliott Smith, The Stones, Nick Drake and Lou Reed. However, unlike THE LIFE AQUATIC, the rich design never seems self-indulgent. Where LIFE AQUATIC dragged, so that all the audience had to do was look at the beautiful sets, the foreground action of TENENBAUMS always has us rapt. The cute incidental background details are just that. It is this delicate balance between fascinating foreground action and the hints of a fully developed world behind it that makes TENENBAUMS one of my favourite movies.

THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS is out on DVD.