RANGO - Wonderful, radical, revolutionary

RANGO is a revelation. It is one of the best films I have seen this year, one of the best animated films since TOY STORY, and must surely raise the bar in terms of what is seen as appropriate material for a children's film, and the level of ambition one can bring to the visuals in an animated film. I wonder if history will judge it as revolutionary as AVATAR in terms of bringing the craft of cinema forward and - contra AVATAR - showing us just how dazzling and immersive visuals can be without 3D, but when the CGI animators are guided by one of the best cinematographers working today, Roger Deakins (TRUE GRIT, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN).

The movie has been put together by the team behind PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN - director Gore Verbinski and star Johnny Depp - and it's their best film to date - capturing the sheer energy and comedy of the original POTC film, but allying it to a stronger story and imbuing it with an indulgent love of cinema. For this is, above everything, a film for cineastes - a film about the joy of transformation - of being part of a story that you craft - and about living up to the Heroic Ideal. To that end, John Logan (GLADIATOR)'s screenplay leans heavily on the plot of 70s film noir, CHINATOWN, but lives in the shadow of all of those wonderful Clint Eastwood westerns, not to mention doffing its cap to FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and APOCALYPSE NOW among others.

Johnny Depp plays a pet lizard with no real friends but a vivid imagination. The lizard is the ultimate cinephile, indulging in wild cine-literate fantasies, but ultimately lonely and confused about who he really is. When a car accident leaves him wondering into a old western town in the Mojave desert, he takes the opportunity to reinvent himself as "Rango" - a gun-slinging hero along the lines of The Man With No Name. And boy does this town need a Hero. Some Evil man (obvious to anyone who's seen CHINATOWN) has been hoarding water, leaving the town to run dry, forcing humble farmers from their land....In order to sort this mess out, Rango has to over-come his fear, make good friends, and become a Real Hero, helped out by a wise armadillo (Al Molina) and a surreal dream featuring Timothy Olyphant as the Clint-like Spirit of the West.

What I love about Rango is its evident love for the genres it's referring to (in sharp contrast to the risible YOUR HIGHNESS) and its evident love for the textures of the western. I've never seen an animated film - typically full of shiny, bright, smooth CGI - look so dusty, weather-beaten and worn. The details of the fur, the clothes, the buildings is quite stunning and the film is drawn as if it really has been shot on old fashioned 35mm by the best cinematographer in the business. Add to that a story with real stakes and real emotional heart, voiced by actors at the top of their game. (Special mentions for Isla Fisher as Beans and Ned Beatty as the Mayor.) But most of all I love that this film neither patronises its young audience nor bores its adult audience - and yet doesn't pander to quick, cheap laughs with post-modern winks at popular culture - a trait I particularly detest in the SHREK films. Which other animated movie would dare to have a joke in which the word "thespians" is confused for "lesbians" - or a sequence in which the Hero cross-dresses?

All of this makes RANGO at once marvellously old-fashioned in its cinephilia, its textures and its wonderful photography, but also marvellously modern in its subversive adult humour and willingness to use surreal dream sequences. This really is a wonderful film - and one can only hope that other animated features rise to the challenge of matching its attention to detail and depth of vision.

RANGO is on global release in all bar Japan where it opens on September 23rd.

THE KILLER INSIDE ME - They fuck you up, your mum and dad Part Two

Lou Ford is a courteous, softly spoken cop in 1950s Texas. He has a sweetheart called Amy who dotes on him: the townsfolk think he's a stand-up guy. But when he was a kid, Lou's housekeeper got off on his spanking her. And this poor little fucked up kid grew up into the kind of guy who can only express love through violence. Lou is something of an enigma - he is alienated from himself - from real emotional engagement with others - and thus from the viewer. Far more intriguing, from a psychological standpoint, are the two women - his girlfriend and his hooker-mistress - who love him. It's mysterious that they love such an emotionally avoidant man - let alone that they continue to do so despite suffering at his hands. Maybe they too were fucked up by their parents? Maybe it's just another case of people being attracted to people whose pathologies enable their own.

Whatever the answer, this is not the kind of film that deals in straightforward answers. Rather, Michael Winterbottom gives us a more or less faithful adaptation of the celebrated pulp novel from Jim Thompson - its triumphs and failures in tact. The film works best as a sinister mood piece, anchored by the superb central performance of Casey Affleck and embedded in superlative production design. I was genuinely surprised that actresses known best for fluffy rom-coms - Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson - would want to appear in such a film, and yet more surprised to see how well they acted in the demanding supporting roles as Lou's mistress and girlfriend respectively. They really hold their own against a supporting cast of the calibre of Ned Beatty and Elias Koteas. This movie is worth watching for the quality of the performances and the cinematography alone.

Nonetheless, this is a flawed film. Yes, there's a crime caper that propels the plot, and some faint dramatic tension between the unions, big business, and a cover up, but this movie is basically a psycho-drama. The fault of the piece lies in the fact that, as psycho-drama, it always holds the viewer at a distance from the motivations of the three key characters. This makes for a frustrating film - a teasing provocation.

One final word about the violence in the movie. THE KILLER INSIDE ME got a lot of press coverage in the UK on account of its graphic depiction of violence against women. Moreover, the movie was accused of misogyny on the grounds that the women in the movie apparently get off on being victimised. To my mind, THE KILLER INSIDE ME is not at the extremes of graphic violence in cinema. Viewers used to the cinema of Haneke or Noe will have seen far worse. Moreover, there is no sense in which this film is "torture porn". Winterbottom's intentions are manifestly earnest. I also find accusations of misogyny misplaced. Yes, the fact that these women go back for more is disturbing. But surely the movie/book are saying something about a particular psychopathology - and in this case it happens to involve the man as sadist and women as masochists. But there is no general point to be made about the role of men and women in such relationships. After all, just look at the dependent relationship between Johnny Papas and Lou.

Additional tags: Mags Arnold, Melissa Parmenter, Tom Bower, Simon Baker, Liam Aiken, Jay R Ferguson, Jim Thompson

THE KILLER INSIDE ME played Sundance and Berlin 2010 and is currently on release in the UK, USA and Denmark. It opens next weekend in South Korea. It opens in August in Belgium and France; in September in Switzerland, Greece and Taiwan; in Finland and the Netherlands in October.

Timely reminder 2 & pantheon movie of the month - NETWORK

In NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, the Coen Brothers and Cormac McCarthy lament the fact that every generation feels that it is uniquely witnessing the decline of humanity into barbarous savagery. And yet, no matter how far we think the bar has fallen, our children will no doubt distantly remember a golden age of civilisation and see their own frail dotage as the era of scandalous decline. I suppose one small upside to this relentless cycle of disillusionment is that we can truly relate and fully appreciate great cinema afresh.

NETWORK is an incredibly famous and highly praised movie originally released in 1976. It articulates rage at the devaluation of politics after a kleptocratic presidency; rage at an economic meltdown characterised by spiralling inflation and rising unemployment; moral and phsyical exhaustion after an long-fought war; and disillusionment with the crass commercialisation of the media. Sound familiar?

The genius of NETWORK is to express all this rage through a premise so preposterous you almost catch yourself believing it; so funny you want to laugh, but so perceptive you're scared to admit it.

One night, a beat-up old news-caster, the victim of poor ratings, tells millions of viewers that he is going to blow his brains out on TV. At first, the production team are so self-involved they don't even notice what he's saying. After much ado, the news-caster goes back on air for a final show, but loses his cool again, railing against the bullshit: "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

At first, the Network is furious with his outburst, but a brilliant young studio executive realises that they have a hit on their hands. Here's a man who can articulate the angst of his time - tapping into the visceral fears of the viewers - and turn them into high ratings, prime-time advertising and the proverbial phat cash. The newscaster is given a glossy prime time show where he's encouraged to rant against the very machine he's feeding. And it doesn't stop there. The Network fills its schedules with radical, subversive TV. Communist revolutionaries broadcast guerilla terrorist attacks live, but squabble over distribution rights when the camera's off. The message is utterly miserable: you may rage against the machine, but the machine is so damned efficient that it will use your energy as fuel. Finally, it will spit you out.

NETWORK drips with class. You've got Sidney Lumet, of TWELVE ANGRY MEN fame, as director, eliciting fine performances from his cast. Peter Finch won Best Actor for his role as the angry prophet; Faye Dunaway won Best Actress as the glamourous, talented but ultimately soul-less studio exec; Beatrice Straight won Best Supporting Actress for a small but incredibly powerful role as a scorned wife; and Ned Beatty was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in his role as a ruthless corporate boss.

Lumet and his DP, Owen Roizman (THE FRENCH CONNECTION) create a documentary syle early on which helps keep the movie feeling credible despite the increasingly absurd story. We wander around news-rooms and into studios with a fluid camera. In addition, we never here an orchestral score: the sound-track feels realistic.

But the real star of the show is screen-writer Paddy Chayevsky, whose scabrous, darkly funny script is always shocking and utterly compelling. Not since DOCTOR STRANGELOVE have we seen humour and tragedy so brilliantly combined.

NETWORK was originally released in 1976 and is widely available on DVD. Peter Finch won Best Actor postumously; Faye Dunaway won Best Actress; Beatrice Straight won Best Supporting Acress;and Paddy Chayefsky won Best Original Screenplay. Ned Beatty was also nominated for Best Actor but lost to Jason Robards for ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN; Owen Roizman was nominated for Best Cinematography but lost to Haskell Wexler for BOUND FOR GLORY; Sidney Lumet was nominated for Best Director but lost to ROCKY; Alam Heim was nominated for Best Editor but lost to ROCKY; and Howard Gottfried was nominated for Best Picture, but lost to ROCKY.

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR - funny/scary morality tale

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR is whip-smart, viciously funny and scarily based in fact. Wilson was the Republican Congressman who channelled monumental sums of money to the Afghan militias fighting the Soviet Union in the 1980s. In doing so, he forced the Soviets to retreat ignominiously and precipitated the fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. But as Wilson realises in the moment of his greatest triumph, "we fucked up the endgame." By pulling funding as soon as the fighting stopped - y refusing to rebuild Afghanistan - the US left a power vacuum that was filled by all those CIAl-trained Islamists, armed to the teeth by Charlie. They went on to wreak havoc in Afghanistan, and later, the world.

The movie is brilliantly funny, thanks to an incisive, ballsy script from Aaron "West Wing" Sorkin and the fundamentally scoundrelous subject matter. The paradoxes abound. Wilson is a Republican Congressman from Texas, expert at wheedling favours out of Committee-men, but he's also a womanising, cocaine-snorting, whisky-swilling good-time boy. Wilson has the private morals of a skunk but he's curiously good to his word when it comes to the big stuff. He does what he promises and he's intelligent enough to feel the tragedy of his Committee's refusal to fund a reconstruction. That's why Tom Hanks is perfectly cast here. He's made a career out of being charming and decent, so that even when he's sleazing around a hot-tub you still love him. Wilson is matched pound for pound by all-time scoundrelous CIA agent and bad-ass Gust Avrakotos. Philip Seymour Hoffman's is on top form as the angry, devil-may-care but politically astute CIA fixer who finds his ultimate sugar daddy in Wilson. The only down-side is that, chaps aside, the women in this flick get short thrift. Julia Roberts is magestic and menacing as the Christian fundamentalist fund-raiser Joanna Herring but you never really understand why a Texan socialite would become obsessed with Asian politics. Amy Adams and Emily Blunt are wasted in small roles as Wilson's PA and mistress.

Some critics have complained that there isn't enough politics in this movie. Specifically, that the script does not explicitly show the impact of Wilson's war on the Soviets occupying Afghanistan, or the way in which the arms and training fuelled Jihadists that ended up in the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iraq. Frankly, I think they're missing the point. We all know the grim repurcussions of the Afghani war. We're living with them. It's far more incisive to see how that sad misadventure began. And frankly, it's a lot more entertaining.

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR was released in the US in 2007 and is currently playing in the UK, Greece, Kuwait, Japan, Portugal and Greece. It opens later in January in Belgium, France, Iceland, Argentina, Australia, the Netherlands and South Korea. The film opens in February in Estonia, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Venezuela, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Turkey, Slovakia, Spain, Egypt, Singapore and Brazil. It opens in Russia on April 24th 2008.

THE WALKER - the localised and global consequences of a corrupt political establishment

THE WALKER is the latest film from celebrated writer/director Paul Schrader. As a writer, Schrader gave us the definitive picture of the disenfranchised, angry young man in TAXI DRIVER. And as a director he has given us many iconic images of men who are outside of the establishment but mingle with it and luxuriate in its superficial beauty. Until, of course, they are ensnared in the seamier side of the power structure. AMERICAN GIGOLO is perhaps the apex of this style of thriller cum character exploration.

In THE WALKER we see another exploration of character. This time, the central character is a flamboyant homosexual who precariously balances his lifestyle with his position as scion of a rapaciously Republican, Virginian family. Woody Harrelson's performance as Carter Page III is yet another career-best to rival his perfomance as Larry Flint. He struts through Washington high-society wearing an ill-fitting toupe, and speaks through a near-closed mouth with a broad Southern accent - and have they done something to his nose? His observations on Washington society are rapier-subtle and very, very funny, but he manages to maintain an almost boy-ish innocence and loyalty to his friends.

These friends are rather a different breed. They are the well-heeled wives of Washington power brokers. While their husbands hush up an Enron-style scandal implicating the Vice-President, Carter "walks" them to parties and to the opera - a convenient piece of arm candy to hire. Of the three lead actresses, Lily Tomlin is unusually, ambiguously evil as the wife of a Karl-Rove-style lobbyist. Lauren Bacall is magisterial as a rich widow. And Kristin Scott Thomas gives a rather auto-pilot performance as a philandering wife who happily lets her "friend" Carter get implicated in a murder-scandal on her behalf.

Yes, the witty script and strong performances from Harrelson, Bacall and Tomlin are the highlights of this drama. But there are other strengths. I rather liked the insidious, smooth flowing camera shots that circle and permeate political society. There is a wonderful homage to the infamous AMERICAN GIGOLO scene where Richard Gere gets dressed to go out. This time, the scene is reversed. An ageing, balding Harrelson takes off his vulgar but expensive clothes and the camera hovers lovingly over trays of cuff-links and ties. Then, he takes off his toupe!

I also rather liked the unabashed references to Abu Ghraib through the photography of Carter's boyfriend Emek (Moritz Bleibtrau). I like the idea that the venality of Washington; the unquestioning xenophobia; the sacrifice of constitutional checks and balances in the name of the national interest - all this leads to the relatively localised corruption in which Carter is implicated, but also leads to the wider loss of moral integrity seen in Iraq.

THE WALKER played Berlin 2007 and goes on release in the UK on August 10th and in the UK on December 7th.

SHOOTER - These people shot his dog!

SHOOTER is 50% hillarious Maguiver-like action movie. Marky Mark is a US sniper who's abandoned in Ethiopia by his own government. Back in the US, he holes up in a una-bomber shack with a big dog until impressive sounding high-ups (Danny Glover) call him back to help prevent a presidential assassination. But Marky Mark gets framed and is soon on the run with the help of a curiously Ruffalo-like FBI newbi (Michael Peña) and a cute chick who turns from third-grade teacher to Lady Vengeance with comic-book speed. This is all good clean fun and I liked the odd comedy one-liner from Wahlberg.

But SHOOTER aspires to be so much more than a meat-head Friday night multiplex filler. It wants to be *political* and provocative. But instead of the twists and turns of director Antoine Fuqua's TRAINING DAY we get a pretty heavy-handed critique of the neo-cons in general and Dick Cheney in particular. So anti-liberals should be warned. Personally, I've got nowt against the agenda, but I'd probably be able to take it more seriously if Wahlberg's character weren't avenging his exploitation as an unwitting stooge of The Man, if he weren't continuously shooting the crap out of other unwitting stooges....

SHOOTER is on release most everywhere bar Slovakia, where it opens April 26th, South Africa where it opens April 27th, Turkey where it opens May 11th, Japan where it opens June 2nd and the Czech Republic where it opens June 7th.