WHITNEY & WHITNEY: CAN I BE ME

To be a kid in the 1980s was to live in an aural world created by Whitney Houston. Seven consecutive number ones, stunning good looks, she embodied all the optimism of the go-go decade.  And yet, as the introduction to Kevin MacDonald's authorised biographical documentary shows, one could as easily intercut this with much darker footage of a racially and economically divided time.  These two documentaries - one authorised and the other not - give a complementary portrait of a woman who embodied all those divisions and was ultimately undone by them. Of the two, Broomfield's documentary seems the most coherent in its diagnosis, and the darker, even if it's MacDonald's that gives us the shock revelation that Houston was sexually abused by her cousin, Dee Dee Warwick.  Put together, they give a remarkably complete view of Whitney Houston, and for my money they should be watched in the order in which they were released.  Broomfield gives the story, MacDonald supplements it with his better access to family interviews.  

The picture we get is of a girl with a horrid childhood, no matter what family friend Aunt Bae says.  Sexually abused when her performer mother left her with others to tour - bullied at school for not being black enough - growing up in a ghetto ripped apart by the Newark riots - in love with a corrupt and philandering father-politician who divorced her mother who cheated with the minister of the church that provided Whitney with a second home.  So Whitney may have seemed privileged - being placed in a private school by aspiring middle class parents. But she had a lot of stuff to deal with that struck at the very core of her identity, and all this financial privilege was after all an investment in a future star - one who would have more talent, yes, but also poise and sophistication than her rivals.

We then move to the Whitney we all knew in the 80s - super successful but as a pop star with an image carefully crafted to be unthreatening to white America -, booed by her own community at the Soul Train awards.  Broomfield does a really great job of showing how this echoed childhood bullying was deeply hurtful to Whitney and may have propelled her toward dating and then marrying the most black of all hip hop stars - Bobbi Brown.  At the same time we have a woman whose best friend and protector is a lesbian, with whom she may have been sexually intimate.  Both docs make the cause that Robyn Crawford really loved Whitney and may well have been the only person who put her needs first. One can only imagine - with the benefit of watching MacDonald's doc - how if Whitney had been abused by a woman, this could've complicated her feelings of attraction toward Robyn, exacerbating issues already there from the homophobia within the black church teaching she was raised within. 

The complications magnify with the amazing success of THE BODYGUARD - the inter-racial love story that magnified the black community's feeling that Whitney wasn't one of them - the huge inequality between Whitney and Bobby's success - his jealousy toward Robyn - and perhaps a need to bring her down to his level.  Both docs make clear that Whitney's brothers were already doing drugs around her and with her - and they are admirably clear and honest about that - but there's something about the toxic co-dependency of her relationship with Bobby that led to the years-long drug binge that all but killed her touring career and almost killed her recording career.  Perhaps the most tragic part of the whole thing is that it also engulfed their neglected and corrupted daughter, who soon followed Whitney to the grave.

Could it have been different? Maybe if she had married someone more stable, or not a music rival?  But would this really have resolved the sexual and racial identity crisis at the heart of Houston's life, or got rid of the exploitative hangers-on that are the through-line of all these stories of wasted talent? My major takeaway from both docs is just how cruel racial identity politics is - whether in the classroom or the awards ceremony - and perhaps re-watching the various versions of A STAR IS BORN so recently - the impossibility of a wholesome marriage between stars of unequal success. 

WHITNEY has a running time of 120 minutes and is rated R. It played Cannes 2018, was released earlier this year, and is now available to rent and own. WHITNEY: CAN I BE ME has a running time of 105 minutes and was released in 2017. It is also available to rent and own.

DEVIL'S FREEDOM - BFI London Film Festival 2017 Preview

Serving as a powerful counterpoint to SICILIAN GHOST STORY, Everardo Gonazalez' DEVIL'S FREEDOM is a chilling and unforgettable documentary about the consequences of drug related violence in contemporary Mexico.  Gonzalez interviews both victims and perpetrators of murder rape kidnap and extortion - and hidden by unsettling and levelling surgical masks - their testimony has both candour and power.  What's amazing is how much one can get from the eyes and intonation despite the masks - and yet how honest people are believing they are masked.  You have a schooled describe the weight of a gun and thrilled with the power of his increasing number of kills - a mother in tears as she describes punching police officers to get to the body of her dead son - policeman uncovering corpses that died with their mouths open, signifying that they were buried alive.  The result is a film that is relatively short but rightly intense.  A brave and bold way of showing the horror of life in a country where violence is commonplace. 

DEVIL'S FREEDOM aka LA LIBERTAD DEL DIABLO has a running time of 74 minutes. It played Berlin 2017.  Tickets are still available for both screenings at the BFI London Film Festival. 

BORN TO BE BLUE

Chet Baker - mellifluous crooner and first-rate jazz trumpeter - grew up in the shadow of Miles Davis and his West Coast distance from the cool jazz scene of New York.  In this new fake-fiction biopic, Ethan Hawke plays him as endlessly charming but vulnerable, most of all to Davis' harsh note that he needed to go away and experience life to be truly great.  And per Robert Budreau's inventive but ultimately psychologically reductive script, Baker decided not just to emulate Davis' playing but what he perceived to be the secret to that greatness - being high.  And so our hero becomes a junkie, to the point where drug-dealers break his jaw and destroy his ability to play. That's the tragic irony of his life - a drug fiend so addled that he destroys the very physical ability to play because he thinks the drugs make him play better. This is the dramatic set-piece finale of the film.  Baker finally cleans himself up and teaches himself how to play again, and his promoter finally let's him play one night at the hottest jazz venue in town, in front of all-time greats such as Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie.  But Baker gets nervous, injects heroine and falls right of the wagon. And that's where he stayed up until his death.  The price of the addiction, according to this movie, is the loss of love - depicted here by Carmen Ejogo as the composite lover who walks out on him.

WILD - LFF14 - Day Six

You can listen to a short podcast review of this film here:



This movie is based upon the autobiography of Cheryl Strayed, a college student utterly undone by the death of her mother, who became a sex and drug addict, ruined her marriage and decided to hike the 1,100 mile Pacific Crest Trail over three months to clear her head and come to some kind of self-awareness and self-acceptance. 

This could have made for a fascinating and moving story in the manner of last year’s LFF entry, TRACKS, or maybe INTO THE WILD. However, the key defining point of those two movies is that they are not afraid to show their protagonists getting kicked around by life and nature. When Mia Wasikowska tracks through the Australian desert her lips are cracked, her face raw with hot wind, her limbs burned and blistered. We’re not sure what she has come to understand about life but her struggle with it feels credible and her character realistically equivocal. By contrast, in WILD, Reese Witherspoon never allows her character to get roughed up. She hikes for months and complains about stinking but always has squeaky clean hair and a fresh face. Save for the bruises of martyrdom from her backpack and one opening shot of a bloody toenail it’s not credible that she’s undertaking this journey. Her kit always looks freshly laundered. Moreover, she doesn’t seem to encounter any real adversity. Her backpack is comically to heavy to lift up in the first scene, but after thirty seconds she’s walking with it happily. Every man who might be a threat turns out to be charming and even the forest services give her coffee and a donut. Where’s the self-realisation through suffering there? The underwhelming nature of the trip is summed up by the final shot at the Bridge of God - we have been led to believe by its name that this will provide some great epiphany but hey it’s just a steel suspension bridge and she looks at it rather wanly and doesn’t even cross it.

If all this weren’t bad enough, Cheryl’s hiking trip is intercut with flashbacks to her past. Her mother (Laura Dern) is portrayed as a kind of saint - every perfect, smiling, singing and wise. No wonder Cheryl took to heroine failing to live up to this unblemished mother figure. And let’s be honest, there is apparently a limit to how bad Reese Witherspoon will let herself look, even when playing a junkie shooting up in a squat. Contrast this with the actress playing junkie Sanne in Susanne Bier’s stunningly good drama about grief, A SECOND CHANCE. Now that’s how you do emotional trauma and redemption. The final insult is a technical one. You’d think that a movie that spends this long in nature reserves would contain some amazing landscape photography of the kind we found in Mike Leigh’s MR TURNER or Fatih Akin’s THE CUT. But no - director Jean-Marc Vallee (DALLAS BUYERS CLUB) and cinematographer Yves Belanger - give us nothing that is out of the ordinary - nothing that makes us feel Cheryl’s head clear and her heart soar. 

Overall, one can’t help but feel that this is a cynical attempt for Reese Witherspoon to break out of the rom-com’s she’s now too old for and to earn an Oscar. I know it’s a thin year in the Best Actress race but it would be shocking indeed to see this do well either in awards season or at the box office. Avoid.

WILD has a running time of 115 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Telluride, Toronto and London 2014. It opens in the USA on December 5th, in the UK on January 16th, in Estonia on January 30th, in Germany, New Zealand, Austria and Romania on February 5th, in Denmark, Italy and Portugal on February 19th, in the Netherlands on February 26th, in Belgium, France and Norway on March 5th.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY

BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY is a cool dark comedy feature from first time writer-directors Geoff Moore and David Posamentier. It stars Sam Rockwell as a bored suburban pharmacist married to a hyper competitive wife (Michelle Monaghan).  He falls for a glamourous rich bored housewife (a wonderfully slick Olivia Wilde) and their joint use of drugs gives him the confidence to get petty revenge on the people who've held him down until the drug use spirals out of control and the DEA get on his back.  The whole thing gets unravelled in an elegant manner and despite the overall tone of wry dark humour, perfectly captured in Jane Fonda's voice-over and the ironic sound-track, there's actual deep emotion  in there. The final scene between Rockwell and Wilde subverts the fantasy elements of the film in a genuinely affecting way.  I really want to see what these directors do next.  I also really want to see more of Sam Rockwell. Why isn't he a bigger star? When he can do proper gonzo goofball comedy and proper depth? 

BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY has a running time of 91 minutes.  It was released earlier this year in the USA and is currently available on DVD.

FILTH

Irvine Welsh's Filth was a novel of characteristic brutality and dark humour - depicting corruption, drug abuse, sexual perversion and decadence in contemporary Scotland with an unflinching stare and a complex prose style.  Notoriously, part of the novel was narrated by the tapeworm living inside of police officer Bruce Robertson's abused gut.  Hilariously, the tapeworm later becomes sentient and helps us diagnose the true root of Bruce's current emotional breakdown.

Writer-director John S Baird's approach to the novel is one of courage in taking on the grim subject matter, with barely any concessions to the censors, as well as a pragmatic and inventive approach to solving the tapeworm problem. Rather than trying to do some kind of bizarre POV a la Terry Gilliam, he's given Bruce a nutty psychiatrist, Dr Rossi, who in surreal nightmarish visions does much of the work the tapeworm did, with some nice visual pointers for the book fans.  The result is a movie that is loyal to the spirit of the novel but understands that to make a coherent film you sometimes have to make drastic changes.

So, on to the meat of the film.  Bruce Robertson (James McAvoy) is a nasty corrupt drug-addled cop determined to screw over every departmental colleague in his mission to get promoted. That said, his sense of dark mischief doesn't extend to making trouble for some concrete end - he'll happily taunt his best friend's wife with sexually harassing phone calls, or spike said friend's drinks with drugs and leave him freaking out in a hotel room, for no reason at all.  As the movie progresses, we realise that there is some cause to this malevolence - or perhaps causes - rooted in an unhappy home life in the past and present (isn't it always!)  Thank god the movie makes all of that sound far less hackneyed than the description just sounded.  And even when the movie introduces a character explicitly designed to make Bruce question his morality, it doesn't give him an easy out.  

The framing device for the film is the investigation of the murder of a kid by a group of nasty violent teens in an underpass.  The irony is that despite his deeply unethical methods, Bruce is actually apparently fairly good at investigating the murder - apparently.   But let's be honest, that's not what this movie is really about. It's a character study - or a study of Bruce's psychosis - a study of just how far a human being will descend into mayhem in order to avoid the truth.   And in amidst all that, we have lurid, sleazy, darkly funny visuals and cameos - John Sessions as the homophobic head of department who dreams of writing screenplays - Shirley Henderson as the deliciously sex-starved middle-class wife throwing herself at her phone stalker - and of course Eddie Marsan as her husband, the repressed accountant.   But really, this movie belongs to James McAvoy who throws himself into an incredibly challenging and provocative role and is utterly compelling throughout.  It's his real emotional trauma that keeps us anchored in a movie that would otherwise be a confusing and alienating mess of nastiness.

FILTH has a running time of 97 minutes.

FILTH opened earlier this year in the UK, Hungary, Ireland, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Serbia, Slovenia, Finland and Japan. It opened last weekend in Australia and New Zealand. It opens in Lithuania on December 6th, in Estonia on December 13th and in the USA in 2014.

THE COUNSELOR

THE COUNSELOR has been comprehensively drubbed by the film reviewing community, recalling Roger Ebert's seminal review of Vincent Gallo's THE BROWN BUNNY, along the lines of "I've had colonoscopies that were more funny."  And just as I really liked THAT film, I actually rather like THE COUNSELOR. Or rather, I should say that I'm fascinated by why people are so horrified by it.  It's not that I enjoyed watching it so much as I enjoyed all the provocations it presented as I watched it.  

The movie opens with and maintains a rather opaque narrative style - a mash-up of abstruse conversations in beautifully designed international locales inter-cut with grungy Mexican drug runners pushing a truck full of cocaine disguised as human shit over the US border.  The Counselor of the title is a naive but greedy lawyer (Michael Fassbender) who is defined his love of the equally naive Laura (Penelope Cruz).  The Counselor works for Reiner - a flamboyant drug dealer and club owner played by Javier Bardem as a cross between Brian Grazer and Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys. Which is weird because Brad Pitt also stars in the film as a kind of a redneck magus, who tries to wise the Counselor up, but to little avail. The plot, such as it is, sees someone hijack the drug shipment and pin it on our crew, which violent and grim consequences.

Bardem does Grazer's fright wig

The moral of the story, is that there are no morals. There's just the hunt. This is a fascist world in which weakness, and flamboyance, and hubris are brought low in a manner that is so foul and evil as to be shocking.  The moral is that you should not be shocked.  There is a brutal simplicity and fascination in seeing faceless men pull off brutal procedural heists. But also something bewildering about seeing actors such as Toby Kebbell and Natalie Dormer pop up in small roles that hint at something more fascinating that isn't given a chance to develop. 

Anyone looking for the redemptive final act of Cormac McCarthy's sublime novel, The Road, is looking in vain.  And critics who have panned the film have typically blamed McCarthy for forcing this word-heavy, abstract, opaque script on a high quality cast and director.  I disagree.  This is like a sleazy B-movie filtered through an art-house lens -  as grungy and elliptical as Raymond Chandler - as absurd and meaningless and provocative.  As an example, I'd give you the notorious scene in which Reiner's wonderfully unapologetic and spiky girlfriend Malkina fucks a car.  This is as shocking as Chandler's depiction of the nympho Carmen Sternwood would've been in THE BIG SLEEP.  But what is the movie really focussed on? Not her sexual act - she is confident, unapologetic and uncaring about what you or I or Reiner might make of it.  The movie focusses on the reaction of the men in the picture - their horror, fear, inability to process.  In fact, I would argue that THE COUNSELOR is a shocking and reviled movie because it's so radical.  No-one's a good guy.  The bad guys are pussies.  And the bad girl doesn't care what you think.

THE COUNSELOR has a running time of 117 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

THE COUNSELOR is on release almost everywhere except Taiwan where it will be released on December 6th and in Italy where it will be released on January 30th 2014.

DOWN TERRACE

With the release of A FIELD IN ENGLAND, I decided to review the work of British writer-director Ben Wheatley, charting his move from well-crafted but fundamentally straightforward character dramas to surreal, obscure horror.  His first feature was the low-budget gangster drama, DOWN TERRACE, which garnered acclaim on the festival circuit but got only a small release in the US and UK in 2010. 

The movie follows a small-town British family for a fortnight after the mobbed-up father and son, Bill and Karl, are released from prison.  The first half of the film feels a bit like The Sopranos, as mid-ranking criminals are deadpan funny in their petty arguments about banal everyday problems, contrasting with their high-crime professional lives.  It's the kind of movie in which the assassin moans about having to babysit his toddler, and the long-suffering mother offers his little kid some orange squash while offering his father a selection of knives for his hit. And there's a scene at a bust stop that I hated myself for finding so funny. There's even a feckless son of a former friend who may or may not have grassed up the father - mirroring Tony's irritation with Chrisopher Moltisanti. 

Wheatley turns his small budget and limited shooting time into a virtue, creating a feeling of claustrophobia and slowly building tension as DP Laurie Rose shoots almost exclusively handheld in situ in a small terraced house.  The soundtrack is also effectively used as a commentary and a counter-point - beautiful blues music from Robert Johnson and folk music from Karen Dalton juxtaposing increasingly out-of-kilter violent scenes.  In front of the camera, we feel the menacing domineering presence of the paterfamilias, even when he's not on screen, and the relationship with his volatile son is brilliantly drawn - no doubt helped by the fact that most of the cast are related in real life.  But it's really Michael Smiley who steals the show as Pringle - the family's in-house toddler-toting assassin - and you can see why Wheatley chose to work with him in his subsequent movies. 

Overall, the movie is an assured and accomplished feature début that manages that truly difficult balance of dark humour and dark violence - combining an almost surreal descent into violent paranoia with some genuinely laugh-out-loud moments. It deserves to be seen more widely. 

A podcast review of this film is available on iTunes, by subscribing here.
It can also be played directly, below. 

DOWN TERRACE played a few festivals in 2009  and 2010 and went on limited release in the UK and USA in 2010.  It is available to rent and own, including on iTunes.  The movie was rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK for strong violence, drug use and strong language including one use of very strong language. It has a running time of 89 minutes.

GIMME THE LOOT

Sofia (Tashiana Washington) and Malcolm (Ty Hickson) -
charismatic stars of GIMME THE LOOT

GIMME THE LOOT is a wonderful joyful movie that proves that you don't need a big budget and big stars to make an exceptional movie - you just need love-able characters with real chemistry and deep sense of place.  In his début directorial feature, Adam Leon provide both of these to create one of the most charming, real, memorable movies of the year to date.  Amateur stars Tashiana Washington and Ty Hickson star as Sofia and Malcolm, two close friends and graffiti artists, on a mission of revenge against the rival gang who defaced their designs.  This involves a MacGuffin about graffiting a dumbass fixture at a sports stadium, which in turns requires raising enough cash to bribe the security guard.  This is the driving heart of the movie: watching the two friends trying to scam and steal their way to the pathetically small amount of money and seeing them being scammed and cheated on in turn.  It's a rare feat - but the director manages to show just how savage and dog-eat-dog the streets are, without ever making this film seem downbeat or miserable.  Instead, we root for our plucky hero and heroine.  We laugh at the unexpected joyful victories of Malcolm, when he improbably scores with a trust-fund chick, and feel his humiliation when she rejects him.  We sympathise with Sofia's world-weary, ever-scammed existence, and root for her to catch a little of Malcolm's levity.  And behind it all, we get a real feeling for the heat and hustle of the City, the rat-a-tat dialogue keeps us laughing, the shooting style involves us, and the score reminds us of those long-hot summers when as kids we felt we owned the city.  This is a film not to be missed. 

GIMME THE LOOT played SXSW 2012 where it won the Grand Jury prize for Best Narrative Feature. It also played Cannes and London 2012. It opened earlier this year in France and the USA and opens in the UK tomorrow.

GIMME THE LOOT has a running time of 80 minutes. The movie is not yet rated.

SUNDANCE LONDON 2013 - Day 2 - THE INEVITABLE DEFEAT OF MISTER AND PETE

The reason people like me go to festivals is for that occasional flash of wonder when a programmer selects a film that would ordinarily have slipped beneath your radar and it rocks your world. That's how I feel about George Tillman Junior's THE INEVITABLE DEFEAT OF MISTER & PETE - a movie that made me laugh, cry, despair and marvel in equal measure.

The premise is simple. The two young kids of the title are abandoned by their crack whore mothers during a hot summer in New York. Forced to forage and steal for food, to protect themselves from the cops who would put them into care and the neighbourhood thugs who would do them harm, they forge an unlikely if utterly credible friendship and alliance. The remarkably talented Skylan Brooks plays Mister, the older and more worldly wise of the two. A young kid who looks like he's never had a good night's sleep - a kid of such wisdom and strength and pride that he inspires the grudging respect of the local drug dealer (Anthony Mackie). A kid so fierce that when he finally breaks down it moved me to tears. Mister's sidekick is a young, guileless ridonkulously cute Korean kid called Pete (Ethan Dizon). A kid who desperately needs a protector and mediator.

I could happily spend another two hours in the company of Mister and Pete. I totally believed in their friendship, shared their occasional joys and felt their many setbacks deeply. Kudos to Tillman Jr for finding them and coaxing such wonderful performances out of them. Kudos as well for managing to stay just the right side of manipulative sentimentality. The film never descends into Poor Joe the Crossingsweeper territory, neither does it pile melodrama onto melodrama as PRECIOUS did. The result is a beautifully shot, intimate, high stakes drama that is genuinely felt and totally unforgettable. You need to see it.

THE INEVITABLE DEFEAT OF MISTER AND PETE has a running time of 118 minutes. The film played Sundance 2013 but does not yet have a commercial release date.

SPRING BREAKERS

Almost every review I read of SPRING BREAKERS after watching it described the movie as a kind of "fever dream" which is presumably lifted from a PR-prepared media packet and says more about the laziness of the mainstream critics than the film itself.  For me, the film was less a fever dream than an elaborate revenge fantasy with feminist overtones that belied its apparently sexploitation vibe.  The subversive message, and the careful balance between absurdist humour and the deeply sinister had me on the edge of my seat.  SPRING BREAKERS may, then, occasionally, be deliberately bad, but it's not a bad film, and every provocation it makes is deeply thought out and played out with utter conviction.

The movie is written and directed by Harmony Korine - the writer who worked with Larry Clark on the controversial but brilliant teen sex and AIDS drama, KIDS. He brings that same authenticity to SPRING BREAKERS, with its willingness to examine the allure, the stupidity and the decadence of teen culture all at once.  As the movie opens, we meet four teenage girls desperate to escape their banal lives and go on vacation to Florida.  Somewhat improbably, three of them decide to commit a robbery to fund their trip. It's not an immoral act so much as an amoral act - they seem to live in a world without consequences or impulses other than those originating in their own desires.  This behavior continues in Florida - they get drunk, get high, and it is only by a whisper's breath that they aren't raped.  To be sure, there's plenty of simulated exploitation in the way they're photographed by the over-riding message we're getting is not to be titillated but shocked at their stupidity and awed by their luck in not coming a cropper.

The exception is Selena Gomez' rather obviously named Faith, who is an evangelical Christian.  She goes along on the trip funded by crime, and is at first the most mesmerized by the promise of Spring Break - the idea of freedom away from home.  But, tellingly, she's also the first to see the danger inherent in the girls' open-ness.  What I love about Korine's treatment of this character is that in the context of the MTV does Cancun shooting style of the film - all lurid color  thumping soundtrack, close ups of girls getting pissed and showing their tits - it would have been easy to mock Faith's naivety and, well, faith. This is  in fact what we see the other girls do.  But in fact the movie has an unspoken respect for Faith, and she is allowed to escape with her morality and beliefs in tact.

The remaining three girls continue to come off as frighteningly stupid and ripe for exploitation as they take up with James Franco's rapper, Alien aka Al.  This may well be Franco's greatest performance - combining as it does some really sinister movements with laugh out loud humor.  When Alien tries to groom Faith, persuading her to stay, he comes off as a deeply sly and manipulative character dripping with hatred of the white trash teens.  Then again, as we get to see him more, we realise that he's in fact far more naive and ripe for exploitation than the girls. In fact, he's a rather pathetic figure.  Franco also has the best lines of the movie, as he articulates his value-structure in terms of the American Dream. It's a speech so funny, so pathetic, so damning of American consumerist culture that it's worth repeating:

"This is the fuckin' American dream. This is my fuckin' dream, y'all! All this sheeyit! Look at my sheeyit! I got... I got SHORTS! Every fuckin' color. I got designer T-shirts! I got gold bullets. Motherfuckin' VAM-pires. I got Scarface. On repeat. SCARFACE ON REPEAT. Constant, y'all! I got Escape! Calvin Klein Escape! Mix it up with Calvin Klein Be. Smell nice? I SMELL NICE!"

In that speech we see that Alien is as bound up in a fantasy as Faith is. She wants to escape her banal life by coming on Spring Break and staying there forever, and Alien has apparently succeeded in just that mission.  It's so absolutely right that he would compare himself to Al Pacino in Scarface, although he's blind to the true meaning of that story. And how subversive and glorious to cast pretty teen cover boy Franco as the metal-mouthed rapper, aspiring to the perfume ad perfection that Franco, in real life, did so much to perpetuate.  

As the film moves into its second act, we see Alien and the three remaining girls go on a spree of robberies, which are evidently idiotic insofar as they incite the wrath of a competing drug gang.   While the girls appear to think they're in a rap video, come first-person shooter, Rachel Corine's Cotty soon learns different and she too departs.  As much as I loved that Faith was allowed to leave, I was equivocal about the message Harmony Korine was giving in allowing Cotty to escape relatively unharmed, both in this later pivotal scene, and in an earlier Girls Gone Wild moment that could so easily have ended in rape. This is the only small criticism I would make of the film.

Faith, Cotty and Alien are clearly delineated because, for all their delusions, they are deeply human. They care.  They love. They are scared. By contrast, Vanessa Hudgens' Candy and Ashley Benson's Brit are so interchangeable that it's barely worth learning their names.  But they are memorable because unlike Cotty and Faith and Alien they are utterly without morality, utterly without regret or fear or love or delusion.  They are what they are - natural born killers.  They don't go to Florida to escape themselves, but to become more fully what they always were: first-person shooters who are more than aware of the stereotypes their gender and dress give off, and more than happy to humiliate any man who seeks to exploit them as a result.  Their proto-feminist revenge is a fantasy - by this point the film has let go of any anchor it might have once had to reality, but it is deeply emotionally satisfying and cathartic, at the same time as being horrifying. After all that gyrating and objectifying it is the girls who are objectifying the men, and not as sex objects but as targets in a video game.  

I loved this film. I loved the intelligence with which it mimicked an exploitation genre but subverted it.  I loved the day-glo cinematography and the use of voiceover with its lullaby repetition - similar to Malick.  I loved the uncomfortable mix of menace and pathos and dark humor - the sharp turns that catch you unaware and the moments of intimacy and authenticity.  This is a memorable film and a powerful film and deserves to be seen.

SPRING BREAKERS played Venice and Toronto 2012 and was released earlier this year in France, Italy, Denmark, Spain, the USA, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Serbia, Bulgaria, Estonia and Canada. It i s currently on release in the UK, Ireland, Poland, Romania, the Netherlands and Norway. It opens on April 26th in Lithuania, May 2nd in Portugal, Singapore and Mexico, on May 9th in Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and Russia and on June 15th in Japan. 

SPRING BREAKERS has a running time of 94 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES

Writer-director Derek Cianfrance follows up his critically acclaimed, intimate, raw portrait of an unraveling marriage, BLUE VALENTINE, with what he describes with a male melodrama about fathers and sons.  Both movies are an unflinching examination of real people making bad decisions for the best of reasons. But where VALENTINE feels brutally real, PINES has a self-conscious symmetry - a deliberate interweaving of plot points and characters that lifts us out of the real and into the archetypal.  This is a movie that is architectural - whose structural underpinnings are it's point - and that willingness to put the whale-bones outside of the flesh almost, but not quite, threaten to obscure our emotional response to the material. That it doesn't, speaks to the fine performances at the heart of the movie.

As the movie opens, we see a bravura tracking shot of Ryan Gosling's motorcycle stuntman, Luke, walking through the back-alleys of a circus, his small-town fans cheering him as he enters the tent. Three stuntmen will ride bikes over and around each other in the tight confines of a rotating metal framed ball  - an elaborate metaphor for the feat that Cianfrance is trying to pull of with this film.  

The first act of the film is Luke's story.  He rolls back into town to find he fathered a baby after a one night stand with Eva Mendes' Romina. She's living with Kofi (Mahershala Ali) - an archetypal good father who can provide everything Luke can't - a house, stability, commitment.  Somewhat predictably, Luke falls into bank robbery, tutored by Ben Mendelson's Robin, with immediate success but ultimately catastrophic results.   The hackneyed tale of a heist gone wrong is elevated by Ryan Gosling's absolute commitment to the role, the high-energy cinematography, the creeping sense of foreboding and, perhaps surprisingly, Eva Mendes.  There's a scene where Romina is asking Luke how he's going to take care of her, and Luke begs her not to talk down to him, not to assume he's as worthless as everyone else thinks he is, that is absolutely heartbreaking.  It's heartbreaking because we see how desperate Luke is to break the cycle of absence and neglect that he lived through, and heartbreaking because we know that Romina loves Luke, but that she loves her son, and his future, more.  

In the second act of the film we focus on Avery (Bradley Cooper) - the cop that gets shot in an altercation with Luke.  He's also a young father, also trying to do right but caught up in nefarious shit. His story is also mired in predictability - Ray Liotta cast as a corrupt cop - and the pace is much slower.  I have always thought Bradley Cooper a good actor, but at first I thought his performance in this segment fell rather flat. I just wasn't convinced he'd found the character. And then I realised that this was exactly what we were meant to be falling, because Avery hasn't found his character.  He's a guy constantly defining himself against other's expectations.  His father, a judge, wants him to be a lawyer. The police chief wants him to be a hero.  The rozzers want him to take the cash. And he thinks he wants to just be a good dad.  Turns out, he wants more. It's a subtle performance, and one that's nicely complemented by Rose Byrne as his wife.

In the final act of the movie, we fast forward to the present day, where Luke and Avery's sons are now teenagers at the same public school, although from radically different economic backgrounds. Indeed, Avery is now a man of some power and complacency, and his son  AJ (Emory Cohen) is a sinister, drug-fuelled bully.  Already exploited by AJ, when Luke's son Jason (Dale DeHaan) figures out their fathers' relationship he flips into a spiral that brings Avery face to face with his past in a lurid, melodramatic denouement that is at once utterly unrealistic and majestic.  Bradley Cooper is masterful in his final scene.

What should we make of this film? Clearly, it's macro structure forces it into highly stylised pairings and plot points, but this is not a weakness.  It gives colour and provocation, and doesn't alienate us because each section is so filled with deep emotion and finely shaded moral dilemmas.  In other words, this movie has heart as well as style.  In fact, it's something of a tour de force. 

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES played Toronto 2012 and is already on release in the USA, France, Denmark, Finland and Spain. It opens this weekend in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore, Norway, and Sweden. It opens on April 12th in the UK, Ireland, Greece and Lithuania.  It opens on April 18th in Russia. It opens on May 2nd in Croatia; on May 9th in Australia; on May 24th in Poland, Taiwan and Japan; on June 14th in Turkey; on June 20th in Germany and on June 28th in Mexico.

The film has a running time of 140 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

SIDE EFFECTS

SIDE EFFECTS reads as one half New York Review of Books essay on the insidious pharmaceuticals industry and one half John Grisham knock-off.  Both halves sit uneasily alongside each other, and while well-enough done, never quite cohere. Moreover, they aren't satisfying in the conventional sense.

To my mind, the first half of the film is by far the strongest. The NYRB lecture on the complicity of Wall Street, psychiatrists and Big Pharma is elegant and concise. What's unnverving for a British audience, where medications is, if perhaps less common, certainly less overt, is how little surprise everyone evinces when the protagonist, Emily (Rooney Mara) tries to commit suicide.  As she returns to work and socialising with her ex-convict financier husband (Channing Tatum), everyone she comes into contact with has their own use of anti-depressants to relate. There is no sense of enquiry. It's taken for granted that everyone has periods where they need medication - whether for depression or just a sharpener before a job interview.  Of course, the first half of the film isn't really a film in a conventional sense. There's no sense of drama  - no tension.  Emily's family and friends are so understanding that it turns into a pharma-procedural - we are literally just being educated on what it is to be within modern psychiatry. 

The second half of the film is far less satisfying. It plays as a kind of sub John Grisham thriller in which a wronged man is reduced to nothing and then, with nothing but self-belief and his own intelligence, double-crosses all those who did him wrong.  Jude Law, as Emily's pyschiatrist Dr Banks,  is thus the avatar of Michael Douglas, using and abusing his ability to institutionalise and medicate his opponent. This part of the film works as a finely tuned clockwork toy.  You know precisely what the outcome is - it follows its genre conventions precisely.  There's no tension - no surprise.  I found myself marvelling at the interior design of Jude Law's apartment and the shockingly trashy ombre hair colour on Rooney Mara's hair extensions. 

So here's the deal, you can watch SIDE EFFECTS and have an okay time learning about stuff you already know and watching a thriller where every plot twist is expected. The performances are good enough, and the soundtrack by Thomas Newman is particularly good.  But let's not kid ourselves that this is a work of art.

SIDE EFFECTS has a running time of 106 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

SIDE EFFECTS was released earlier this year in the USA, Canada, Romania, Australia, Russia, the Ukraine and Lithuania. It is currently on release in Greece, Portugal, Ireland and the UK. It opens next weekend in the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Kuwait and the Netherlands; on March 21st in Argentina, Singapore and Mexico; on March 28th in Chile, Estonia and Latvia; on April 3rd in France; on April 10th in Belgium; on April 19th in Poland and Sweden; on April 25th in Germany; on May 2nd in Denmark; on May 9th in New Zealand and on May 31st in Brazil.

SAVAGES

THE SAVAGES is a day-glo bright, tawdry, energetic mess. Aaron Johnson and Taylor Kitsch play unlikely friends and wholesale drug manufacturers - the former an earnest hippie who has perfected killer strength drugs, the latter a war vet who cares more about money and getting the job done. The two share a ditzy blonde chick played by Blake Lively. The plot, such as it is, sees the trio under threat from a Mexican drug cartel (Salma Hayek and enforcer Benicio del Toro) and entrapped by a corrupt narc (John Travolta).

The lurid colours and kinetic force of the film are attractive but are not enough to compensate for the alienating characters.  Ultimately, it's hard to care about the fate of Lively's character in the movie's more serious second act, when her persecutor is playing a drug baroness a la Cruella deVil. Moreover, the satisfyingly tricksy plot is ultimately undone by an entirely fatuous epilogue. 

SAVAGES opened earlier this year in Canada, the USA, Colombia, Mexico, Turkey, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Portugal. It opens this week in Argentina, New Zealand, Russia and Vietnam. It opens on September 20th in Singapore, Ireland and the UK and on September 26th in France, Chile, Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Iceland, Poland and Spain. It opens on October 3rd in Belgium, Hungary, Brazil and Lithuania. It opens on October 12th in Denmark, Germany, Finland, Norway and Sweden. It opens on October 18th in Australia and on October 25th in Greece and Italy.

Late Review - MR NICE

Director Bernard Rose takes a break from contemporising Russian literature, with his straight-ahead adaptation of Howard Marks' autobiography, MR NICE. The charm of Marks' story is that he stands against the cliché of the drug dealer typically seen in films. He doesn't grow up in a mean urban setting - he doesn't push drugs to survive - he isn't particularly flash - he doesn't do whores - he's faithful to his wife and kids - and he studiously avoids Class A drugs - both dealing them and taking them. In fact, he is rather more like a hero of an Ealing Comedy - stumbling into drug dealing quite by accident and permanently amused that he is getting away with it.

Marks was basically just another middle-class kid studying at Oxford and smoking hash when a mate asked him to do a favour and drive a car stuffed with drugs back from Germany. Marks was quite happy to quit teaching for easy money-making and soon hooked up with the Provos to bring his hash into UK airports without the inconvenience of customs checks. Before long he's got the biggest outfit in the UK and tries to crack America. Moreover, he's been recruited by his old college chum to be a spy in Kabul - after all, he moves in circles they can't penetrate! The first time he's busted for dealing he gets off on grounds so spurious he seems to be amazed, but he does eventually serve time - and not because of hubris, or narcissism, or betrayal - but basically because he was too bored to quit.

The film is charming and fun, and uses a deliberately lo-fi amateurish style, with live action footage digitally inserted into grainy old vintage footage of the 60s and 70s. Rhys Ifans is suitably bumbling and charming as Marks and he and Chloe Sevigny as his wife seem genuinely in love. I also love David Thewlis - who has just that edge of danger required to play the Provo, Jim McCann. The charm and the fun is entirely in keeping with Marks' carefully cultivated persona as Mr. Nice. Yes, that was his real alias, but he also wants to be seen as basically a good guy. To that end, this movie drips with family values, and to watch it, one would think that his wife and daughters never blamed him for one second for being absent from their lives. The film also refuses to question how far his involvement with the Provos was morally pretty nasty - after all, the dodgy money they were earning wasn't going into real estate, was it? And there is a deliberately cultivated equivocation about how far he ever really did any spying for the British.

So, MR NICE is basically a rather fawning film - frothy, light, charming, disposable. It doesn't get to grips with Howard Marks - but provides him with a yet another self-justificatory platform. Is that bad? Who knows. But there is something rather, well, distasteful in an international drug dealer who consorted with the IRA palming himself of as a charming rogue.

MR NICE is currently on release in the UK.

London Film Fest 2010 - Day 16 - KABOOM

KABOOM is a bizarre little movie set in a surreal day-glo version of a So-Cal college campus. Said campus is populated by horny, promiscuous teens who spend all their time fucking, SMS-ing and...er...getting sucked into the machinations of an evil cult that's trying to bring about the end of the world.

Writer-director Gregg Araki's is exploring similar territory as in his previous work - teenage sexual shenanigans, gay, straight and everything in-between. But instead of the gritty, raw emotion of MYSTERIOUS SKIN, we get day-glo colour, 1980s kitsch stylings and a plot that seems like the spoof love-child of ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE. The resulting movie is basically a colourful, inconsequential mess. I didn't care about any of the characters, I didn't find the trying-too-hard-to-be-witty dialogue funny, I wasn't impressed by the sexual candour, and I didn't buy into the spoof-horror plot. This movie just isn't as well-written or as finely balanced as, say, DONNIE DARKO, and it certainly isn't as funny as it needs to be. Pretty much the only person who comes out of it with their reputation in tact is actress Juno Temple. Still, I guess, in the age of banal mainstream movies, you at least have to give Araki props for trying.

KABOOM played Cannes, Berlin and Toronto 2010. It was released earlier this year in the USA and France.

London Film Fest 2010 Day 14 - SUBMARINO

Nick and Martin are brothers living in contemporary Copenhagen, struggling to deal with the childhood trauma of their little brother dying of neglect as the result of their mother's alcoholism. Nick has served time, and now passes the day at the gym or drinking and the evenings with a hooker. Martin is a junkie who turns to pushing to support his little boy. Both of them, in their own fucked-up way, try to protect the kids in their lives, as a sort of penance for having failed their little brother.

The movie is austere, closely observed and unrelentingly grim. It is a return, if not in form, but in content, to the Dogme style of film-making that Thomas Vinterberg (DEAR WENDY) originated in. The lead performances are strong, and the stories of the two brothers - who are estranged for much of the film - are deftly inter-twined. However, I am not sure why, but I just couldn't get into the film. Something about the unrelenting self-annihilation kept me at a distance, just as the brothers try to distance themselves from their emotions, with alcohol and smack respectively. As a result, SUBMARINO is a film that I admired rather than enjoyed.

SUBMARINO played Berlin 2010 and was released in September in France, Finland and the Netherlands. It opens in Belgium on November 17th.

Random DVD Round-Up 1 - FROM PARIS WITH LOVE

To my mind, the greatest tragedy of the Bush presidency was that the image America projected of itself was a crude caricature of all that was great in the idea of America. A country founded on lofty principles had descended into populist, xenophobic, knee-jerk foreign policy, and with figures like Sarah Palin and media outlets such as Fox News, was portraying itself as a country that gloried in its own ignorance - where a stubborn refusal to see the complexity of an issue was lauded as homespun wisdom.

The problem with playing with such caricatures (as I am sure many of the more savvy in Washington were consciously doing) is that others may take you at face value. And for every American who thinks of the French as cheese-eating surrender monkeys, and the average Pakistani as a terrorist-harbouring rag-head, there's a Frenchman and a Pakistani who believes that Americans are basically coming straight out of TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE with a cultural chauvinism and gun-totin' agenda that is as abhorrent as it is (I hope) mistaken.

If cinema reflects the times in which we live, FROM PARIS WITH LOVE is, then, a fascinating cultural artefact. A movie financed by a US studio, starring a major US movie star, in which a US secret agent comes to Paris to chase down a Pakistani terrorist cell that is pushing coke to launder money. (Presumably they have never heard of Liechtenstein). The French are impotent, bereaucratic fools; the Chinese are drug-dealers; the Pakistanis are terrorists; and the brave heroic Yanks are there to save the day, with their Jack-Bauer-inspired brand of summary justice. In a scene that could come from a Glenn Beck wet-dream, at the end of the film, the Ivy-League-educated protagonist, James Reece, overcomes his squeamishness about killing people to join up with his buddy Charlie Wax in a campaign of killing "bad guys".

And so, ladies and gentlemen, we have stepped through the looking glass. A Frenchman, Luc Besson, is peddling back to American mainstream cinema a vision of American chauvinism. I can't decide whether this is particularly insidious or just brilliant business.

The basic mechanics of the movie are the same as in most other Luc Besson-penned movies. As in TAKEN, a hard-ass American (John Travolta) comes to Paris to kick some Muslim terrorist ass. As in the TRANSPORTER movies, there will be a lot of driving really really fast through busy streets and some loud explosions. There will also be a lot of swearing and the occasional line that's trying to be as iconic as Arnie in TERMINATOR. (Is there any reason for John Travolta's character to be called Charlie Wax except to allow a lame KARATE KID joke? And for that matter, did they only cast John Travolta so that they could reference a Royale with Cheese?)

Still, for all that, I can't deny that FROM PARIS WITH LOVE zipped along at a pace, and wasn't as painfully shit as Besson's ANGEL-A. The stunts are fine; the car chases through the streets of Paris exhilarating; and John Travolta chews up the scenery. I even liked Jonathan Rhys Meyers as his square side-kick, Reece. In the one scene where Meyers gets to act - when he sees himself in a mirror covered in blood and his to react to his new life - he actually looks pretty convincing. The key point is that this movie is firmly in the B-grade of action flicks. It's treading well-worn ground and dripping in faintly offensive cliché. That they're being peddled by a Frenchman is about the most interesting thing about the whole enterprise.

FROM PARIS WITH LOVE was released in Spring 2010 and is available on DVD and on iTunes.

Additional tags: Frederic Thoraval, David Buckley, Richard Durden, Kasia Smutniak

GET HIM TO THE GREEK - They fuck you up, your mum and dad - Part Three

In fairness, the people doing the psychological damage in the alleged buddy-comedy, GET HIM TO THE GREEK, aren't just the parents. The record label, entourage, management and fans all take the blame in enabling viciously damaging pop star behaviour. That Aldous Snow, self-proclaimed white musical Jesus, manages to retain any humanity at all, in the haze of adulation and exploitation, is a miracle. This movie is about how Aldous Snow, washed up, alone, makes it from London to LA to play a comeback gig in spite of various attempts at self-sabotage. He does so in the company of a fan-boy turned record label chaperone, Aaron. It's meant to be a laugh-out-loud comedy, giving the character who stole every scene in FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL more screen time. The problem is that while Russell Brand IS funny as Aldous Snow, he's also too good to leave his performance at the level of superficial pratfalls and lascivious word-play. Brand's Snow is actually a very sad man, and there's something faintly exploitative in the screen-writer, director and audience trying to find laughter in his pain. It's almost as though we're milking Aldous Snow in exactly the same way that his record company is milking him. "We know you're physically and psychologically harmed, mate, but go on, do that funny song-and-dance act!"

Maybe I'm taking it all too seriously. After all, this is a film in which Sean Combs is genuinely very funny spoofing himself as a hard-balled record exec. (I loved the line "you're three zippers away from Thriller"), It's a movie in which Rose Byrne is really very funny indeed as Aldous Snow's ex-wife and fame-junkie Jackie Q. Maybe I should just be happy with the laughs? But even as simple comedy this movie doesn't quite work. I know Jonah Hill is essentially playing the straight man to Russell Brand's comedy protagonist, but even then, Aaron could've been a lot more interesting as a character. Where's that slightly geeky creepiness that Hill brought to his cameo in FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL? And as for the scene where Snow tries to instigate a threesome with Aaron and his girlfriend (Elizabeth Moss) - excruciating just doesn't cover it.

The best Judd Apatow movies are both funny and touching. FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL isn't just great comedy - at some level we really feel for Jason Segel's Peter as he tries to get over his girlfriend, and we're really routing for him to get together with Mila Kunis' Rachel. Okay, we've probably never been dumped for a rock star, but I think everyone can empathise with Peter's pain - and even Sarah's despair at trying to make the relationship work. At the heart of all comedy, there has to be an emotional core we can relate to. The relationship arcs in GET HIM TO THE GREEK - between Aldous and his dad; Aldous and his ex-wife; and most of all between Aaron and his girlfriend - just don't feel real, and as a result I didn't care about them. The only part of the movie that felt real was Snow's addiction and loneliness. And I simply wasn't heartless enough to laugh at that.

Additional tags: William Kerr, Michael L Sale, Sean Combs, Elizabeth Moss

GET HIM TO THE GREEK is on release in the US, UK, Kazakhstan, Canada, Iceland, Australia, Georgia and the Netherlands. It opens in July in Greece, Portugal and Estonia. It opens in August in Sweden, Turkey, France, Finland, Norway, Germany and Spain. It opens in September in Denmark and Argentina and in October in Hungary.

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - SHIFTY

SHIFTY is the impressive debut feature from British writer-director, Eran Creevey. It portrays 24 hours in the life of a second generation Pakistani boy nick-named Shifty (Riz Ahmed, THE ROAD TO GUANTANEMO), who has evolved from being a good schoolkid selling a bit of weed on the side into a hard core crack dealer. Shifty is on the edge of a knife - his elder brother Rez (Nitin Ganatra, EASTENDERS) and his best mate Chris (Daniel Mays, ATONEMENT), recently returned from Manchester, are trying to pull Shifty back from a life of crime. But Shifty is being set-up by his dealer Glen (Jason Flemyng).

The movie was shot for under £100,000 in just 18 days and captures the grim reality of suburban drug use in sludge colours and lower middle-class homes. This isn't London as Compton wannabe KIDULTHOOD style. Rather, you see drug use messing with real families. The movie is emotionally tense and builds suspense toward a dramatic conclusion. It feels authentic and while it makes some perceptive points about the cultural ironies of a being a second-gen Muslim immigrant, it wears its social critique lightly. SHIFTY is just superb guerilla film-making.

SHIFTY played London 2008 and opened in the UK in April 2009. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.