TAMMY

In which Melissa McCarthy (BRIDESMAIDS) plays a woman who has lost her job and her husband, and goes on an impromptu road trip with her similarly unboundaried alcoholic grandmother (Susan Sarandon.) We are meant to be amused by their scampy hi-jinks as they wend their way to Niagara Falls, picking up guys en route (Mark Duplass) robbing a fast food joint and generally being mildly transgressive. The problem is that all of this is way too underwritten - way too unfunny - and it seems that as fine an actress as Susan Sarandon is, she’s not even attempting to truly play an old woman. Contrast this performance with Julie Walters, also aged up to play a granny going on an impromptu road-trip in THE HARRY HILL MOVIE. The only scene worth anything is when Tammy and her grandmother end up at a magnificent house owned by two gay lovers played by Kathy Bates and Sandra Oh. Tammy is feeling sorry for herself but Bates’ character schools her on how hard she had to work for everything she has, as well as acceptance. It’s the only moving and authentic moment in the whole film. Otherwise, TAMMY follows the typical comedy arc with the protagonist falling out with people and then making up, finding self-knowledge en route. I just wish that Melissa McCarthy and the Hollywood producers who throw scripts her way would realise that she is a better actress than this, and just because she played a gross character on BRIDESMAIDS doesn’t mean that she has to play versions of that for the rest of her career. She’s a beautiful woman. How about being daring and giving her a conventional rom-com?  The fact that she CHOSE to co-write this movie makes me all the more sad.

TAMMY has a running time of 97 minutes and is rated R.  The movie is on release in the USA, Canada, Germany, Singapore, the UK and Ireland. It goes on release in Kuwait on July 28th, Denmark on July 31st, South Africa on August 29th and Australia on October 16th.

PARKLAND - LFF 2013 - Day Nine

I'm the wrong person to give an objective review of Peter Landesman's JFK assassination drama, PARKLAND.  I'm a self confessed conspiracy nut, who went to Dealey Plaza a year ago and followed that visit up by reading Vincent Bugliosi's mammoth and scrupulously researched doorstop book, "Reclaiming history: The Assassination of JFK".  It's a hardback book so thick it reaches the same height as a litre tub of Haagen Dazs and that doesn't include the CD Rom of notes.  If you haven't heard of Bugliosi, he's the criminal lawyer that prosecuted the Manson family.  His book is born of passion and professionalism.  He thoroughly debunks all conspiracy theories about JFK, defends the Warren Commission report, and is scandalised at how the tragedy has been exploited and sullied by nefarious scandal mongers and publicity seekers.  It totally changed my view on the assassination and if you have a year to spare (!) I thoroughly recommend reading it.  This movie is based on what is basically the first chapter of that book: a scrupulously detailed account of the facts of what happened on the fateful day of the assassination up to the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald.  (It was also published as a separate and shorter book, "Four Days In September".) Naturally, when I realised it was being turned into a movie, and that in addition, that movie was being filmed by a first time director who was an actual proper journalist who shared my and Vincent Bugliosi's mission to reclaim the historical narrative, I was all over it.

Yes, it's fair to say that PARKLAND was the movie I was most excited about at this festival, and I wasn't disappointed.  To say that I loved it doesn't quite capture how I felt.  As we saw the presidential motorcade drive into Dealey plaza, I literally shivered.  When I saw Paul Giamatti's Abraham Zapruder plead with the editor of Life magazine not to publish the "kill shot" to preserve JFK's dignity, I cried.  When I saw the quiet decency of James Badge Dale's Robert Oswald, I was filled with empathy.  When I saw the selfish greed of Jackie Weaver's Marguerite Oswald, I felt physically sick.  I admired greatly Landesman's decision not to show the assassination itself, or indeed the Zapruder tape, but rather to show us the visceral reactions to it.  He held up to his promise of stripping away the conspiracies to restore the emotion at the heart of the story.  There was nothing salacious, or   prurient.  Even Jackie Kennedy's grief was handled with dignity.  It's as if the film-makers were trying to give her the privacy she deserved.  

As a technical feat, the film is a marvel, seamlessly blending in archive footage with the recreations.  There's a particularly beautiful and moving scene in which we see the Zapruder tape reflected in Abraham Zapruder's glasses, but can see through to Giamatti's eyes, shocked, devastated. The use of handheld cameras gives us a sense of immediacy, chaos, fear. And centring the film on Parkland is a stroke of narrative genius. It's in that humble hospital that both JFK and Oswald were treated - the bookends of the film.  They were treated by the same junior doctors, played by Colin Hanks and Zach Efron, and the stoic nurse played by Marcia Gay Harden.  There are two very powerful symmetric scenes that show empty trauma theatres, blood on the floor, remnants of chaos.  There's a point being made about death the great leveller.  

Like I said, I'm the wrong person to give an objective review of this movie.  I passionately believe in the project to reclaim the assassination from the conspiracy nuts: to centre it in procedural fact and real emotion.  I think Peter Landesman's movie has done this with a surety of purpose and complexity of style that is impressive.  And I hope the non fanatics will  benefit from that experience as much as I did. 

PARKLAND has a running time of 93 minutes and is rated PG-13.  

PARKLAND played Venice, Toronto and London 2013 and is already on released in the USA. It will be released in the UK on November 22nd - the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination.

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.

PEOPLE LIKE US

Screenwriter Alex Kurtzman (STAR TREK) makes his directorial debut with the occasionally hilarious, but tonally uneven and overlong dramedy, PEOPLE LIKE US.  The person I watched the movie with judged it "the worst movie I've seen in some time".  I agree that it was a wearying watch, and had more endings that LORD OF THE RINGS. But every time I gave up on this over-wrought drama, a scene would take place that once again got me into it.  This flick isn't a failure - it just drowned any spark of life in melodrama.

Perhaps the movie's real problem is its central conceit - damaged brother discovers he has a half-sister and a nephew after his father's death. But instead of coming clean about their family ties, he insinuates himself into their lives until the sister is in danger of falling for him.  This is the classic plot contrivance that only ever happens in cheap films, and prevents the movie doing what it really wants to do - which is to portray real , authentic damaged people struggling to come to terms with an emotional crisis.

The movie stars Chris Pine as Sam, a resentful son commissioned by his recently deceased father to give $150,000 to the sister he never knew he had. That sister, Frankie (Elizabeth Banks) is a recovering alcoholic with a whip-smart son called Josh (Michael Hall D'Addario). Chris Pine is the weak link in the set-up with his limited emotional range, and while Banks is the better actress, she's far too glossy to convince as a struggling single mum.  In every case, they are both upstaged for comedy by Michael Hall D'Addario (the coolest screenkid ever, with the best screen entrance for a schoolboy since Malcolm McDowell in IF...), and for drama by a dishevelled and conflicted Michelle Pfeiffer (Sam's mum).  Her role in the estrangement of her husband from his illegitimate daughter is beautifully written and played, and it's sad that it is resolved in such a hammy way.

PEOPLE LIKE US opened earlier this year in the USA, Italy, the Philippines, Chile, Norway, Germany  Denmark, the UK and Ireland. It opens this weekend in Turkey.

Sundance London 2012 - SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED

I guess it was a sure bet.  Any movie based on a cutesy internet meme (see above graphic) was gonna rub me up the wrong way.  SAFTEY NOT GUARANTEED is the kind of hipster, quirky, indulgent comedy that I hate.  In fact, even calling it a comedy is a stretch given that it peddles the gentlest of gentle comedy.  I only laughed out loud three times, so on that basis it fails the Wittertainment 5-Laughs rule.  I predict that this will end up like last year's lauded hit, LIKE CRAZY. That was another movie the indie community loved and I hated. It too ended up in a bidding war at Sundance only to fail at the box office.

The problem with the film is that everything about it is so contrived that goofy that there's nothing to relate to - no point of entry unless you're also a wannabe oddball hipster.  It also contains precious few proper jokes (as mentioned above), and uneven tone, as it skirts past various genres. I blame Derek Connolly's pretentious script and Colin Trevorrow's lacklustre direction.  Performances are mostly so-so.  Aubrey Plaza (PARKS AND RECREATION) does her snarky, moody thing, but predictably melts when she meets Mark Duplass' oddball paranoid wannabe time-traveller.  They meet up because she an intern at a magazine and her boss Jeff is faking interest in the madcap scheme so as to write a funny story on the guy.  Jake M Johnson provides the only real laughs as Jeff, nicely playing against the "nice Nick" character in THE NEW GIRL.  As for Karan Soni's Arnau, it's nice that we people of Indian origin are starting to get more airtime in movies, but does it always have to be a clichéd geeky hard-working student? I'm starting to get offended.

SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED played Sundance 2012 where Derek Connolly won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. It also played Sundance London. It will play SXSW 2012 and will be released in the USA on June 8th.

Random DVD Round-Up 6 - THE PUFFY CHAIR

So I should've written up THE PUFFY CHAIR years ago, but looking back at 2010, and realising that CYRUS was the movie I loved the most, prompted me to finally get round to doing it. That and being snowed in, wondering whether my Christmas vacation was going to be cancelled. It's amazing how much crap you get round to doing - filing your pay-cheques, organising your sock drawer (literally), and writing up old film reviews....

THE PUFFY CHAIR is basically a relationship movie set up as a road trip. Two brothers and a girlfriend drive from New York to their parents house in Atlanta to give their father the gift of a new lazyboy chair. The elder brother is caught in a bind with a highly dramatic needy woman. The younger brother happens upon a woman he likes. And both brothers are struggling with the nature of their relationship to each other given their wildly differing personalities.

THE PUFFY CHAIR is the kind of movie I normally hate, given that it's characters are slacker/hipster/moany/whiny twentysomethings who are basically pretty privileged but spend their time stressing about what life is all about and what they are going to be When They Grow Up. BUT the key difference here is that while its characters ARE self-indulgent, the movie IS NOT. And that's a nicety I think many reviewers and message-board-posters have over-looked. I am not disagreeing that the elder brother Josh is passive-aggressive, or that his girlfriend is an irritating drama-queen, or that his brother Rhett is immature and narcissistic. I'm not disagreeing that, like, calling, like, everyone, dude, is, like, irritating. But if you're trying to capture certain people at a certain point in their lives, then maybe this is the reality. And maybe, it's more honest than a Hollywood hipster rom-com like (500) DAYS OF SUMMER or a movie like CLERKS which deals with real frustrations and dilemmas but with a hyper-real set of comedy twists and dialogue that none of us bar Kevin Smith can come up with?

All I can say is that I've met these people and I've been through those phases, and had those uncomfortable midnight conversations about real relationships. So whether or not I'd care to see this film again (probably not!) it was still refreshing and interesting to see it that one time.

THE PUFFY CHAIR played Sundance 2005 and went on limited release in the US and UK in 2006 and 2007 respectively. It is available on DVD.

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.

CYRUS - He *loved* his mother

I love CYRUS. It’s a movie that’s honest, funny, dark and moving. I haven’t seen a sweeter more unlikely romance on screen in years – and rarely one in which the characters are at once so spiky and unusual and yet express such honest emotion. John C Reilly plays a basically good guy, also called John, who is still reeling from divorce and lacks the confidence to date again. Pushed to a party by his remarkably tolerant ex-wife (Catherine Keener) he stumbles upon the beautiful Molly (Marisa Tomei). The scene in which they meet could be taught in film-school as a lesson in how to subvert the “meet-cute” with something far more surprising. There’s a drunk, dejected guy pissing against a tree and a woman walks by and says “Nice penis!” I mean, what an awesome reaction! Immediately we know that’s she’s got an off-beat sense of humour. And then John starts talking to her and immediately denigrating himself: “What are you doing in the garden with Shrek?” But as much as he thinks he’s scored, he’s so drunk and, in a sense, so innocent, that when the Human League’s “Don’t you want me?” starts playing he basically brushes her off to go dance in the living room. Of course he makes a complete ass of himself, but the most amazing thing happens. Rather than being weirded out by what a drunk loser he is, the hot chick saves him by dancing and singing too. I think this is pretty much the most genuinely cute meet-cute I’ve seen.

There is, of course, a glitch to this odd-couple romance, otherwise we wouldn’t have a narrative arc. Molly has a son called Cyrus. And Molly and Cyrus have a very un-boundaried relationship. Cyrus is the kind of kid who should have grown up and gone to college and gotten a girlfriend but is so molly-coddled by his mother that he has become self-centred and unstable. He is massively threatened by John, who he sees as a rival for his mother’s attentions and basically tries to sabotage the relationship. This leads to a comedy of manners in which both Cyrus and John pretend to be getting on well to please Molly but are secretly sabotaging each other. Things come to a head and John’s ex-wife’s wedding where all the bitterness is exposed. This leads to a truly amazing third act, where the movie turns from indie rom-com into tragic-drama, as Cyrus and Molly confront how messed up their relationship is.

I love CYRUS on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin. John C Reilly has that great mix of being able to act both as a loveable chump but also as a wily reader of the messed up relationship he encounters. Marisa Tomei is one of those charming actresses with whom you’re happy to spend time. But the actor who really impressed me was Jonah Hill, who for the first time managed to beyond his smart-ass, slightly weird screen persona and deliver a heart-breaking redemption scene. Behind the camera, I think you have to give the writer-director Duplass Brothers mad props for managing to portray a situation that could have been gross – oedipal complex plays out – as basically sweet, but never cloying. I also love the fact that no scene or line is wasted. There’s an economy to their screenwriting and editing that could also be held up to film students. A classic example is the way in which they handle what would conventionally be a montage scene – mixing visuals with audio from another scene – and audio that sounds improvised and natural. And maybe that’s the biggest achievement of all. The Duplass Brothers have taken a caricatured movie situation – ludicrously clingy son sabotages mum’s relationship – and have used that as a hook for dialogue that actually sounds real, and so moves us.

CYRUS played Sundance 2010 and was released earlier this year in the US, Canada, France, Finland and the UK. It opens later this month in Belgium and in November in Russia, Germany and the Netherlands.