MOONLIGHT

In over a decade of watching over 200 movies a year, and trying to seek out independent movies, I've never seen a film about gay black men.  That's really quite something when you think about it.  And so it's deeply refreshing and heartening to see MOONLIGHT capture critical praise.  That said, while I found much to admire in its intent and some of its performances, it was a less moving and impressive watch than I had anticipated.  

The film is written and directed by Barry Jenkins, based on an unproduced play by Tarell Alvin McCraney and is based on their childhood experience of growing up gay in a deeply dysfunctional black community in Florida.  What's impressive is that they manage to subvert the stereotypes of the black drug dealer and the crack whore, and the entire concept of masculinity by showing us what they know. The result is a film that feels claustrophobic and melancholy - of a community that is fundamentally dysfunctional, in which its members feel trapped, but where there is some slight hope of escape. It's also a community that feels odd to English eyes insofar as it's so un-diverse - the only white face we see is a cop.

The formal structure of the play carries over to the film: we meet our protagonist at three ages, in three thirty-five minute segments.  In the first part he's a skinny schoolkid called Chiron (Alex R Hibbert), bullied for being camp, who finds solace from his crack addict single mother with a drug dealer called Juan (Mahershala Ali) and his girlfriend, Teresa (Jangle Monae).  Against all expectations, it's the drug dealer who proves caring, understanding and comforting - even going so far as to tell young Chiron that he doesn't need to figure out of he's gay yet, and even if he is, he shouldn't feel ashamed of it.  Moreover, Juan is morally complex, at once judgmental of Chiron's mother's drug addiction, but also conscious that he's the man selling to her.  The power of Ali's performance in this segment is quite dazzling, and I'm not sure the film ever really recovers from his absence.

OUR KIND OF TRAITOR

OUR KIND OF TRAITOR is a spy thriller directed by Susanna White (PARADE'S END) and adapted by Hossein Amini (THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY) from a novel by John le Carre.  It stars Ewan McGregor as a feckless cheating academic who tries to redeem himself in his own and his wife's eyes by carrying a message from a Russian mafia money launderer to MI6.  Problem is, aforementioned gangster (Stellan Skarsgaard) doesn't trust the British government to get his family to safety and demands that the husband and wife (Naomie Harris) take part in the negotiations as a vouchsafe.  This is a wise move, as the British spy making the negotiations (Damian Lewis) is in the midst of some backroom politics orchestrated by a corrupt politician (Jeremy Northam).  The result is a thriller than attempts to work on two levels - will the couple and the spies get both the mafiosi and his family out of harm's way?  And will his information expose the corruption at the heart of the City of London?

Sadly, the film fails on all counts. Skarsgaard is horribly mis-cast as the mafioso, Dima.  He makes no attempt at a Russian accent and just acts bigger and louder.  He doesn't come across as a successful financier at all.  McGregor is good as the feckless spy but poor Naomie Harris has very little to do. And Damian Lewis is over-styled and over-broad in his performance - playing a kind of caricature of the over-confident British spy - as if auditioning for some kind of 1970s spy film, or that godawful recent movie remake of TINKER TAILOR.  Behind the camera lens, director Susanna White has no idea how to create a sense of tension in directing action. Scenes in a French sports club are almost laughably absurd as spies and mafiosi dip in and out of steamy saunas and massage rooms.  And the very conceit that somehow an ordinary couple could double up and help out MI6 in extraditing a source is just patent nonsense.  Finally, the film (and arguably the book's) heavy-handed political agenda is just too obvious and lacking in nuance to be interesting.  

OUR KIND OF TRAITOR has a running time of 108 minutes and is rated R. The movie is on release in Italy, Finland, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Denmark, Croatia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Serbia, Russia, Estonia, the UK, Ireland, Norway, Kuwait, Bulgaria, Sweden and Lithuania.  It opens in June in Israel, the Netherlands, Ukraine, the Philippines, Belgium and France; in July in the USA, Canada, Germany, Portugal, Singapore, Australia, Greece and Brazil; on August 4th in Thailand; on August 18th in New Zealand; on October 21st in Japan and on November 18th in Spain.

SOUTHPAW

SOUTHPAW is an earnest but risibly cliched and over-acted boxing drama written by Kurt Sutter (SONS OF ANARCHY) and directed by Antoine Fuqua (TRAINING DAY).  The movie starts Jake Gyllenhaal in a typically intense, hyper-realistic portrayal of a working-class kid turned successful boxing champion.  He's married to the love of his life (Rachel McAdams) and has a young daughter which is all so far so ROCKY. But pretty soon, his wife is caught up in a shooting and dies in one of those over-scored over-dramatic moments that will serve as the lynchpin for the rest of the film, in which our broken hero tries to resurrect his career and win back his daughter from the evil social services. His flashy manager (50 Cent - actually ok as an actor) having left him, our hero winds up begging a wizened old boxing manager played by Forrest Whitaker to train him.  Because as in ROCKY, the best training is low-rent, austere hard work on the worn-out mats of a back-street gym.  

MANDELA: LONG WALK TO FREEDOM

MANDELA: LONG WALK TO FREEDOM is a film in that long tradition of sepia toned Hollywood hagiography that fully subscribes to the Great Man theory of history.  It is a simple film that tells a powerful story and contains a truly exceptional central performance.  But it is mortally wounded by  bad make-up and intellectual timidity.

So, I guess we all know the story.  Nelson Mandela is a lawyer in apartheid South Africa - an advocate for the repressed in white courts.  At first reluctant, he becomes a leader in the African National Congress - a banned political party campaigning for equal rights.  When the struggle goes nowhere, they turn to violence and Mandela goes underground.  When a sabotage mission goes wrong he's caught, tries to become a martyr, but is instead imprisoned for life on Robben Island. There he stayed for decades as international pressure increased, the ANC's violence increased, and F W DeKlerk realised he would have to negotiate.  All this led us to that iconic image of Mandela walking free, hand-in-hand with his long-supportive wife Winnie. The crucial final act, is seeing the man who could so easily seek vengeance, pleading for what would become "truth and reconciliation".

The problem with this film is that while it tries to make us see the nasty side of Mandela - his serial womanising - it doesn't want to go too far in damaging the legend. Similarly, it treats Winnie Mandela - a fascinating figure - with respect and sympathy - which is right - but arguably goes too far.  We see her brutalised and radicalised - but we don't see enough of the ANC campaign of violence that so alienated her from Nelson. Indeed, I wanted much more of Winnie, not least because while Idris Elba's acting was just fine as Nelson, Naomie Harris absolutely mastered the accent and growing hardness of Winnie.  It is absurd to me that Elba is getting award nominations while Harris is unrecognised. Of course, at a much more superficial level, the real problem of this film is that Elba looks nothing like Mandela.  That doesn't matter of itself. I saw Mark Rylance play Cleopatra and his acting was mesmerising.  And maybe if they'd been less heavyhanded with the make-up and just let Elba act Nelson rather than trying to make him look like Nelson, it would've been less distracting. As it is, the make-up is utterly unsuccessful and utterly distracting.

So, overall, a rather disappointing film, worth watching only for Naomie Harris, and to see just how far Mandela's conditions eased in the final years of his captivity. There is no real depiction of the horror of living in a small cell for decades.  No searing indictment of that captivity in the manner of Steve McQueen's HUNGER. And no real desire to stir up the pot of controversy surrounding the ANC's tactics, as embodied in Winnie.  It's a picture book movie of fortuitous timing and poor make-up.  Mandela deserves better. 

MANDELA: LONG WALK TO FREEDOM played Toronto 2013 and opened last year in South Africa, the USA, Iceland, Portugal, Belgium, France, Israel, the Netherlands, Canada and Kuwait. It opened earlier this year in the UK and Ireland. It opens in Spain on January 17th; in Denmark on January 23rd; in India on January 24th; in Germany and New Zealand on January 30th; in Australia on February 6th; in Sweden on February 7th; in Finland on February 14th; and Singapore on February 27th. 

SKYFALL

Despite my pseudonym, I am not in fact a great fan of Bond - rather I named myself after my friend Caspar who famously crashed his car pulling out of Frankfurt airport when distracted by an Aston Martin, and was forever after known as Caespi007.  For me, Bond was a pathetic fantasy denying Britain's post-Suez decline.  A man more in the tradition of Flashman - slick surfaces, sport fucking and sado-masochism.  The movies were, in general, even more ridiculous, with their wonkish gadgetry and porn-name Bond girls.  Some were entertaining in an ironic way, but let's face it, as spy thrillers go, this was a long long way below the standard set by John Le Carre's Smiley. Smiley lived in a world of decay, corruption, failure and bureaucratic incompetence. There was a sense of honour and of love, but it was struggling to survive. 

Of the recent Bonds, CASINO ROYALE was a superior reboot but only because it was trying to be a Bourne film.  Moreover, the dumbing down of the Aston Martin to a Ford, and baccarat to poker, struck me as anti-Fleming, insofar as one cared at all about the heritage of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.  We all know that QUANTUM OF SAUSAGE (HT @djeremybolton) was impenetrable, dull nonsense, and undid much of the goodwill that CASINO had rebuilt.  What then could we expect of SKYFALL, helmed by Sam Mendes, a wunderkind British theatre director of middling reputation as a cinema director, starting with the acclaimed AMERICAN BEAUTY and sliding into obscurity ever since? 

The early signs were good - a cast list full of English thespians of the highest calibre - Ben Whishaw, Rory Kinnear, Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney.  A script from Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (CASINO ROYALE) and John Logan (RANGO) that was going to tackle head-on the incompatibility of kiss kiss bang bang Bond with the age of Bourne.  And photography from perhaps the best DP working today: Roger Deakins.  All was shaping up for a Bond that was in tune with London 2012 and the Diamond Jubilee - a country presided over by an implacable matriarch, learning to be proud of its imperial heritage without making the mistake of being shackled to it, looking to a very different future with some slight degree of confidence. 

The result is a movie that is perhaps the most thoughtful and reflective of the Bond series.  A movie that can look upon its heritage with fond humour but safely put it aside.  A movie that is conservative - passionately making the case for on the ground espionage; for men with the experience to tell them when to, and when not to, fire the bullet; for leaders with the balls to take the tough calls but also with the good sense to know they are accountable. It's the kind of movie, in short, where Bond can do his job with just a gun and a radio, but ultimately also uses the rockets in his Aston Martin DB5, and doesn't feel the need to apologise for either. It's the movie in which a joke can be made about the ejector seat, but in which ultimately we are rather pleased to see order restored - M, Moneypenny, Q and Bond, in a tastefully old-fashioned leather padded room.   This was a Bond I could get on board with.

In fact, SKYFALL may well be the Bond I've seen. It had wry humour; real emotional development; perhaps the most sleazy, scary villain in the canon; precious little cheap sex; and real consequences to actions. It felt plausible in a way so little Bond feels plausible.  The acting was superb. And the cinematography deserves an Oscar. I had a thoroughly good time - laughed, cheered, was moved, was scared.  It was the complete entertainment experience.  

The plot has reflection and consequences and sheer heft built into it from the start.  In the precredits sequence, as Bond (Daniel Craig) chases down a man with a MacGuffin, we see M (Dame Judi Dench) take two brutally hard but necessary decisions, resulting in Bond's apparent death. He goes off on a drinking binge post-credits only to emerge when a terrorist attack on MI6 turns into a very personal attack on M. It appears that a rogue former agent (Javier Bardem) seeks vengeance on M precisely for taking those brutal decisions that put the country before the agent.  Bond is broken, unfit and old; M's "fitness for purpose" questioned by her political superior, Mallory (Ralph Fiennes); and even Q (Ben Whishaw) mocks the idea of exploding pens and the necessity of on the ground fieldwork when the world's battles are now fought with computers. 

Through all this M is our unwavering moral compass. She never questions that her decisions were right, but also fully acknowledges their human cost.  Bond is, through her faith in him, reconstituted from broken man to polished active agent, able to acknowledge that the world has changed, that the new Q is valuable, and to see his own worth within the modern machine.  Mallory is a good example of just how well-thought act the script is - that a minor character with only a handful of scenes can challenge our prejudice about him every time we meet him.  Ralph Fiennes is superbly slippery in the role.  The screenwriters do a similarly superb job with Bond girl Eve (Naomie Harris) who begins as an irritating incompetent, and raises our suspicions of typical Bond misogyny, until we realise that it's all part of her character development.  Ben Whishaw is, as always, a scene-stealer as geek hacker Q. And as for the villain, Javier Bardem has created a character as outlandish as Scaramanga, or Anton Chigurh, or Hannibal Lecter - all of which this movie consciously references.  In a tour-de-force piece of CGI work we see just how damaged he is.  He is at once the most pantomime villain of the series - but also the most scary, sleazy and unnerving.  He is the Bond villain that surpasses all others - just as Heath Ledger's Joker redefined Batman villains.

Behind the camera, Adele provides the strongest theme song in years, with Paul Epworth's orchestration echoing, but never quite pastiching the old Shirley Bassey numbers.  Daniel Kleinman's opening credits sequence is also one of the most memorable of the recent Bond outings.  But most of all the superior quality of this film is down to DP Roger Deakins, long-time collaborator with the Coen Brothers.  You can see this most of all in the Shanghai, Macau and Scottish sequences.  In Shanghai, he captures that exciting neon brightness of the modern metropolis - every glass surface reflects luminous advertising - the city has the unreal air of Newton Thomas Sigel's LA in DRIVE.  In Macau, Deakins has Bond arrive at a casino against a backdrop of darkness surrounded by soft orange lanterns that takes one's breath away.  And in Scotland, we see Bond silhouetted against burnt orange night sky that reminded me of some of the most arresting visuals from Robert Elswit's THERE WILL BE BLOOD.

Is everything perfect? No.  Naomie Harris and Daniel Craig do not have enough sexual chemistry to carry off the shaving scene. And the Scottish scene starts off a little A-Team.  But these are all minor quibbles in what is an incredibly beautiful, superbly written and acted film that lifts the standard of the Bond series and puts it on a much more sustainable footing. Kudos to all involved. 

SKYFALL is on release in the UK, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Iraq, Iceland, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malta, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, South Korea and Sweden, the UAE, Switzerland.  It opens next weekend in Italy, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Serbia, Spain, Argentina, Austria, Bolivia, Chile, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Peru, Singapore, Slovenia, Uruguay, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Estonia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Taiwan, Turkey, Venezuela and Vietnam. It opens in November 9th in Jamaica, the USA, Albania, Canada and Pakistan, It opens on November 15th in Cambodia; on November 22nd in Australia and New Zealand; on November 30th in South Africa; on December 1st in Japan; and on December 6th in the Dominican Republic.

SEX & DRUGS & ROCK & ROLL - Spasticus Autisticus

SEX & DRUGS & ROCK & ROLL is a fast-paced, manically inter-cut biopic of Ian Dury, New Wave singer, genius wordsmith, ladies man and radical. Born working class, crippled by polio, trained by Peter Blake, married to a middle-class portrait painter, father to two kids, living in suburbia. That's how we meet Dury - a punk radical playing shitty pubs with a dodgy band, desperate for fame, and deeply at odds with his suburban home life. Somehow his wife puts up with his shit, even when he shacks up with a pretty West Indian girl much younger than him and moves out. Somehow the Kilburn and the High Roads turn into The Blockheads, the seminal songs are written, and the money comes rolling in. Before you know it, Dury and his crew are in a swanky rented country house, generally pissing about and not getting much work done. His girlfriend and wife are both simultaneously in love and at wits end with him. His young son is much loved but exposed to drugs and not much schooling. His young daughter is basically ignored. The End.

If the plot summary above seemed to have no structure, well, neither does the film. It survives as entertainment purely on the strength, charisma and sheer bravado of Andy Serkis' (best known as Gollum) leading performance. You get a good sense of Dury as wordsmith but you don't really get how he became famous. One minute he's playing pubs, the next he's famous. You never get how his character might have changed. His girlfriend Denise (Naomie Harris) complains that fame has changed him, but the audience doesn't see it. He just seems as much of an egotistical but charming arse as ever. His wife (Olivia Williams) evolves - moves on - but Dury never changes. He's just too clever by half, too selfish by half, and a lot of fun to be around.

If you love Ian Dury's music, you'll get a kick out of this film. Serkis is genius, and ably supported by Olivia Williams and Naomie Harris. But if you don't know who Ian Dury is, this film isn't going to help. You get a lot of stuff about his early life, but it doesn't tell you about art school and how he became a radical performer. You get the starting point (the film posits that being crippled was the defining change) and the final product, but nothing inbetween. You don't have a clue why he's married to an RA.

So, all in all, this is a great little film that could've done with a bit more substance, and a bit more exposition, a little more context.... As it is, it's unlikely to get an audience beyond the core fanbase. Still, anything that makes you dust off your old vinyl, it's no bad things.

SEX & DRUGS & ROCK & ROLL is on release in the UK.

STREET KINGS - once a patsy....

STREET KINGS is a dull, predictable, mis-cast, dirty-cop-thriller from the director of HARSH TIMES and writer of TRAINING DAY. The movie features Keanu Reeves as a meat-head, bent-out-of-shape, vigilante cop. Forest Whitaker is the corrupt police chief pulling his strings. The Reeves character has an attack of morality and goes after the gang-land killers of another cop who was actually snitching on him. It's a cute little Catch 22 situation. If he finds the killers, they could implicate him (wrongly, for once) in the hit. Should he take the fall but do the right thing? In a town so corrupt, what's the right thing anyways?

After LA CONFIDENTIAL and TRAINING DAY, I need to see something pretty special from a dirty cop film to justify its existence, and this film just doesn't have it. The script is derivative, paced too slow, and the plot twists will be obvious to anyone familiar with the genre. The casting is an even bigger problem. Keanu Reeves is plain unconvincing as a grizzled, hard-as-nails cop. He's about as hard as my grandmother. Hugh Laurie is similarly unconvincing as a foul-mouthed, intimidating Internal Affairs cop. Forest Whitaker hams it up as the Chief - it's like watching one of those grim Al Pacino performances where he randomly shouts things and pastiches himself. In fact, pretty much the only actors who do a good job are two young, relatively inexperienced cast members - Naomie Harris as a grieving widow and Chris Evans as a rookie cop.

STREET KINGS is on release in the Philippines, Singapore, Estonia, Finland, Indonesia, Turkey, USA, Oman, Germany, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan and the UK. It opens next week in Argentina, Denmark, Iceland, Spain and Sweden and the following week in Norway. It opens in May in Belgium, Hong Kong and in June in Australia, France, Italy and Poland.