HAPPY END - Day 10 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

Meester Phil and I walked out of HAPPY END after an hour of tedium and inanity.  Advertising blurb suggesting it's a sharp satire of contemporary French financial and racial inequality in the shadow of the Calais migrant camp was wildly overblown. There's a rich family. It includes Isabelle Huppert. They run a construction company. There's a feckless grandson who may or may not inherit the company. There's a granddaughter who's mum just attempted suicide. There's a little baby who's shot on an iPhone with text messages indicating her train of thought. What there isn't is drama or meaning or any kind of coherence.  In fairness that might have all been resolved in the final 45 minutes but life's too short to find out.

HAPPY END has a running time of 107 minutes. It played Cannes, Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto and London 2017.  It opened earlier this month in France and Austria. It opens in Belgium on Oct 11th, Germany on Oct 12th, Hungary on Oct 26th, Sweden on Nov 3rd, the UK on Dec 1st, the USA on Dec 22nd, and Norway on Dec 25th.

Oscar Surprises On The Upside

Gael Garcia Bernal stars in Pablo Larrain's superb Chilean
political dramedy NO - deservedly nominated for Best Foreign Language Film

This may well be the least controversial set of Oscar nominations in decades.  No obviously great works are missed, except in the Best Documentary category, where I would have expected to see WEST MEMPHIS THREE, MEA MAXIMA CULPA and CHASING ICE.  Similarly, the large set of nominations for LES MIS seems, frankly, bizarre, but this is more than offset by the utterly genius inclusion of Pablo Larrain's Chilean political dramedy, NO.  I'm sure it will be beaten by Haneke's AMOUR, but the nomination alone should raise awareness of this funny, politically astute and technically brilliant film starring Gael Garcia Bernal.

All this aside, the  key message was that the early lead established by Ben Affleck's superb thriller, ARGO, has been usurped by Ang Lee's imaginative and visually stunning LIFE OF PI, and Stephen Spielberg's mesmerizing LINCOLN.  I suspect LINCOLN may well sweep the major categories with LIFE OF PI, ARGO and maybe ZERO DARK THIRTY sharing the rest of the spoils.  However, of these first three major films, I'd be happy no matter who takes the Oscars, as all three are stunning pieces of work.  A true upset would be if SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK won anything other than Best Screenplay or LES MIS got any awards at all.

As usual, you can see the full list of noms below. I've put the likely winner in UPPERCASE and placed an asterisk by the nominee I think deserves to win.

Ben Affleck's brilliant political thriller ARGO has lost its early lead to
LINCOLN and LIFE OF PI

BEST PICTURE: Amour; Argo; Beats of the Southern Wild; Django Unchained; Les Misérables; Life of Pi; LINCOLN*; Silver Linings Playbook; Zero Dark Thirty.

BEST ACTOR: Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook; DANIEL DAY-LEWIS*, Lincoln; Hugh Jackman, Les Mis; Joaquin Phoenix, The Master; Denzel Washington, Flight.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Alan Arkin, Argo; Robert de Niro, Silver Linings Playbook; Philip Seymour Hoffman*, The Master; TOMMY LEE JONES, Lincoln; Christopher Waltz, Django Unchained.

BEST ACTRESS: JESSICA CHASTAIN, Zero Dark Thirty; Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook; Emmanuelle Riva*, Amour; Quvenzhané Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild; Naomi Watts, The Impossible. 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Amy Adams*, The Master; SALLY FIELD, Lincoln; Anne Hathaway, Les Mis; Helen Hunt, The Sessions; Jacki Weaver, Silver Linings Playbook.

Daniel Day-Lewis must be a dead cert for Best Actor as LINCOLN,
and should lead this film to the most Oscar wins.

BEST ANIMATED FILM: Brave, Frankenweenie, PARANORMAN, Pirates!*, Wreck-it Ralph.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Seamus McGarvey, Anna Karenina; Robert Richardson, Django Unchained; Claudio Miranda, Life of Pi; Janusz Kaminski, Lincoln; ROGER DEAKINS*, Skyfall.

BEST COSTUMES: Jacqueline Durran, Anna Karenina; Paco Delgado, Les Mis; Joanna Johnston, Lincoln; EIKO ISHIOKA*, Mirror Mirror; Colleen Atwood, Snow White and the Huntsman.

BEST DIRECTOR: Michael Haneke, Amour; Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild; Ang Lee, Life of Pi; STEVEN SPIELBERG*, Lincoln; David O Russell, Silver Linings Playbook.

BEST DOCUMENTARY: 5 Broken Cameras; The Gatekeepers; How To Survive A Plague; The Invisible War; SEARCHING FOR SUGARMAN*

BEST EDITING: William Goldenberg, Argo; Tim Squyres*, Life of Pi; Michael Kahn, Lincoln; Jay Cassidy and Crispin Struthers, Silver Linings Playbook; DYLAN TICHENOR AND WILLIAM GOLDENBERG, Zero Dark Thirty.

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM: AMOUR, No*; A Royal Affair, War Witch.

BEST MAKEUP AND HAIR: Howard Berger, Peter Montagna and Martin Samuel, Hitchcock; Peter Swords King, Rick Findlater and Tami Lane*, The Hobbit; LISA WESTCOTT AND JULIA DARTNELL, Les Mis.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE: Dario Marianelli, Anna Karenina; ALEXANDRE DESPLAT, Argo; Mychael Danna*, Life of Pi; John Williams, Lincoln; Thomas Newman, Skyfall.

BEST ORIGINAL SONG: Before my time, J Ralph, Chasing Ice; Everybody needs a best friend, Walter Murphy and Seth MacFarlane*, Ted; Pi’s lullaby, Mychael Danna and Bombay Jayashri, Life of Pi; SKYFALL, Adele Adkins and Paul Epworth, Skyfall; Suddenly, Claude-Michel Schönberg, Herbert Kretzmer and Alain Boublil, Les Mis.

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN: Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer, Anna Karenina; Dan Hennah, Ra Vincent and Simon Bright, The Hobbit; EVE STEWART AND ANNA LYNCH-ROBINSON, Les Mis; David Gropman and Anna Pinnock, Life of Pi; Rick Carter and Jim Erickson*, Lincoln.

BEST SOUND EDITING: Erik Aadahl and Ethan van der Ryn, Argo; Wylie Stateman, Django Unchained; Eugene Gearty and Philip Stockton, Life of Pi( Per Hallberg and Karen Baker Landers, Skyfall; Paul N J Ottoson, Zero Dark Thirty.

BEST SOUND MIXING: John Reitz, Gregg Rudloff and Jose Antonio Garcia, Argo; Andy Nelson, Mark Paterson and Simon Hayes, Les Mis; Ron Bartlett, D.M. Hemphill and Drew Kunin, Life of Pi; Andy Nelson, Gary Rydstrom and Ronald Judkins, Lincoln; Scott Millan, Greg P. Russell and Stuart Wilson, Skyfall.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: Joe Letteri, Eric Saindon, David Clayton and R. Christopher White, The Hobbit; Bill Westenhofer, Guillaume Rocheron, Erik-Jan De Boer and Donald R. Elliott, Life of Pi; Janek Sirrs, Jeff White, Guy Williams and Dan Sudick; The Avengers; Richard Stammers, Trevor Wood, Charley Henley and Martin Hill, Prometheus; Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, Philip Brennan, Neil Corbould and Michael Dawson, Snow White and the Huntsman.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Chris Terrio, Argo; Lucy Alibar & Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild; David Magee, Life of Pi; Tony Kushner*, Lincoln; DAVID O RUSSELL, Silver Linings Playbook.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Michael Haneke, Amour; Quentin Tarantino*, Django Unchained; John Gatins, Flight; Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola, Moonrise Kingdom; MARK BOAL, Zero Dark Thirty.

London Film Fest 2012 Day 4 - AMOUR

AMOUR is a typically austere, unflinching and technically formal Michael Haneke film.  His camera faces the protagonists head on and does not move, refusing to follow the action off screen, waiting for it to return to the original set-up.  As an audience, we are forced into that same immobility.  We are forced to slow ourselves down to the pace of this film, to live inside the four walls of the apartment, and endure what the protagonists endure.  

They are an old married couple (Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva) , still sympathetic, still vital, until she suffers a stroke and a failed reparative operation.  Promising not to take her to hospital again, and repulsed by the brusque carers, he takes on the burden of her care.  We feel her anger and indignity.  We feel his frustration and hopelessness.  Their daughter (Isabelle Huppert) also suffers but her pat solutions seem distance from the reality of her parents' situation. As with all Haneke, a quiet tension builds until a provocative final resolution.  It is a resolution that we have been guessing at and fearing since the prologue.  That it comes as less of a surprise does mt diminish it's force. 

That said, I did not find this film as convincingly deserving of its Palme d'Or as Haneke's THE WHITE RIBBON.  I felt that there was some repetition and tedium during its middle passage. Did we really, for instance, need so much time with Isabelle Huppert's character? Did we really need to see two nurses.  The film also felt a little bit like it didn't know how to end, and the scene that was finally chosen seemed somehow "small" in the context of the powerful emotions that proceeded it.

Still, Haneke that is not quite at the level of perfection of THE WHITE RIBBON and HIDDEN is still quality film-making, and after all we have something here That we do not see so often in his films, and perhaps in life: dangerously selfless love.

AMOUR  played Cannes 2012 where it won the Palme d'Or, and London 2012. It opened earlier this year in Germany, Hungary and Greece, and opens on Oct 24th in Belgium, france, Russia and Italy. It opens in Poland on Nov 2; in the Netherlands and the UK on Nov 16; in Sweden on Nov 23; in Portugal on Nov 29; in the USA on Dec 19; and in Denmark and Norway on Dec 25th.

The running time is 127 minutes.

London Film Fest Day 8 - THE WHITE RIBBON - DAS WEISSE BAND

Michael Haneke makes films that toy with the audience - whether with malicious black humour in FUNNY GAMES or with subversive, slippery political provocation in CACHE/HIDDEN. He hates clear-cut answers and stories that claim that life is more simplistic than it really is. He is concerned with human nature and the cruel violent and sexual impulses that lie behind the facade of bourgeois life. All these preoccupations are visible in his beautiful, disturbing, Palme d'Or winning new film DAS WEISSE BAND - A GERMAN CHILDREN'S STORY.

In terms of toying with the audience, this starts with the very title of the film. DAS WEISSE BAND or THE WHITE RIBBON is translated for non-German audiences, but the beautifully written sub-title isn't. Haneke claims that this is because the story should resonate for people whichever country they are from, rather than being read as a particularly German fable, but then why have the sub-title there at all, untranslated and provocative. The games continue with the first image of the film, shot in pristine black-and-white. This serves as a distancing device that panders to our images of the early twentieth century, in black and white photos. The distancing also comes through the employment of a voice-over from one of the characters in the film, who admits in the first line of the film that he can't be sure that he's remembering events correctly after all this time. In other words, nothing we are to see can be taken at face value.

The tale that unravels is certainly concerned with sexual violence and cruelty. It is set in a North German town in the year before World War One, but could easily be depicting a world from centuries before. The town is oppressed financially, under the feudal system under the Baron, and by the fierce religious morality enforced by the town priest. A young boy is forced to wear a white ribbon to remind him of the purity to which he should aspire. But more violently, each night his hands are tied to the side of the bed by his pastor-father to stop him from masturbating. Naturally, this being Haneke, superficial rigid morality disguises physical and moral corruption - incest, murder, arson, theft, adultery. Adults brainwash children, but act like wilfully, as children. Children are either presented as cherubic paragons of virtue or as sinister and in mobs. For every scene that is heartbreakingly beautiful there is a scene that is perverse and frightening.

There is no doubt that DAS WEISSE BAND is a great, beautiful, challenging, multi-faceted film. You can watch it for the sheer joy of the composition of the photography, or for the tense portrayal of an oppressed society. No doubt some will watch it, reductively, as a story of how the generation who became Nazis was formed. But this movie is much richer, and more applicable, than that.

THE WHITE RIBBON played Cannes, where it won the FIPRESCI prize and the Palme d'Or, and Toronto 2009. It was released in September in Germany and Austria. It is currently on release in Belgium and France and opens next week in Greece and Italy. It opens in the UK on November 13th, in the Netherlands on November 19th, in Sweden on December 11th, in Norway on December 26th, in the USA on December 30th and in Russia on January 12th.

Bina007's most spine-tinglingly awesome moments of 2008 - or why I still enter every movie theatre in joyful hope!

To quote last year's post: "It may be hard to believe when you read an excoriating review, but every time I sit down to watch a movie I do so in joyful hope. I can't explain how much I love cinema. Ever since I was a little girl there seemed to be something magical about a beam of light that transformed a negative into a living and breathing story. So in a rare annual moment of warmth and optimism, here follow those flashes of brilliance that reminded me - amidst the sequels, threequels and hopeless failures - just how wonderful cinema can be. Note that this list is significantly different from my Best Films of 2008 list (found in a drop-down box in the side-bar). Even piss-poor flicks can have moments of inspiration - which is a faintly hopeful thought."

1. When Rambo Strangles The Guy So Hard He Breaks Through His Skin and Blood And Veins and Shit Start Spurting Out. The long-awaited RAMBO flick was clearly piss-poor but among all that irony-free absurdity there was one moment so transcendentally ridiculous it gave me one of the biggest belly-laughs of the year!

2. The Sound-track and Cinematography as Daniel Plainview Rushes to the Oil Platform to Save His Son. A breathtaking moment of pure cinema in THERE WILL BE BLOOD - stunning cinematography, unbearable tension, intense orchestral score. This was cinema at its most visceral and inescapable and audacious. I'm still sore that the soundtrack was disqualified from the Oscars on a technicality. 

3. Michael Pitt Scares the Bejesus Out of the Middle Classes in the Final Frame of FUNNY GAMES. A movie so brilliant Michael Haneke had the arrogance to make it twice, this time with the angelic looking Pitt holding the audience's eyes in the final frame. Are we being warned that we're next or indicted for sado-masochistic voyeurism? Genius.

4. Hrithik Roshan's Dance Routine to Main Aisa Kyun Hoon Establishes Him As the Best Song and Dance Man in Cinema since Gene Kelly. Hrithik Roshan is a hoofer. He knows dance and not in the over-choreographed Michael Jackson c.Thriller style that most Bollywood movies adopt. Pure talent. Pure entertainment. The best traditions of Hindi cinema.

5. When Dawn Slices Off Tobey's Cock With Her Vagina Dentata. Seriously funny. (Probably not if you're a bloke, admittedly). And by far the best reason to watch the teen horror cum political satire, TEETH. 

6. When The Joker Slams The Droog's Face Into the Pencil. Great horror is not what you're shown but what you imagine. A lightening bolt of pure fright energises an over-long and over-worked Batman sequel.

7. When The Joker Rides Through Gotham Triumphant, His Head Out The Window Of a Moving Car. One of the most spine-chilling images of 2008. Shame Nolan didn't have the balls to end THE DARK KNIGHT on that image, creating a second part finale as powerful as EMPIRE.

8. When The Thief Chases The Cop In JAR CITY. I can't escape why this scene is funny. It doesn't sound funny when I try. Just please try and seek out this superb Icelandic comic thriller. Please.

9. Hellboy and Abe Listening to Barry Manilow's "Can't Cry Without You" closely tied with Johan Krauss kicking Hellboy's ass in the Locker Room. Pure Comedy Gold.

10. JAAACK!!!! The not unattractive and yet infinitely goofy Jean Dujardin as pre-Bond spoof Agent OSS-117. At times, this actor's facility for physical comedy almost touches Sellars in the Clousseau movies. Perhaps the most unexpected belly-laugh of the year - given that Professor007 and I were in an art cinema famed for showing turgid self-righteous foreign language flicks. 

FUNNY GAMES (1997)

FUNNY GAMES is the original German language horror film that Michael Haneke recently remade as FUNNY GAMES U.S. Both movies are identical, barring the language and small differences in performance. In this version, we meet a prosperous couple and their young son travelling to their summer house on a lake. Two apparently polite young men ask to borrow some eggs. Their insistence is a little sinister, but I think Susanne Lothar is slower to exhibit her suspicions that Naomi Watts in the remake. Soon, the two youths are torturing the family for kicks, occasionally turning to the camera and breaking the fourth wall. Haneke teases the audience - first, by never actually showing the violence and second, by mocking our voyueurism.

On the whole, I prefer the remake and not simply because my German isn't perfect. Michael Pitt seems more self-assured than Arno Frisch as the lead torturer - he's more poised and more sinister. And if there's any single scene that defines this movie, it's the closing shot where the torturer looks directly at the audience. For that reason, the re-make just has the edge over the original.

FUNNY GAMES played Cannes and Toronto 1997.

FUNNY GAMES U.S. - who gets the last laugh?

FUNNY GAMES U.S. is Michael Haneke's shot-for-shot remake of his 1997 post-modern horror flick in which two polite teenage boys torture an affluent family for no reason other than to entertain themselves. The genius of the original film and this English-language remake is to create an atmosphere of stomach-churning tension without actually showing us any gory violence. Our imaginations fill in the blank between the scared reaction shots and the blood-spattered TV set. As a slow-burn thriller of almost unbearable tension, FUNNY GAMES is hard to beat. After all, what is more frightening than an evil that we cannot reason with? It's for this reason that I find the HOSTEL movies laughably unthreatening. If someone wants to sell me to a torturer, I'll simply offer more money. No, what's really terrifying is a situation in which I have simply no language in which to communicate with my kidnapper - no purchase on his conscience or on his wallet. The final shot of a torturer holding our eyes unashamed is brilliantly frightening.

On one level, we can simply watch FUNNY GAMES U.S. as a brilliantly executed thriller. But Haneke wants us to question our enjoyment of the experience. He does this by having one of the torturers break the fourth wall and directly question the audience. Not only is he torturing the couple, he is trying to make us feel bad for enjoying our voyueurism.

I have to say that I find this trite post-modernism rather simplistic and condascending. I feel no shame in enjoying a movie like FUNNY GAMES qua horror movie. I find it cathartic. I do not enjoy it as a voyueur but as an intelligent, affluent, comfortable woman who can empathise with the situation of the family in the film and who is working out her fear of social change through the experience. So who gets the last laugh? The director who tries to under-cut our enjoyment of his masterpiece with his hectoring, or the audience, who can choose to dismiss such foolishness and get a brilliant thriller anyway?

FUNNY GAMES U.S. played London 2007 and Sundance 2008. It was released in Canada, the USA and Greece earlier this year. It is currently on release in Finland and the UK and opens later this month in Israel, Singapore, Belgium, Norway, Frnace and Sweden. It opens in May in Portugal, Russia, the Netherlands and Germany. It opens in Romania in June and in Spain in July.

HIDDEN - Intellectually demanding thriller, superbly executed

Austrian director Michael Haneke's new flick HIDDEN is superb. Indeed, for what it is worth, this is my Best Film of 2005, a triple honour shared by A History of Violence and Kung Fu Hustle. It is a thriller that is tense from the first second to the last; it demands utter concentration and intellectual engagement from the audience. One scene in particular will take your breath away. It repays dividends.

The movie is set in present day Paris (though one of the filming locations is Vienna.) Daniel Auteuil (perhaps best known as Henri of Navarre in La Reine Margot) gives a bravura performance as George Laurent and Juliette Binoche plays his wife Anne. They are a successful couple - he is a famous TV literary figure, a Melvyn Bragg if you will - and she is a succesful publisher. They have a teenage son. They start getting video cassettes of surveillance footage of the street where they live and threatening pictures. The police are powerless to help. George's reaction to this "terrorism" is to become aggressive, taking action on thin evidence, becoming deceptive. Anne "gives in" to the terrror. So by now you should realise that as well as being a superbly executed face-value thriller, this movie can also be taken as an allegory for France's colonial history and recent political/military history.

In a rare example of Awards ceremonies getting it right, HIDDEN won the prize for Best Director at Cannes and was nominated for the Palme d'Or. I can't say more for fear of ruining the tension, but believe me, if you are not feeling tired and could do with an "adult" movie you could do worse. It's this or David Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, and for me, HIDDEN edges it out.

HIDDEN is already on release in France. It goes on nationwide release in Austria on the 18th November, limited release in the USA on 11th January 2006, and nationwide release in the UK and Germany on 26th January.