THE BLING RING

So here's my ten minute review of Sofia Coppola's new film, THE BLING RING, based on the true story as covered in Vanity Fair magazine.  It's a really scary, zeitgeisty flick about young rich kids so badly parented and so obsessed with reality TV and celebrity that they aspire to live that lifestyle, even if means casually robbing celebrity houses to get the labels.  Sofia Coppola's take on the story is straightforward and leaves us to make our own judgement about both the kids, their parents and our own complicity in turning them into pop culture phenomena. It's a less auteur film than SOMEWHERE but is visually superb and features a great performance from Emma Watson.

THE BLING RING has a running time of 90 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

THE BLING RING played Cannes 2013 and opened in June in the USA, Belgium, France, Australia, Sweden, Croatia, Israel, Canada, Poland, Bosnia, Hungary, Russia, Finland and Lithuania. It opened earlier this month in the Philippines, Kuwait, the UK and Ireland. It opens on July 12th in Denmark and India, on July 19th in Macedonia and Estonia, on July 26th in Mexico. The movie opens on August 1st in Argentina, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Brazil; on August 8th in Australia and Portugal; on August 16th in Germany and Romania; on September 6th in Norway; on September 12th in Peru and on September 19th in Italy.

Download the MP3 here.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 6 - RESTLESS

Gus Van Sant seems to alternate between directing genuinely art-house cinema often with an experimental edge and directing more mainstream fare.  It has to be said that RESTLESS is very much in the latter camp, and may well be his most banal film since FINDING FORRESTER.  Based on a debut feature film script by playwright Jason Lew, the movie feels like a sort of watered down romance with pretensions to the style and feel of HAROLD & MAUDE or even second-rate Wes Anderson (himself already derivative of H&M). You can't start a film with a lead character obsessively crashing funerals while wearing a three-piece suit and end the film to the sound of Nico without raising eyebrows.

If you set aside all that stylistic pilfering what do you get? A wannabe cute romance between two quirky teenagers: Mia Wasikowska's terminally ill Annabel and Henry Hopper's morbid, mournful Enoch.  They share a dark sense of humour, they don't quite fit into the world, and run around being kooky. We're meant to care. And then she dies. I just couldn't get into the film at all. I wanted the subversive comedy that the opening references to funerals implied, but which the movie didn't deliver aside from one very funny staged death scene.  I wanted the film to make more of it's one genuinely new and good idea - Enoch's imaginary friend, the kamikaze pilot Hiroshi (Ryo).  I wanted the movie to tackle the death from cancer with the honesty of Will Reiser's 50/50 but to no avail. I wanted to care, but just plain didn't.  I mean, there's something wrong with a movie when you care more about the plight of the hero's imaginary friend than the hero himself.  I think the problem here is the script, which once you strip it off its affectations, is pretty banal. The direction, photography and lead performances are just fine. Forgettable, derivative, blah.

RESTLESS opened earlier this year in Egypt, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Italy, Argentina and France. It played Cannes, Toronto and London.  It is currently on release in German, Greece, Russia and Spain and opens on October 21st in Finland and the UK. It opens in Portugal on November 10th; in Sweden on November 25th; in Hong Kong on December 1st and in Japan on December 23rd.

SOMEWHERE - I got you under my skin

I thought I was going to hate SOMEWHERE. In fact, I almost wanted to hate it. I had even crafted the first line of this review. "It must be possible to create a movie about boredom and alienation that is not itself boring and alienating." And as the curtain lifted on Sofia Coppola's latest movie, I thought I was going to have to walk out. For here we had a guy driving round a dirt track in a Ferrari - driving fast, going nowhere, static framing, not even choosing to show the whole circuit in the frame - and I thought "Oh god, this is some pretty heavy-handed metaphor we're trading in here." The credits came up and we switched to an interior scene at the infamous Hollywood hotel, the Château Marmont. Stephen Dorff is Johnny Marco - Hollywood star and good-time boy - so drunk he falls over and injures his wrist - recuperating in his bedroom with two blonde twins pole dancing for him in a manner so unerotic as to be ridiculous. I thought - here we go: poor little rich movie star, all alone in the Chateau Marmont, bored, alienated, self-hating, blah blah blah.

Having watched the entire movie, I can't disagree with its critics. This is yet another Sofia Coppola movie in which we see static framed, dialogue-free shots of beautiful people hating their beautiful lives. There is a deep-set narcissism here - both in terms of the narcissism of the characters and Coppola's assumption that we, The Ordinaries, give a rat's ass. There's also something rather snide in her treatment of the people who enable the Stars. Public relations people, agents, producers and TV stars are all depicted as basically sycophantic, fake morons. Even worse than that, SOMEWHERE could be seen as a deeply misogynistic film. Every woman Johnny meets throws herself at him, and even when they hate him (nasty text messages, "what the fuck?" meetings in hotel lobbies) they still respond to his summons. Even his 11 year old daughter Cleo, brilliantly portrayed by Elle Fanning, loves him, mothers him, raises an eyebrow but not a fuss when his one-night stand shows up at breakfast. She'll still love him even after he off-loads her at camp.

This movie has technical faults too. No film-maker should dare to quote from Fellini's masterpiece of ennui, LA DOLCE VITA unless they are willing to make the stakes as high (death, suicide, alcoholism) as Fellini did. But Coppola does it twice - first in a press conference where the questions are asinine, second in a pivotal scene near the end where Johnny's confession to Cleo is drowned out by the sound of a helicopter. Worst of all, I think the movie is simply ten minutes too long. I bought into all of it except the final character development. Without spoiling the ending, is it really credible that we should see such action from a person who has up until now been entirely passive?

Still, for all its narcissism and misogyny, SOMEWHERE really did get under my skin. Why? Because I genuinely enjoyed watching the relationship between Johnny and Cleo and Johnny's best friend Sam (Chris Pontius). There is something rather touching in the way in which a guy who is basically a waster can still be a loving father, at least when his daughter is within his sight. I also like the symmetry of actions e.g. when Cleo is with Johnny she lovingly cooks for him, then when he's on his own he makes a cak-handed attempted to cook for himself. This is a more eloquent portrayal of a lonely soul than a histrionic emotional breakdown would've been. I also got into the static framing and long takes of not much happening. It was relaxing and contemplative and gave me room to consider what was going in the relationships on screen. So, overall, I'd say that I really liked SOMEWHERE. It's not flawless, but it did affect me, and it affected me more than the movie most critics seem to prefer, the thematically similar but stylistically more showy LOST IN TRANSLATION.

SOMEWHERE played Venice 2010 where it won the Golden Lion, beating BLACK SWAN, and London 2010. It opened earlier this year in Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Kazakhstan and Russia. It is currently on release in the UK and the US. It opens later this month in Australia, Norway, Finland and Malaysia. It opens in France, Estonia and Brazil in January and in the Czech Republic on February 10th. It opens on April 2nd in Japan.

Overlooked DVD of the month - GREENBERG

Writer-director Noah Baumbach makes excruciatingly well-observed films about financially privileged, neurotic, unsympathetic middle-aged Americans. When his films work, they are masterpieces of razor-sharp dialogue and uncomfortable silences and fleeting moments of sympathy for the fundamentally unsympathetic. His latest film, GREENBERG, features a classic Baumbach character, brilliantly played by Ben Stiller. Roger Greenberg is the definition of the bi-coastal American mid-life crisis. He's a forty-something, neurotic failed pop star turned carpenter who spends his life feeling sorry for himself, using recreational drugs, hitting on younger women and basically being self-indulgent and whiny. He is a walking embarrassment - the Uncle who won't grow up - the brother who won't get himself together - the friend who won't admit to his failures. 

Greenberg comes to LA to house-sit his brother's house and, taking the family's cue, casually abuses the services of their au pair/social secretary/general all round skivvy Florence (Greta Gerwig). The interaction between the passive-aggressive Greenberg and the vulnerable, low-self-esteem Florence is fascinating. She is sympathetic but hopeless. Greenberg is simultaneously repelled by her openness, and inflated by the fact that he has finally found someone in such dire circumstances that even a loser like him can help her. (I've been rewatching the classic 1981 BRIDESHEAD REVISITED recently, and as far apart as these things are, I thought I recognised something of the relationship of Sebastian Flyte and Kurt in Greenberg's attraction to finally being of use.)

I liked GREENBERG. Or maybe it's a film that you don't so much like, or enjoy, but see as a reflection of people you know, and admire for its honesty in depicting a certain slice of life. Greenberg is a profoundly unsympathetic character, but I did care about his journey and find some satisfaction, if not redemption, in the final scenes of the movie. GREENBERG isn't as bitterly funny as THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, nor does it have as interesting a cast of characters. GREENBERG feels more like a character study - a closely drawn, almost claustrophobic, portrait of a man in a crisis. It felt real, and painful and sometimes infuriating. But I was happy to have spent time with its characters and bought into the relationships and narrative arc.

Baumbach is, like Nicole Holofcener, the great chronicler of our decadent, pampered lives. Of rich people who feel guilty for being rich, but want all that being rich gives them. Of emotionally unstable people self-sabotaging. Of people in their thirties and forties who refuse to grow up and take responsibility. Of emotional narcissism and the difficulty of connection. I am grateful that there is room for his kind of cinema, even if it is, by definition, a painful watch.

GREENBERG played Berlin 2010 and opened earlier this year. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

Random DVD Round-Up - WHATEVER WORKS

WHATEVER WORKS is Woody Allen decoupage. You watch a bunch of his film and cut out and assemble the familiar characters and themes. First, you take a Woody Allen cipher, played in his younger days by Allen, and now by Larry "Curb Your Enthusiasm" David. Second, you have that character be cynical about life, and to talk about his cynicism incessantly to his friends, random strangers and, breaking the fourth wall, to the audience. Third, you have the Allen character meet and, rather improbably, have a sexual relationship with, a nubile young girl. It started with Mariel Hemingway in MANHATTAN but we now get a surprisingly charismatic and fascinating Evan Rachel Wood. Fourth, you have all the characters fall in and out of love and talk about charmingly in a series of rather lovely autumnal New York scenes. Finally, you have the cynical old know-it-all realise that the young flibbertigibbet was really on to something when she said, "you gotta have a little faith in people". The End. The only real difference in WHATEVER WORKS is that the old lech and the young idiot actually get married in an implausible turn of events that seems like a desperate plea for understanding by a writer-director who's marriage to his much younger adopted daughter has been ill-received.

Larry David is just about watchable even when he's trying to shoe-horn his schtick into the Woody Allen straitjacket. As I said, Evan Rachel Wood acts just about everyone off the screen. Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Junior are just fine as the parents who come to get their daughter back, but end up being transformed by the magical mystery powers of New York. Henry Cavill is rather flat and anonymous as the younger man. All's well that end's well, I suppose, but the whole film feels rather warmed over and re-hashed - like a Muzack cover of a Greatest Hit.

Where's the provocation of CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS? Where's the genuine heartbreak of ANNIE HALL? Where's the fizzy subversion of VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA?

Eventual tags: woody allen, comedy, evan rachel wood, larry david, harris savides, patricia clarkson, henry cavill, ed begley jr, conleth hill, michael mckean

WHATEVER WORKS was released earlier this year in the USA, Canada, France, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Australia, Hong Kong, and Finland. It is currently on release in Brazil and Estonia. It opens on November 27th in Iceland. It opens in Germany on December 3rd and in Russia on December 31st. It does not have a UK release date but is available on Region 1 DVD.

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING - a step back from SQUID

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING is a film about a selfish, hateful novelist who arrives at her sister's house and proceeds to hurt everyone in her path, not least her own son. She is a rather savage figure, and despite the fact that writer/director Noah Baumbach creates a realistic, fully-fleshed portrait, I found it hard to have any empathy for her or to be interested in what she did. Some way through the film, another callous author (Ciaran Hinds) brutally exposes Margot (Nicole Kidman) at a public reading. I thought this might have been cathartic. Up until that point, I would have happily slapped Margot myself, so presumably I would have enjoyed seeing her skewered? But I felt neither happiness at, nor sympathy for, her downfall. Just mild irritation that I had to witness yet another selfish, hateful novelist inflicting pain on others.

So what is there to hold our interest in this film? Jennifer Jason-Leigh gives a wonderful performance as Margot's kind-hearted but weak-willed younger sister, Pauline. Despite all the punishment Margot deals her, Pauline still loves her and listens to her. Jack Black is also marvellous in a small role, playing it relatively straight. He seems all the more funny the more he is hemmed in by a stern script and director, and he plays one of the few love-able characters in the movie.

Other than that, MARGOT AT THE WEDDING is a pretty dismal affair. And that extends to the production design and the camera-work. DP Harry Savides has treated the negative to give the scenes a dull, mono-chrome look, and interior scenes in particular look murky and uninteresting.

The movie seems like a step backward from THE SQUID AND THE WHALE. That movie was far from perfect, but it did capture my interest and the cutting observations of human frailty were tempered by something like human warmth. By contrast, MARGOT feels misanthropic. And the little flaws that marred SQUID are magnified in MARGOT. The final scene is a case in point. Baumbach doesn't seem to be able to restrain himself from big dramatic flourishes at the end of his films. They feel stagey and heavy-handed.

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING played Telluride and Toronto 2007. It opened in the US last year and is currently on release in Australia. It opens in the UK on February 29th and in Belgium and the Netherlands in March. It opens in Denmark on April 11th and in Norway on May 9th. It opens in Spain on June 6th. MARGOT AT THE WEDDING is also available on Region 1 DVD.

AMERICAN GANGSTER - handsome but heartless

AMERICAN GANGSTER is a handsomely produced, engrossing police procedural. But it fails to create characters, dialogue and emotional story arcs that draw you in and capture the collective consciousness.

Ridley Scott and Harry Savides have created a movie that oozes authenticity with it's detailed rendering of 1970s Harlem projects. Real-life heroin dealer Frank Lucas, played by Denzel Washington, slips through these rough streets with a cool confidence that is magnetic. He eschews the super-fly pimp stylings of lesser black criminals such as Nicky Black (Cuba Gooding Junior) or his own younger brother (Chiwetel Ejiofor). This is because Lucas is smart, and less a gangster than a businessman. He supplies a product that is twice as potent than the competition for less than half the price, because he goes straight to the supplier and cuts out the middle-man. Naturally, this puts the traditional Italian mobsters out of business so he cuts them in. But they work for him. He controls the mob.

Lucas gets away with it because of his restraint, his self-control and the endemic corruption of the New York DEA, epitomised in Josh Brolin's sleazy rozzer, Detective Trupo. But he slips up when he wears a flashy chinchilla coat to a a boxing match and is seen to have better seats than mob bosses. This brings Lucas into the sights of New Jersey's one honest cop, Richie Roberts, played by Russell Crowe in a middling performance. Roberts is in many ways a more interesting character than Lucas. Lucas comes to us fully formed - fully in control - fully unquestioning. He is a family man. A business man. But also a ruthless killer. Roberts is more complicated. He clings to his honesty in police matters but is an adulterer going through a messy divorce. He is flawed, but driven, and yet, somehow, Crowe never really made him live for me.

AMERICAN GANGSTER is a long film but never drags. I was hooked on seeing the net close in on Lucas, and thrilled to see the good cop and smart dope dealer unite in the final frame to sit on the real scum - the rozzers. The production design and cinematography is excellent. But this is not an epic movie as the portentious title might suggest. The movie has no heart. There is no family treachery, no conflicted love story, no crisis of conscience, at the movie's heart. In fact, I think this film is slick but ultimately disposable.

AMERICAN GANGSTER is on release in the US, UK, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Canada, Estonia, Lithuania, Belgiu, France, Germany, Portugal and Iceland. It opens on November 23rd in Norway and Sweden. It opens in December in Russia, Greece, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain and the Czech Republic. It opens in January 2008 in Denmark, Argentina, Australia, Hungary, Singapore, Italy, Mexico, Egypt, Brazil, Finland and Turkey. It opens in Japan in February.

ZODIAC - frustrating on purpose...?

In the late 1960s a serial killer shot and stabbed random people in the San Francisco area. He then sent letters and encripted messages to newspapers and police departments taunting them to catch him. The self-appointed Zodiac killer was a fan of publicity. He must have been pleased to see himself portrayed in DIRTY HARRY. He may well have appropriated murders that weren't his own to boost his twisted kudos. The police didn't solve the murders but a cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle started an ad hoc investigation that resulted in a paperback book. He posits a theory as to the killer, but a quick google search will show you that there are still several theories as to who committed the crimes.

All of which brings us to the central problem: how can a director film gather together the fragments of a serial killer story with no resolution and fashion an engaging linear narrative? David Fincher addresses this problem byruthlessly organises his material into three acts, signposted clearly with timelines, and by throwing people who absolutely need to have closure a bone.

The first third of the movie is the most like a conventional serial killer flick. Victims are off'ed in tense tableaux; cryptic letters are sent into the newsroom; and the cops and reporters go through their procedures. In the second act, fatigue and frustration sets in. The only real suspect is cleared; the cops are moved onto other cases and the lead journo gets the sack. Even the Zodiac himself seems fatigued: the killing and the letters stop. It's a stand-off. At this point, even the viewer might feel frustrated and tired of the story - I gave Fincher the benefit of the doubt and decided that this was a deliberate attempt to have us empathise with the bewildering...slipperiness of the case. If this really is Fincher's aim, I think it's rather brave in facing the difficulty of filming the case head-on.

The final act puts us back into classic Fincher territory. The newspaper cartoonist picks up where the coppers left off and starts tracking down old witnesses and suspects. There is almost unbearably tense confrontation with a suspected murderer in a basement and a final confrontation with the suspect he chooses to believe is the Zodiac. The ending of the film is, however, slippery indeed. On one level, the viewers have been presented with a hypothesis as to the killer's identity and the text at the end of the film suggests that we should walk out of the theatre happy that the whodunnit has been solved. But there are too many important threads left hanging - and at least two very strong suspects still out there. So, the viewer can choose to leave the film unsatisfied and frustrated - having truly experienced the manifold evasions of the Zodiac. Clever stuff.

So right about now, you know that I found this movie to be frustrating but strangely gripping nonetheless. It's also worth pointing out that in terms of pure cinematic technique, this is a must-watch movie. The production design and visual style of the film is mesmerising. It's all warm claustrophobic browns and greens. Often-times, the camera seems to record an atomsphere - an oppression - rather than document movement. (Perhaps this is just me reading the lack of progress with the case onto the film.) ZODIAC is also pioneering in that it's the first feature film in which the entire shooting process took place without film OR video but completely digitally. In other words, the images were shot with digital cameras and the data was sent to directly through cables to the editorial suite. The images were backed up digitally and loaded into the Apple FinalCut Pro programme for editing. The hard drives were then reused. In other words, the only time the film was put on video or celluloid was for distribution to conventional theatres. Truly a feat.

Set against this, the casting is sometimes weak, othertimes under-used. Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards are serviceable as the two investigating cops, but their motivations are unclear. In particular, it is not clear why the latter should drop the case in favour of a normal life. It's also not clear why a hitherto down-to-earth honest cop could have become so mesmerised by fame as to have faked fan letters to Amistead Maupin, leaving him open to accusations of faking Zodiac letters. Elias Koteas and James Le Gros are just fine in cameo supporting roles as provincial cops but I couldn't help feeling that more could've been made of the Brian Cox role. Cox plays a famous pyschologist who is called by the Zodiac live on air. The film-makers start to investigate the corrosive relationship between fame and crime, but leave that strand hanging.

Robert Downey Junior chooses to play his role as a brilliant but strung out investigative reporter by swallowing half his words and becoming no more than a handful of physical ticks. I remain to be convinced that Jake Gyllenhaal can act as opposed to look put-upon. And that's a major problem because when Downey Junior's character fades into alcoholism and the cops get reassigned it's Jake's character who fills the screen. He plays the boy scout-cartoonist turned investigator who runs around the Bay area like one of the kids from Scooby Doo, reading old files, re-interviewing suspects and generally running great risks. Moreover, in a two and half hour film spanning twenty odd years Gyllenhaal neither alters his physical presence nor gives a satisfying account of why such a "boy scout" would become so obsessed with a serial killer.

Still, it's a testament to the fascination of the case and the virtuosity of the production that ZODIAC remains a gripping and memorable thriller.

ZODIAC was released in Canada and the US in March and played Cannes 2007. It is currently playing in France, Argentina, Australia, Denmark, Egypt, Israel, New Zealand, Serbia, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey and the UK. It opens in Slovenia and Finland on May 24th, in the Philippines, Germany, Singapore, Brazil and Estonia on the weekend of May 31st. It opens in Belgium on June 6th, in Hungary on June 7th, Latvia on Juune 8th, Japan on June 16th, Hong Kong on June 21st and Russia on August 2nd.