Random DVD Round-Up 2 - CREATION

CREATION is a handsomely made, beautifully acted biopic of Charles Darwin, focussing on the period during which he wrote his seminal work, ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. Based on the biography by Randal Keynes, the movie stars real-life couple Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly as Charles and Emma Darwin. They are utterly convincing as a deeply loving couple grown distant because of their differing reactions to Darwin's work, more widely, and to familial grief, more closely. Emma looks to the Church for solace, as represented by the orthodox but genuinely concerned Reverend Innes. Charles turns to his science, and experiences a gradual loss of faith. He also, most touchingly, lives in his memories of his relationship with his dead little girl Annie (Martha West). One of the most brutal lines in the film is where Charles asks Emma whether his fancies are an more a prop than her idea of Annie in heaven.

What I love about this film is that, despite the costumes and the lush period settings, which can so often be distancing, there is an immediacy and credibility to the Darwin family. I completely believed in the emotional and intellectual struggle between the two parents, and I was entranced by the relationship between Charles and his daughter Annie. Martha West (daughter of the Dominic West) has genuine charisma, and it's delightful to see Charles' delight in telling his children fantastical stories of different tribes he has encountered on his travels.

The movie also cleverly sidesteps the highly politicised debate (in the US at least) between believing in evolutionary theory and in the Old Testament. Rather than reducing the movie to a bald and crude debate between the two sides, CREATION makes the struggles personal and nuanced. Reverend Innes is orthodox but no fanatic - he wants to be a genuine friend to Darwin. And Darwin is losing faith, but for a personal reason, and sees in the wondrous variety of nature something to be praised.

Given the lamentful tone of the piece, its considered pacing and focus on internal struggle, I was rather surprised to find that CREATION had been directed by Jon Amiel, the man behind action flicks, THE CORE and ENTRAPMENT. But he has completely succeeded in creating a quiet, delicate film in which deep issues are internalised.

CREATION played Toronto 2009 and was released in 2009 in the UK, Greece and New Zealand. It was released earlier this year in the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, and the US. It goes on release in Brazil next week and in Argentina on April 15th. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

Additional tags: Jon Amiel, John Collee, Randal Keynes, Jim Carter, Martha West, Christopher Young, Jess Hall.

Londn Film Fest Day 10 - BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS

Werner Herzog's remake of the 1992 Harvey Keitel flick BAD LIEUTENANT is insane. Herzog is basically inviting us to join with his actors in laughing at the crime thriller genre. To say that the performances are hammy, or that the direction is off-the-wall, doesn't even begin to capture it. Problem is, with everything subordinated to a cheap laugh, there's nothing to hold our attention for the two hour run-time.

The original flick was directed by Abel Ferrara. It was a gritty, sleazy exploitation film about a New York cop strung out on drugs and booze, investigating the rape of a nun, whose forgiveness of her attacker, the cop can't understand. It was down and dirty, sure, but it was serious, after its own fashion. I was expecting a similar tone to this remake. After all, the new flick is written by William Finkelstein, whose credits include NYPD Blue, Law & Order and Murder One. But no.

Nic Cage stars as a corrupt cop, self-medicating for back pain with smack and crack he hustles from people he's taking down. His girlfriend (Eva Mendes) is a hooker, he's running up serious gambling debts, and he's trying to bring down a local drug baron for executing a Senegalese pusher and his family. The cop claims that there's no limit to what you can achieve when you concentrate, which is like a kind of insane joke at the centre of the film. Because just when the cop should be interrogating someone, or investigating a crime scene, Herzog decides to spend a few minutes in extreme close-ups of iguanas set to a hammy version of "Please release me". In one shot, you can actually see Cage in the background cracking up. By the time Cage's character is ruffling the feathers of a "connected" client of his hooker girlfriend in Biloxi, the movie has truly jumped the shark into "just for laughs" territory. I mean, you can admire Herzog's insanity all you like, but what really is the difference between this flick and SNAKES ON A PLANE?

Some reviewers are going to try and sell you the idea that this movie is so ludicrous it's brilliant. Nope. If this were directed by anyone other than Herzog, they'd be calling it an over-long pastiche B-movie and giving it one star. Don't believe the hype.

BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF NEW ORLEANS played Venice, Telluride, Toronto and London 2009. It opened this autumn in Italy, Greece and Israel. It opens on November 6th in Romania, on November 20th in the US, on December 2nd in Belgium, on January 8th in Sweden, on January 15th in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, and on March 3rd in France.

Late review - HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU

HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU is a deeply depressing film about contemporary thirty-somethings dating, divorcing, marrying and generally entering into sado-masochistic relationships. The basic premise of the movie seems to be that women, and occasionally men, read too much into situations and end up getting hurt when they should just stop being delusional and move on....except for when the studio needs a Hollywood-cute ending, and they shouldn't, in fact, move on, but hold out for the fairytale happy ending. I dislike this movie for being too gutless to pursue its world-view to its logical end. I discard the movie for being so poorly directed by Ken Kwapis, whose priors include the abysmal Robin Williams vehicle, LICENSE TO WED. And I despise it for basically crafting a product aimed at women that seeks to, essentially, mock them for their delusional fantasies while simultaneously pandering to them. All this is not to discount the nuanced performances from Jennifer Connelly and Jennifer Aniston, but to regret their choice of script.

HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU was released in Spring 2009 and is released on DVD next week.

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL: Keanu screws Klaatu

I'll admit a conflict here. I'm a big fan of the original 1951 THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, with Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal. I'm not alone of course, as you'll see if you click on the link, the original movie is #199 on the IMDB Top 250 movies of all time. 

Of course, there's a reason for that. THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951) was an incredibly brave piece of cinema, coming as it did at the height of McCarthyism - challenging the rabid suspicion of outsiders and the dogma of the nuclear arms race. 

Klaatu (Michael Rennie) and his indestructible robot Gort come to earth to deliver a message of cooperation and peace to world leaders. Yet, immediately as he steps out of his spacecraft, Klaatu is shot, taken into custody, and branded everything from Angel of Death to evil communist. Yet he escapes, is helped by a kindly widow named Helen Benson (Patricia Neal), her son Bobby (Billy Gray) and a well known scientist, Professor Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe).

Finally, he delivers his message outside of his spacecraft, which is worth re-printing in full:

"I am leaving soon, and you will forgive me if I speak bluntly. The universe grows smaller every day, and the threat of aggression by any group, anywhere, can no longer be tolerated. There must be security for all, or no one is secure. Now, this does not mean giving up any freedom, except the freedom to act irresponsibly. Your ancestors knew this when they made laws to govern themselves and hired policemen to enforce them. We, of the other planets, have long accepted this principle. 

We have an organization for the mutual protection of all planets and for the complete elimination of aggression. The test of any such higher authority is, of course, the police force that supports it. For our policemen, we created a race of robots. Their function is to patrol the planets in spaceships like this one and preserve the peace. In matters of aggression, we have given them absolute power over us. This power cannot be revoked. At the first sign of violence, they act automatically against the aggressor. The penalty for provoking their action is too terrible to risk. The result is, we live in peace, without arms or armies, secure in the knowledge that we are free from aggression and war. Free to pursue more... profitable enterprises. 

Now, we do not pretend to have achieved perfection, but we do have a system, and it works. I came here to give you these facts. It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We shall be waiting for your answer. The decision rests with you."

This speech has been debated and poured over since the film's release. Was it a stab at the toothless U.N. before it became fashionable to call it toothless? Was it an attack on the arms race and space race, being fought at the time against the Soviets? Was Klaatu actually meant to represent a religious figure - are there parallels to the Christian message?

Whatever the answers to these questions, it was certainly not pointlessly moralising, nor did it descend into feel-good shmaltz. The message was simple: "You guys are violent assholes. If you stop being violent, you can prosper and be happy. But if you turn your violence out into space towards us, our robot pigdogs will fuck you up."

The same cannot be said of the pointless modern remake. THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (2008) lurches between paint-by-numbers Hollywood moralising about the environment and how we're screwing it up, to ridiculous levels of shmaltziness near the end. The message of this movie seems to be that humans have a soft and squidgy side that will come out in a crisis and that this will somehow manage to save us (from ourselves). This is despite copious evidence to the contrary played out in front of us throughout the film.

Now, don't get me wrong. One might well imagine that the (poorly acted and awfully scripted) love between a mother (Jennifer Connelly) and her unnecessarily black son (Jaden Smith) might convince Klaatu (Keanu Reaves) that human beings are worth saving. But surely it wouldn't convince him that we can save ourselves?! Not after the (equally poorly scripted) US Secretary of State (Kathy Bates) has unleashed seven shades of shit, torture and sidewinders on him and his unoffending robot for no good logical reason.

Talking about bad acting, let the record show that Reeves showcases the full repetoire of his monotonal potential in this flick. The scene with a catastrophically underused Professor Barnhardt (John Cleese) is a case in point. Cleese (the only competant actor in the film) looks like he's doing a bluescreen dress rehearsal next to a piece of wood. He delivers his lines as if he were trying to wake Reeves up, or at least trying to awake some extremely well hidden talent in him.

Mind you, Keanu doesn't have much to work with. He agreed to perform an (unintentionally) hilarious, monosyllabic script so as not to stretch himself - setting low standards that he consistently fails to live up to. The plot is similarly dire. Rather than perfectly pitching the low-key anti-communist paranoia of the 1950s - it goes for the catastrophism of the execrable I AM LEGEND and the similarly fecal modern remake of WAR OF THE WORLDS.  

All this adds up to a totally unnecessary money-spinning remake, arrogantly self-justified as some sort of environmentalist crusade. If you love cinema, love the original, or indeed have any of the human emotions that Reeves so conspicuously fails to imitate on screen, I would advise you to steer well clear of this garbage.

Cheers 

Maximus

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (2008) - An inconvenient remake

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL was a lean, simple sci-fi movie about an alien in human form who tries to warn humankind against continuing on its destructive path. Released at the start of the Cold War, the movie had a strong agenda - against realist inter-state politics and for liberal internationalism as mediated by the United Nations. The movie also contained a lot of Christian imagery, with Klaatu as the saviour of humankind come down to earth to point out the error of our ways. The message was large and profound but it was made through argument rather than special effects. Klaatu - the alien - ponders the words of The Lincoln Memorial and debates politics with an eminent scientist. It was a remarkably quiet and thoughtful film.

The new remake is a rather different beast. For a start, it's replete with big-budget special effects and it's self-consciously grandiose. The message is also different. Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) isn't here to save us from ourselves but to save the Earth from human-kind. Maybe in a post-modern world full of failing states and discredited supernational institutions, the film-makers thought appealing to liberal internationalism wouldn't fly? But it's a real shame. In the year of the Obama landslide, I could easily imagine a film that earnestly professed belief in the redemptive power of liberal democracy striking a chord.

The one constant is the Christian iconography - Klaatu walks on water, raises a man from the dead, and in a closing scene seems to take the agents of death out of the Bensons and into himself - thus taking away the sin of the world.

I rather like the bleak message and I also liked the special effects. But I didn't buy into the human relationships that power the plot. In the original film Klaatu strikes up a warm relationship between a single mother and her son who happen to live in the same boarding house as him. Through spending time with them he realises that humans have good qualities and deserve the chance to change. In the current movie I was never sold on the relationship between Klaatu, Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) and her stepson Jacob (Jaden Smith). Maybe it's because Helen is cast as a high powered scientist, and the relationship between Helen and her son is now rather complicated. Somehow it detracts from the relationship with Klaatu. At any rate, I didn't buy that in the course of a rather cursory relationship, Klaatu would change his mind about humanity.

So, for my money, stick to the original movie. Not least to avoid any fanboy disappointment at the omission of the most famous line of the original movie.

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL is on release in Belgium, France, Norway, Thailand, Austria, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, the UK, the USA and Venezuela. It opens in Japan on December 19th; in South Korea on December 24th; in Australia on December 26th; in Egypt on December 31st; in Argentina on January 1st; in Brazil on January 9th; and in Poland on January 16th.

Overlooked DVD of the month - RESERVATION ROAD

I'm not sure why RESERVATION ROAD didn't get distribution in the UK but the good news is that it's available on DVD. It's a beautifully crafted, emotionally charged drama about the impact of a hit and run accident on the perpetrator and the victim's family. The perp - Mark Ruffallo - is a divorced father who doesn't stop because he's afraid that the legal ramifications will result in him losing his son. It's a cowardly but plausible action and the rest of the film is about the character working up the courage to confess. The victim's family - Jennifer Connelly and Joaquin Phoenix - are alienated from each other by the death. The father takes to stalking the road where the accident took place, photographing the plates of similar cars, trying to track down the killer. Eventually he realises that the perp is his lawyer. Some people have said that this seems convenient. But I think it's eminently plausible that when a devastating act hits a local community, the ties that bind are many and various.

RESERVATION ROAD is one of those films that takes its time and patiently investigates the emotional distress of its characters. The acting is raw and powerful - the ending suitably ambiguous. I love that for once we see both sides of a story and that the so called bad character - the hit and run driver - is shown to be just a typically flawed and frail man trying to be a good father. Mark Ruffalo deserves credit for his brilliant central performance. And as a straightforward investigation of grief this movie has far more honesty about it than something like THE THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE.

RESERVATION ROAD played Toronto 2007 and was released in 2007, though not in the UK. It is available on DVD.

THE FOUNTAIN - intriguing/frustrating

In short, Darren Aronofsky disappearing down a dead end is still more interesting than most Hollywood hacks getting it right.

Aronofsky is a challenging director – both in terms of content and visual style. And if I found his debut feature, PI, more intriguing than perfect, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM is certainly one of my pantheon movies. Its bleak depiction of drug abuse and crass commerce was told in an innovative style and with uncompromising honesty. Not to mention the fact that Aronofsky managed to coax career-redefining performances from Ellen Burstyn and Jennifer Connelly. Where these movies succeeded was in scraping underneath the surface of a relatively closed under-ground world. Investigating the workings of mania and paranoia and addiction on a small group of individuals living in contemporary society – albeit a strand of society that most of us never interact with.

With THE FOUNTAIN, Aronofsky moves well beyond his (dis)comfort zone into the territory of 2001. He eschews contemporary settings to produce a more abstract, symbolic and richly stylised movie. At its heart is a man called Tom (Hugh Jackman) who is desperately in love with his fatally ill wife, an authoress called Izzy (Rachel Weisz). The crux of the story is Tom’s initial refusal to accept Izzy’s impending death. In the contemporary story-line, Tom chooses to spend time researching a cure rather than spending what time remains with Izzy. This choice will rack him with guilt in the futuristic story-line, which sees Tom living alone with his regrets in a sci-fi world of loneliness (another Requiem for a Dream of Eternal Love?) The film is also inter-cut with a further storyline which sees Izzy’s novel re-enacted. Tom is now cast as a Spanish conquistador on a mission from Izzy’s Queen of Spain to find a plant that can give eternal life.

The thematic content of the movie is thus profound, but also surprisingly simple, especially given the complexity of Aronofsky’s narrative structure and visual and audio stylings. The movie boasts an evocative sound-track from the Kronos Quartet and Mogwai and the production design features fairy-tale symbols and beautifully rendered old-fashioned visual effects. The problem is that at least half of it feels redundant. I am also unconvinced by the heavy-handed symbolism of the presumably deliberately under-lit opening scenes of the Conquistador? Of many examples, Christopher Nolan proved in BATMAN BEGINS that it is possible to create a dark, brooding atmosphere while actually allowing the audience to see what is going on.

The overall effect is that while powerful, the simple central question posed by the film drowns under the weight of the deliberately obscure production design, cinematography and editing. The over-complicated structure and design and abstract script also prohibit Jackman and Weisz from giving memorable performances - though they do their best with portentious dialogue. All this combines to make THE FOUNTAIN simultaneously one of the most intriguing and frustrating films I have seen in a long time.

THE FOUNTAIN played Venice and Toronto 2006. It opened in the US, Argentina, Brazil, Taiwan and France in winter 2006. It opened in Poland, South Africa, Germany and Estonia earlier this month and opens in Australia, Italy and the UK this weekend. THE FOUNTAIN opens in South Korea on Feb 8th and in Israel and Singapore on Feb 22nd. It opens in New Zealand on March 1st and in Hong Kong, the Netherland and Belgium on March 8th. It opens in Norway on March 16th, Spain on March 30th, Sweden and and Finland on April 13th and in Japan on July 7th.

BLOOD DIAMOND succeeds despite the sentiment

From the director of THE LAST SAMURAI and the writer of K-PAX....! Not a great pedigree, but BLOOD DIAMOND works as a tolerably interesting thriller with strong performances, albeit overlaid with an annoying layer of liberal sentiment. Not that I'm against liberal sentiment: naturally, we should not buy diamonds that are used to finance civil wars. But as a reasonably well-informed adult I do not need Edward Zwick to tell me this. I especially don't need him to tell me this in such a heavy-handed manner, with a politican literally lecturing me from a podium.

The good news is that BLOOD DIAMOND succeeds as a decent thriller despite its clumsy attempt at agit-prop. It's fundamentally a chase story. Djimon Hounsou is outstanding in his portrayal of an African man who finds an enormous rough diamond of incalculable value. He wants to use it to leverage a better life in Europe with his family. Meanwhile, his young son has been captured by the rebel army and is being trained as a child soldier. This is by far, the most interesting and scary strand of the movie. Hounsou's character forms a sort of devil's pact with a white Zimbabwean mercenary played by Leonardo di Caprio. Caprio's character is an ultra-realist to the point of cruel cynicism. He doesn't give a rats ass about anyone, including Hounsou's character's family, but also wants to use the diamond as an exit route from Africa. To that end, he's willing to help the African. The third player is an idealistic American journalist played by Jennifer Connelly. She'll help out Hounsou and play along with di Caprio in exchange for a real story of corruption in a diamond company that is clearly meant to approximate De Beers.

I love the movie's exploration of the harsh reality of life in war-torn Africa. And I love that despite it's good intentions it still has a glossy, fast-paced Hollywood feel. I also think all three lead performances are strong, and from my limited experience, find Leonardo di Caprio's accent convincing. (He sounds just like the cricketer, Kevin Pietersen!) So it gets a marginal thumbs-up. The big minus point is that for a movie that claims to be harsh and realistic it has as saccharine an ending as you could want, reminiscent of the fairy-tale ending from THE CONSTANT GARDENER.

BLOOD DIAMOND is already on release in the US, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Brazil and Taiwan. It opens in Hong Kong on the 18th and Belgium, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Estonia, Iceland, Italy, Norway and the UK on the 26th. It opens in France on the 31st, Hungary on Feb 1st, and in Finland, Spain, Sweden, Turkey on the 9th. It opens in Argentina on Feb 15th and in Japan on March 31st.

LITTLE CHILDREN - four reasons why this film is a fiasco

Let me be clear that when I go into a movie I really do want to enjoy it, especially when it comes with cast credentials as high as this. I hear all the Oscar buzz for LITTLE CHILDREN but I have to say that I just don't get it. I sat through this film waiting for that light to turn on - for the insight, the originality, the flair of vision or the emotional epiphany to happen. It didn't. I feel like I am missing out on this amazing movie experience that everyone is having.

So for what it's worth, here's why I didn't like LITTLE CHILDREN. First off, the film is based on a novel and the screen-writer/director, Todd Field, has opted to keep an intrusive, fairy-tale type narration of the kind I saw deconstructed in STRANGER THAN FICTION. The narrator has a voice like something out of Doctor Seuss. It seemed grossly out of place for a purportedly adult movie about marital infidelity and the re-introduction of a convicted sex offender into a conservative suburban community.

Second, the primary plot strand is dull. The film is basically the story of a bored suburban house-wife (Kate Winslet) and a disillusioned house-husband (Patrick Wilson) who have an affair. She, like Madame Bovary (a painfully over-worked metaphor in this film) hopes he will leave with her. The adultery story is handled in a workmanlike manner. It features a fairly explicit and yet completely unerotic and rather, well, ungainly, sex scene. It also features Winslet's character defending Madame Bovary as a heroic proto-feminist with a hunger for "options". There is nothing heroic about Winslet's character's struggles.

Third, the other inter-secting plot strand is handled in a clumsy and exploitative manner. The strand has the unhappy couple living in a community in an uproar because a convicted child abuser has moved in. The theme of sexual predators in suburbia has been handled with credible emotional authenticity and sensitivity by Kevin Bacon in the astounding movie, THE WOODSMAN. Watching THE WOODSMAN you got the feeling that everyone involved in the movie took a genuine interest in the emotional life of the molester. In this movie, he just seems like a conveniently shocking and "interesting" plot strand. The film-makers are as brutalising as the people in the community they are depicting.

The fourth reason why I didn't like LITTLE CHILDREN is that the whole thing was drained of energy and interest by bland cinematography, pedestrian editing and an over-long run-time for the subject matter. The plot meandered, skirting around larger issues that it never quite got a handle on. The director lingered on scenes that propelled the action and the character development (such as it was) not one iota. Sometimes the director's choice of focus is just plain odd. For instance, the cuckolded wife (Jennifer Connolly) is a two-dimensional character. We never learn much about her and it is hard to empathise with her. But all of a sudden she does get a scene editing footage for a documentary she is making. The footage shows a small child - far too young to string together the pretentious sentences he is uttering about his father's death in the Iraqi war. Does the director think that just by placing a small child in front of a picture of a dead soldier and a flag he will strike a chord? A movie is not something wherein you pack in random references and hope a meaning will fall out.

As a result, the film runs for over two hours and you feel every minute. This could be the most badly directed film playing the London Film Festival.

LITTLE CHILDREN showed at Toronto and London 2006. It is already on limited release in the US and opens wide in the US and in the UK on November 3rd. It opens in Australia in December, Turkey, Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands in January 2007 and in Spain in February.