VICE

VICE is an occasionally very funny film that contains a great performance. But it's also an overlong, baggy mess in which half of what the director throws at the film fails to stick. Even worse, it's a film that pretends to be as close to factual as possible, even while committing the cardinal mistake of painting Bush 43 as nice but stupid (he was neither).  And worst of all, it's a film that pretends to give us some kind of emotional truth about Cheney's loving home life while accusing him of being a venal power-hungry shit. This is all fine, so long as you don't then claim that what you're doing isn't partisan but "factual".  It's simply asinine for a movie director to claim that he's just showing us facts, when he's already admitted that much of what Cheney did is secret.  You can't claim that it's fact that Cheney did X or thought Y.  And to then throw in a mid-credits sequence that wants to cut off criticisms of the film as being nonsense, because it's factual.... well this is the worst kind of bullshit.

But anyway, there are many good performances in bad films.  Christian Bale's depiction of Dick Cheney is indeed a great performance and worth the ticket price. Unlike Rami Malek donning some fake teeth and an accent to play Freddie Mercury, Bale goes way beyond a mere impression (as perfect as his accent is).  In fact, it's pretty insulting to see both of these performances nominated for the same award.  Bale inhabits his character - gives him nuance, and depth, and a whole range of emotions. He has Cheney be a genuinely loyal steadfast father, a loving and proud husband, an almost absurdly slow-moving politician, but also a greedy, conniving, Machiavellian thinker.  When Bale's Cheney turns to the screen at the end of the film to address us, I utterly believed his apologia pro vita sua to be authentic and convincing.

Bale is matched in his endeavours by Amy Adams as his wife Lynne, but I'm pretty sick of two-dimensional Lady MacBeth characters and found little to really engage with.  I thoroughly enjoyed Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld, but he's played, literally, for laughs. But Sam Rockwell looked like a Mad magazine version of W.  So yeah - this is pretty much a one-man show.

As for McKay, the gonzo collage style directing that made THE BIG SHORT so successful goes haywire in VICE.  This film is indulgent, over-long, bizarre, heavy-handed, bludgeoning. I get the fishing metaphor Adam! I don't need to continually cut back to a sinister looking fish moving through water or have end-credits of bait.  I also really think I'd rather not have you use Cheney's heart-transplant donor - a young dead veteran - mouth your script from beyond the grave. That's just distasteful.  Overall, I don't want to get my politics from Mad magazine, and that's what this film is. 

VICE has a running time of 132 minutes and is rated R.  It was released last December in most global markets. It will play Berlin 2019.  

WHILE WE'RE YOUNG

You can listen to a podcast review of the film here.

WHILE WE'RE YOUNG is a funny, acutely observed and sometimes profound comedy from Noah Baumbach - the director behind FRANCES HA and, more happily, GREENBERG.  Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts play a forty-something couple alienated from their baby-obsessed peer group who meet and become fascinated by a twenty-something couple played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. Hanging out with the seemingly-authentic fun-loving hipsters reinvigorates the older couple even as it further drives them from their old friends.  But soon the honeymoon is over as we learn that the gap between Gen X and Gen Y is wider than their years - it's the gap between a generation who learned about digital media as it occurred versus the digital natives - and this has a profound impact on every kind of basic world view and value that the two generations have.

INSURGENT

You can listen to a podcast review of this film below:

INSURGENT is the second instalment of the Divergent series based on the popular young adult novels by Veronica Roth.  I didn't review the first film even though I did see it on DVD. The movie just struck me as so derivative and banal and mechanical that I just couldn't be bothered. There wasn't anything bad about it per se - it was slick and well-acted for the most part - but there wasn't anything to get me excited either.  Sadly, that characterisation applies to the sequel too. It's well-made, well-acted for the most part, and full of great CGI action set-pieces.  But it's so mechanical, so derivative and so predictable that I found myself watching it in a rather mechanical way - utterly detached from the emotional journey.

BIRDMAN

BIRDMAN is a laugh-out loud satire on the insecurity of the actors and bitter negativity of critics that also plays as a tragic tale of mental illness.  It's also a technical tour-de-force of cinematography that's meant to take you right inside the claustrophobic mania of its lead character - a device that both impressed and alienated me and made the experience of this film less visceral than it should be.  It's a great film and a failed film all at once - ambitious both in its subject matter and style - way beyond anything Hollywood is currently giving us.  Noble in its pitch and flawed in its final act. 

Michael Keaton riffs on his own past to play Riggan Thomson, a Hollywood star who used to play a superhero called Birdman.  Today, he's old, divorced, with a daughter just out of rehab and a legacy he's unsure of.  Still beloved by the public, Riggan wants more - he wants artistic credibility.  He wants to literally be the star who makes the front page when he goes down in a plane crash with George Clooney.  The fine line the movie walks is whether Riggan is just another insecure Hollywood star or whether he's genuinely unwell - is he really seeing Birdman and the musicians who form the backing track to this film?  Does he really think he has superpowers?  The evidence in favour of the first theory is that everyone else in the theatre is as insecure as he is, from the ageing starlet played by Naomi Watts to the self-parodying method actor played by Ed Norton. In fact, it's arguably Ed Norton who cuts closest to the bone in his portrayal of the gifted actor who can't be real in real life, and self-sabotages every project he's in.  You have to wonder at the psychology behind Norton - the real Norton - who is so willing to portray himself as a vulnerable douchebag on film. 

DIANA

You can listen to a podcast review of DIANA below, or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.


Oh dear. I really wanted to like the Prince Diana movie, imaginatively titled DIANA, if only to put two fingers up to the mainstream elitist critical opinion. But the film flops heavily onto our screens with little wit and less understanding - a soppy, weepy love story that hasn't got the balls to tackle the fascinating issues that the Princess embodied. The film never takes on the Royal Family apart from a few shy hints that Diana would have liked to have seen her children more. Charles and Camilla emerge unscathed. The fascination that Diana seems to have had for spiritualists and quacks is unquestioned and unexplored. The influence of her butler, Paul Burrell, uninvestigated. And her capricious relationship with the media - hunted but also manipulating - only very gently hinted at. This movie lets everyone - including the late Princess - off the hook.

So what DO we get? We meet Diana as a lonely woman, fascinated with healing, who falls for a leading heart surgeon, Hasnat Khan.  They begin a shy courtship - an odd couple romance.  She's the Princess who loves classical music and exercise. He's the Pakistani surgeon who likes junk food and jazz.  When push comes to shove, he isn't willing to upset his traditional Muslim family or indeed to have his work compromised by her fame.  She reacts rather childishly by trying to make Hasnat jealous by publicly being photographed with Dodi Fayed, leading to their fateful crash in Paris.  Yes, it's tragic that the mother of young sons died, and even more tragic that her celebrity prevented her from enjoying a fulfilling relationship (if true).  But there is no emotional truth in this movie.  No nuance, empathy or insight.  It's as vacuous as Hello! magazine, but at least THAT has the benefit of the real Princess, rather than poor Naomi Watts, in a career-embarrassing performance, tilting her head to the side and fluttering her eyelids in a succession of bad wigs. 

The mind boggles. How could director Oliver Hirschbiegel, who directed the incredibly powerful, intelligent and affecting Hitler's bunker film, DOWNFALL, have produced something so insipid?  I suspect the blame lies partly with the timid producers, but also with screenwriter Stephen Jeffreys, who wrote a movie so risible it earned the shortest review this blog has ever published, for THE LIBERTINE.  One can only wonder what kind of sympathy Sofia Coppola might have brought to this story, after her luminescent depiction of Marie-Antoinette.  At the very least, her product placement would have been less crass than the long lingering handbag close-up that opens this film.

Eheu o me miserum.

DIANA has a running time of 113 minutes and is rated 12A in the UK for strong language, brief land mine injury and surgical detail. 

DIANA is on release in the UK, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland and Poland. It opens on September 26th in Belgium, Denmark, Portugal and Serbia; on October 3rd in France, Italy, Russia and Sweden; on October 10th in Australia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the UAE, Estonia and Norway; on October 17th in Hong Kong and Japan; on October 25th in Brazil; on November 1st in the USA; on November 7th in Argentina and Finland; on November 14th in the Netherlands; on November 28th in Greece and Singapore; on December 13th in Spain; on January 9th in Germnany; and on February 6th in Chile.  

J. EDGAR - A Love Story

J Edgar Hoover is perhaps one of the most significant figures in twentieth century US history. He near invented the FBI; ran it and its predecessor for 50 years; held presidents and public figures in fear of his blackmail material; used the resources of the FBI to pursue personal vendettas and prejudices - against "reds" and civil rights activists - and forever damaged the balance between personal liberty and security.  Hoover was involved in the crackdown on prohibition era gangsters; the Linbergh baby kidnapping; the McCarthy witch-hunts, "Cointelpro" and all the Cold War and anti-civil rights movement paranoia that followed. It is no exaggeration to say that he shaped US history.  He did all this, but remained himself an enigma - unmarried, but with a suspiciously close relationship with his professional sidekick Clyde Tolson. Hoover was a man capable of viciously hounding public figures but also capable of inspiring such personal loyalty that his long-time secretary Helen Gandy destroyed all his personal files after his death before Nixon could get his hands on them.

The odd thing about Clint Eastwood's new biopic is that it seems utterly unconcerned with Hoover's political and institutional significance.  Presidents come and go, the Lindbergh case is used to enhance the bureau's power, but all this is merely grist for Hoover's emotional mill. McCarthy isn't mentioned - neither is Cointelpro.  There is a brief scene where Hoover is trying to pressure Dr King, but nothing is fully explored.  One leaves the film knowing no more about his real significance than when one enters the cinema. That emptiness and confusion is exacerbated by the film's structure - which cuts between a linear re-telling of Hoover's career highlights as he narrates a self-serving autobiography from the 1970s.

Rather than create a biopic, Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (MILK) have decided to create a movie about a repressed love that just happens to involve famous historical figures.  To that end, this is less JFK or W. than BRIEF ENCOUNTER. In Black's thesis, Hoover suffered his whole life from severe emotional repression. He fell in love with Clyde Tolson at first sight, but couldn't return his love physically because his domineering mother had so inculcated her shame at having a gay son.  Even after her death, the relationship remained chaste - a love that was hidden in private as well as in public.  This is, to be sure, a deeply tragic story, and I was genuinely moved by it.  The scenes between Tolson and Hoover - a pivotal and rare emotional outburst at a hotel - the final scene together - are incredibly touching.  But, unfortunately, that wasn't the movie I had been sold, and wading through the hours of running time - of famous politicians lifted up and cast aside - to get to these few emotional scenes - was just utterly dreary.

The movie is a similarly mixed bag when it comes to the technical specs. Lensing by long-time Eastwood collaborator Tom Stern is straightforward, but the film is desaturated to within an inch of its life, leading to a distancing effect that is as artificial as Armie Hammer's make-up as the ageing Tolson (diCaprio has a far more convincing make-up job as the ageing Hoover).  The period costumes and set are sumptuous - as one would expect from a big budget affair, but it all feels as deadened and manicured as Hoover's inner life. In terms of performances - diCaprio is typically impressive, but the real breakthrough is Armie Hammer - the emotional heart of the film, who even manages to move us through his terrible make-up - and Judi Dench as Hoover's grandiose, truly horrifying mother. I would love to see both get Best Performing nods, but I suspect that it's diCaprio who will take the glory come the Oscars.

J. EDGAR played the AFI Fest 2011. It is on release in the US and Canada. It opens on January 6th in Greece, the Netherlands, Singapore, Italy and Norway; on January 11th in Belgium and France; on January 20th in Denmark, Sweden and the UK; on January 26th in Australia, Portugal, Brazil, Spain and Japan; on February 16th in Germany; on March 1st in the Czech Republic and on March 2nd in Turkey.

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER

It has become fashionable for critics to patronise Woody Allen, a director who, apart from the odd freak hit such as VICKY, CHRISTINA, BARCELONA, hasn't produced a run of sustained hits since the late 1980s. He has been accused of cannibalising his back catalogue; producing dramas of diminishing quality; and for focusing his attention on an idea of the upper middle-class intellectual elite that is both anachronistic and irrelevant to modern life. Woody Allen has thus been condemned as a parody of himself. An old man who should do his reputation a favour and just retire. This view seems to be shared by the distributors. Outside of the Woody Allen-loving Parisians (and let's face it - they thought Jerry Lewis was a genius) most Woody Allen films receive a limited theatrical release or just go straight to video.

Still, for those of us who obsessively watched, loved and were provoked by his back catalogue, particularly the greats from the late 70s and 80s, a new Woody Allen film is hard to pass up. And when you get a movie based in your home town, starring actors of the calibre of Gemma Jones, Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas and the criminally under-used Lucy Punch, expectations are higher than the critics would allow.

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER is about the things that Woody Allen films are always about - the big questions of modern life. How far are we willing to delude ourselves into believing in love? How far are we willing to compromise our morals to achieve success? How crazy will we become to avoid admitting our mortality? If the first question was best explored in ANNIE HALL, and the second and third in CRIMES AND MISDEMEANOURS, what does YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER add?

Precious little. The mood is perhaps even more cynical and nihilistic. The location different. But the material is undoubtedly rehashed not to mention the use of characters such as brassy hookers (DECONSTRUCTING HARRY, MIGHT APHRODITE) and men who are willing to murder and steal to get ahead (CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, MATCH POINT) let alone the idea of justice hanging on the throw of a dice or the fall of a coin (MATCH POINT). Humanity is portrayed as fickle, callow, self-serving and self-obsessed - life is a pathetic game of self-delusion - a desperate bid to outrun the inevitable. Woody Allen's characters may live in beautiful houses but they are rarely happy, and if they are, he mocks them for being idiots.

Having said all that, I still thoroughly enjoyed YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER for the simple pleasure of watching those familiar themes refracted through a new set of characters and a new set of actors. Because I didn't have to concentrate on surprises in the plot or thematic material - because I knew how the relationships would pan out from the start - I could simply luxuriate in the wonderful performances and three or four superb dramatic set-pieces that hold their own against any of Woody Allen's finer movies.

The first of those scenes is wonderful tragicomedy. Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) is an old man who doesn't want to admit that his life is nearing its end. He dumps his wife Helena (Gemma Jones) and bankrupts himself dating a money-grabbing hooker (Lucy Punch). Woody Allen skewers Alfie's vanity in a marvellous scene in which they sit in a sterile penthouse flat. She is draped on a fur coat she has just extorted for him, and he is waiting for his viagra to kick in, "Three more minutes..." Pathetic, beautifully observed, hilarious!

The second scene features Alfie's ex-wife Helena and their daughter Sally (Naomi Watts). Sally has married a failed author (Josh Brolin) and desperately needs her mother's money to start a new art gallery, but her mother has been wasting it on seeing a psychic who tells her she will meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and even worse, advises Helena not to give Sally money. The scene is wonderful because, as in life, you have two people who are related but who are in such different emotional and intellectual places that they simply cannot communicate. Helena comes across as smug, deluded and selfish in her manufactured happiness. Sally comes across as justifiably frustrated but also entitled and spoiled. It's beautifully acted and also tragic that this mother and daughter are unable to understand each other's needs.

The third scene features the wonderful Josh Brolin, schlubbed up as the failed writer Roy, so pissed off at his wife Sally's constant nagging for a baby that he has an affair with a pretty young woman (Freida Pinto) and so desperate for success that he steals an unpublished novel. There is a marvellous scene where he realises that he may well be busted and that look on his face - simply that - is worth the price of admission alone!

So, what can I say? YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER doesn't tell you anything you didn't know about Woody Allen's misanthropic world-view.  I don't need to see another brash hooker, and Freida Pinto certainly cannot hold her own among this cast-list. But, for all that, I enjoyed almost every minute, and certain scenes will stay with me as much as anything in Woody Allen's earlier work.

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER played Cannes and Toronto 2010 and opened last year in Spain, the USA, Canada, France, Belgium, Israel, Greece, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Estonia and Uruguay. It opened earlier this year in Mexico, Portugal, Romania, Argentina, Kazakhstan and Russia. It is currently on release in Poland and the UK.

FAIR GAME

True story. Valerie Plame was a CIA operative, building networks to fight terror in the Middle East. Her husband, Joe Wilson, was a pugnacious ex-diplomat, and mediocre businessman.  When the Bush administration misquoted his research, and used it as casus belli for a "pre-emptive" war in Iraq, Wilson went public, explosively. In an act of miscalculated vengeance, Dick Cheney's aide, Scooter Libby, outed Wilson's wife as a CIA agent, exposing her network in the process.  Plame and Wilson had their reputations slandered in the press, suffered the stress of intrusive paparazzi, but ultimately history will see them as on the side of truth. Scooter Libby went to prison for obstructing justice but Bush soon commuted his sentence. And, of course, on the larger issue, the war in Iraq, it was too late to put the genie back in the bottle.

FAIR GAME is a new feature film based on this political and family drama, directed and shot by Doug Liman (MR AND MRS SMITH, THE BOURNE IDENTITY) and written by John-Henry and Jez Butterworth (THE LAST LEGION).  The movie drips in earnest good intentions. It wants us to be utterly repulsed by the dinner-party ignorance in Washington; by the brazen exploitation of Plame by the Bush administration; and the manipulation of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraqi war. It wants us to share in Joe Wilson's outrage and see his journey as one of vindication - from puffed-up has-been to inspirational public speaker. It wants us to admire Valerie Plame's loyalty, and sympathise with her disillusionment.

I think the problem with the film is that for those of use who share its political stance, none of this is new, and for those who don't - well, they are hardly going to pay to watch it. I was shocked at the time, but too much time has passed - too much nefarious wrangling has been exposed - for the shock factor to still exist. And as for the mechanics of cooking up a war, there is no better exposition than Armando Iannucci's IN THE LOOP.  And, suffice it to say, IN THE LOOP managed to be unbelievably entertaining, while at the same time expository. In contrast, FAIR GAME where it's mission very heavily indeed.  All that is not to say that the film isn't handsomely acted and technically well-made. It just fails to spark up.

FAIR GAME played Cannes 2010 where it lost to OF GODS AND MEN for the Palme D'Or.  FAIR GAME was released in 2010 in Italy, Norway, Belgium, France, Canada, Finland, Spain, Sweden, the USA, Bulgaria, Greece, Israel, the Netherlands, Thailand, Australia, Germany, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Austria, Taiwan, Portugal, Denmark, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia and the UAE. It was released earlier in 2011 in Iceland, India, Egypt, Croatia, Singapore, New Zealand, Estonia, Indonesia, Ireland and Latvia. It is currently on release in Serbia, the UK and Brazil. It opens later in March in Brazil and Mexico. It opens in May in Argentina and Poland; in June in Chile, Kazakhstan, Russia and Uruguay; and it opens on July 14th in Ukraine.

THE INTERNATIONAL - 'enslaved to debt'; betrayed by modern art

I really enjoyed THE INTERNATIONAL: it's a solid, intelligent thriller that neatly side-steps a few irritating genre conventions but also delivers a very slick, satisfying action set-piece.

The set up is simple. Clive Owen and Naomi Watts play an Interpol officer and a New York DA trying to frame a case against a shady Luxembourg based bank. Based non-too subtly on the infamous BCCI, the bank is using its capital to broker arms deals, selling cheap weapons from China to fund coups in Africa. It uses any means necessary to protect its interests. The movie is essentially a police procedural in which our two investigators track an IBBC assassin. CSI: Eurozone leads them back to New York where a quite magnificent shoot out takes place in the Guggenheim. (I acknowledge that, strictly speaking, there is no reason to have a shoot-out in an architectural marvel, but my word, it's glorious.) Thereafter, it would've been quite easy for director Tom Tykwer to have rolled into a high-octane, pat ending. Rather, he reverts to the discursive, restrained tone of the preceeding scenes. There is no simmering sexual tension between the leads; no dramatic denouement a la MICHAEL CLAYTON. We leave the film as we begin - the world is "enslaved to debt". I find this a fitting, if bleak, film for our times.

THE INTERNATIONAL played Berlin 2009 and is currently on release in Germany, the USA, Egypt, Australia, Sweden, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, South Korea, Finland, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Norway, the UK, Venezuela, Denmark and Estonia. It opens next week in Belgium and France and on March 19th in Argentina, Greece and Italy. It opens on March 27th in Russia, Poland and Romania. It opens in April in Japan, the Czech Republic, Israel, Singapore and Turkey.

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.

London Film Festival Day 1 - EASTERN PROMISES

This is NOT a review of EASTERN PROMISES. That will follow soon from my colleague. Rather, this is a critical discussion of the movie aimed at those who have seen the film and want to discuss it. SPOILERS FOLLOW.

EASTERN PROMISES is a cheap name for a rather cheap film. That is the sad conclusion I came to, having talked through my disappointment with five other people who had just seen the film. I went in with great expectations on the back of the cast and credit list. David Cronenberg's HISTORY OF VIOLENCE was one of the best films of 2005, thanks largely to a revelatory performance by Viggo Mortensen. I was also impressed by Steven Knight’s depiction of the reality of London away from the Millennium Bridge in DIRTY PRETTY THINGS. Sadly, Knight and Cronenberg let themselves down badly here.

The movie opens with a 14 year old pregnant prostitute called Tatiana collapsing in a pharmacy. Naomi Watt's nurse, Anna, helps deliver her baby and calls the time of her death. She gives the girl's diary to her Russian uncle to translate, hoping to find a next of kin to stop the baby being fostered. Uncle Stepan refuses to translate the diary because of its references to drugs, rape and prostitution, so Anna goes to a restaurant whose card is in its pages. At the restaurant an old man called Semyon claims no knowledge of the girl until Anna reveals she has a diary. He then offers to translate it. Anna meets Semyon's son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and Kirill's henchman, Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen). She discovers that Semyon raped Tatiana and that he is now trying to eliminate Stepan and the child. She also strikes up an unlikely friendship with Nikolai. Meanwhile, Kirill has assassinated a man who accused him of being gay, with violent consequences for Nikolai. The set-up is compelling. Is Nikolai playing Kirill and Semyon off against each other, so as to assume leadership of the gang? And will he eliminate Stepan or help Anna and the child.

The plot of this movie is implausible and simplistic at every level. For instance, how is it that a prostitute who cannot even commit suicide because the windows of her brothel are barred can somehow turn up in a pharmacy at midnight? Of course, Steven Knight and David Cronenberg don't actually care about child prostitution or about the hows and whys of Tatiana’s predicament. Despite Sandra Hebron’s valiant attempt to introduce this movie as a liberal expose of the seamier side of London, Tatiana’s story serves merely as a mechanism to throw Anna and Nikolai together and get us into the world of cool gangsters and stylised violence.

An even more fundamental problem with the film is that Stephen Knight and David Cronenberg choose not to make Nikolai an interesting, conflicted character. The set up of the film captures the audience's imagination. Is Nikolai playing a long game, trying to take over the gang? Is he really a good guy? Will his conscience get the better of his ambition? Anna’s attraction to Nikolai is also more interesting because it becomes a transgressive relationship between a decent woman and a criminal. As soon as it is revealed that Nikolai is a "good guy" the movie falls apart. There is no conflict - no tension - and also no transgression in the relationship between Anna and Nikolai. They are merely two mutually attracted decent people who will not be able to have a relationship because he is working under-cover. At that point, all that is left is for David Cronenberg to give us a corny Mills-and-Boon love scene in which the two protagonists finally manage a chaste kiss. Puh-lease.

If the movie lacks interesting characters and a plausible plot, what remains? Well, this is Cronenberg so we get a lot of beautifully choreographed but largely gratuitous violence. In fact, despite the generally negative tone of this discussion, it is worth saying that in the first half of this movie, Cronenberg creates one of the most iconic movie Badasses of all time. Nikolai is absolutely brilliantly rock-hard. Take the scene where he disposes of a corpse, tie over one shoulder, cigarette in his mouth, defrosting the wallet with a hairdryer. Another absolutely iconic scene is the "Bath House" scene where a butt naked Nikolai despatches two knife-wielding assassins. This scene was so intense, so elegant and so instantly iconic that it raised applause from the packed Odeon Leicester Square audience. It also raised some laughs from those of us acknowledging our complicity in this pornographic violence and also the cartoon-like nature of the scene. David Cronenberg always lingers on the shot of the severed throat or the mutilated fingers for those few seconds too long. He’s enjoying himself in a way that makes the viewer feel uncomfortable. It’s like a school-yard dare to see who will blink first.

The movie also has some of the most instantly iconic homo-erotic scenes since Alan Bates wrestled Oliver Reed naked in Ken Russell's WOMEN IN LOVE. The naked Bath-house scene is an obvious example, but the tattooing of the stars above the heart is another, not to mention the scene between Kirill and Nikolai in the basement.

And this brings us to the heart of the film. EASTERN PROMISES is neither a thriller about child prostitution nor a transgressive romance nor a story about two do-gooders who fall in love. Rather, it is a story about a man who will kill to stop being out-ed. The whole engine of this story is that Kirill cannot bring himself to rape Tatiana because he is gay. So Semyon shows him how, knocking Tatiana up in the process. Kirill assassinates Soyka because Soyka is spreading rumours that Kirill is gay. Kirill has to force Nikolai to fuck a whore so he can get his rocks off as a voyeur. He’s clearly drinking to drown his frustrations. And Nikolai clearly uses the fact that Kirill is attracted to him to gain influence in the gang. Kirill’s dilemma is really at the heart of the story. It is, then, bizarre that Stephen Knight chooses not to focus on Kirill but on the childish love story between Nikolai and Anna in his script. It is also a weakness of the movie that Vincent Cassel, who is a great actor, has not managed to master a convincing and consistent Russian accent. By contrast, Viggo Mortensen gives a flawless performance in a flawless accent.

Ultimately, EASTERN PROMISES will be remembered for its stylish violence and its lead male performance. The story is thin and more banal than the PR campaign would have you believe. This is neither an expose of a grimy underworld, like DIRTY PRETTY THINGS, nor a compelling character study of a conflicted man, like HISTORY OF VIOLENCE. On the surface, it’s an hour of great set-up followed by an hour of a sappy love story between two banal do-gooders. It is really an equally banal and under-developed story about a man in the closet. Either way, cheap thrills aside, this movie is unworthy of its credit list.

EASTERN PROMISES played Toronto and London 2007 and is already on release in the S, Denmark, Russia, Iceland, Spain and Norway. It opens in Singapore, Australia and the UK later in October. It opens in Finland, France, Turkey, Belgium and the Netherlands in November and in Italy and Germany in December. It opens in Argentina on January 31st 2008.

THE PAINTED VEIL - as beautiful and vapid as Kitty before cholera

THE PAINTED VEIL is a handsomely produced adapatation of W Somerset Maugham's novel of the same name. Naomi Watts plays a spoiled English girl who marries a serious bacteriologist (Ed Norton) in a fit of pique and ends up in 1920s China having an affair with Liev Schrieber's charming vice-consul. In revenge, her husband drags her to a cholera-infested town in the interior; murder by another means. She goes, jilted by her lover, and learns her husband's true worth as she enters into his work at the local convent cum infirmary.

The production design and cinematography (Stuart Dryburgh) are absolutely top class. The acting itself is first class too although Norton and Watts are unconvincing in their English accents and Diana Rigg flits in and out of her accent as the French Mother Superior. I also found the orchestral score over-worked - all that echoing Satie! - but fans of soupy melodramas and Merchant-Ivory productions should be happy.

SPOLIERS FOLLOW. But for those who have read Somerset Maugham's novel, this adaptation will leave you feeling a little cheated. Because the novel is very firmly about Kitty Fane's journey from spoiled party girl to grown-up self-aware woman. Indeed, in the novel, Walter Fane is given very little time at all. He exists merely as an inscrutable engine of the plot, whose actions prompt Kitty into self-realisation. There is no soupy death-bed reconciliation - only the bitter realisation that he was delirious as she begged for forgiveness. We see her final humiliation at the hands of her ex-lover's wife and her declaration that she will raise her daughter to be a strong, independent woman - equal to any man. It is stirring stuff, and as much as BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, a novel about the operation of grace on a pretty, harmless, adulterous flapper, raised for nothing better than to marry well.

By contrast, this adaptation is at once more modern and more reactionary. It is modern because the film-makers feel the need to bring our post-colonial liberal angst to bear. The motives of the British, the Catholic missionaries, the Nationalists and the local warlords are all brought into question. The nuns can't just be good people doing good work. They buy babies from the poor and forcibly baptise them: the Mother Superior is in a crisis of faith. But the film is also more reactionary than the novel. We must have a romantic reconciliation between our leading couple. Walter's role must be beefed up to warrant Norton's interest - so there is a lot of time-wasting with local warlords and water-pipes. The death-bed reconciliation is a neat ending and while Kitty does meet her ex-lover in the epilogue, she is gracious and healed rather than angry and raw. Notably, her child is a boy called Walter. There are no dreams of female emancipation.

Poor show.

THE PAINTED VEIL was released in the US in December 2006 and in China, Singapore, Iran, Canada, Russia, Turkey, Lebanon, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Greece, Latvia, Hong Kong and Mexico earlier this year. It is currently playing in the UK and opens in Italy and Iceland in May. It is released on Region 1 DVD in May 2007.

Four days later....

...and I still can't find anything interesting at the cinema. That's the problem with the London Film Fest - you get through all the buzz movies for the next six months in a fortnight. I just can't quite bring myself to see SAW III or STEP UP. This weekend's a bit thin too. Satan vomits in my eiderdown with the UK release of DECK THE HALL. I won't be watching it as it falls foul of Bina007's first rule of Cinema but there's a proper review here. I have unabashedly prejudged this overtly "cheery" movie featuring Matthew Broderick's uptight suburban family man getting riled by Danny DeVito's vulgar neighbour's Christmas light display. Frankly, I find this picture of Danny Devito in a Santa hat vaguely sinister.

The only film I will be watching this weekend is LONDON TO BRIGHTON, despite the fact that it looks a bit like a cheap Lilya 4 Ever. Ironically, I am on the London to Brighton train tomorrow although I doubt we'll get any grungily filmed violence, more's the pity. It's been four days since I ventured inside a movie theatre, which is something of a record for me. I'm starting to get the shakes.

In other random news, they're filming David Cronenberg's new flick outside my office. It's called EASTERN PROMISE which sounds like a gift box of Turkish Delight. However, it's apparently about illegal immigrants and organised crime in London. Viggo Mortensen is playing a slimy East End gangster with slicked back hair and Naomi Watts is also in it. All East End gangsters have slicked back hair. It gives the rozzers a fighting chance. The whole movie set thing is less exciting than annoying - the huge equipment lorries blocking the road make it the devil to get a black cab.

Eheu, o me miserum

ELLIE PARKER - shitty production values; mediocre content

ELLIE PARKER is a deeply disappointing movie. From the first ten minutes you think it's going to be a barbed satire at the expense of Hollywood. No such luck. It's an ultra-low budget flick shot by actor Scott Coffey on Digital Video. Seriously, I have seen better prodution values in my Unky Herb's holiday videos. Grainy print and shoddy sound aside, the substance of the movie is also mediocre. The plot consists of an actress named Ellie Parker going from audition to audition, interspersed with therapy, acting class and various encounters with her boyfriend. So much for a narrative arc. The actors do well with limited material. In particular, Naomi Watts turns in another good performance, despite the fact that she was filmed over a period of months and with radically different haircuts! In fairness, I should point out that ELLIE PARKER garnered a lot of critical acclaim for its "truthful" portrayal of the harsh realities of being an aspiring actress. Alls I know is that the "it's no biggy" scene in KISS KISS BANG BANG says more in less time and with more laughs. So perhaps fans of Naomi Watts' work or aspiring actors should check this out on DVD. But it's not worth a cinema trip.

ELLIE PARKER played Sundance 2005 and went on limited release in the US last fall. It is currently playing in the UK but it also available on DVD.

STAY - visually stylish but frustrating psychological thriller

STAY is a psycholgical thriller. It is set in modern-day New York and stars Ewan MacGregor as a psychiatrist, Dr Sam Foster. When Foster's colleague suffers a nervous breakdown he takes over one of her patients - a twenty-year old art student called Henry Letham. Letham is threatening to commit suicide on his twenty-first birthday and Foster is desperate to stop him. The problem is that the more Foster investigates Letham's life the more he feels he is losing grip on reality.

The movie is visually stylish and uses jarring edits and dissolves in a clever manner to unsettle the viewer and convey Foster's increasingly tenuous grip on reality. The movie also features a talented cast, including Naomi Watts, Ryan Gosling and Bob Hoskins. It is directed by the man who helmed FINDING NEVERLAND and written by the man behind 25th HOUR. But despite the incredibly impressive look and pedigree of the film, I found STAY to be a noble failure.

I love movies that rely on a clever twist or have an unsettling tone, but in this case so few pointers are given to the audience that the viewing experience becomes frustrating, alienating and finally, plain dull. When the final twist is revealed everything does make sense, but short of going back to re-view the movie it is hard to see what the cinema-goer will gain from the overall experience.

STAY was released in the US in October 2005 and is currently on release in Germany, Italy and the UK. It opens in Austria on April 28th 2006 and in France on July 26th.

KING KONG - 90 minutes stupendous boredom, 90 minutes cinematic genius

You should definitely see KING KONG and, if at all possible, you should see it on the big screen because it is one of the most beautiful and brilliant love stories ever photographed. However, you should be sure to take a lot of food and a discrete video gaming console for the first ninety minutes which, super visuals aside, suck ass. Let me explain.

00:01. The movie opens in 1930s New York. It is the Great Depression and there are people who have - the rich movie producers who only care if a movie contains boobies - and the havenots - notably the renegade film-maker Denham and our heroine, out-of-work actress Ann Darrow. People wear snazzy clothes and speak in declamatory statements that end in exclamation marks. ("You mean the world to me!" "He died for what he believed in!" "He never met his mother" "Noooooooooooooooooooooooh!" etc.)

00:30. Ann takes a chance on a renegade film production. The Orson Welles-like egomaniacal film director has hijacked a boat and camera crew and is a bound for the uncharted "Skull Island". The captain is spoooooooooky and there are lots of stupid B-movie film tricks, like creeeepy music, and Extreme Close Ups of Jack Black's crazy eyebrows.

01:00. We get to the spoooooky island. It's all a bit Scooby Doo, especially when the locals arrive in grass skirts and spears. Mean locals kidnap lovely Ann and sacrifice her to Kong; film crew go to the rescue shooting awesome footage along the way. Bina007 would not, at this point, be surprised to see Oompa Loompas.

01:30. Movie flips into absolutely convincing and genuinely heart-breaking love story between hot chick and large ape. Thanks to CGI, ape has all the warmth and facial expressions of Gollum a.k.a British thesp. Andy Serkis. Naomi Watts, the fanastically talented actress who rose to prominence in the wonderful David Lynch flick, MULLHOLLAND DRIVE, gives Ann Darrow real warmth and credibility. Despite the clear absurdity of the match, the audience finds itself rooting for the ultimate Odd Couple.

01:40. Skip back to stupid-ass dinosaur scenes. They look awesome, but advance the plot not one iota. Peter Jackson feels very happy with himself for having topped Jurassic Park but to what end? Jackson could have dropped these scenes, saved me half an hour and his production company $50 million. Only slight plus point is crew member's gruesome death by evil giant sucking slug thing.

02:15. Back to New York, where the captive Kong is put on show by the eeeeeeevil Denham. Kong escapes, shares quality time with girlfriend atop Empire State Building, airforce intervenes.

02:53. Jack Black, alleged comedian and actor playing evil director Denham, massacres one of the most iconic lines in movie history: "Well there you have it: beauty killed the beast."

02:55. Credits roll.
03:10. Credits end.

KING KONG went on global release yesterday.

I HEART HUCKABEES collapses under the weight of its own eccentricity

I HEART HUCKABEES is a movie with so much chutzpah that you desperately want to like it, but in the end it collapses under the weight of so many kooky characters; so many superficial nods to philosophy. The sad truth is that no matter how many individually eccentric characters you throw up, no matter how many suitably indie cuts from Jon Brion you put on the sound-track, a movie has to be more that a kaleidoscope of cool. While HUCKABEES has something like a narrative arc, and some rather witty scenes, at times the whole thing just teeters over the edge of control into full on absurdity and brings the viewer out of the picture. But, in these sadly conventional times, I'd rather have a movie fail for attempting too much than retreading mediocre hits of the past.

Some of the complexity will be hinted at by my attempt at a summary of the characters involved. A young earnest man called Albert (Jason Schwartzman) spends his time campaigning against environmental damage by a Walmart-like chain of supermarkets called Huckabees. Afflicted by angst, he hires a couple of existential detectives (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman.) What this means is that they believe that everything is inter-connected and fundamentally okay: they just need to spy on Albert's every move in order to find out the root source of his angst. Much of it lies in his interminable fight against Huckabees, personified in its ueber-smooth PR man, Brad (Jude Law), and his Barbie-doll squeeze, Dawn (Naomi Watts). However, life is not so green on the other side of the fence: Dawn is disillusioned with her brighter-than-bright image, and consequently making life hard for Brad. In the midst of all this we have a troubled fire-fighter (Mark Wahlberg) who wanders round in his dressing gown convinced that the world is going to hell on a high wind thanks to its addiction to oil. Tommy subscribes to an alternate philosophy proposed by a formidable French philosopher played by Isabelle Huppert, which is, shall we see more Herzogian. Life is cruel: get used to it.

I cannot really summarise the plot. Such as it is, it consists in these wildly eccentric characters interacting in a series of scenes that are alternately funny, funny yet strange or just plain strange. And then the whole thing sort of collapses under the weight of myriad ideas. There are wondrous moments: the conflict between Jason Schwartzman's Albert and Jude Law's Brad is hysterical, and perfectly cast. There is something maliciously enjoyable in seeing someone who appears to be as suave as Jude Law undergoing a complete breakdown. Mark Wahlberg and Naomi Watts display real comic talent - superb timing and deadpan delivery. But what can have attracted an actress of the calibre of Isabelle Huppert to such a role? I mean, seriously, how does one go from The Piano Teacher to I Heart Huckabees unless you are sending yourself up? Similarly, I have seen Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin funnier.

On balance I feel that in the case of HUCKABEES, sheer ridiculousness isn't enough to make the kind of film you want to see again, or tell your friends to see. It seems to combine one part Charlie Kauffman insanity with one part Wes Anderson eccentricity, shake them both together and put the results on screen without much disicpline or order applied. Perhaps this is the philosophical point of the movie? Either way, it doesn't leave much for the humble audience member to cling on to.

I HEART HUCKABEES played Toronto and London 2004 and is released on DVD today.

THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON – earnest yet dull

THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON is a movie about the psychological breakdown of a man named Samuel Bicke. He is decent working class man pushed to the limit by a series of misfortunes. His wife leaves him when he cannot provide for her and their daughters. The bank turns him down for a business loan largely because his partner is black. He is the butt of jokes and criticism at work. He feels denigrated and de-humanised at every turn, and comes to think of himself as a modern-day wage-slave. For some bizarre reason, which is never convincingly explained, he sees Richard Nixon as the ultimate cause of his downfall – the man who sold him a vision of the American Dream that turned out to be a lie. In a bizarre turn, Bicke decides to take a hold of his life, and become more than just another face-less nobody. He will hijack a plane and crash land it into the White House, thus killing the President.

Where the film succeeds in casting three great actors, Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Don Cheadle, in the leads. Each gives a technically pitch-perfect performance, although because of flaws in the concept of the story, I found their performances ultimately uninvolving. I also think that the film beautifully captures the absurdity of the man on the edge of society: Sam Bicke is a tragi-comic character. Nowhere is this shown more clearly than we he tries to join the Black Panthers, who are understandably mystified and insulted that he should want to join. Bicke argues his case for allowing white membership as follows: “Zebras. You see, they're black, and they're white. The Black Panthers become The Zebras, and membership will double.”

However, for me this movie ultimately fails. The title, the fact that it stars Sean Penn and the plot summary that references a suicidal terrorist mission, sell the movie as a tense political thriller with contemporary relevance. However, viewers may find themselves feeling short-changed. Terrorism and the corruption of Richard Nixon are never really discussed here. Instead, it is the process by which a man becomes dehumanised to the point of considering extreme action of any kind that is the real subject matter. The Samuel Bicke character could have expressed his frustration at society in any number of ways. For instance, he could have become a lone gunman like Michael Douglas’ character in the movie FALLING DOWN, hitting out at anyone who came across his path. To my mind, there is something crass in the current climate in using the hijacking a plane that is intended to crash into the White House as a sort of background, substitutable plot device.

Overall, I found that despite some technically brilliant performances by the leads and the rare flash of black humour, this movie had nothing new or interesting to say about the disenfranchisement of working men in corporate America. It certainly had very little to say about terrorism. And worst of all, because it re-treads old ground, it was a very dull movie to watch.

THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON showed at Toronto 2004 and is released in the UK today.