COSMOPOLIS

COSMOPOLIS is a steaming pile of pretentious wank. This may well be the point. Either way, it's boring as hell. Robert Pattinson plays a young Wall Street "big swinging dick" stuck in a limousine for a day as he tries to cross town for a haircut but is trapped in heinous traffic by a presidential motorcade and anti-capitalist protesters  En route, he meets his wife, lovers, advisors and a doctor. All of these people, and the antihero himself, speak in a bored self-assured monotone. Mostly they speak in nonsensical platitudes. There are no emotions, and little real intellect. They are trapped in a slick process, and smugly content there. When the antihero's wife says "it hurts" she shows no emotion. Her husband responds by telling her "my prostrate is asymmetrical".  It's all basically bollocks, especially the bits where Cronenberg (or maybe source author David Cronenberg) try to construct dialogue that refers to central banks or any actual financial happenings.

Is this how the creative industry views Wall Street? A bunch of humourless, self-deluded, pretentious, vapid cyborgs? Because it's nonsense.  If you want to really know about Wall Street and its ethics you can watch MARGIN CALL.  Because COSMPOLIS is nothing more than beautifully produced but alienating and alienated nonsense. And as for the ending, don't even get me started on just how massively Cronenberg pussies out.

COSMOPOLIS played Cannes 2012 and opened earlier this year in France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Hungary, Portugal, Croatia, the Netherlands and Canada. It opens this weekend in the UK and Ireland. It opens on June 22nd in Poland, June 28th in Israel, July 20th in Russia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, on August 2nd in Australia, on August 9th in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Ukraine and Turkey, on August 16th in Slovenia and the USA,  on August 21st in Finland, on September 7th in Brazil and Sweden; on September 13th in Hong Kong, on September 27th in Greece, on October 11th in Spain and on November 8th in Argentina.

COSMOPOLIS is rated R and has a running time of 109 minutes.  

London Film Fest 2011 Day 13 - A DANGEROUS METHOD

A DANGEROUS METHOD is a deeply disappointing movie - dull, vacuous, with a desperately poor central performance by Keira Knightley - little sexual or emotional tension - it rolls through its scenes until it comes to a sudden halt. Frankly, the most exciting that happened during the Gala screening at the BFI London Film Festival was some poor sod having a seizure. Fans of Cronenberg's dark, dangerous films will be underwhelmed, I suspect, and those of us looking for Christopher Hampton's trademark elegant screen-writing will feel let down.  And if you want to see Michael Fassbender in psychologically challenging material, look no further than SHAME.

The central conflicts of the movie are almost bourgeois in their banality.  The first conflict is between Dr Carl Jung (Fassbender) and his one-time mentor Dr Freud (Viggo Mortensen).  Jung thinks not all neuroses have sexual origins, and that psychiatry should also embrace spiritualism.  Freud thinks Jung is discrediting an already embattled new field of research with his mystic nonsense.  Moreover, the poor Viennese academic resents Jung's rich wife.  The second conflict is between Jung and Sabine Spielrein (Knightley), Jung's patient, lover and finally his academic peer. Initially traumatised by her father, whose spankings excited her, Sabine progresses to become a psychiatrist of greater skill than Jung. Moreover, in the Freud-Jung conflict, she sides with Freud. She also escapes their love affair a stronger woman, whereas we are asked to believe that engaging in sado-masochistic sexual practices precipitated Jung's nervous breakdown.  

All this should have made for an intellectually challenging, daring, complex film.  But it does not.  The almost sterile production design; stilted camera-work; and almost coy treatment of the sexual material make for what can only be described as a kind of TV afternoon movie biopic.  I am hard-pressed to think of less erotically charged sex scenes, and a movie about overcoming sexual repression where the actors faces seem so wooden.  Worst of all, in the early scenes of most acute neuroses, Keira Knightley acts "at" being mad, rather than portraying the emotional truth of the scenes. Her physical contortions are mannered rather than real - the part was simply too challenging for her.  Still, the movie could've survived this had the script been more profound, the conflicts mined more fully, and the camera-work more innovative.  I wanted to see more of the anti-semitism and mistrust of psychiatry in Vienna. I wanted to see more of the reaction to Otto Gross' (Vincent Cassel) breakdown.  This film desperately needed widening out. 

A DANGEROUS METHOD played Toronto and Venice 2011. It opened earlier this year in Italy. It opens in Germany on November 10th, in the Netherlands on November 17th, in the USA on November 23rd, in Spain on November 25th, in France on November 30th, in Denmark on January 12th 2012, in Sweden and the UK on February 10th and in Hungary on March 8th.

London Film Festival Day 1 - EASTERN PROMISES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SHOPGIRL - truly painful, often pretentious, sometimes funny

I hated SHOPGIRL almost before it began. The opening credits feauture a logo for the production company, "Hyde Park Films". All good, except that the logo features a picture of Tower Bridge?! Sounds petty, I know, but you can't mess around with Zone One iconography and still be my friend. As the opening credits rolled I hated this film even more: melodramatic, irritating orchestral score; pretentious and pointless tracking photography; and a grating faux-naif voice-over from writer/actor Steve Martin. Steve Martin's very existence pisses me off. In 1989, he sold his soul to Hollywood plastic surgeons. Instead of manic comedy we get formulaic remakes and soupy family "entertainment". I introduce Sergeant Bilko and Cheaper by the Dozen 1 and 2 into evidence for the prosecution.

Anyways, back to SHOPGIRL. Steve Martin introduces our heroine, Mirabelle, as she goes about her mundane life. Mirabelle, played by the wonderful Claire Danes, is an aspiring artist who works on the glove counter at Saks Fifth Avenue in LA in order to help pay off her student debt. The movie tells the tale of how Mirabelle is romanced by two men. One is a sixty year old rich lecher played by Martin: the other is a young, hapless, romantic, amplifier-salesman, played by Jason Schwartzman. The scenes involving Martin are truly painful to watch. Danes self-knowledge - her choice to be a victim of this old lecher - is horrible to witness. When Martin touches her naked body, our skin crawls. I know that this is the desired effect but somehow it is done so often and in such a manner that it becomes simply off-putting. Moreover, every time it happens, we have that same over-wheening orchestral score - the same pretentious cinematography. Sure, the film makes some good points about the commoditisation of relationships, but the sheer weight of the pretentious visual and aural imagery loaded onto this slender subject matter threaten to send this movie up its own ass. The only saving grace of the flick - the factor that kept me in the cinema to the end - is Jason Schwartzman's performance. Every time he comes back into frame I breathed a sigh of relief. We were back to sweet, quirky comedy - the natural habitat of the Indie movie.

Overall, SHOPGIRL may be one of the most disappointing movies of 2005. After all, Steve Martin was, once upon a time, a great comedian. Anand Tucker, the director, last graced our screens with the wonderful riff on the life of the du Pre family, Hillary and Jackie - one of my all-time favourite movies. The film is also shot by Peter Suchitzky, the DP from A History of Violence, Spider, Existenz, Mars Attacks, not to mention the best of the Star Wars flicks, The Empire Strikes Back. With so much talent on the roster, it is something of an achievement to have made such an unengaging, frustrating flick. At one point in the flick, the hapless suitor asks Mirabelle, "Can I kiss you or what?" She responds, "The point being?" I left the cinema asking the same question.

SHOPGIRL is on limited release in the US and UK. There is no scheduled release date for France, Germany or Austria.

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE - Best film of 2005

This review is posted by guest reviewer, Nik, who can usually be found here......

David Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE is without doubt the best film of the year 2005. It combines suspense, a wonderful but not overly complicated plot, absolutely outstanding acting, good production values and sparing but sensitive dialogue. I seem to have developed a recent reputation for the cynical panning of seemingly worthy movies, especially in my criticism of Woody Allen's underwhelming MATCH POINT, so such a ringing endorsement of a film should rightly been considered exceptional from my pen.

Let's start with the acting. Viggo Mortensen, best known as Aragorn, is brilliant as the mild-mannered Tom Stall. His performance only improves as the plot continues to thicken, and Stall's character takes on new dimensions as his past is revealed. His wife, Edie Stall, played by Maria Bello, is utterly convincing as the small town sweetheart whose life gets turned upside down by the bloody attempted robbery of her husband's cafe-diner. However, it is their performance together as husband and wife that is particularly noteworthy - and especially in a memorable sex scene of such vivid and captivating realism that I was actually embarassed to watch. Their relationship is central to the plot - and so strongly acted as to totally immerse the viewer.

The male and female lead are equally well supported by the psychotic-looking Carl Foggarty, played by Ed Harris - who excels in his role as villain - and Ashton Holmes as Jack Stall - son to Tom and Edie and victim of schoolyard bullying. The way that Holmes handles the character development of Jack - and the way that development is juxtaposed with that of his father - is masterful and shows immense promise for a young actor.

Next, the plot and dialogue both pull off the trick of being hugely powerful but quietly understated at the same time. Whereas many modern movies attempt to compensate for a lack of originality through overly-complex plot or timelines, and sharp, witty dialogue - A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE relies on a fairly simple plot, realistically acted and developed, with dialogue that says enough but not too much, and action in proportions that are strictly necessary. That's not to say it's boring - it's never that - rather the relationships between the characters, and the dark history that the film unfolds sustains an incredible tension in the audience. Noone was talking during this one - you could have heard a pin drop - and that made the action, when it came, all the more thrilling.

Finally, the film is wonderfully shot - the camera gets it just right in every scene - capturing the expression, the mood, the feeling of the moment perfectly. The locations are spot on - and it goes to show that you don't need millions of dollars and endless special effects to make a great movie. It makes such a refreshing change to see a Hollywood picture reject explosions, gun fights and CGI and get back to the basics of capable acting and strong characterisation. It's not a thrill a minute, that's for sure - and the kids won't understand it until they're older - but you get plenty of bang for you buck.

If you've yet to see a HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, look it up right now, and beg, steal or borrow whatever you need to get to your local cineplex and hire a seat. Perhaps I'm just a member of the hysterical conservative right, but this is a truly worthy film, and it saddens me that it will be passed over for awards in favour of lesser films that just happen to be about homosexuals. It's okay to be gay, but it doesn't mean you deserve an Oscar - and anyway, it's better to be violent.

HISTORY OF VIOLENCE is still playing in a few cineplexes but is also available of Region 1 DVD. It is released on Region 2 DVD on March 27th 2006.