A COMPLETE UNKNOWN**

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is a deeply frustrating biopic of Bob Dylan.  Rather than challenging his misogynistic bullshit, the film replicates it.  Director James Mangold (WALK THE LINE) is not interested in interrogating the complexity of Saint Bob. Rather, everything must be packaged neatly in a convenient narrative arc.

That arc is massaged to within an inch of its life. Young Bob - choirboy turned gravelly voiced folk-singer - makes a pilgrimage to New York to meet his chronically ill hero Woody Guthrie.  Scoot McNairy (IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS) stuns in an entirely wordless performance as Guthrie, struck mute with Hungtington's Disease, but still keen to be surrounded by music. Such is Bob's evident talent that he is taken in by a kindly, paternal Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) and his wife Toshi, a couple whose life was devoted to preserving the American folk music tradition.

Bob finds fame and massive music sales with his protest songs against a backdrop of the civil rights movement.  But this is the era of the Beatles and The Stones and The Kinks and he feels trapped in amber by the historicity of the folk movement.  He hires a blues rock band and records what will be his first electric rock album, Highway 61 Revisited.  

The narrative arc poses a big showdown at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Will Bob play nice and play folk? Or will he disappoint everyone around him and play electric rock?  We all know the answer. And we all know that what transpired afterwards didn't happen at Newport but in the Manchester Free Trade Hall a year later. But that doesn't fit Mangold's neat and claustrophobically American narrative. Nowhere do we see Bob travel to London and the influence the Swinging Sixties Carnaby Street vibe had on him. He just goes from one scene to the next transformed from shabby folk clothes to extra tight Carnaby Street suits and winkle pickers.  

The problem with the way this film is constructed is that most everyone is a single-dimension character, giving the excellent cast very little to do. Pretty much everyone just looks at Bob with an air of disappointment.  Elle Fanning (The Great) plays Sylvie Russo - a thinly veiled version of Bob's real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo - and just looks at Bob disappointed and heartbroken.  Monica Barbaro plays folk icon Joan Baez and just looks at Bob disappointed and contemptuous. Peter Seege looks disappointed and paternally heartbroken.  You get the picture.

And what of Bob himself? Timothee Chalamet (DUNE) plays Bob with pads in his cheeks to give him a boyish round-face, and has admirably mastered his growly deliberately ugly style of singing and playing. It's a great impersonation, but for my money, outclassed by Scoot McNairy in the acting department.  You get the ferocity of Bob, his uncompromising attitude toward music.  But the film skips so lightly over his way of mooching off women, or his initial passive-aggressive barb that Joan Baez sings too well.... Imagine a film with this cast that really wanted to get into the verbal attack on Joan in Like A Rolling Stone, or his womanising, or his fundamentally dishonest appropriation of a persona.  

But no, this is a film for fans that wants us to see (rightly) just how bloody brilliant his early music was. Where the film shines is in giving is so much music so brilliantly rendered. But by including so much music it squeezes out the time that could have been spent on personal relationships.  I feel like maybe this was a deliberate choice and a cowardly one too.

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is rated R and has a running time of 141 minutes.  It was released in the USA on December 14th and opens in the UK on January 17th 2025.

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY**

James Mangold (FORD VS FERRARI, LOGAN) directs the fifth instalment of the beloved INDIANA JONES franchise as if he's making a dated greatest hits compilation.  Indy battling evil Nazis (Mads Mikelsen), check.  Indy in a dusty desert town in a rickety vehicle outrunning the bad guys, check. Indy helping out a bumbling but super-smart British archeologist (Toby Jones), check. Indy hunting down a MacGuffin with supernatural spooky powers, check. Indy with a short, precocious ethnic minority sidekick, check. Indy pining over Marian, check. 

The problem is that as much as I love those early Indy movies, cinema thrills have moved on since then.  So when we now see an old grumpy Indy and his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) outrunning the bad guys in a tuk tuk it feels low pace and lacklustre, especially in a summer when we watched Tom Cruise basically do the same thing, way better, in a Fiat in Rome.  Worst of all, I was expecting some witty banter between Indy and Helena to paper over the weaksauce action scenes but even that didn't happen. This is a script singularly lacking in zip!

To be frank, you'd be better off just watching the original trilogy for Indy 1.0, and then flipping over to Apple TV to see modern day grumpy Harrison Ford do his comedy thing in Shrinking.  This film is well-made in its nuts and bolts but has zero charisma, fun, or novelty.

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY has a running time of 154 minutes and is rated PG-13. It opened in June 2023 and is now available to rent and own.

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

Aaron Sorkin follows up his directorial debut MOLLY'S GAME with a movie whose subject is far more in his wheelhouse, and what an energetic, pointed, anger-making film he has created in THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7.  Its concerns are those that Sorkin has explored throughout his career:  the liberal fight against injustice, corruption and political repression.  He cast these ideas in a warm-fuzzy light where optimism won in his hit TV show The West Wing. He was angrier and more cynical in The Newsroom.  And in the Trump era, the anger is rightly turned up, and the absurdity of a system wherein the rule of law has been bent out of all recognition fully explored.  

The film opens with a montage that takes us back to the 1960s and the potent combination of the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam protests. We see RFK beg for calm after the assassination of MLK before himself being assassinated. We then zoom in to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  Protestors flooded into the City hoping to protest Vietnam in front of the media outside the convention hotel soon clashed with the police brutally trying to keep them away.  Once Nixon is elected his regime decides to prosecute the so-called ringleaders of the riots for Conspiracy to Incite Riots and other charges, even throwing in iconic Black Panther Bobby Seale, who had no part of it, for good measure.  The charges were clearly trumped up, the judge (Frank Langella) was clearly biased and bogus, the jury was tampered with to ensure a friendly verdict, and the defendants were clearly there just to be made an example of.

Sacha Baron Cohen is absolutely note perfect as Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman. He gets all the funniest lines because he is most comfortable with showing the absurdity of proceedings.  But it's Eddie Redmayne that has the more interesting role as Tom Hayden - the apparently more sensible, less showy leader of a student protest movement who hates Hoffman's grandstanding. Much of the intellectual back and forth of the movie comes between them as they throw barbs about how best to serve the movement.  And they are joined in a kind of Sorkin Triumvirate of Repartee by Mark Rylance as progressive attorney William Kunstler. It's so clear that the prosecution is bent (despite an ill-conceived attempt to soften Joseph Gordon-Levitt's prosecution attorney) that all the real intellectual fun is to be had in the arguments WITHIN the defense.  

The result is a courtroom drama that is thrilling and rightly anger-making, and a movie where Sorkin's trademark razor-sharp combative dialogue is absolutely right for the job.  But he has also come on leaps and bounds as a director of action. The way in which he reconstructs the riot as he interrogates the version of events that Tom Hayden is telling himself is a visual and editorial tour-de-force.

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 has been released on Netflix due to Covid. It has a running time of 127 minutes and is rated R.

DOWNSIZING - BFI London Film Festival 2017 - Day 10

DOWNSIZING is a deeply patronising movie that pulls of the remarkable feat of being both annoying liberal and socially conscious AND offensively racist. There's probably a decent 45 minute episode of Black Mirror in there somewhere, but the surrounding 90 minutes of meandering, indulgent padding renders the whole work frustrating and meaningless.

The big concept of the film is that a bunch of Norwegian scientists have invented a way to miniaturise humans to 5 inches tall. And if humans can do this, they can leave a much lighter environmental impact, as well as use their current net wealth to live a deeply luxurious life. After all, you may not be able to afford a 10,000 sq ft mansion but you can probably afford one the size of a shoebox. This range of motives for "downsizing" reflects a parody of the cultures that DOWNSIZING deals with. So the liberal touchy feely hippie Scandies downsize to save the world and their mini-colony looks like The Shire. By contrast, Americans downsize to afford a luxury retirement in Disney like gated communities. 

Of course, this being (a piss-poor attempt at) sci-fi, none of the actual world-building makes sense. The downsized wouldn't survive rain or insects and there's an irony in the amount of energy being created in the downsizing probably making climate change worse. None of this would matter if the story was captivating and you cared about the characters. But the story is all over the place. Is this about an everyman recreating his life once his wife leaves him? Is it about finding yourself on a gap year trip to Norway? It is a piece of propaganda about climate change? Or is an undercover expose about illegal immigrant working conditions? It's like writer-director Alexander Payne through Big Ideas in the air like so much confetti and the result is a baggy, poorly scripted and edited mess that outstays its welcome. Worst of all, much of its comedy in the latter half of the film lies in taking the piss out of a Vietnamese woman's strong accent. In 2017. This is just flabbergastingly offensive on a Jar Jar Binks level. 

DOWNSIZING has a running time of 135 minutes. The film is rated 15 for strong language, drug misuse and sex references.  The movie played Venice, Toronto and London 2017 and will go on release in Spain and the USA on Dec 22nd, in Australia, New Zealand and France on Dec 26th, in Norway and Turkey on Jan 5th, in Argentina and Bulgaria on Jan 11th, and in the UK, Germany and Sweden on Jan 18th.

NEBRASKA - LFF 2013 - Day Three

I am so in love with NEBRASKA it may well be my favourite film of the festival to date, even above the stunningly beautiful GRAVITY.  It's the kind of movie that makes you laugh, reminds you of your real life, gives you beautiful visuals, and when you leave you just want to call your dad and tell him you love him.  

So the story is one of an old man and his son reconnecting on a road trip.  The old man is Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), an alcoholic with Alzheimer's who gets one of those publisher's scam letters and thinks he needs to go to Lincoln, Nebraska, to claim his million dollars. In act of frustration and desperation, his lovely son David (Will Forte) decides to take him and pander to his happy wishes.  But en route, Woody has an accident and they end up detouring to his old home town of Hawthorne, where they catch up with his family and old friends - all of whom have stories about his past and apparently, claims on his newfound wealth.

The movie is consistently laugh-out-loud funny - whether due to the blunt chastisements of Woody and his wife Kate (Jane Squibb) or the menacing idiocy of David's cousins, or the deadpan banter between the ageing brothers.  There's even a brilliant moment of Coen Brothers-style goofball comedy when David and his brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk) decide to "liberate" a compressor that Ed Pegram (the deliciously menacing Stacy Keach) supposedly stole years ago. But what really elevates this film is the wonderful relationship between Woody and David, the evident care that even his badgering wife feels for him, and the touching portrait of a real family complete with inane conversations, petty grievances, and weary old stories. 

There were many moments in this film where I was close to tears and many more where I laughed out loud. Kudos to directer Alexander Payne (THE DESCENDENTS) and writer Bob Nelson for creating a dramedy so consistently engaging and funny and wise and to cinematographer Phedon Papamichael for his stunning widescreen black and white landscapes and family tableaux. 

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

NEBRASKA is rated R in the USA and has a running time of 110 minutes.  It played Cannes and London 2013. It opens in the USA on November 22nd; in the UK and Ireland on December 6th; in the Netherlands on December 19th; on February 6th in Argentina; on February 7th in Sweden; in Belgium on February 19th; and in Italy on February 20th. 

London Film Fest 2011 Day 8 - THE DESCENDANTS

Hawaii is the location of this drowsy family drama, Alexander Payne’s latest feature after 2004’s wonderful SIDEWAYS, and any comparison between the two movies, as far apart as they may be now, will find THE DESCENDANTS sorely wanting. George Clooney has the responsibility of a few generations here as Matt King, a landowner who must reassess the relationship he has with his two young daughters, and the property owned by his family, after his wife ends up comatose in the hospital following a boating accident. Her history is only known through the remaining characters, chiefly Clooney’s, and ultimately any grief the audience has for her loss is only as considerable as the feeling evoked by his central performance. Unfortunately, Payne’s multitude of close-ups only serve to reveal how inexpressive Clooney’s face is, and limited his talents are (beyond some hammy running), for this kind of unpolished role and the vulnerability it requires. The work that a more capable actor – Paul Giamatti, most obviously – might have achieved with the same amount of screen time ends up being a regret larger and more diverting than any other in this disappointing and needlessly lengthy story.

<< Shailene Woodley (Alexandra); Alexander Payne (Writer-Director); and George Clooney (Matt King) at the photocall for THE DESCENDANTS at the BFI London Film Festival 2011.


THE DESCENDANTS played Toronto and London 2011. It opens in the USA on November 23rd; in Germany, Ireland and the UK on January 20th; in Lithuania on January 27th; in the Netherlands and Turkey on February 3rd and in France on February 29th.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 8 - THE IDES OF MARCH

THE IDES OF MARCH is a cheap thriller full of plot holes that wants us to believe that it's an insightful, intelligent political film.  It tries to mask poor writing and construction with an all-star cast, but I'm not buying it.  This is, for all its pretensions and earnest good intentions, a bad film.  Now, I haven't seen the play on which the movie was based - Beau Willimon's Farragut North (a road on Washington DC full of political consultants).  But my friends tell me that this movie makes a departure from the closed world of that play in the final forty minutes - in other words, the movie is not content to stick with the play's obsession with the mechanics of political campaigns - and "raises the stakes" in the jargon of Screenwriting 101.  The result feels amateur and undermines the momentum and spark of the opening half hour.

As the movie opens we feel we are in good hands. The movie has pace and wit and does what a lot of great political films do - it gives us the feeling we're peeking behind the curtain at a world we're fascinated by.  We love how Stephen and Paul (Ryan Gosling and Philip Seymour Hoffman) intricately plot and plan Governor Mike Morris; (George Clooney) Ohio Primary Campaign. We love the Machiavellian scheming of their opposite number, Tom (Paul Giamatti).  We love the whip-smart dialogue from the pushy intern (Evan Rachel Wood) that Stephen's sleeping with.  The dialogue is almost Aaron-Sorkin-esque and the action takes place in seedy hotel rooms and cheap offices and bleak parking lots.  It all seems to be going so right!  We care about whether Morris' will cheapen himself in order to get an endorsement from sleazy Senator Thompson (Jeffrey Wright).  We care about whether he will win.

The problem is that the movie then takes a turn into nonsense.  The event upon which the action turns is that Stephen will take a meeting with Tom. This is anathema during a campaign - the press will jump on it. So why would a guy so smart for for it? OK, I thought, I'll go with it. But then Stephen needs to get just $900 petty cash to propel another key plot point. Does he just draw it from an ATM thus involving no-one else? No! He asks his sidekick to get it out of petty cash leaving no receipt in an open plan office! Not so smart! And if you don't believe Stephen is smart, you don't believe he can rescue the mess he gets himself into, other than through the divine right of the hero in  mainstream movies.

And what about the politics? THE IDES OF MARCH is not telling us anything new by "revealing" that idealistic politicians can make low deals and do bad things. We are a decade after Clinton. We know about sex scandals. It all seems rather old hat. 

So we're left with a film whether the story is simply not credible and falls from grace into cheap thriller. The only things we can cling to are superb supporting performances from Evan Rachel Wood (who manages to make a stock character sympathetic and nuanced) and the always legendary Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Where's the elegance and sophistication that coloured Clooney's earlier directorial effort, GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK?

<< Philip Seymour Hoffman (Paul Zara); Evan Rachel Wood (Molly Stearns) and George Clooney (Governor Mike Morris and Director)  at the photocall for THE IDES OF MARCH at the BFI London Film Festival.


THE IDES OF MARCH played Toronto and Venice 2011. It opens in the US on October 7th; in the Netherlands on October 20th; on October 28th in France Portugal, Ireland and the UK; on November 4th in Sweden; on November 11th in Finland; on December 22nd in Germany; on January 5th 2012 in Hungary and on February 14th in Russia.

3:10 TO YUMA - outstanding Western

After GIRL INTERRUPTED, COP LAND and WALK THE LINE, here's another great film from director James Mangold. This time it's a remake of the 1957 western, 3:10 TO YUMA, itself based on a short story by Elmore Leonard. There's nothing pioneering or rocket-sciency about this movie: it's just a gripping story, really well-told.

The ever-brilliant Christian Bale plays an indebted Arizona rancher who commands no respect, even in his own eyes. In a last ditch attempt to raise some cash and do something heroic, he escorts a notorious thief (Russell Crowe) to the train station in another town, where he will take the 3:10 to Yuma prison. The small posse gets eliminated one by one as Crowe's charming but immoral villain takes them out en route. And all the time, they are being followed by the villain's gang, not least a nasty but dandy-ish side-kick, played by Ben Foster in a truly break-out performance. The drama of the piece is in the confrontation between a deeply moral but pathetic man and an amoral swaggering anti-hero. The tension builds to a thrilling final shoot-out from the town-hotel to the train station. Will Bale's character get the villain to the train? And how far will the villain, who now has a grudging sympathy for the hero, collude in his own arrest. It makes for a brilliant character play, with the added bonus of some superb action sequences and handsome design and photography. Not to be missed.

3:10 TO YUMA is already on release in Russia and the USA. It opens in the UK on September 14th, in Iceland on September 28th, in Norway on October 12th, in Italy on October 19th, in Singapore on October 25th, in Turkey on November 2nd, in Argentina on November 8th, in Estonia on November 20th and in Finland on January 11th 2008.